Villainess [3]: Rosalie’s Followers
Red Pill [0]: Evictions, Beatings
Before this tale continues with Janet Fleming, it must take a detour to the fortunes of three other ladies attending Lassen Academy, so let the mind’s eye shift from Mariana House to Guinevere House, where the scene of another outrage was about to begin. Just before 7:00 a.m., while Janet was still asleep, another lady named Mindy Kessler was already up and dressed in her school uniform and combing her green shoulder-length hair before the mirror at her vanity table. And right beside her was her silver-haired maid waiting for Mindy to finish and holding Mindy’s book bag in the meantime.
When Mindy Kessler put her comb down, she reached out for her book bag, and her maid obliged her with it, and Mindy slung it over her shoulder and stood up, thinking of the events of last Friday for the umpteenth time. Mindy Kessler had a lot of things on her mind as she stretched out her arms and yawned, ready to greet another day, yet what she had witnessed on that fateful Friday afternoon last week still haunted her, still left her mulling over the details of it.
“My Lady, are you okay?” her maid said.
“I’m okay,” Mindy said, smiling. “Why do you ask?”
Her maid was about to explain—
When there came a knock on the door, accompanied by a voice that said, “Lady Kessler, there’s a message for you that you need to see at once.”
Mindy’s maid was about to utter something abrasive, but Mindy stopped her with a grab of her forearm and a shake of her head, then said, “Is that you, Lady Felton?”
“Yes,” Lady Felton said. “May I come inside?”
Mindy and her maid traded glances, and her maid said, “Don’t.”
“It’s okay, Ellie,” Mindy Kessler said, then to Lady Felton: “Yes, you may.”
The double doors opened, revealing a gray-haired lady dressed in her school uniform with a ribbon in her hair and a piece of paper in her hand. Lady Felton was looking at Mindy Kessler with a flash of her steely velvet eyes and said, “This is for you, Lady Kessler,” and she handed it over to her.
Mindy Kessler took it and read it through to the end, where she noticed Prince Blaise’s signature on the underline and said, “What the hell is this? This is a joke, right?”
“It’s not a joke,” Lady Felton said.
“What did I even do?” Mindy Kessler said.
“You must’ve done something to anger his Highness,” Lady Felton said. “Otherwise, you wouldn’t have received that notice. Goodbye, Lady Kessler,” and she exited the room.
Mindy Kessler just stood there.
“My Lady?” Ellen said.
Mindy Kessler said, “Keep an eye on this room for me. I need to talk to Jean and Saraya about this.”
Exiting her dorm without listening to her mind’s response, Mindy Kessler headed down the central hallway of Guinevere House. On the way, she passed by Lady Felton talking with Rosalie Edgeworth still in her nightgown at her own dorm and felt their gazes on her back as she reached the back of the dorm house. Then Mindy Kessler ascended one set of half-turn stairs and passed by another student named Lady Childeron descending the stairs and paused on the steps.
Mindy Kessler turned and looked back down the stairs at Lady Childeron, her long brown locks swaying after her in her descent, and realized what was going on. She ran up the rest of the stairs and cleared the top step and ran down the second-floor hallway towards two sets of opposing double doors open at the end of the hall, where she heard Jean and Saraya complaining about the same eviction notice.
She peeked into the doorway of Saraya’s room but found it empty to her left. So she walked to the other doorway and saw Jean and Saraya still in their nightgowns, Jean sitting on her dressing bench and readjusting her glasses and Saraya pacing around before their two maids, Diana and Niana, standing by the doorway looking flustered.
When Mindy Kessler saw both sisters holding their eviction notices in their hands, she said, “You got ones, too?”
Both sisters looked up at her.
“Wait,” Jean said, standing up, “you also received one?”
Mindy Kessler held hers up and said, “Yeah.”
“That’s crazy,” Jean said.
“Why would they do that?” Saraya said.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Mindy Kessler said, “but tell me what happened first.”
So Jean and Saraya approached Mindy Kessler and complained about the way Lady Childeron just banged on their doors, waking them up and making them open up for her, only to be handed an eviction notice. When they asked Lady Childeron what the heck was going on, Jean said, they were brushed off and told that they must have done something to Miss Edgeworth for his Highness, Prince Blaise, to issue both of them an eviction notice before Lady Childeron left a few minutes ago.
Moments passed.
Then Mindy Kessler said, “Don’t let anyone else know about this, till I talk to Professor Palmer.”
“Do you think he’s gonna help?” Jean said.
“I’ll find out,” Mindy said, stuffing her eviction notice into her book bag, and walked out through the double doors and back down the second-floor hallway and down the half-turn stairs and down the first-floor hallway. And along the way, she passed by the closed double doors of Miss Edgeworth’s dorm and figured she was getting dressed for school and exited through the foyer with her book bag beneath the shadow of Guinevere House in the cool morning air.
Mindy Kessler ran down the walkway towards the fountain in the courtyard and headed up the entrance steps through the open double doors of Lassen Academy and into the Eastern side of the campus building past the restrooms and entered the double doors of the Professor Commons Office, where she spotted Viscountess Durham arranging things on her desk.
For a moment, Mindy just looked around the shared office space for Baron Andrew Palmer, till Viscountess Durham said, “Are you looking for someone?”
“Oh, sorry about that,” Mindy Kessler said. “I was just wondering if you saw Professor Palmer just now?”
“No,” Viscountess Durham said, “I haven’t seen him yet. Is there anything I can help you with?”
She thought of the eviction notice in her book bag, but since she didn’t have Viscountess Durham in any of her classes, she refrained from telling her anything about it. Instead, she shifted her thoughts onto a safer topic and said, “Yeah, there is. Jean and Saraya Drevis and I are looking for a clubroom right now.”
“You’re a little late for that,” Viscountess Durham said. “Why didn’t you join one at the start of the semester?”
“None of the available clubs interested me then,” Mindy Kessler said, “so we decided to make our own.”
“I see,” Viscountess Durham said, “but three members aren’t enough to make a club. You need at least one more member before I can approve of it.”
“Okay,” Mindy said. “Thanks for letting me know.”
The Viscountess nodded and said, “Let me know if you’ve found another member, and I’ll approve your club.”
“Thank you,” Mindy said and left the Professor Commons Office, wondering if she had just dodged a bullet or overlooked an opportunity, then walked up the first flight of stairs into the second floor and then up the second flight of stairs into the third and last floor.
By the time she had cleared the last step on the stairs, Mindy Kessler felt the urge to take a number two. So she hurried down the Western half of the hallway towards the restrooms at the end just before the hallway turned into a side hall with more classrooms. She opened a heavy door into the women’s bathroom and rushed towards the nearest stall and hung her book bag on the door hook of her stall door, then raised her dress skirt and pulled down her panties and plunked herself on the toilet, where she relieved herself of last night’s dinner. Then she pulled out some toilet paper and wiped herself and pulled up her panties and lowered her dress and flushed the toilet and took up her book bag and washed her hands in the sink.
With that done, Mindy Kessler exited the women’s restroom and headed for her homeroom class past the auxiliary room. She figured that during Homeroom 1, she could ask her homeroom professor, Count Archibald Wilhelm, for permission to visit Baron Andrew Palmer, but she knew the count was the nosy type that would want to know why. Instead of risking that, she doubled back around the corner into the main hallway, deciding to wait for Baron Palmer at her former homeroom, Classroom 1-3C, and ask him if she could talk to Lady Fleming about the club, and perhaps, maybe let Baron Palmer know about this latest predicament about the eviction notices she and—
She got shoved from behind, and she fell to the floor, and stars flew across Mindy’s eyes on impact. Then she heard running footsteps, and she thought she saw Lady Childeron coming up and kicking her in the stomach, where she felt pain shooting up her diaphragm. Mindy covered her face with her forearms, and when her assailants started kicking her legs, she gritted her teeth and stole a glance and recognized Lady Felton and Lady Childeron with the former kicking her legs and stomping on her knees and the latter kicking her forearms and stomping on her hands. They were cursing at her, too, saying that Mindy and her friends were wrong about Rosalie, that they were just jealous of her, that if she or either of those Drevis sisters disparaged Rosalie again, they’d kill them.
“Hey, get off of her!” someone said.
It was Saraya, and she and Jean came running.
Mindy Kessler’s assailants backed off, and Mindy heard running footsteps and Jean and Saraya cursing at the assailants going down the stairs. When Mindy raised herself up into a sitting position with her butt on the floor and her legs extended, she winced at the pain in her knees and shins and ankles, fisted and opened her aching hands, and noticed her friends ascending the stairs again.
Both sisters came running up to her and crouched on either side of her, asking her if she could stand.
“I can’t,” Mindy said.
So the Drevis sisters took both of Mindy’s arms across their shoulders and raised Mindy to her feet.
“Can you walk if we carry you?” Jean said.
“I think so,” Mindy said, and step for agonizing step, her friends guided her down the hallway and down both flights of stairs into the open-plan parlor area, where Saraya and Jean looked out for Mindy’s assailants. When there was no sign of either one nearby, they trio of girls passed the restrooms into the Western side of the campus building and passed the clubrooms, but they paused at the sight of Miss Edgeworth exiting the infirmary where the main hallway turned into a side hall full of more clubrooms.
The trio waited for the two-faced Rosalie Edgeworth to pass by, the same girl they had seen tearing her own dress at the fountain in the courtyard and blaming it on Lady Fleming, the one that had Prince Blaise publicly denounce Lady Fleming in front of unsuspecting bystanders, the one that was now walking past them as if today was just another school day. They looked back at Rosalie and wondered amongst themselves if she had her lackeys attack her beforehand, then headed for the double doors of the infirmary, where the school nurse rose from her desk chair at the sight of them.
“She got beaten up,” Jaen said.
“Wait, what do you mean?” the nurse said, leading them to an available bed beside a window.
“Two girls beat me up in the hallways,” Mindy said, “but my friends chased them off and helped me get here.”
The nurse paused, midstride, and said, “Making things up will get you into a lot of trouble.”
“We’re not making it up,” Jean said.
“We saw everything that happened,” Saraya added.
“Nurse, I can’t even stand right now,” Mindy said. “Can we just get there already?”
The nurse let out a sigh and led them to the bed and pulled the curtain aside, revealing a clean mattress with pristine sheets and a fluffed-up pillow. With Jean and Saraya’s help, Mindy Kessler managed to perch herself onto the bedside, and the nurse helped her swing her legs up onto the mattress and lay herself flat on her back, still aching in her legs and knees and forearms and hands, but she toughed it out.
When the nurse looked over the bruises on her limbs and hands, applying slight pressure to them with her fingers and making Mindy wince, she went back to her desk, pulled open a few drawers, and came back with bandage wraps doused in red mana that colored it in a pinkish glow. She wrapped Mindy’s hands and calves and knees with them, leaving her forearms that had only sustained minor bruising throughout. Of course, when the healing energy of the red mana took effect and seeped into her bruises, Mind grimaced and gritted her teeth as a surge of pain flared through her, till it settled into an ache.
When the nurse went back to her desk to fetch her clipboard with a sign-in sheet, Mindy whispered to her friends, saying, “Should we trust her?”
“I’m on the fence with her,” Jean said.
Saraya adjusted her scarf around her neck, looking back at the nurse taking the sign-in sheet and a pen and approaching them again, so she turned and said, “Do you think Miss Edgeworth bribed her or something?”
“I don’t know, maybe,” Mindy said.
“But you don’t know for sure, do you?” Jean said.
Mindy nodded, saying, “Wanna find out?”
Saraya and Jean nodded their heads, and the game was on with Mindy taking a deep breath and breathing it out. When the nurse came back with furrowed brows holding clipboard and pen in hand, Mindy took the initiative and said, “Nurse, what do you mean by ‘making things up?’”
“Just what I said,” the nurse said, reviewing the contents of a previous entry page before slipping it underneath the other pages in the clipboard.
“Which is what, exactly?” Mindy said.
“You fell down the stairs, right?” the nurse said.
“Are you kidding me?” Mindy said. “If that had happened, I wouldn’t be conscious right now.”
The nurse put down her clipboard and had Mindy prop herself up on her forearms with the Drevis sisters helping her, then had Mindy and her friends sign the sign-in sheet. With that done, the nurse took up the pen and clipboard, leaned over Mindy, and looked into her eyes, saying, “Keep your eyes open for me and don’t blink, okay?”
So Mindy nodded and refrained from blinking.
“Okay, good: no concussion,” the Nurse said, replacing the old entry page with a new sheet and writing notes. “I want you to answer my questions with a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ got that?”
“Yes,” Mindy said.
“Do you feel any dizziness right now?”
“No.”
“Any need to vomit?”
“No.”
“Just bodily pain?”
“Yes.”
“Any tightness in your chest?”
“No.”
“Any tingling sensation anywhere in your body?”
“No.”
And so, the back-and-forth questioning and answering continued between the nurse and Mindy, till they had exhausted everything in the check-list of her chipboard sheet. After that, the nurse informed Mindy that she needed to rest in bed till after lunch period. After that, the nurse said, Mindy was free to go, but before she let them off, she asked the three girls about the details of what had happened, and they all said that Lady Childeron and Lady Felton had ambushed Mindy in the third-floor hallway after she came out of the restroom.
The nurse furrowed her brows.
That’s when Mindy said, “Did Miss Edgeworth tell you that I fell down the stairs?”
“Yeah, she did,” the nurse said.
“Then Miss Edgeworth lied to you,” Mindy said.
Yet the nurse just stood up and shook her head, mumbling something about not being able to believe it, and said, “But why would she do that?”
“Beats me,” Mindy said and added a half-truth: “I don’t know why I got attacked, either, so there.”
“You must’ve met Miss Edgeworth on your way here,” the nurse said. “Did she say anything to you three?”
The girls said she hadn’t.
Then Jean was about to say something, but Mindy caught her glance and shook her head, which the nurse caught and said, “What happened before the assault?”
Still unsure how far she should trust the nurse, Mindy gave an abbreviated version of what happened this morning, omitting the details about the eviction notices. Yet for the nurse’s benefit, Mindy emphasized Miss Edgeworth talking with her attackers at her dorm room in Guinevere House just as she was going to school, and that tipped the scales in her favor.
“I’ll go find that girl,” the nurse said. “Just stay put, till I come back, okay?”
They all said they would.
Then, after the nurse exited the infirmary, Mindy seized on the clipboard the nurse had left behind and slipped the old entry page free from the other sheets. They saw the notes that listed out the phony details of Miss Edgeworth’s lies on the page in the nurse’s scraggly handwriting, then turned the sheet over and noticed what looked like a three-sided pyramid still shimmering on the page for just a moment, just long enough for it to register without grabbing them completely unawares like it did with the nurse after she had fallen for Miss Edgeworth’s ruse before their arrival.
When the nurse’s footfalls reached them, they put the old sheet back in place on the clipboard, and Mindy said, “Don’t tell the nurse what we saw.”
“Why?” Jean said, looking back at the clipboard.
“Just don’t, okay?” Mindy said.
“Was that symbol a curse?” Saraya added.
“I don’t know for sure,” Mindy whispered, “but let’s not take any chances. Okay?”
Saraya and Jean traded knowing looks, then nodded that they understood, so Mindy breathed out a sigh on the hospital bed and waited. After a time, the nurse came back in and informed the girls that she couldn’t find Miss Edgeworth anywhere, so they asked if she had informed anyone else about this, and she said she did. She said she found Baron Palmer and asked him if she could help her find Miss Edgeworth, so the both of them searched for the next several minutes for her whereabouts, till the nurse said she had to go back to the infirmary. The baron said he’d keep looking for her, the nurse said, so he was still out there looking for Miss Edgeworth at the moment.
Then the nurse added that the Drevis sisters were free to stay till the start of Homeroom 1. So for the time being, Mindy chatted with her friends in conspiratorial whispers about Miss Edgeworth’s possible whereabouts and motives, till the symbol slipped from her mind like a forgotten dream. And before she knew it, Jean and Saraya Drevis had to go to their homeroom class, Classroom 1-3J, on the third floor right next to Mindy’s homeroom class, Classroom 1-3K.
Mindy bid her friends goodbye for now and then lay there on her bed with a lot of things on her mind. First were those eviction notices they’d received from Lady Felton and Lady Childeron; second was the tussle with those same bitches; third was finding another member for their club; and fourth was the problem of that two-faced Rosalie Edgeworth and her Prince Donavan Blaise. Mindy thought hard on that damning Friday afternoon, recalling the sequence of events: turning around and listening to Miss Edgeworth arguing with Lady Fleming, then seeing Rosalie rip her own dress, then seeing Prince Blaise exit the double-door entrance of the school building and confront Lady Fleming over what Rosalie had done, then seeing a lovers’ quarrel in which the Prince defended Miss Edgeworth against Lady Fleming’s accusations and denounced Lady Fleming with a few unforgivable words against her honor. She tried calling up what Prince Blaise had said to Lady Fleming in front of Mindy and her friends, remembering his exact words:
“‘Only a witch can give birth to someone like you.’”
After repeating his words in her mind, Mindy remembered seeing Lady Fleming in tears, but what surprised her the most was Lady Fleming’s response when she said, “My mother is dead, your Highness. Don’t make light of the dead.”
Lady Fleming left after that, leaving the Prince and Miss Edgeworth and Mindy and her friends speechless by the fountain, till the Prince came up to them and asked what they had seen and heard. So they told him the truth, but the Prince shook his head, saying, “You’re lying.”
“Maybe that’s why,” Mindy said under her breath, recalling the Prince’s signature on her eviction notice and wondering why the Prince was so damn protective of Miss Edgeworth, wondering if giving them the eviction notices was Rosalie’s idea, and wondering if Prince Blaise was complicit in it. She then looked over at the nurse organizing her desk as another thought came to her, which she articulated only in her mind: “What are you hiding, your Highness?”
