I chased the next private love interest event by popping right next to Louis during lunch. The dining hall was arranged with long, very Hogwartsian tables, and Louis was picking at his duck confit and kale while his older sister roped him into a conversation.
When I set down my plate, Colette gave me a big, bright smile, the watts only challenged by her brother's. I’d seen his sour face from across the dining hall, and now here he was, grinning; it was so weird to me that I had this effect on anybody.
Louis said, “Hey, Chloé, can you convince Colette that I don't want to join her dumb class?”
I waved away his snark with a forkful of lemony asparagus. “You hate any kind of class. What is it, Colette?”
Colette only resembled Lou in their round jaws, big brown eyes, and smattering of freckles; she had hair cut in a bob, the colour of cashmere and the fluffy texture of candy floss, a detail that didn't come across in the game graphics. A butterfly clip held her bangs to the left–in true cartoon fashion, her twin sister, Cécile (the one who got Louis the RA side gig), had long hair and a dragonfly clip on the right.
“I convinced my art tutor to let me run painting classes during the evenings!” She danced in her seat. “I want anyone to be able to pop in whenever they want, no prior experience required. I’ll lead the class, and you enjoy making friends, drinking some adult beverages, and learning a new skill!”
“That sounds super fun to me,” I said. Actually, in my real life, the game inspired me to attend a couple ‘paint and sip’ events. Alone, sure, but that let me have some fun conversations with the teacher and other students. I liked getting to know strangers for a couple hours at a time–all the fun chatter, none of the obligation to keep up with them and seem totally normal.
“See?!” Colette snapped at Louis.
“It sounds girly and boring. Like going to one of mom’s society parties, but with worse drinks.”
"You’re such a hater. Please, Lou? If my first class has a bad turn-out, my tutor will shut it all down."
Ping!
[https://64.media.tumblr.com/d98e06fee8b96dedb546cd9d5060c366/38da916db2289870-3f/s2048x3072/135b25a2595dbcf4b723e55eab7b9b770e4e7da5.jpg]
Spice!Marie made me nudge Louis, almost putting his elbow in his salad. “That sounds like fun! Let’s go together, Lou!”
He blushed. “Not like I was gonna study that night, I guess.”
Colette dug a flyer out of her messenger bag. "Thank you!" She handed it across the table. Amidst the crinkle from her bag, it gave a date and time, along with a note that the class would be in the Francois Marceaux art studio on campus. Then she dug out a few more. “Chloé, you’re popular. Could you pass these out for me?”
Popular? I guess it looked that way, considering the love interest company I kept.
"Sure." I pretended something just occurred to me. "You know who else you should ask? Antoinette Delphine. She's so talented. I mean, even her planner’s designed perfectly."
Sparkles gleamed in Colette’s eyes. "Ooh, having her attend would be as good for our advertising as Monet signing up to teach!"
As much as I liked Antoinette, I had a feeling Colette was greatly overestimating how much time people wanted to spend around her. The excitable Chapelle sped off to the next table, a fresh handful of flyers armed and ready.
~*~
I don't know how she managed it, but sure enough, when Lou and I entered the art classroom, Colette was showing Antoinette around.
Antoinette had brought two of her lackeys who had gone through my luggage. There were three bonus NPCs in attendance: one flirty couple and a quiet guy sitting alone, poring very seriously over his palette as he dolloped paint on it.
Colette hurried to us. "Thanks for dragging him here, Chloé. You'll have fun," she said to Louis, more of an admonishment than encouragement. "The class will be really easy. Even for you."
Ouch.
She took us to a supply closet to pick up our canvases and brushes, letting us choose whichever ones as long as we took "a little flat one and a big round one and a bigger flat one." She bounced impatiently on her heels whenever I hovered over what I guessed to be the wrong brush.
We were handed a little caddy of pre-selected paints. As Colette explained everything, I noticed Antoinette taking a seat at an easel. In her row were two free seats on either side of her–of course Antoinette wanted to be literally front and center. She had two friends with her. If they sat to either side of her, Louis and I were screwed.
Louis and Colette were now caught in a loop of teasing, Louis pretending to not understand any of her artist jargon and Colette giving him increasingly frustrated fake-explanations. I gathered up my caddy and then plopped down directly beside Antoinette.
"You came! Hi!" I said.
She was carefully placing her paint on her palette. I'd accidentally made her jump the tiniest bit, smearing purple on her finger.
"Oh. Chloé. It seems every time I turn around, you’re there."
And she sure didn’t sound pleased about it.
Louis set his things down beside me, throwing a parting middle finger at his sister as she went to greet more newcomers. He was holding a glass and gestured at the drink station with it. "I didn't know what you wanted? Sorry. You ran off."
"No problem! I'll grab something. Hey, look! It's Antoinette! Didn’t you guys once hang out together or something? You have memories to bond over, right? Okay, bye." I sped off to the forest of wine bottles.
I pretended to be completely engrossed in all the wine labels instead of just pouring a glass and returning to my seat. Antoinette and Louis weren’t even paying attention to each other.
I honestly wasn’t sure if Lou was my best bet…or my worst. His history with Antoinette ran deeper than anyone else’s, even Sylvain’s. She and his sisters were friends in their early adolescence, right up until Antoinette humiliated them both at their societal debut as sixteen-year-olds…a slight that seemed to have been resolved, or at least buried under layers of that specific high school amnesia we’re all eventually afflicted with…or maybe just forgiven, considering how affluent and important Antoinette now was (his sisters were notoriously fierce networkers). Either way, Lou grew up with Antoinette, and his parents were delighted by how the Chapelle kids had a connection, no matter how brittle, to the Delphines.
Louis could be the worst bet, though, because their connection was never explicitly romantic. In Love Blooming, Antoinette treated him like a brother, taking on the protective older sister role. She antagonized Marie not by flirting with him, but by planting rumours with the twin sisters and humiliating Marie at a family gathering.
So Antoinette definitely didn’t have the blind passion that romance inspires, but she was programmed to ingratiate herself in the family throughout the course of the route. Could the Chapelles help her in the end? Would they want her good opinion so badly that they’d help her even when her reputation was ruined, or would she just look like spoiled goods to them?
Soon enough, we were all in our seats and Colette was at the front of the class, her eyes sparkling even more than the students’ glass-blown vases lining the wall behind her. “I’m thrilled that so many of you came to my very first class! Please be patient with me if there are any hiccups! And remember, don’t worry about being perfect. I want you to have fun. If there’s ever a moment where you want to go your own way, I encourage you to–to hurry on over in that direction!”
Like with Étienne and Antoinette at the opera, I made a show of focusing on the entertainment instead of my companions. My hands followed each of Colette’s instructions perfectly while my mind zeroed in on every word they exchanged.
And I really did mean word.
Louis accidentally flicked a drop of paint water near her foot. So he said “Sorry.” And she said “Hmph.”
The tale has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
I cleared my throat. “When you guys were kids—“
“Your painting is reall—“ he started at the same time.
“Sorry. You first.”
“You’re following super well.”
“Thanks! Your sister has great instructions.” While obviously Colette had more skill, clear in the steadiness of her hand and the confidence of her blending, my sunset-on-a-wildflower-field was a pretty good forgery.
Marie fulfilled her protagonist destiny by being awful at art but in a cutesy way that Louis could help her with, Ghost-style. This episode ended with a cute little paint fight between them, obviously. Something I was sure Antoinette wouldn’t find so fun.
I–Chloé–Hanna–whatever, well, I was an okay artist in real life. I definitely didn’t post any of my fanart online because I didn’t need ship wars chipping at my already delicate artist ego (they fought enough in the notes on my fanfics). I always was trying to capture that keen, serious look Antoinette had in the game graphics, but I could never quite get it. It was like she was looking at me through the game in a way I could hardly understand.
Back in the studio, Louis’ painting wasn’t even close to his sister’s example. I leaned over, taking in the layered landscape of fields, mountains, and deep cravesses. The colours were bright and almost abrasive, with graphic line work and brazen edges. So modern. I can see something like this on Instagram. The whole painting was cut in three by thin veils of different colour.
"What are you painting? It's cool."
"It's, uh…it's a place in the fantasy thing I'm inventing."
“What’s it like?”
Lou thought for a second, letting me finish up a flower. He glanced over at Antoinette’s perfect painting, suddenly seeming a bit insecure, like he’d been caught misbehaving. But few things made this guy happier than talking about the stories he was passionate about, so I gave him a nudge.
"How it works in the story…there are three worlds. They're not different planets though. They're all on the same Earth." He used the end of his paintbrush to point out the different colour washes and where they met. "The surface plane, the past plane, and the future plane. They're pretty self-explanatory."
"Not for me; I don't read books like that."
He launched into his answer with gusto. "So the surface plane is the current day. The past is all the…kinda like the world's memories and the people's memories. The future plane is what the world will be, but some of the characters theorize that the future plan is actually just the surface plane of future people, and their past plane is our current surface plane, and so on and so on, stacked on each other forever. The idea is that all of time is happening at the—at the same time around us, though the only one we see is the present."
"Do they interact?" I asked, pointing out a flower he'd drawn growing on the purple-tinged past plane, being picked by a silhouette on the surface plane.
"Sometimes. Sometimes things line up so perfectly that they slip through the planes and can be accessed by everyone at once. Sometimes that even happens to people. They fall through one plane and into another. They didn't end up on another planet. Just another layer of the only planet we have."
I tried so hard to never think about this, but as I stared at Lou's painting, I couldn't stop the questions that zipped through my mind.
What happened to me?
Was my normal life still happening somewhere on the Earth–the plane–I belonged to? Or had everything stopped? Was it all going on at the same time like Lou’s painting?
Ah, shit. Was I dead and my ghost was possessing my DS, like some Ben Drowned situation?
Seriously, was I dead?
My surgery was because of something I never talked about online. People would be dicks about it, because even on Tumblr, honorary home of the neurodivergent and disabled, people were such dicks. I’d been sick for a long, long time, leading me to sequester myself in fandom spaces so I could still connect, create, and matter even if I couldn’t reliably interact with the real world like a normal woman in her 20s.
So…did the surgery not work?
"Chloé? Sorry, didn't mean to talk your ear off…"
I thought of someone inheriting my DS and finding the game, hacked by the ghost of a loser otaku who was following around the villainess with heart eyes.
"No, don't worry. It made me get lost in thought. That's the biggest compliment I can give you."
He smiled, cheeks going pink under his freckles.
Okay, okay. What good would it do me to think about these risky things, huh? Not like there was anything I could do…
I pivoted. “Antoinette?”
She didn’t look up, focusing on adding depth to her field of grass.
“Hey, could you teach me how you did the grass like that? It’s beautiful.”
She glanced over at my grass, which was pretty much just a big blob of flat green. “Weren’t you listening to Colette?”
No. I was having an existential crisis about my possible demise. “I missed it? Actually, maybe you and Louis could compare techniques. Doesn’t his look nice?”
Antoinette sighed. She set down her paintbrush with an air of great exhaustion, looked past Louis, and glared right at me. “Look, Chloé. I understand you have some sort of silly, nervous tic that makes you speak incessantly around me, but can you please try to control it for the rest of this class? I’m trying to focus.”
I froze. Maybe my nerves were a little delicate after the whole Ben Drowned thing, because my mouth went dry and I couldn’t figure out what to say.
Yeah, well–you’re just a heap of pixels in a DS! A secondhand DS I covered in shitty Sanrio stickers to cover up the scuffs! In a game that didn’t sell well!!
After a long twenty minutes of awkward silence, the class finished.
We all went around, complimenting each other’s work. Even the ugly ones (sorry, just being honest) got lots of praise from Colette, and the combination of stress about showing my work and happiness about how nice the group was finally pushed aside my existential anxiety. All the compliments reminded me of how the LB fandom, especially when it first started, was so happy to get any content at all, so our small group would embrace any creators who fumbled their way in. Fic with miserable characterisation? Fic that was all one paragraph with no understanding of dialogue punctuation? Fic that reused every hackneyed trope in the book? All a part of our museum of fanwork, now. Enjoy your kudos!
Colette admired everything from colour to technique to the errors–happy little accidents, she said, with absolutely no idea who she was scripted to quote. At least, until she got to Lou.
I guess she felt more comfortable chiding her brother than a bunch of well-meaning strangers, because she was quick to say, “Were you even listening to my lesson?”
“You said I didn’t have to copy you exactly,” Lou said. Unfortunately, pretty much everyone else, including me, had followed Colette’s example as closely as possible.
The flatness of everyone’s work struck me. Did they not make any creative decisions because they weren’t programmed with anything more complex than a basic skill level? Was that type of individuality too complex?
I was scanning the group of students, feeling totally weird, as Colette said, “You should have listened to me. This is completely unrecognizable from what I modeled. I mean, if everyone did something like this, I’d have reason to doubt my teaching, huh?”
Lou shrugged. “It’s for me, not you.”
“Not really. If you want to be a real artist, it has to be for your audience. And who is that for? It’s too strange.”
After a beat where it became clear Lou wasn’t gonna defend himself, I noisily cleared my throat. “I–well, I think it’s neat.”
That seemed to snap Colette out of it. She fixed her hairpin and said, “Thank you for coming to class today, everyone. Please leave your paintings here so they can dry safely, and you can pick them up this week. Oooorrr, you can sign them and leave them as examples for the next classes!”
I didn’t really have any need for my art, so I decided to leave it. Antoinette's friends were waiting for her as I tried to carefully sign my name, forcing my hand steady and wondering what Chloé’s signature could be. Antoinette told her friends, “Go on. I’ll catch up.”
It was only when my big, block-letter CHLOÉ was dry that I realised Antoinette was waiting for me. “I’ll put it in the drying rack,” she said tautly.
I’d thought her letting me into the carriage was an apology for being so rude to me, too. I’m not about to be tricked again, Miss Villainess!
“That’s okay. I’ll take it myself.”
Antoinette pivoted sharply on her heel. She went around, picking up paintings left behind, until it was only me, her, and the Chapelles in the classroom.
Signature dealt with, I headed over to Antoinette. She glided behind the high shelf with all the paint bottles, handling the paintings. I watched her pick out Colette’s example painting, hum a single, snide note at it, and then take out the whole stack of the students’ paintings.
And then dump a bottle full of red paint on them.
I gasped. She whirled to me, very narrowly avoiding getting paint on her shirt.
“What the hell are you doing?” I whispered.
I expected her to fire back with a, What does it look like? Instead, she blinked as if clearing the sun from her eyes and grimaced at the red paint now dripping off the canvases and onto her glossy black shoes.
Antoinette said, “The way she spoke to Louis, I couldn’t…”
Her floaty tone, the way she was looking at herself…it was like she had no idea what she’d done or why.
“Um, Chloé, do you want to go grab coffee? There’s a–what happened?” Louis appeared behind me, eyes wide at the mess of paint.
“Accident,” I said quickly.
Antoinette snapped back to her senses. She tossed the canvases aside, splaying her paint-covered hands and trying to step out of the mess. “For god’s sake,” she was whispering. “For god’s…”
“I mean, now they all match perfectly,” Lou said weakly. I noticed a smirk flicking at the corner of his mouth.
Antoinette shouldered between us, much more roughly than I expected. She strode out of the classroom, leaving red footprints behind her and ignoring Colette calling after her.