After classes on the first day, Antoinette announced she was going to speak to the headmaster about the rooming situation…but judging by how she stormed into the dorm a couple hours later, it didn't go over the way she wanted.

She was stuck with me.

And she was gonna make it my problem.

First of all, we each had our own in-loft baths and toilets but a shared double sink connecting the two rooms. Antoinette had been using my sink as her makeup station, so I had to carefully move her piles of cosmetics to fit my stuff…only to have it all replaced in the morning (she threw my toothbrush and toiletries on my bed).

My bathtub had been the designated spa zone, with baskets of bath bombs and oils and scrubs and aloe and one of those bathtub caddies with a book-stand. I didn't notice until the next morning when I had to take a shower, and was late to breakfast because I couldn't figure out where to put all this stuff without seeming passive aggressive. By that evening, she was taking a bath in my bathroom, and had locked both doors.

At least that gave me a chance to work on my new project. Étienne had bought me a lovely, hour-by-hour planner, and had even blocked in a few days himself, writing where my classes were and how long meals were and giving me ideas on where to spend my time over the weekend (there was a campus bar, a gym, botanical gardens, a cute hamlet for shopping…all places I recalled from the game).

I flipped to a section at the back of the purple-covered journal. June. Surely I wouldn't still be here by June, right? The game ended in May…

I wrote everything I remembered from Love Blooming's plot. Every key plot moment, every instant that soft locked you into a boy's route, and especially, every nasty little moment with Antoinette.

And then, all I could remember about how Antoinette fell.

~*~

I was walking to the dorms after class when a memory of the next beat in the game hit me full in the face. I doubled back to the classrooms in a rush.

It was so bizarre to live through the game events I knew so well, but have them be padded and paced by the passage of real time. I actually had to write notes! I had to listen in class! Come on, if this was some anesthesia-induced fantasy, why was I dreaming about classwork?

I took the winding, gold-carpeted stairs up to the library. Antoinette had misplaced her fancy pen set while studying. She’d only notice later that night and she’d be sure that Marie was to blame. In a later scene with the love interests, Marie would find the pen set.

Where was it? The guys and Marie would be brainstorming for their project in the library. Rémi wanted to keep their plans a secret from eavesdroppers though…

Aha! I hurried to the private study rooms at the back of the library. I spotted students hard at work through the frosted glass panels. I scanned the chalkboard with the booking calendar–room 6 was vacated a half hour ago, while everything else was occupied or hadn’t been touched since this morning. That one had to be Antoinette’s.

Sure enough, I snuck in and found the cherrywood-and-gold box behind one of the big plush chairs. I hugged it close. Now…should I tell Antoinette I’d found it? Or should I slide it into her desk without saying a word and tempting her nasty, petty programming?

I loved Antoinette as a character…but she was built to be unreasonable. Hopefully the game would flex around its rigid contours and Antoinette would reveal the depths I was sure the developers had denied her.

I channeled my triumphant energy into scurrying out of the hall of study rooms and taking the sharp corner at a jog.

If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

I should’ve known that would be a mistake. I was an otome game protagonist, after all!

I crashed right into Sylvain. He frowned at the pen set I’d dropped, like I’d done this on purpose.

"Isn’t that Antoinette’s?" he asked, tactless.

"Yep. Um. I was getting ready to study here, then noticed she forgot it, so I was gonna return it."

"You can’t use these rooms without signing up first. There’s a waiting list. Besides, it’s your third day. What on earth do you have to study?"

"The school rules and etiquette, apparently!" Sheesh, cool it with the interrogation.

I picked up the pen set, making sure none of the pieces rolled away, then surfaced to find him still glowering at me.

"What."

"You’re the girl who lost her memories, aren’t you?"

Louis, seriously! Was he that bad at keeping his mouth shut, or did Antoinette tell Sylvain? Or maybe it didn’t matter. The cast was programmed to know about me, anyways.

"I did, yes."

"And you’re staying in the palace in the meantime?"

"Technically I’m staying in the dorms. What do you really want to know?"

"I’m only thinking," he said with pointed care for each syllable, "that this academy is famous for its elitist barriers. Only students of high status can attend."

I bristled. "I’d have to be pretty ballsy to think that throwing myself in front of a carriage would get the prince to help me out. It wasn’t even his carriage."

"Yes, it was Miss Delphine’s. The tensions between her family’s corporation and the palace are well-documented."

"Huh, that so? I wouldn’t know. Considering I have amnesia. Excuse me."

He didn’t move out of my way.

My temper flared in a way it hadn’t since someone came into my ask box on Tumblr for the first time, saying I was an abuse apologists for my stupid fictional ships. "You’re saying I hunted down a Delphine carriage in a thunderstorm, threw myself into its path, and laid there hoping the prince would find me just so I could blame his dad’s rival? Did I steal Antoinette’s earring, too, so she’d be on the road that night? All of that for a scholarship?"

Amazingly, dialogue choices hadn’t popped up yet to shut me up. Maybe we were too far off-script. Sylvain suspected Marie from the start, sure, but this conversation never happened.

He said, "Full retrograde amnesia is unbelievably rare, you know? Especially when there isn’t any sign," he brushed my fluffy black bangs away from my forehead to get a look beneath, "of injury."

I jerked away. Jackass. The game never noted Marie having a head injury, apparently forgetting about unsexy bruises or stitches, so it certainly never had Sylvain lampshade it.

"Please don’t touch me.” I reached for my only ammunition: use this world against him. "And maybe be careful not to imply that the royal family is stupid enough to be tricked by a girl you think is an illiterate scam artist."

Who knew you could actually see eyes going cold in the real world, too? I ducked past him, Antoinette’s pen set digging into my sternum, and didn’t look back until I was sure I’d left him in my dust.

I never understood the fandom's obsessive love for Sylvain. Art of his face led new players to this old, forgotten game, and he dominated Love Blooming's AO3 category, shipped with everyone from Marie to, of course, every other male love interest. (Antoinette, meanwhile, was doomed to be his scorned ex-lover.)

I’ll admit it—I got in a lot of fights about this twit. It’s not that I thought he was particularly notable. Boohoo, jerk with a sad past and secret heart of gold? How predictable. You could look at this guy’s dreary thunderstorm of a scowl and know that he’s got a dying little sister and a dark backstory. But I always ran into his fans because, besides being everywhere, their treatment of Antoinette made no freaking sense.

Antoinette and Sylvain were friends. Clearly he never thought she was too nasty to hang out with. They were mean in similar ways: classist, petty, and suspicious of Marie’s every move. But Sylvain was soooo much better than a bully because you could kiss him.

Plus they turned Antoinette into a ghoul who, in Sylvain’s fanfic-ified past, did everything to him from poison his sister to slap him around.

What was the harm in treating Sylvain the way I wished the game would let me treat him?