Rainshower/Guilt

It was finally the day I'd been waiting for.

After monitoring the chat logs for the past few days, Maya finally announced to her club members that she had an important exclusive piece of news she was going to reveal on Monday so everyone should prepare to help spread it throughout the entire academy.

Obviously, she was referring to me and the "love" I have for Diana as well as the "curse" that haunts me.

Thinking about how paranoid I was over the past week, I was happy that I could finally walk into the bathroom without having to look around to make sure that she wasn't following whilst invisible.

Maya was a creepy stalker obsessed with eavesdropping on conversations she wasn't meant to but once she releases her findings, she loses her interest in the person and moves on to the next scoop.

That meant I was finally free from her grasp.

'Thank the heavens!'

It didn't even take a single second for me to notice all the heads that snapped in my direction as I entered the hallway.

These head-snapping had practically disappeared by Friday but now they made their return. This time, for a different reason.

It's hard to change someone's opinion about you when you've done something terrible but if that action of yours is caused by a demon, beings that every sane human hates, that hatred they initially have for you turns to sympathy.

When you include a tragic love story of how your crush on a girl turned into a terrible sexual assault story, that sympathy becomes guilt.

Students looked like they had committed a crime against me.

They looked like every nasty rotten word they spoke of me, they regretted them.

Some looked like they were about to cry because of how terrible they felt for me. They looked like they wanted to give me a hug and tell me that it wasn't my fault.

I hadn't read the newspaper yet but if this was the kind of reaction that I was getting then I was sure Maya had written her Magnum Opus thus far.

As I stepped deeper into the areas where the students were crowding the hallways, particularly the lockers where Maya's secret club always placed their newspaper for the student body to read, I began to hear conversations.

"Look at him. I... I want to give him a hug. I feel so bad for him."

"Me too. Putting myself in his shoes, I couldn't imagine how bad it would feel to attack my girlfriend because of a demon's curse."

"Should we go apologize to him for what we said?"

"I don't know if he'll accept our apologies. We've said things that we can never take back."

"You're right. We fucked up."

Just because someone doesn't accept your apology doesn't mean you shouldn't apologize but these were still students who had their youthful pride so I couldn't hold it against them.

Those who just finished reading the news looked up at me, with fresh emotions, and a few of them shed some tears.

Like a tragic hero treading through a land that didn't appreciate his acts of heroism, I walked toward my classroom with ecstatic emotions coursing through my veins.

I was thinking to myself that this was an impressive display of just how trusted Maya's club was. Nobody other than her was a witness to the conversations between myself and the headmistress of teacher Vivian but just the symbol on the newspaper alone garnered the complete trust of every student.

If this was Earth, any article of this manner would be received with doubt and distrust.

Well, some idiots would naively trust whatever they see online but those are idiots so they don't count.

As I was about to step into my classroom, a girl who was nearly a foot shorter than me cut me off.

She looked up at me with these eyes that had a layer of tears on them and she said to me in this guilt-filled voice that shivered, "I'm sorry Bell. I know you do not know me but I've said horrible... horrible things about you for months. I'm sorry I said them without knowing the truth."

She continued to look up at me with this look of wanting to grovel to show how sincere she was with her apology.

I was silent for a while, pretending to be taking it all in, contemplating, processing just what was happening.

"Thank you," I told her with this fake smile that was purposely obvious about how fake it was.

Nodding my head slightly, I walked into the room and heard a soft, "Sorry," behind my back.

The reactions of my classmates were even worse and more exaggerated to a comical degree.

Because of how "closer" they were to me than the random students in the hallway, the guilt they must've felt as they stared holes into my skull during lectures must be eating them up from the inside like a parasite trying to control their body.

About to rest my head on the desk and act as if I was struggling to maintain my emotions, one of the girls in my classroom handed me a note and walked back to her seat without giving me time to react.

Opening the note, I read it and slowly, fake tears appeared and dripped down my face.

[Dear Bell,

I'm sorry. I know that you wouldn't want to hear the voice of someone who's made your days horrible so I decided to write a note instead. I'm sorry that I...]

The note was basically an apology note written from the bottom of her heart.

I let out a soft sniff of the nose before resting my head on my arm, wiping my tears while I was at it.

'Master!' screamed Liona. 'That was flawless! Absolutely flawless! The way your tears came out at the perfect time, the expression on your face, everything about your performance was flawless.'

'Thank you,' I replied.

'I have to agree with Liona on this one. Your acting has gotten better, master,' said the ever-noble Kimi.

'Thank you, Kimi.'

I listened to feet shuffling around the room and using my sixth sense, I was able to see the mana of others around the room;

One by one, they were approaching my desk, dropping something off before walking back to their seat.

When the teacher entered the room, he also had this face of guilt on his face but he tried to mask it in order to get the class going.

I looked at the folded notes on my desk and placed them inside my pockets. One by one, I began reading them.

The teacher definitely noticed but I think since he had a clue on what I was reading, he didn't stop me or call me out for doing it during his lecture.

This went on for the first of the first half of the school day. People apologized to me, sympathized with my story, and left me notes.

None of them had my phone number to text me so traditional paper and pencil were what they had to resort to.

My friends, former friends, those that severed their relationship with Bell Agnus after his sexual assault story was revealed to the academy, they probably tried to text me but I had already changed my number.

Some of them approached me in between classes or during lunch but I ignored them to show the student body just how hurt I was from their "betrayal" and "lack of trust" in their friend.

Now came the real courses that mattered and perhaps because these courses tended to be more physical and intimate between the classmates, the familiarity they shared with me was greater than those of the previous classes.

One by one, they came up to me regardless of whether or not I accepted them and apologized, showing to me their character.

This was likely a result of what I've demonstrated the past week, the willingness to participate in lessons, group up with other classmates during group projects, helping them if need be.

A few with nasty characters rolled their eyes as they watched the apologies come pouring down my direction.

But every apple tree is bound to have a few rotten apples so I didn't care all that much.

The trio of Jess, Francis, and Cormier, my partners who helped me win the black egg that I was taking care of at home, were the ones who had the strongest reactions so far.

Somehow, someway, the four of us were grouped together again.

As we were in the middle of an exercise where we were watching a film about an actual historical battle between two squads during a previous war and were meant to analyze the mistakes the leaders made with their squad as a group, the three of them spent the entire time apologizing to a point where I got annoyed.

"It's fine," I told them with a smile. "Thank you for the kind words."

Luckily, the quiet Cormier had already watched this film in his spare time and when it was time to write the paper about our analysis, he did the entire thing by himself.

"Don't worry," he told me. "I still need to pay you back for helping me win the egg."

I told him that he already did enough to pay me back but he shook his head and explained that what I did for him was something that he wouldn't be satisfied paying back until the semester is over at the minimum.

That was a little extreme but I understood where he was coming from.

He was a student that came here through the scholarship program and if he succeeded in hatching that egg, he'd be able to get his family out of whatever trench they were in because owning a magical creature would grant him hundreds of new ways to earn money.

He was a quiet student but when it came to paying back things, he wasn't one to shy away.

This meant that for Jess and Francis who he didn't feel indebted to, he requested that they give him a free meal as payment for doing the entire paper for them.

These three were people that weren't referred to once in the novel but I couldn't help but feel like I didn't mind befriending them.

"Thank you," said Francis who clapped his hands together and bowed as if Cormier was a god in his eyes.