Labeled (A The Selection Fanfiction)

Chapter Nine

Jacqueline, our mentor in the Selection, was giving us a lesson, which we should be grateful for, about breakfast manners.

Before breakfast. Doesn't she understand that we are all falling asleep? Nope. So, here we are, waiting to eat until our manners are fully corrected. Apparently, yesterday at dinner we had abominable manners. Well, most of us, as she says, "You all had abominable manners! You are not pigs, horses, cows, or dogs! You are ladies of the palace! And so, you will now have exceptional manners and never embarrass me ever again. All of you, except for Lady Clarissa, Lady Bridgette, Lady Willow, Lady Bethany, Lady Emerald, Lady Cecilia, and Lady Estelle, will be missing lunch today!" She screeched. I felt the need to cover my ears, and many other girls were wincing and their hands were twitching. I noticed that all the girls who didn't have abominable manners were Prestige. I wonder if Jacqueline did that absentmindedly or on purpose.

Although, in a way it's true. The Prestige have more money than the other labels, and so we can pay more for instruction and actually buying the utensils we are learning about. It's so unfair.

She tapped her sharp calligraphy (which we are all learning - with ink on our hands) pen on her hands and arched and eyebrow. "Lady Violet," Her new target, "would you care to tell me on which side of your table settings your bread plate goes?" She stopped in the middle of her graceful pacing around the room, and her cold eyes glared at Voilet, making the rest of us shrink in our seats.

Violet sat up straighter and confidently replied, "The bread plate goes to the left, above the fork and spoon. The fork is placed on the outside of the spoon." She spoke as if reciting from a dictionary. Jacqueline looked confused for a second, confused and surprised. Her cheeks lifted into a hint of a smile, but no creases formed around her eyes. Her unreflecting, cold, misty sharp grey eyes. It was as if she stared into you and sucked the light out of your soul.

"Nicely done." She said, her highest form of affection, if you could even call it that. "For a Modest, I expected much more trouble, but you have pushed through your limitations and strived to meet your betters." I feel like using this dinner fork to give her a scar she will remember.

Oh, that's gross. You can't blame me though, it's true.

As she continues to call on Modests, to try to prove their unruly behavior, I think about yesterday. After we all had our one-on-one meetings with Alexander, he asked six people to stay behind. This morning, Amanda, Georgia, Odetta, Adele, Bedelia, and Jenna were gone. What could they have done to be dismissed that quickly? And plus, most of them were Modests.

When I heard that, I felt my throat closing in. The wave of fear grew, taller, taller, and taller, until it broke ferociously over my heat. The dark grey, black, and blue rivers of water screamed as they shot around my heart, far too similar to the bullet into my arm. They compressed my heart into a world of doubt as they last drops slithered and fell from what used to be my hopeful heart. In its place was now fear. Unexplainable fear that took over my movements and thoughts, my feelings and dreams.

I pulled my mind back into the Dining Room. The only way to escape the fear was to distract myself. But there was never a real escape. What if Alexander was lying to me? What if he only cared about me because I was a Prestige? What if all he wanted was a pretty face to stand beside him on the Capital Report's, not a wife that could love and care for him? W-what if he didn't even like me at all?

These thoughts swarmed through my head, but I couldn't free them. My heart grabbed onto them and pull them back into a dark abyss as soon as I started to let them go in the form of tears.

"Lady Clarissa?" A very pointed voice called out from the fog of my mind. "Are you with us, or are you just going to daydream the whole time? You are a Prestige, act like it for once!"Jacqueline. Nice to hear your voice again. A few girls giggled.