The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

My wardrobe situation was less impressive. I looked down at the worn jeans and black hoodie that constituted approximately eighty percent of my clothing choices and felt nothing resembling concern. The hoodie was clean. The jeans had no holes that weren’t meant to be there. My shoes were functional.

Diane had opinions about this. She’d been having opinions about it since the shopping trip, when she attempted to detour us into a men’s clothing store on Meridian and I had physically steered the Range Rover in the opposite direction while she was still mid-sentence about structured blazers. Sloane had backed me up in the moment, but I’d caught the look she gave my hoodie that morning. The look that said she loved me and also found my fashion choices personally offensive.

Here’s what neither of them understood yet. I was planning to buy a new wardrobe. College was the ideal time for it. New campus, new environment, fresh start that required a fresh aesthetic. The key detail they were both missing was that I had no intention of shopping alone or paying full price.

Halloran Academy was going to be full of women. Smart women. Powerful women. Women with Aspects that could level city blocks and faces that belonged on magazine covers. The student body was seventy-eight percent Aspect-bearing individuals between the ages of eighteen and twenty-one, drawn from the most competitive applicant pool on the planet, which meant that the average attractiveness level at Halloran was going to be statistically absurd because genetics and Aspect manifestation correlated with physical development in ways that made the entire campus function as an unintentional modeling agency.

All I had to do was wait approximately one week, identify a fashionable heroine with strong opinions and stronger initiative, complain about my wardrobe within earshot, and let nature take its course. Some gorgeous super-powered woman would absolutely drag me to a mall for a shopping spree. They always did. It was like a law of the universe. Tell a girl who cares about aesthetics that you own four identical hoodies and she physically cannot stop herself from intervening.

I giggled.

Not a laugh. A giggle. Quiet and genuine and deeply inappropriate given the context.

Sloane materialized in the kitchen doorway with a box of toiletries in her arms and her pink ponytail already starting to come undone. Her blue eyes locked onto my face with the instantaneous threat assessment of someone whose Aspect could generate explosions.

"What are you laughing about."

"Nothing."

"That was not a nothing laugh. That was a something laugh. That was a specifically perverted something laugh. I can tell."

"You can’t tell the difference between my laughs."

"I absolutely can. I have been living with you for nine years and dating you for two months and that laugh right there. That one." She pointed at my face with the hand not holding the toiletry box. "Is the laugh you make when you’re thinking something that would make me want to hit you."

I took another sip of coffee. "I was thinking about furniture arrangement."

"Liar."

"Lamp placement."

"You are such a liar."

"Thread counts."

"Lukas Belmont, if you don’t tell me what you were actually thinking about, I will put this box of shampoo bottles down and I will detonate your coffee mug while you’re still holding it."

Her ears were red. That was the tell Sloane couldn’t control. When she was angry, her face went neutral and cold and dangerous. When she was flustered because she suspected something involving other women, her ears turned the same shade of pink as her hair and she got louder about it.

I loved this girl.

"I was thinking about how nice it’s going to be living in a real apartment," I said, which was technically true in the same way that saying the ocean contains water is technically true.

Sloane stared at me for four more seconds. Her eyes narrowed. Her jaw worked.

Then she made a sound in her throat that communicated distrust on a molecular level and walked away with her toiletry box, her ponytail swinging with every step.

I finished my coffee and rinsed the mug in the sink, still grinning.

By eight-fifteen, both vehicles were loaded. The Range Rover looked like it contained the inventory of a small furniture store. Sloane’s black coupe had her personal boxes stacked in the back seat with the garment bags laid flat across the top, uncrumpled, because Sloane took threats from her mother seriously even when she pretended not to.

The house felt different with the doors open and boxes gone. Emptier in a way that had nothing to do with furniture and everything to do with the fact that three people were leaving and only one would be coming back tonight.

Diane stood in the foyer with her car keys in one hand and her phone in the other, wearing a cream silk blouse tucked into high-waisted navy trousers with gold heels that added three inches to her already commanding height. Her hair fell in a loose wave past her shoulders. Full makeup. Gold earrings. She looked like she was heading to close a seven-figure deal rather than drive her children to college. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

This was intentional. Diane Fitzgerald did not drop her children off at the world’s best Hero Academy looking anything less than the most put-together woman on campus. The other parents would see her. The faculty would see her. The agency scouts who attended move-in day because scouting started before classes did would see her. And every single one of them would walk away remembering exactly who Diane Fitzgerald was and what she represented.

I respected the move. I also found it insanely hot, but that was becoming a recurring problem with everything Diane did.

Sloane appeared at the top of the stairs and paused.

She’d changed. Again. The compression top crisis had apparently resolved itself, because she now wore fitted dark jeans, a cropped white top that showed a stripe of toned stomach above her waistband, and her signature black choker tight against her throat. Her hair was up in the high ponytail she reserved for situations that required either combat or serious confidence. Her eyes were bright and blue and slightly too wide.

She was nervous.