The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

The highway opened up past the Creston Hills interchange and then immediately closed again. Move-in traffic. Half the cars on the road carried Halloran stickers on their bumpers or had parents in the front seats with the thousand-yard stare of people about to write very large tuition checks. A grey minivan in the next lane had a banner taped to the side that read FUTURE #1 HERO in letters large enough to read from orbit.

"That’s aggressive," I said.

"That’s a liability," Diane said, already composing the PR crisis in her head. "If that child washes out in six months, that banner is going to live on the internet forever. I would never let a client do that."

"You wouldn’t let a client breathe without a focus group."

"Breathing is on-brand for most people. I just make sure they do it photogenically."

The campus appeared through the windshield like something from a recruitment brochure that had been fed steroids. White concrete and glass rising from the Creston Hills elevation, catching the morning sun in a way that made the buildings glow against the pale sky. The architecture was clean and modern and very deliberately designed to make you feel small before you’d even parked.

It worked.

The main gate crawled with vehicles. Sedans, SUVs, one actual limousine that I watched Diane clock and dismiss in the same glance. Campus security in white uniforms directed traffic with the patience of people who did this once a year and hated every second of it. A drone camera from a local news crew hovered thirty feet above the entrance, capturing the parade of incoming students for whatever segment they’d air that evening.

Diane pulled the Range Rover up to the checkpoint and lowered her window. The guard leaned down, saw her face, and straightened up like someone had run a current through his spine.

"Ms. Fitzgerald. Welcome back."

"Thank you, Marcus. I’ll need visitor parking in the north lot and student parking for my daughter in 1-A residential."

The guard checked his tablet. "1-A, yes ma’am. And the other vehicle following you?"

"That’s the daughter."

He waved us through without checking Sloane’s credentials, which told me everything about how often Diane had been on this campus and how many favors she’d banked with the administration over the years.

The drive through campus felt like passing through a small city that had been designed by someone who thought normal cities didn’t have enough glass. Academic buildings lined the central spine in a row of white and steel, connected by covered walkways with landscaping so immaculate it looked computer-generated. Students and parents moved in clusters along the paths, carrying boxes and bags and the particular expression of people who were simultaneously thrilled and terrified.

I recognized the feeling. It sat in my own chest like a second heartbeat.

Diane navigated toward the residential district on the northern side of campus where the combat operations housing clustered around the training facilities. The road curved uphill through a stand of eucalyptus trees and opened into a clearing where four buildings sat on separate patches of manicured ground, each one five stories of white concrete and glass that looked more like a boutique hotel than student housing.

Signs at the entrance identified each building. Prometheus House 1-A. Prometheus House 1-B. And so on. Because Halloran’s branding department had apparently decided that stealing fire from the gods was an appropriate metaphor for eighteen-year-olds learning to punch things professionally.

"1-A first," Diane said, pulling toward the designated lot. "We get Sloane settled. Then we move your things."

"My things are one bag."

"Your furniture is already in your room. Your bag is the ceremonial conclusion to a logistical operation I have been managing for three weeks. Do not diminish the ceremony."

Sloane’s coupe pulled into the spot beside us. Through the windshield I watched her kill the engine and sit for a moment, both hands still on the wheel, staring at the building where she would live for the next two years. Her lips moved. Talking to herself, or maybe just breathing through whatever was happening in her chest.

Then she got out of the car like she’d been doing this her whole life, and the vulnerability vanished.

The 1-A Prometheus House entrance opened into a ground-floor common area that smelled like new furniture polish and the faintest trace of cleaning chemicals. The space was enormous. Open-plan living area with modular couches arranged in loose clusters, a full kitchen with double ovens and a gas range visible through a wide archway, and floor-to-ceiling windows along the south wall that overlooked the combat training grounds in the distance. Morning sun flooded through the glass and turned the hardwood floors gold.

Students and parents filled the space with the particular chaos of move-in day. Someone’s father struggled with a box too large for the elevator. A mother reorganized her daughter’s shoes on the common room floor while the daughter pretended not to know her. Two guys in matching academy tracksuits debated whether the kitchen had enough counter space for a professional-grade blender. 𝕗𝐫𝐞𝕖𝕨𝐞𝗯𝚗𝕠𝘃𝐞𝚕.𝐜𝗼𝚖

Diane walked through the crowd the way she walked through every room. People noticed. A few parents recognized her and did that thing where their posture changed and their smiles became slightly more performative. One father actually elbowed his wife and nodded toward Diane like he was spotting a celebrity in the wild, which, given Diane’s position in the California hero industry, he basically was.

Sloane carried her first box herself despite my offer to help, because allowing me to carry her things in front of her new classmates would have registered in her brain as weakness. She balanced the box on one hip with the casual strength of someone whose baseline physical output exceeded most professional athletes, and headed for the elevator with the expression of a woman entering a warzone that happened to have very nice countertops.

I followed with two of her garment bags draped over one shoulder and a duffel in my other hand, which apparently qualified me as a pack mule in the Fitzgerald logistics hierarchy. Diane brought up the rear with Sloane’s rolling suitcase and her phone, already texting someone about something unrelated because Diane Fitzgerald did not waste transit time.

The elevator deposited us on the third floor of the West Tower, which the building layout designated as the female residential wing. Sloane’s apartment was 3W-02. She keyed the door with her student card and pushed it open into seven hundred and fifty square feet of empty potential.

The furniture had already arrived. Her black platform bed frame sat against the far wall beneath a window that looked out over the training grounds. The mattress she’d spent twenty minutes testing at Atelier Haven occupied the frame, still wrapped in protective plastic. Her modern steel desk with the glass top occupied the corner near the study nook, positioned exactly where Diane had specified in her floor plan revision emails to the delivery team.

Sloane dropped her box on the bed and looked around the room with an expression that shifted from critical assessment to something quieter and harder to read.

"It’s bigger than I thought."