The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 159

Chapter 159: 159 | The Last Drive from Creston Hills

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."

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