The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 386

Chapter 386: 386 | We Were Doing Homework, I Swear [GT BONUS]

"So I need something nobody wants."

"You need something nobody thought of." She was writing again, fast, crossing out, writing. "Because that’s actually your thing, right? Everybody watches you do something stupid and then it works and they can’t figure out why it worked."

"That’s not a name, that’s a personality disorder."

"It’s a brand." She looked up, and there it was, that competitive fire she got when she’d figured something out before you did. "Crane’s whole point is that the name comes from the gap. The gap between what people expect when they look at you and what actually happens. So what’s your gap."

I didn’t answer right away.

The honest answer was a system in my skull that paid me for being a scumbag and a registration file that would land me in a government facility if anyone checked it twice. The honest answer was that my gap was a canyon and I was standing on one edge of it lying about the depth.

"Unmarked kid," I said. "Dead heroes’ son. Everybody’s got the file before they’ve got the face."

Sloane went still.

Then she reached over and closed her hand around my wrist. The pressure was immediate, deliberate, a little past comfortable. This was how Sloane did physical affection when she hadn’t cleared it with herself first.

"That’s not your gap," she said, and her voice had dropped lower, something steady underneath it. "That’s their gap. That’s the part where they fucked up the assessment."

My chest did something without asking permission. Small shift. Unplanned.

"You’re going to walk into a room four years from now," Sloane continued, "and every single person sitting there is going to have that file open. Unmarked. Late bloomer. Dead heroes’ kid. They’re going to have the whole thing memorized. And then you’re going to do whatever it is you do, and they’re going to sit there and watch their read fall apart in real time." She squeezed my wrist tighter. "That’s the gap. The space between what they wrote down and what’s actually standing in front of them. You don’t name yourself after their mistake. You name yourself after the moment they realize they made one."

The guitar song ended. Something slower started playing through the speaker.

"You’ve been working on that speech," I said.

"I’ve been working on a lot of things." She said it flat and then heard it land, and the entire color spectrum relocated to her face in under two seconds. Her hand jerked off my wrist like she’d touched something hot. The notebook came up fast, positioned like riot shielding. "That came out wrong. I meant positioning. Market analysis. My mother’s whole job is brand management, I think about these things professionally, that’s completely standard operational thinking."

"Sloane."

"Do your homework."

"Sloane."

"Two thousand words minimum, Belmont. Get moving."

I laughed. She kicked me, harder this time, and then her foot stayed there against my leg like she’d lost track of where she’d put it.

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