The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism novel Chapter 397

Chapter 397: 397 | That Twelve-Second Problem [GT BONUS]

My shoulders hit the wall between the vending machine and the fire door.

She stopped with about eight inches left and put her palm flat on the wall next to my ribs, which meant her forearm was across my chest and her face was tilted up at me and I could smell whatever she wore, something warm and sugary with a bite under it, like burnt caramel.

The gauge ticked in my peripheral vision. Four to six.

"Okay so," Maribelle said. "First. Last night."

"Nothing happened last night."

"Twelve seconds."

"You’ve built an entire personality out of eleven dollars."

"I’ve built an entire personality out of being right, babe, the eleven dollars is a bonus." Her tail flicked hard enough that the spade tip clipped the vending machine with a plastic tick. "Second thing. And this is the actual thing, so like, drop the face."

"Which face."

"The one where you’re funny at me instead of talking." She tipped her head, and one of the horns nearly grazed my jaw. "Petra Lang came in through the stairwell last night at eight nineteen and went straight past me without saying anything about my shorts."

"Is that unusual."

"Belmont, she has commented on my hemline every single day since move-in. Every. Single. Day. I could set my watch by it. She has opinions about my hemline the way scientists have opinions about the moon, except scientists are less consistent and substantially less judgy."

Maribelle’s voice dropped completely out of the bright register she’d been operating in, and what surfaced underneath was quieter and significantly more careful. The tail stopped flicking. "She walked straight past me last night, shaking hard enough I could see it from where I was standing, wouldn’t even look at me. So I need to know if you were mean to her, or if you were the other thing."

"What’s the other thing."

"The thing where you see somebody accurately and don’t lie about it." She held my eyes, and hers were completely steady. No performance. "Because that’s worse. Mean, she can handle. She’s had mean since she was four. That girl knows mean. The other thing is going to take her apart."

There it was.

Everybody in this building looked at Maribelle Kennedy and saw the crimson skin and the tail and the way she moved through a room, and filed her under Fun, subcategory Harmless. She let them. She’d probably been letting them since she was old enough to notice that being bright was easier than being feared, and underneath the brightness was someone who tracked twenty people’s emotional baselines by hemline commentary frequency and could tell you the exact moment one of them broke.

"The second one," I said.

Maribelle exhaled hard through her teeth. "Yeah. Figured. Damn it."

"She’ll be fine."

"She will absolutely not be fine, but that’s not on you, so don’t start." She shrugged, and the knotted shirt did something with the shrug that I registered against my will and filed under Later. "She’ll be fine eventually. Around February, maybe March. She’ll hate you all the way to Christmas first. Possibly New Year’s if you’re lucky."

"That’s already the plan."

"God, you’re a mess." She laughed, and the laugh was the real one this time, low and a little unlovely, nothing like the bright peal she used in the common room when the performance was running. "Okay, third thing, and this one’s actually fun, I promise."

"You said there were two."

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