The Scumbag's Guide To Heroism

Chapter 313: 313 | The Girl Was Too Smart for Her Character

The classroom smelled like new carpet and institutional coffee, which meant someone on the facilities staff had made the catastrophic decision to brew a pot in the common area before seven in the morning. The scent followed us through the hallway like a war crime, clinging to uniforms and hair and the inside of my nostrils with the tenacity of something that wanted me to suffer personally.

Room 214 had been restored to its standard configuration since Radiant’s demolition session. The tiered seating climbed in clean semicircular rows toward the back wall, the podium stood at the front where it belonged, and the reinforced wall panels had been swapped back to standard acoustic dampening. No matting on the floor. No equipment racks. No simulation dummies waiting to have their trauma sensors ruined by teenagers with emotional problems and government-sponsored superpowers.

Wednesday morning homeroom. The first official one since orientation week had bled into the actual semester like a wound that refused to clot.

I claimed my usual seat in the third row, center-left, with clear sightlines to the door and the podium. Percy materialized in the seat beside me at the same moment I sat down, his notebook already open and his pen moving across the page in tight, controlled strokes. The kid operated on a schedule that existed outside conventional spacetime.

"You’re trending," Percy said without looking up.

"What?"

"Trending. Your interview from Monday morning. Channel 7 ran the segment during their evening broadcast on Monday night. It was picked up by three aggregator accounts on Tuesday morning. As of six forty-seven this morning, the clip has been shared four thousand two hundred and eleven times across major social platforms."

He turned the notebook toward me. A graph. Percy had graphed my social media engagement in a notebook he carried to homeroom on a Wednesday morning at seven AM.

"The share rate accelerated between eleven PM and two AM, which suggests the content was consumed primarily by adults in the twenty-five to forty-four demographic who browse media during post-dinner wind-down periods. Your name recognition within Halloran’s public discourse sphere has increased by approximately three hundred percent since the broadcast."

"Percy."

"Yes?"

"Did you sleep last night?"

"I slept from eleven fourteen to three forty-two. Four hours and twenty-eight minutes. Adequate." He paused his writing. "I also compiled a folder of every online comment referencing you by name, sorted by sentiment. Eighty-three percent positive, eleven percent neutral, six percent negative. The negative commentary primarily consists of individuals questioning your qualifications based on your late manifestation timeline and three accounts that appear to be bots."

"You compiled a folder."

"It seemed relevant."

I leaned back in my chair and rubbed the bridge of my nose. Behind us, the classroom continued to fill with the ambient chaos of twenty first-year Combat Operations students finding their seats and performing the social negotiations required to exist as teenagers in an institutional setting. Caden vaulted the back of his chair and landed in the seat behind me with the boneless confidence of someone who treated furniture as a suggestion. Marco dropped into the adjacent seat and immediately produced a bag of chips from somewhere inside his uniform, which should have been physically impossible given the fitted nature of the blazer.

"Yo." Caden leaned forward. His breath smelled like energy drink and whatever passed for breakfast at six in the morning for someone who treated sleep as optional. "You see the news yet?"

"Percy told me."

"Percy told you what a graph said. I’m telling you what the comment section says." Caden pulled out his phone with the reverence of someone presenting sacred scripture. "Listen to this one. ’This kid speaks better than most active heroes. Where did Halloran find him?’ And this one. ’Lukas Belmont is the son of Vanguard and Reina Belmont? The legacy continues.’ Oh, and my personal favorite." He cleared his throat for dramatic effect. "’He can manipulate my force any day.’ That one has three hundred likes."

"That’s disgusting," Marco said, crunching a chip.

"That’s popularity."

"Those are the same thing."

Felicity appeared at the end of our row like she’d been summoned by the sound of Lukas Belmont’s name being spoken aloud. Her uniform was immaculate, the white shirt tucked with the precision of someone whose mother worked in fashion, the blazer fitted in ways the standard issue absolutely did not account for. She’d done something with her hair, a half-up arrangement that left blonde waves framing her face and falling across one shoulder. The silver collar pin caught the overhead lights.

"Good morning, bestie." She dropped into the seat on my other side and crossed her legs, her skirt riding two inches above regulation without appearing to violate anything specific. "You’re famous."

"So I’ve been told."

"I watched the segment three times." She settled her tablet on the fold-out desk and leaned toward me with the conspiratorial closeness of someone about to share a state secret. "You know what I noticed on the third viewing?"

"That I need a haircut."

"That you positioned yourself with the Halloran crest in frame behind your left shoulder. The morning light was hitting you from the east, which meant your jawline had definition without harsh shadows. And you kept your hands visible the entire time, which is a subconscious trust signal that media training programs charge three thousand dollars to teach." She tilted her head. "Diane taught you all of that, didn’t she."

"Diane taught me to pour coffee without spilling it. Everything else is natural talent."

"Natural talent doesn’t reference specific lecture content from an instructor who taught class three hours before the interview."

The girl was too smart for the character she played. I’d noticed this before, the gap between the bubbly social butterfly she projected and the analytical engine running behind those blue eyes, cataloging details and building profiles of everyone around her. Felicity Hardy watched the world like someone who had learned very young that understanding people was the difference between being loved and being alone.