Heroine Worship

by Sarah Kuhn

  “But hold on,” Scott said, giving me a skeptical look. “Are we talking about using Evie to draw it out, making her a target for this thing?”

  “I’ll be by her side to protect her,” I said, waving a hand. “This isn’t like when we sent her off on all those missions as me on her own.”

  When you sent her off on those missions, you mean, I chastised myself. Without thinking twice about her safety or well-being.

  I brushed the thought aside before it reared up and sent me into a guilt spiral. Things were different now. I would make them different. “I’m back at full strength,” I said. “I’ll die before I let anything happen to her. Anything.” I gave him a challenging look. I wasn’t sure why I needed him to know how important this was to me, but I did.

  “Plus we’ve got all our X-Men talents to contribute this time,” Bea piped up. “I’ve been working on the traps with Rose and Nate and they should be ready to contain even the most incorporeal of demon asses.”

  “You don’t have to convince me, guys,” Evie said, reaching over to take my hand. “I think we should give our puppy the biggest, shiniest, bride-iest target in the city. So it can’t resist.” She gave me a game smile. I sensed uncertainty underneath, like she was trying to put on her best brave superheroine face, but couldn’t quite mask the doubts she was struggling with. I squeezed her hand.

  “I have an idea!” Maisy shrieked, suddenly back at our sides. We all jumped. “Oh, and I have no records of a Carol Kepler buying anything here.”

  “Is teleporting part of your new demon hybrid skills?” I asked.

  “No,” Maisy said, waving a desiccated hand. “But y’all are really bad at paying attention to your surroundings when you’re deep in battle-planning mode. Shasta and I used to talk about it all the time.”

  “Touching,” I muttered. Evie giggled. “So what’s your plan?”

  Maisy threw her arms wide and gestured to the mannequin in the center of her display—the one with the crumpled paper flame ball.

  “Perhaps you aren’t ready to model custom lingerie, Evie,” she said, making her voice extra dramatic. “But what about modeling your bridal finery for all the world to see? I bet that would be a real event.”

  “And I’m guessing you’re about to suggest a perfect location for such an event,” I said.

  Maisy batted her eyelashes. “I have great lighting in here. Just saying.”

  “Maisy’s shop totally has cool cachet, especially after the proposal video,” Bea said. Her eyes drifted to the ceiling and I could practically see her social media manager wheels turning. “A dress reveal—a proper one—would be a big deal. True, phone camera footage from the bridal tent was posted on YouTube, but it was shaky, not that great. You couldn’t really see all the details, and the dress was sort of being ripped off of Evie’s body at the time anyway. Meanwhile, no one’s seen your maid-of-honor dress at all, Aveda—that could be a real selling point.”

  “I don’t have a dress yet,” I said, even though I’d already decided on the perfect gown, a dramatic scarlet silk sheath to match the flowers on Evie’s bridal wear.

  “I can help with that,” Shruti said. “Whatever you’re envisioning, I can either find in my existing stock or special order for you. I’ve got good relationships with a lot of the bridal vendors and boutiques in town, and at least one of them totally owes me a favor.”

  “Close up the shop and do it as a photo shoot,” Bea said, warming to the topic. “Only staff and Team Evie/Aveda allowed, and we’ll release the photos exclusively on Maisy’s blog afterward. That way, we know Evie will be the only bride present. The only thing for the puppy to affect.”

  “And it will ensure no civilians are around to get hurt whenever this thing shows up,” Evie said, nudging Bea in the ribs.

  “Oh, right. That too,” Bea said.

  “So it’s settled!” Maisy exclaimed, clapping her hands together. Little bits of gray skin flaked off and fell to the floor. “Pussy Queen presents: the grand reveal of Evie Tanaka’s wedding gown and Aveda Jupiter’s maid-of-honor frock!”

  “This actually sounds like a plan,” I said. I planted my hands on my hips, straightened my spine, and narrowed my eyes at the mannequins, as if they were an army I was about to command. “All right, troops,” I said, “prepare to deploy the motherfreakin’ fashion show.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE MORNING OF the big Pussy Queen photo shoot, I rose at six a.m., went on a run through the swooping hills of Buena Vista Park, then returned home to do a two-hour kickboxing workout in the gym. Though we had new weapons in our arsenal—the traps, Scott’s spell—I was still determined to fight this thing the old-fashioned way: I would figure out how to kick the puppy demon’s ass. Even if it didn’t currently have a corporeal ass for me to kick. And that meant being as fit and ready and as Aveda fucking Jupiter as possible.

  I was so focused on planning my workout, going over each move in my head, I nearly ran into Scott, who also appeared to be heading for the gym.

  “Oh, sorry,” I said, stepping back before I had an unfortunate collision with his chest.

  Or maybe it wouldn’t be that unfortunate.

  Stop thinking like that, Annie.

  I’d been distracted enough by Carol’s antics and our Pussy Queen plan that I’d managed to put the sexy cake incident out of my mind almost entirely. Now it threatened to rear right back up and dominate my brain as my eyes wandered over that chest I’d nearly bumped into. And the arms. The arms were nice, too.

  Stop. It.

  “Are you going to the gym?” I said, forcing words to form on my tongue. “Is that a thing you do?”

  I knew Scott worked out, I’d just assumed he did it elsewhere.

  “I stretch in there sometimes after surfing,” he said, giving me his easy smile. I tried to ignore the glow that bloomed in my chest and finally noticed the telltale signs that he’d just come back from the beach: his hair was wet and his t-shirt was sticking to his torso in damp patches that defined the muscles underneath extra well. Which must be why I’d noticed them. Honestly, you couldn’t really blame me, given the way they were just out there like that.

  “But I try to do it when no one else is around,” he added.

  “You don’t want anyone seeing your extra dorky yoga-esque moves?” I asked, arching an eyebrow.

  “Eh,” he said. “I gave up trying to look cool years ago.”

  “You do, though. Sometimes,” I blurted out. I could practically feel the Aveda Jupiter side of me pinching my inner Annie Chang—who seemed determined to rise up and make herself known at the most inconvenient of moments. “Like at the bakery the other day, with the little birthday girl. She definitely thought you were cool.”

  I expected another easy smile, but instead his expression dimmed, his eyes becoming hooded. “I was . . . that was . . . nothing,” he said quickly, waving a hand.

  “It wasn’t nothing,” I said, since I could never seem to let anything go, even when someone was giving me all the necessary signals to do so. Bratty Birthday Girl was right about one thing: Queen Elsa of Arendelle I was not. “It wasn’t nothing,” I repeated for good measure. “Your healing spells are really something. Or they’ve become something. You called the one you used on the birthday girl a ‘Level One’—I didn’t know you had that kind of classification system for them?”

  He shrugged and rocked back and forth on his heels. “That’s something I’ve been working on with Nate and Bea. Down in the basement lair.” This time he did smile, but something about it seemed forced. I cocked my head, studying him more intently. What was going on with him?

  “Anyway,” he said abruptly, nodding toward the gym. “I use the gym when no one else is around. Because I don’t want to bother people when they’re using the gym.”

  I felt my cheeks warm. I was the only one who used the gym. Well, sometimes Luc
y, but that was usually during one of our training sessions.

  “I’ve heard . . . people like peace and quiet during their workouts,” he added.

  “People do. But they won’t mind if you’re just stretching in the corner. Quietly.”

  He nodded and his smile turned genuine. “Noted.”

  Maybe we were doing okay at the whole “being friends” thing.

  We filed in and he retreated to a back corner of the room, settled himself on a mat, and folded his torso over his legs, touching his toes. Which he should have looked completely dorky doing, but of course he didn’t. I’d always admired the way he managed to make moves like that appear effortless and even a bit graceful during the horrors of the stretching section in sixth grade gym class—before he’d filled out, when he was still all scrawny limbs and that ever-present grin, the goofy kid who cracked me and Evie up with endless inappropriate comments during sex ed.

  When he’d first attached himself to us, it had never occurred to me how weird it was that this random little white boy wanted to be best pals with two semi-outcasts who didn’t have any friends other than each other. It was only later, far into adulthood, that the pieces started coming together. He was an outcast too, bullied by all the other boys in our grade for having the nerve to be a runty daydreamer who tended to wear clothes that were always a little threadbare and sometimes verging on being a size too small.

  Things had only gotten worse when those boys found out that the nice, frazzled, exhausted lady who worked the counter weeknights at the 7-Eleven was none other than Scott’s mom, Lynne, who took on a variety of crap-paying jobs to put herself through law school while keeping herself and her son fed, clothed, and alive.

  Everything came to a head one day when the other kids took it upon themselves to come up with “hilarious” nicknames for her and pelted Scott with them mercilessly, chasing him down the hall and chanting like misguided members of a disturbingly pre-pubescent cult. All the nicknames they came up with were unimaginative, terrible, and not particularly true, like “Lazy Lunch-Lady Lynne” (working multiple jobs is the opposite of lazy; she wasn’t serving lunch, she was making change for Slurpees; and she’d ended up becoming a badass in the world of family law, making more of herself than any of those little assholes. But what are twelve-year-olds if not kind of dumb and endlessly cruel?) Eventually, they’d taken to lobbing each syllable at Scott like tiny verbal bullets from a machine gun: “La! Zy! Lunch! Lay! Dy! Lynne!” screamed the chorus, over and over again, until little Scotty Cameron decided he’d had enough. He’d whirled around and screamed that he would fight anyone “to the death” who dared say another word about his mom.

  It was quite a sight: a too-thin little boy in too-small clothes, non-existent chest puffed out, red-faced with righteous fury.

  He had, of course, gotten his ass beat.

  But I remembered thinking in that moment that he was a superhero in the purest form of the word—someone who stands up for others. And since I could never simply stand by and watch something like that happen, I’d shoved my way through the crowd, ignoring the protests of Evie (who was already crying), and planted myself between Scott and the other boys before they could give him yet another black eye.

  “You want to talk about lazy?” I’d spat out. “Let’s talk about your stupid insults, which don’t make any freaking sense.”

  None of them had wanted to fight a girl, so they’d all backed off. The next day, Scott sat next to me and Evie in Biology. And after that, he was always there.

  Sometime around sophomore year, muscle had rippled its way onto his rangy frame. At the time, I’d thought it was just, I don’t know, a natural step in his Hot Guy Evolution, but later I’d realized it was something he’d worked hard at, taking up surfing, lifting weights, working out on the regular. Even though he’d found friend solace with Evie and me, he’d been determined to make sure those kids couldn’t hurt him again—with their words or their fists. As someone who had spent years crafting her own brand of armor—and who felt like she still had to work at it every single day—I could relate.

  Thanks to the muscles, his goofy grin had suddenly seemed downright rakish and plenty of our fellow hormonal teenagers had taken notice.

  But I had noticed him before that.

  What was I doing again?

  Oh, right. I turned away from him, closed the distance between me and the boxing bag, and snagged a pair of hand wraps from the windowsill. I liked the precise, methodical process of wrapping my hands with the long strips of cotton. Three times around the wrist, three times around the knuckles, repeat. Loop each finger. Go back to the wrist. These simple motions put me in a focused, zen state, ready to take on my opponent. I slipped on my boxing gloves and stared down the bag: a long, black column of vinyl, stoic and unmoving. Blank and non-judgmental. I got into my stance and let my mind zero in on the movements, nothing else.

  Jab, cross, hook.

  Jab, block, spin, backhand.

  Spin, backhand, kick! Kick! Kick!

  Roundhouse kicks were my favorite. The bag made the most satisfying thwack sound, my leg connecting and sinking in, pure motion and force, and it was just me and the bag, me and the bag, me and—

  “Annie?”

  I fell out of my stance and made an unflattering “eep!” sound.

  “Scott!” I whirled around and frowned at him. “I thought we talked about the whole peace and quiet thing?”

  “I know,” he said, guilt flashing over his face. He was still on the mat and pretzeled into a new stretch, one leg drawn to his chest, his torso rotated halfway around. He should have looked ridiculous, but no. Still hot.

  “Sorry,” he added. “I just remembered something, and I realized it might be important since you might’ve made further plans since the last time we talked about this, although I know you’ve been busy preparing for the event today and—”

  “Spit out, Cameron!” I sputtered, still flustered from being interrupted mid-kick.

  He untangled his limbs and studied me. “Evie wants to have the engagement party at The Gutter.”

  I shook my head at him, certain I had misheard. “What?”

  “That place is special to her and Nate for a lot of reasons. And she doesn’t want anything fancy.”

  I was still shaking my head. The Gutter was a dank, grimy hole of a karaoke bar beloved by Evie, Lucy, and a fine array of senior citizens and seedy characters. It was also the site of one of Evie’s greatest triumphs—defeating Maisy at a supernaturally enhanced karaoke contest—but other than that, I could not fathom what she saw in it. And it was definitely no place for a proper engagement party.

  I had envisioned something sumptuous and beautiful, a tea room overflowing with flowers or a sweet garden setting with whimsically mismatched china. Champagne and tiny sandwiches and that dark chocolate cake from Letta’s bakery. (Okay, maybe the red velvet since I clearly couldn’t be trusted around anything involving dark chocolate.)

  Instead, Evie apparently wanted beer and nachos and a bunch of randos caterwauling their way through auto-tuned pop songs. And even worse, she hadn’t trusted me with this information. She’d relayed it through a third party.

  “I’m sure she was going to get around to mentioning it to you,” Scott said, as if reading my thoughts. “It’s something she tossed off to me in passing when we were cleaning up the breakfast dishes the other day and I thought—”

  “That you should let me know as soon as possible. Of course,” I said, forcing a smile. “Thank you.”

  I turned back to my bag, ending the conversation.

  Jab, cross.

  I focused on the opponent in front me, trying to get back to the moves, trying to make the fight fill my brain so I wouldn’t think about anything else. But I couldn’t deny the swell of frustration in my chest.

  Jab, cross, hook, cross.

  As m
aid of honor—hell, as Evie’s best and oldest friend—I was the one she should have gone to first with all things wedding-related.

  Hook, cross, spin, kick. Kick!

  And anyway, we’d worked through our issues and now I was kicking ass as maid of honor. There was no denying that.

  Kick! Kick! Kick!

  So why did she feel the need to confide in someone else? Why was I getting cropped out of the picture again?

  Kick kick kick kick kick!

  Why—

  “Annie?”

  I whirled around, breathing hard.

  “What?!”

  Scott held up his hands in surrender. He was standing now and had moved closer to me. But not too close, I noticed.

  “I lied,” he said. “Just now, I totally lied. She did ask me to talk to you about it. She said she was pretty sure you had a whole elaborate vision in your head of what the party should be and she was afraid to bring up anything different and apparently this thing happened with Bea—”

  “Right,” I interrupted. “That.”

  My shoulders slumped. I remembered how she’d shut down and avoided me after I’d barged in and forced her to tell Bea about her power. Well . . . really, I’d ended up telling Bea. I’d hurricaned all over the place. But hadn’t the outcome been good? Maybe it didn’t matter.

  She didn’t need Hurricane Annie fucking up her special day.

  I cocked my head at him. “Why are you confessing mere minutes after lying to my face?”

  He shrugged. “I think you deserve for people to be honest with you. I tried to tell her that.”

  That frustration welled in my chest again, pushed itself up into my throat, forced the beginnings of tears to prick at my eyes. I shook my head, willing them to retreat. I needed to be at full Aveda Jupiter strength today, and getting lost in this weird maze of emotions was definitely not helping. Get out of here, Annie Chang.

  “Thank you,” I said briskly. “Now if you’ll excuse me, I really need to finish my workout.”

  I turned back to the bag, expecting that to be the end of it.