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."
"I lied, I lie constantly, keep up." She leaned in another two inches. "Percy Mendoza."
My brain changed gears. "What about him."
"He held eye contact with Rina for four full seconds at breakfast."
"Good."
"No, Belmont, listen to me, four seconds, and then he said, and I want you to really hear this, he said and I quote, your hair looks structurally sound today." Maribelle’s hand came off the wall so she could gesture with both of them. "Structurally sound! She turned so red her horns went pink! She dropped her mug!"
"Did she seem upset."
"She seemed like she was going to combust and then she smiled into her tea for eleven minutes." Maribelle’s tail was whipping now, a genuine metronome of delight. "So somebody’s been coaching him and it’s either you or Holt and I need to know which one so I can either thank you or make fun of you."
"Both of us."
"Oh, that’s so much worse than I hoped." She pressed her fingers to her mouth. "You’re running a joint operation. On Percy. Who documents everything."
"He’s calling it an experiment with established parameters."
"He’s WHAT."
And then the fire door opened.
Look. I have been living under Ecchi Logic for exactly six days, and I have learned that the trait does not create situations so much as it waits, patient as a landlord, until the physics of a hallway happens to point in a direction it likes.
What came through the fire door was Theo Park, who is six foot four and built like a load-bearing column, moving fast with an armful of equipment from the storage annex, and he hit the door hard enough that it swung a full ninety degrees and clipped Maribelle square across the shoulder blades.
"Oh my god, sorry!"
She came off her feet.
Not far. Ten inches, maybe, and forward, which was the direction I happened to be occupying, and I did what anybody does, which is catch the person who has just been launched at them.
My hands closed on her waist.
Bare crimson skin under both palms, warm as a radiator, and she was heavier than she looked because ninety percent of her was muscle from the hips down, and the momentum put her chest flat against mine and my back flat against the wall and her thigh, somehow, between both of mine.
"Nnh—!"
The sound came out of her before she could stop it. High and startled and just breathy enough that Theo Park froze in the doorway with an armful of resistance bands and made a decision about his own life that I respected enormously.
"Nope," Theo said. "Didn’t see it. Wasn’t here."
The fire door shut.
Maribelle did not move.