Page 51 of The Underachiever’s Guide to Love and Saving the World

COURTNEY

We raced through the castle, running to Bryce’s room like scared children. It seemed we spent a lot of time running from skeletons in closets, whether figuratively or literally.

Glancing out the window, I confirmed the undead army still hadn’t attacked. In fact, they were completely motionless, staring sightlessly at the city. The dragon was nowhere to be seen either. Maybe they were waiting for commands from their minuscule overlord.

So many things made sense now: We sucked at being heroes because the Evil One, Greg, was orchestrating our every move.

Greg was even the one who’d sneaked under the dungeon’s key room door to steal the keys and kidnap Winston.

Yet I still wasn’t sure why a mouse wanted to take over the world.

A severe case of little man syndrome? And I also wasn’t sure why he’d kidnapped Winston of all people.

Maybe because he thought Winston’s predisposition toward chicken violence made him more likely to join his cause, but he ended up escaping instead?

Or maybe he was just an easy target at the time, and it didn’t really matter.

I looked at the potion book in my hand. It should have eased my mind to know I wasn’t the real bad guy in this story.

Yet it almost felt like another failure, like I wasn’t even good enough to be bad.

I was, as I always had been, a peasant—that nobody in the middle.

At least Bryce was here with me. He clearly wasn’t the Chosen One I thought he was either, considering we’d both been summoned by Greg to be pawns for his evil schemes.

Settling myself onto the bed beside Bryce, I laid the potion book between us. “We’ve been trying to save the world for days. If we took this potion, things could finally be easy.” Bryce started to protest, but I cut him off. “Neither one of us is a hero, but we could be with the potion.”

Bryce grasped my hands. “The mouse was steering us wrong before. We can defeat him now.”

I raised my eyes to meet his gaze. “We can’t know that.

I know myself. I screw up everything I do.

Maybe someone like me isn’t good enough to save the day…

and live happily ever after. I want to be better for you.

I need to be better if there can be an us after this.

” I bit my lip. “That is, if you want there to be an us after this.”

He shook his head, and for a moment, my heart dropped, but then he said, “Of course I want an us . There can be an us without the potion.”

I pulled my hands away. Everything I ever wanted was within reach. One drink, and my life would stop feeling like an exhausting hamster wheel where I ran and ran and ran, achieving nothing, only to get spat out onto the dust.

“We have to be honest with ourselves,” I said. “One day, things will get too hard, and I’ll quit, or things will get too good, and you’ll push me away.” Ducking my head, I tried to catch his eye. “Bryce? No miscommunications, remember?”

“I’m thinking,” he said, bloodshot, tortured eyes meeting mine.

I nodded grimly. “I will alert your grandmother as soon as we get home so she can document this occasion in your baby book along with all your other firsts.”

A stunned moment passed before he broke into a smile. He tugged me onto his lap, and I wrapped my legs over his hips. “After we take this potion, and it turns you into a nice person, you’re not going to have much left to say, are you?”

“Isn’t that the point?” I settled my hands on his shoulders, serious now. “The potion will fix me. As the selfless epitome of human perfection, I won’t ever leave you.”

“Are you threatening me?”

Now it was my turn to smile. “And you, you’ll be so brave you won’t think about pushing me away because heroes don’t worry about things like girls abandoning them, crushing their souls, and smashing their hearts.”

“That’s really comforting, Court,” Bryce said brightly. “I’m touched. Like, by a taser in a hurtful way, but still touched.”

“Look.” I slathered a go-getter fun-loving tone into my voice that made me sound like a math teacher who unironically uses words like hip .

“It’ll also get us out of here. If we become good people, the citizens will like us, and our powers will grow stronger.

We could even assemble a band of quirky misfits.

The more unlikely heroes you assemble, the higher the chance of defeating Big Bads.

That’s Newton’s fourth law of motion or something. ”

“Will the hero potion fix your compulsive lying—” Bryce began.

The bedroom door slammed open, revealing the servant we’d left to guard the library door. “There you are.”

I sprang up. “What happened?”

“Amygronkphopoulozeetrop has left the library.”

Bryce swept the book off the bed. “We need to make that potion and get the hell out of here. Now.”

I nodded. Amy was probably fetching guards to throw us in prison for treason. It wouldn’t take him long to realize we’d been working for the villain.

I expected finding the ingredients the potion book listed would send us on the most intense scavenger hunt of our lives—a whole side quest that involved prowling through gloriously blooming castle gardens to snip blooms of wolfsbane or trudging through squelching swamps to pluck the eye of a newt—whatever a newt was.

Instead, Bryce and I found everything we needed in a kitchen cupboard, resting on a shelf that was neatly labeled: Potion Stuff.

Bryce ground herbs with a mortar and pestle while I cracked an egg into a bowl.

Since the city was under siege, everyone was distracted, and there were no servants in the kitchen to ask why we were making the grossest-looking cookie dough ever.

The recipe suggested mixing the concoction with your favorite ale to mask the flavor, but as we had no ale handy, we’d just have to shoot it down.

After five minutes of the least interesting potion-brewing scene of all time, all that was left was infusing the mixture with magic, which would add an extra kick of toxic positivity that would make us ooze likability and heroism.

I tried to conjure up some feelings to spark Bryce’s magic, but I couldn’t focus. I kept expecting Amy to barge in at any moment, or to hear the clank of bone or feel the heat of dragon fire as Greg came to destroy us.

I walked over to look at the chunky sludge inside the bowl. “God, that’s disgusting.”

“—said an angel, after god crafted your soul,” Bryce finished without missing a beat.

It took me a second, but then I forced a smile. “Get it out while you still can.”

We both went silent at that. Once we were heroes, we probably wouldn’t mock each other anymore. Our whole dynamic would be different soon.

Bryce gathered my hands in his. He turned and dipped his head until we looked at each other, nose to nose. “Are you scared?” he whispered.

“Course not.”

His face softened. “A wise… ass once told me that one day the sun will explode and consume the universe, and none of this will have mattered.”

The feeling of loss only grew. It will have mattered. Mattered to me. The mattering was the whole issue. He mattered so much, I’d give up Nothing and everything for him all at once.

Winding his fists in my hair, Bryce brought his mouth down on mine.

It wasn’t like our other kisses, reckless and peppered with fits of uncontrollable laughter.

It was heated and purposeful, overshadowed by unasked questions.

What happens after this? It could have been an end or a beginning, and so we let it be neither.

It just was , he and I, blocking out the world.

At last, I pulled away. I held my hand up, fading orange energy pooling in my palm.

Wisps of blue light hovered over Bryce’s skin as well.

This man, this beautiful man who stuck by my side through everything, he should know how much I valued and admired him.

He should know how much I cared. He should know that I was starting to wonder if, perhaps, I even…

I swallowed hard. “We should do it now, before the magic subsides.”

Bryce nodded. Together, we cupped our hands around the container, willing our magic inside. As the last glow faded from our hands and began to shine up from the potion, I felt like I’d given something up I shouldn’t have.

Bryce looked at me, and maybe, if we were different people, we would have said a few words, but we were us, so I said, “Bottoms up,” and we each threw back a drink of the mixture.

The pulpy herbs, slick raw egg, and buttermilk hit the back of my throat, and I almost gagged, but I managed to muscle it down.

I didn’t feel any different after the supersoldier serum. I didn’t feel like I suddenly knew how to save the world, nor did I miraculously know how to properly wield a broadsword.

I looked at Bryce, who was grimacing and reaching for a cup of water. I felt the same for him as before: craving his affection but scared what its cost would amount to.

Which was interesting. Because heroes shouldn’t have insecurities, should they?

Heroes shouldn’t still be doubting someone who told her he liked her, even if she did hit snooze on her alarm seven times every morning, knowing his bedroom was on the other side of the wall, and even if she was bad with feelings.

“Do you…” I frowned. “Do you feel the same?”

“I feel like I might…” Bryce paused. Frowned. Tilted his head. “Be ill.”

Ill was an unusually tactful word for Bryce. He had to be messing with me, pretending he’d been turned into some kind of heroic gentleman. I opened my mouth to tell him to stop faking, but what came out was “Oh dear. Can I help you in any way?”

Bryce opened his mouth. Closed it.

I wanted to know what he was trying to say, to ask if his brain was also stuck in a new, polite hellhole of a body. “Are you having a nice day?” was what came out of my mouth.

“Quite nice” popped out of his.

Small talk? We’d been reduced to pleasantries and small talk ? I’d never been so sickened in my life. My mind spewed curse words. My mouth said, “What a lovely spring we’re having, isn’t it?”

“Quite. Nice.” He clasped his hands together serenely.

How would this help us get home? We couldn’t communicate now.

My insides raged, but my body was infuriatingly calm as I walked over to the potion book and flipped through the pages.

In addition to the hero potion, there were spells to make perfect peasants, blacksmiths, knights, bakers, and many more, but no antidotes for any of it.

“Is there no way to—” My jaw snapped shut, nearly biting my own tongue. I wrenched it back open. “We have to un—” SNAP.

I couldn’t say what I wanted: Can we undo it? I supposed asking if there was a way to go back to being a bad person wasn’t a heroic thing to do.

I read the hero potion description again: Will turn the foulest person’s actions pure.

Actions. Not thoughts. Actions. I’d thought the potion would make me better all the way to the inside so changing would’ve felt like a good thing instead of a sacrifice. But my same old subpar spirit was trapped inside a prison of goodness.

I snatched the book off the counter to heft it over my head and hurl it against the nearest wall, but my muscles hardened in my arms, forcing my movements down. I gently closed the book and slid it to the side.

A scream ravaged through me but rose no higher than my chest. Angry, hot tears burned behind my eyes but weren’t allowed free.

I was trapped and frantic and furious , and all I could do was stand there, my face relaxed, save for a slight tension between my brows—the smallest, most delicate of frowns.

It felt like wearing a mask again. Like it was six months ago, and I was trapped, losing myself and wondering why people only cared when my outsides didn’t match my insides.

“What now?” I asked, my voice happy and pleasant.

“We’ll be heroes.” Bryce’s expression was unreadable.

“You’re right,” I said. “This is perfect.” Evidently, as a hero, I could still lie, so long as my lies were agreeable.

“We will take care of everything we messed up, and then we will find the mouse. We’ll defeat evil and live…

” My words petered out. I couldn’t imagine how we could live happily like this for the rest of our lives.