Much as Lila adored crafting ever-more-elaborate yarns about her exploits in Achu, humanitarian work, or torrid friendship/possible romance with one of the superheroes or superheroines that were popping up everyday now – she left that to her peers' imagination with just a smidgen of innuendo – sometimes, the simple truth was the best option; honesty the best policy.
Because sometimes – only sometimes in the most opportune or, well, desperate of situations – she didn't have to weave and forge. On rare occasions, life offered all the material that she needed. So much better to guide gulls into entrapping themselves than to spin the web yourself; merely present the whole collection of simple, straightforward facts and let others come to their own conclusions.
A true story well-told was all you needed, every now and then.
The five second video clip of Marinette Dupain-Cheng, Adrien Agreste's oh-so-faithful and simpering girlfriend of the past two months, her arms locked around Kagami Tsurugi's neck as she pressed the gasping and disheveled girl against the art-room wall and plucked up a tender, yearning kiss from her mouth?
Well, a picture was worth a thousand words. And at twenty-four frames per second, she had a 120000 word novel to share with the rest of her class.
Gabriel and Adrien Agreste, in particular, would love to read it.
Odd that Tsurugi was at their school, but she didn't question her good fortune.
As she slunk her way towards the lunch room, where she knew her peers had congregated, another thousand words was devoted to the associated crystalline image of her wedding to the Agreste heir, orchestrated by a doting father-in-law who had been wrapped around her finger so tightly that his pocket book was just on the verge of bursting now that she'd demonstrated herself sufficiently apt at cowing his son into obedience while breaking his will through the provision of proof that miss-goody-two-shoes class president Marinette Dupain-Cheng was an unfaithful harlot.
Harlot. Good word.
That was the thought that crested over her mind and impelled her to spill the proverbial beans, complete with photographic evidence, the moment she burst into the lunchroom and found the majority of students – less Marinette herself, who was probably still sucking her apparent girlfriend's tongue – from Madam Mendeleiev's class had congregated at a single table.
Staring in a distinctly forlorn fashion at the more robust meals – from pasta salads to meaty sandwiches – enjoyed by his fellow students, Adrien sat before his Tupperware container of kale salad, spearing random leaves with his fork and then flicking them off again against the sides. While Alix and Kim bickered, as was their want, Rose and Juleka sat curled up together in only the second most disgustingly gay display that Lila had seen today.
Gay in the colloquial sense only because it involved love.
Cunning and forward-thinking young women who had the world at their feet and intended to keep it there, pausing only to plant a heel to the back of its head and force it to grovel harder, didn't permit themselves to indulge in something so juvenile and emotionally-compromising as love.
But they could leverage it, of course, and any sense of moral duties or justice. Anyone could be twisted up around her finger if she just found the right kind of knot.
Like the one that Kagami and Marinette had apparently been attempting to tie between their tongues.
“Oh, Adrien!” That holler was utterly unnecessary as it would have been a simple matter to cross the room, guide Adrien to a quiet corner despite his misgivings regarding her conduct, and engage him in a clandestine conversation wherein all parties could retain their dignity and maintain secrecy.
