Maxine Nguyen in: Smoke Break

"No, no, no. This isn't working." Irritated, Max shut off her camcorder and shoved it into her handbag as Edie looked up from her phone.
"What? Why?"
Max shrugged, face dark. "I don't know. The mood's off."
"Then leave it," Faith said easily, looping one arm around Max's shoulders. "This isn't a full-time job, anyway."
"Yeah." Max slipped out of the taller girl's grasp. "I'm going to go off for a bit." She left the other two behind, glancing down at her phone from time to time as she weaved through the crowd, trying to look like she knew where she was going. That was the problem: there were too many people. She knew that she was probably being a bad friend by leaving Faith and Edie to flounder, but they could take care of themselves. This festival was boring. She was only here because the rest were coming.
There was a darkened corner off to the side. Max ducked under the stallholder's arm and wandered into the darkness. When she stopped, her back to the darkness, she reached into her handbag and withdrew a slim, metallic tube with what looked like a nozzle on the end and several arcane-looking indents on the side. Compressing one of the indents, she slid the nozzle into her mouth and inhaled; the device gave off a soft, mechanical hum, the only sign that it was working. Her watchful eyes peered out at the festival as she closed her fingers around the vaporizer, ready to slip it into her pocket at a moment's notice.

"Didn't know you smoked."
Max spun around, eyes wide, and caught a glimpse of the boy from the store. He was leaning against the wall, some distance away, and the end of his cigarette was giving off just enough light to reveal the outline of his face. He plucked the cigarette out of his mouth as she exhaled in surprise, the smoke from their mouths intermingling between them both. "You got me fired," he continued, voice flat but venomous, and pushed off the wall. "Bitch."
Max tipped her head up as he advanced on her, sparks fizzing up and down her spine, almost as if Minnie was right behind her. (She wasn't, though. Right?) "You'll find another one," she retorted, slipping her vaporizer back into her handbag without breaking eye contact. "Unless you're lazy or incompetent. Or both."
"I found a new job," the boy snarled. "It pays better." He flexed his fingers, and for the first time, as her eyes adjusted to the dim lighting (and the fact that they were less than a foot apart), Max realized that there were a number of spurs jutting from his left arm. "I've learned a lot."
"See?" Max inched backwards, muscles tense. Getting ready to flee - or fight. Could she take him? No, she couldn't. She could scream, though. Her word against his? Then again, she was a foreigner. "You should thank me. You were probably just getting by in that job. Now you're free to find your own destiny in the world." She wrinkled her nose. (What was she doing, trying to bait him? Why was she still going?) "As long as you do it far, far away from me. God, you stink."

"You still think you're in control," the boy growled. His right arm whipped upwards, prompting Max to dodge towards the wall, only to realize, far too late, that he was trying to hem her in. His left hand slammed against the brick, making her twitch, and the specially-tailored slits in the back of her hoodie parted to reveal her bone-white limbs, digging into the cement. "You think you're so great, huh? Sitting atop this shit-heap of a system."
"If you couldn't cut it, then maybe that's your own fault," Max shot back. There was a soft, grinding noise behind her as a few clumps of hardened cement fell to the floor. "You ever thought of that? I find that a lot of people tend to blame everyone but themselves."
The boy's purple eyes (Max had just noticed that they were purple. Lilac, maybe? Violet? His face was very close to hers.) flared, and he pulled back, clearly in preparation for something. Max didn't give him the chance. Her limbs tensed, splaying out behind her in one explosive motion, and she lifted off the ground, pulling herself up the wall until she was looking down at him.
The boy glared up at her. The stubs on his arms had inched out minutely. (Or had they? Was it a trick of the light?) "You don't know me," he said, raising his voice slightly. Were they still talking? It looked like they were. Max could feel her fingers twitching with adrenalin. If they were going to fight, she'd rather do it now, rather than later.

"Don't I?" she called. In her peripheral vision, she saw the stallholder closest to them begin to turn, only for a customer to interrupt him. "I'd say I know what kind of person you are by now. You're probably one of those disaffected idiots who think tearing down the status quo will benefit them. That's not how it works. It just leads to someone worse coming along. Like Hitler."
"Who's Hitler?"
Max's phone buzzed. She ignored it. "Oh, so you're historically illiterate too?"
"You're a judgmental bitch."
"And you're an entitled mouth-breather."
"Fuck you."
"Not in a million years, asshole." Her phone buzzed again, then kept buzzing. The girls were @ing her in their private chat. Max's heart pounded as she stared down at the boy. Was her face red? It felt warm. She was raring for a fight, but the girls were @ing her.
"Believe me, the feeling is mutual."
"Yeah, whatever. This conversation is over." Max pulled herself up off the wall, removed her phone, and scanned the screen, then dashed off a few texts. "I'm off to go do some hero shit. Have fun getting lung cancer, maybe."

"Hypocrite." Then: "What's happening?"
"Mass suicide, apparently," Max said, distracted, tossing the words over her shoulder as she hopped off the wall and darted into the crowd, her limbs receding into her back. She took a few moments to regain her bearings and turned with a huff. "Dude, just fuck off. This isn't any of your business." When he didn't move, she gritted her teeth. "Fine. Your funeral."
She found Sagara and Atsushi elbowing people aside in their rush to get to wherever the East Pond was, and decided to use the path that they'd so thoughtfully blazed for her. When they finally left the scrum, the lights and sounds of the festival fading behind them, Sagara turned and gave her a tight nod, followed by an even tighter one from Atsushi. Max didn't bother to check if the boy was behind her, because they had reached the pond, and there were people to save.

Later, when they'd handed their charges over to Soujyuuro and Katsuragi to process (or whatever), Max went to grab her bag from where she'd tossed it into the grass. The boy followed. "What, you're still here?"
"I wasn't following you." The boy shouldered past her. "I have a job to do."
"Have fun working security, asshole," she shouted, giving the finger to his retreating back, and turned to see her friends arrayed before her in full regalia: Minnie, worrying at her turtleneck (probably to cover up a hickie); Faith, eyes wide and curious, her drones disassembling themselves in the distance; Hailey, arms folded; and Edie, who'd shoved her phone back into her pocket in favor of staring straight at her, a mischievous cast to her mouth.

"So," Hailey began, "who was that?"
"No one."
"That's fast," Faith remarked.
"Really. I'm serious. Just a random guy who decided to come along and help out."
"Oh, really?" Minnie interjected. "Because I could've sworn that that was the guy from the convenience store." She was enjoying this, the bitch.
"Was it? I completely forgot about him, honestly."
"How'd he know about this?" Edie challenged.
"Uh, he asked?"
"And you told him? Without, like, fobbing him off or telling him to fuck off?"
"Give me a break, it was an emergency."
"He's pretty hot," Faith mused.
"No, he's not," Max snapped. "He's an entitled, immature creep."
"Since when did you care about personality?"
"I always pay attention to personality, I don't know what you're talking about."

This continued for a while.