Midtown School of Science and Technology — September 5, 2012
[FOURTH-WALL BREAK]
[Peter steps out again. He's at the entrance to Midtown School of Science and Technology — a building that is genuinely impressive for a public school, because it is technically a magnet school with a highly competitive admissions process and an endowment supplemented by several tech companies. Peter got in on academic merit. Some other students got in on other kinds of merit.]
I should explain Flash Thompson.
Flash Thompson is not a cartoon bully. He is something more specific: he is a person who, at the age of fourteen, has organized his entire social self around the performance of dominance because something at home is not working and this is the only way he knows how to feel in control of anything.
I know that. I understand that. Understanding it does not make it less annoying when he trips me in the hallway.
Anyway. Flash Thompson.
[He steps back in.]
The hallway of Midtown School of Science and Technology was approximately what you'd expect from a high school for academically gifted students — taller and noisier than its physical size suggested, with the specific social hierarchy of a place where intelligence was currency and athletic ability was a surprisingly effective secondary currency, and Flash Thompson had both.
Flash Thompson was fifteen, a grade ahead of Peter, five-ten, blond, athletic in the way of someone who'd been put in every sport from age six, and constitutionally incapable of walking past Peter Parker without making some version of the same calculation: there is the easiest available target.
This was not personal. This was systematic.
Peter rounded a corner. Flash's shoulder connected with Peter's bag, which connected with the wall, which connected with several textbooks and Peter's carefully organized lab notes cascading across the floor.
"Whoops," Flash said, without breaking stride.
His audience — two friends, a guy from the swim team, a girl whose name Peter didn't know who laughed because she was standing next to Flash and that was socially easier — passed by in Flash's wake.
Peter crouched and gathered his lab notes.
The thing about being Spider-Man — which Peter was not yet, it was day two — is that it changes how you respond to things like this. Not immediately. Not by making you brave or certain or less embarrassed when your notes are on the floor. But gradually, it creates a kind of internal orientation. An understanding that the size of the moment doesn't determine the size of the response.
Peter gathered his lab notes. He did not say anything.
He stood up.
And noticed that he'd gathered them extremely quickly. Too quickly. With a precision and economy of movement that he hadn't had yesterday. His hands had found each page, processed it, stacked it, in the time it would normally have taken him to pick up two.
He looked at his hands.
The reflexes, he thought. That's part of it too.
He went to class.
The class was Advanced Chemistry, which Peter had tested into a year early, which was either impressive or socially catastrophic depending on who you asked. He sat in the second row from the front — never the front, that was the row of students who had something to prove, and Peter didn't need to prove anything to a teacher, he just needed to learn things — and opened his notebook.
The teacher, Mr. Harrington, was mid-presentation about molecular bonding structures. Peter listened with one ear and spent the other seventy percent of his attention on a corner of his notebook where he was, quietly, drafting out what he understood about the spider bite's mechanism.
Modified Steatoda — silk-producing, naturally adhesive tarsal setae, proprioceptive vibration sense. Connors' modification: cross-species integration, specifically regenerative protein work. The bite introduced — what? A retrovirus? A modified protein chain? The changes are expressed in the body's existing systems, enhanced rather than replaced. So: strength comes from muscle fiber density change. Adhesion comes from something like the setae — Van der Waals force, microtubule expression on the epidermal level—
"Parker."
He looked up.
Mr. Harrington was watching him with the expression teachers wore when they'd been about to catch someone not paying attention and then recalibrated to uncertain. "Can you complete the electron configuration for the example on the board?"
Peter looked at the board. He hadn't been looking at the board. He'd been looking at his notebook.
He completed the electron configuration. Correctly. From memory and inference in about four seconds.
"Yes," he said.
Mr. Harrington wrote it. Looked at it. Looked at Peter. "Thank you," he said, with the tone of a teacher who was mildly annoyed that he couldn't make a point.
Peter went back to his notebook.
*[THOUGHT BUBBLE: Chibi Peter at a desk, surrounded by equations and spider drawings. Chibi Mr. Harrington is impressed/irritated. Chibi Flash Thompson in the background is making a face that says "teacher's pet." Chibi Ned, two rows over, gives a tiny thumbs up.]
Ned found him at lunch.
This was their arrangement, since fourth grade: they found each other at lunch. Not because they'd agreed to, initially. Just because they'd independently arrived at the same table and discovered the other one was already there and something about the mutual recognition of a person who was fine to eat with had calcified into a standing appointment.
Ned Leeds was fourteen, shorter than Peter by two inches, round-faced in the way of someone who would probably grow into his features in approximately two years and then be extremely attractive, and currently wearing a NASA t-shirt that he'd paired with cargo shorts in a combination that he committed to with absolute confidence.
He put his tray down across from Peter. He looked at Peter for three seconds.
"What happened," he said.
"What do you mean."
"You have your 'I discovered something and I'm trying to decide if it's a problem' face."
"I don't have a face."
"You have like forty faces. That's one of them."
Peter ate a chip. "I went back to the expo."
"The Connors lab."
"The lower-level wing that happened to include the biocable section, yes."
"Peter."
"The door wasn't locked."
"The door was definitely locked."
"The door had a keypad that wasn't—"
"Peter, what happened."
Peter looked at his food. He looked at Ned. He looked at the cafeteria around them — two hundred students in various states of lunch, nobody paying attention to their table, the ambient noise of collective eating providing the same privacy as a forest.
He held up one finger. He pressed it, very gently, against the underside of the lunch table.
He lifted his hand.
The table came with it.
He put it back down before anyone noticed.
Ned stared at the table. Stared at Peter. Stared at the table again.
"Okay," Ned said. Very quietly. "That's new."
"Yeah," Peter said.
"How new."
"Three days."
Ned was quiet for a moment. He ate a piece of broccoli, which was the most Ned thing to do in this moment — to absorb significant information via the processing function of casual eating.
"What else?" he said.
Peter told him. The ceiling. The reflexes. The strength. The hearing. The vision. The adhesion.
Ned ate broccoli through all of it. When Peter finished, Ned said: "Okay. Are you — are you okay?"
"I'm fine."
"Are you actually fine or is this—"
"I genuinely feel — good. I feel really good. Physically. Like, better than I've ever felt." He paused. "Which is disorienting because I went to sleep on the ceiling."
"You went to sleep on—"
"I didn't plan to. I woke up there."
Ned processed this. "Do you have, like—"
"A plan? No. Do I have a theory? Several. Do I have access to a lab where I could run tests to figure out exactly what the modification did? Also no, because—"
"Because you were in a lab you weren't supposed to be in."
"I've been saying 'the door wasn't locked.'"
"And I've been saying that the door was definitely locked and you are choosing to define 'locked' very creatively." Ned pointed at Peter with his fork. "What are you going to do?"
Peter looked at his hands. He turned them over — front, back. The same hands he'd had yesterday. Looking at them, there was nothing to see. The change was internal. In the cells. In the fibers.
"I don't know yet," he said. "But I need to figure it out. Before—"
"Before you accidentally pick up something you shouldn't?"
"Before I pick up something and then drop it at a bad time," Peter said. "I need to control it. Before anything else. I need to understand and control it."
Ned nodded. "Okay," he said. "So we figure it out."
"You don't have to—"
"Peter. You're my best friend and you woke up on the ceiling. I am absolutely involved in this."
Peter looked at him.
Ned ate another piece of broccoli with the demeanor of a man who has made a decision and the decision is final.
"Okay," Peter said. "Yeah. Okay."