Once Peter left the house he walked through the streets of New York, and a couple of memories came flooding back mid-stride, stopping him momentarily before he started moving again.
The headaches were not as bad as before, more like minor pressure behind the eyes than the white hot pain from earlier.
As he walked he analyzed what came through, some memories showing him the location of Midtown High School and others pointing him to details about the neighborhood, confirming that he was in Queens, in the same general area where the Peter had grown up, only it was a house now rather than an apartment building.
When he finished processing those memories he let go of his board and skated in the direction of the school, glad to find that it was not particularly far, unlike the The Andrew's Peter who had to take the subway to get there every morning.
While skating he reached into his jacket and pulled out his headphones along with his phone, put them on, and started the music, letting the melody fill the space around him as he moved through the morning streets of New York.
When the song started he was completely lost in it almost immediately.
He smiled and put the phone back in his pocket, letting the music carry him forward, and without really noticing it he started singing along because some habits simply refuse to die no matter what universe a person finds themselves in.
Before he knew it he was only a few meters from the school entrance, so he stepped off the board and took a look around.
"Midtown High School," he said it aloud, looking at the building with a calm and indifferent expression while his eyes moved across the surroundings and the people moving around outside.
"The place where my amazing story and my amazing boredom both will begin. At least it will give me some resources for the future, the same way the first Peter used it when he was developing his web fluid formula."
The place was larger than it appeared in the film, more expansive and spread out than he had pictured it.
He was scanning the crowd with mild interest when his gaze stopped moving on its own, pulled by something before his brain had consciously registered what it was.
Blonde hair.
"Emma Stone, also now known as Gwendolyn Maxine Stacy, or Gwen," he thought, letting out a slow sigh when he recognized her.
"It seems this Peter was in love with her too, given that my eyes went straight to her without any instruction from me."
Seeing her in person he could understand completely why the this Peter had lost his mind over her.
He could see the charm and the beauty she carried with an ease that seemed entirely natural to her, but he doubted he could fall in love with her, not with everything he knew from the comics about how that particular story ended.
That said, he was not the kind of person to judge a book by its cover, so he would give her a fair chance to interest him on her own terms.
In the meantime, being her friend seemed like a reasonable starting point, and breaking the streak of zero friends that the previous Peter had accumulated was something he genuinely wanted to do, since it would also go a long way toward chipping away at the infamous Parker Luck that seemed to follow anyone carrying that name.
Now that he thought about it, if Gwen was here then that caveman(Flash) was probably here too.
He had always wanted to punch Flash Thompson once, just to see if it would rearrange whatever was happening inside that skull, and he hoped it was the old film version of Flash rather than the new one.
When he had first seen the other casting choice and heard who the character was supposed to be he had not been able to stop laughing for an embarrassingly long time, because the actor had looked nothing like the character and the performance had been so painful to watch that he had felt secondhand embarrassment on behalf of everyone involved.
'Apparently she is the only person I can recognize from here,' he thought, scanning the crowd one more time as he walked toward the entrance. 'No one else I know.'
He walked through the front doors and let the memories and muscle memory take over, guiding him down the hall and around the turns without him having to think about it. When he reached his locker the combination came through in a flash. 02 left, 12 right, 21 left, 05 right.
He was starting to realize that this was how it worked. Certain locations unlocked certain memories. It felt exactly like a video game, except instead of new areas on a map he was unlocking information about his own life.
He opened the locker, pulled out his Algebra, Physics, Biology, and Math books, swapped what he needed.
He closed the locker and let his body, along with the memories that were starting to surface, guide him to the algebra classroom, which he found without much difficulty.
When he went in there were not many students yet, so he went to the back, sat down, and waited for the teacher to arrive and for everything to begin.
------------
The classes were boring.
That was the only accurate and honest way to describe the next four hours, because nothing out of the ordinary happened during that stretch of time, with one notable exception.
The physics exam was far too easy.
He finished it in half an hour, and the experience was genuinely unsettling in the best possible way, because the moment he looked at each question the answer simply appeared, clear and complete, like his brain had already done the work before his eyes finished reading the problem.
It reminded him of the scene in the Matrix where Neo finally sees the code, and he was certain without any doubt that when the exam results came back it would have a perfect score on it.
When the bell rang he was already packed and ready to leave, but he stopped by the teacher's desk on the way out to collect his corrected exam since the teacher had apparently graded them during the period.
He looked at the score, confirmed it was a ten, felt no particular surprise about that, and headed to his locker to swap out the books he had used before making his way to the cafeteria.
He had just finished at his locker and was heading in the direction the memories told him the cafeteria was located when he heard shouting coming from the courtyard.
He changed direction and went to see what it was about, and when he arrived he found exactly what he expected to find, a crowd gathered in a rough circle around something happening at the center.
He pushed through the outer edge of the crowd to get close enough to see and hear clearly.
The closer he got the clearer the words became.
DO IT!
DO IT!
DO IT!
He moved through the crowd and found exactly what he had expected to find.
Flash Thompson was in the middle of it, holding a younger kid by the collar in the specific way of someone who has practiced this particular power dynamic enough to be comfortable with it.
The kid's face told Peter everything he needed to know about how close he was to breaking, and if he broke in front of this many people watching and filming it would be considerably worse for him than if it happened in private.
From somewhere at the edge of the circle Peter could see Gwen being held back by the people around her, clearly trying to stop it.
So it was not going to play out the same way it had in the film.
That was fine. Better, actually, because what he had in mind did not require the scene to follow the script.
He stepped out of the crowd.
Old memories surfaced briefly, humiliations from corridors not unlike this one, and he felt a familiar irritation settle in behind his eyes.
He stepped out of the crowd and walked toward the center, and he noticed several people nearby looking at him like he had lost his mind for moving toward Flash instead of away from him.
When he finally cleared the crowd and stood a few meters from Flash, that was when Flash noticed him and smiled with the particular arrogance of someone who has never once in his life considered that a situation might not go his way.
"PARKER!" Flash said. "You are here at the perfect moment. Take a picture of this. Go on."
"I am not taking a picture of anything," Peter said, his face calm and his arms crossed. "Put the kid down and back off. I will not give you another chance."
Silence!
"..."