Spider-Man

  There was a loud honking from behind them, and a car packed with her girlfriends pulled up alongside. If Peter thought the transformation he’d undergone from the night before was remarkable, that was nothing compared to the lightning-fast transformation of M. J.’s face. Immediately all the despondency and frustration vanished, to be replaced by a broad smile and a party-girl demeanor. The car slowed enough for M. J. to hop in and, like Cinderella off to the ball, she was gone. With the girls laughing merrily, the car zipped away, angling around the school bus… .

  School bus?!? Aw, crap!

  Peter bolted down the street. Once upon a time, such a hurried, determined sprint would quickly have left him breathless, but not this time. His breathing was slow, steady, and sure, as was his heartbeat. It was as if he wasn’t even straining himself, as if the rapid clip at which he was moving was only a fraction of just how quickly he could truly move.

  Even so, it wasn’t quite fast enough as, with a belch of smoke, the bus moved off from the curb. Peter was starting to wonder if the driver was actually waiting until he spotted Peter coming and then gunned the engine and roared away.

  Peter got to the side of the bus just as it angled away from the curb. There was a GO WILDCATS banner on the side. Running into the street after the bus, he slammed his hand against the banner, with the intention of pounding repeatedly on the bus in order to get it to stop.

  The bus pulled away.

  The banner stayed behind.

  To be specific, the banner was sticking to his fingers, in much the same way the sock had clung to his toe but much more forcefully. He tried to pull the banner clear of one hand, but found it adhering to the other one. Why the hell was the banner so blasted sticky? It was as if it were made out of flypaper.

  Except his eyes told him there was nothing unusual about the material that the banner was made from. It just was clinging to his fingers… .

  No …

  No … that wasn’t it at all. His fingers … were clinging to the banner.

  And suddenly something pounded through his head, something with such force that it almost split his skull in two. It was a warning, a sensation, a fight-or-flight response, all clamoring for attention simultaneously, and as he tried to sort it out, a horn blasted above all of it. But the horn was outside his head, not inside, and he whirled just in time to see a truck bearing down on him. He could feel the heat coming off the radiator, could practically smell the rubber of the tires, it was that close.

  With a scream, Peter leaped out of the way, all the while knowing that there was no way, absolutely no way, that he was going to be able to get out of the way in time, even as the brakes locked and the tires screeched.

  And then it was gone, the heat, the smell—all gone, to be replaced by a dizzying sensation as if he were flying. He angled up, up, the breeze of his acceleration hitting him in the face, and below him the ground sped by as if he were a jet lifting off from a runway. That sense of glorious freedom, of not being bound by such trivialities as gravity.

  And that was when he hit the wall of the building. It wasn’t a particularly tall building, a three-story office structure that housed a law firm. But its bricks were just as solid as any Manhattan skyscraper, and when Peter slammed into it, forty feet above street level, it almost knocked him unconscious. In his dizzy, confused state, he did something that made absolutely no sense at all: He reached out and tried to hold on to the side of the building, so that he wouldn’t fall.

  What made even less sense was that it worked.

  He clung there, batlike, his mind trying to process the insanity of what was happening to him.

  He glanced over his shoulder and saw, twenty yards away, the truck driver standing on the street, staring at his front grillwork as if unable to comprehend why there wasn’t a teenager smeared all over it. The fellow hesitated a moment, then got down on his hands and knees to inspect the underside. For a moment, Peter thought he was actually dead, and that he would see his body lying there like in those movies with ghosts and angels and such. But then the trucker shrugged, shook his head as if doubting his senses, climbed into the cab, and drove off. He left behind him a street that was decidedly devoid of corpses.

  At that moment a woman in the office building slid open a window, with the intention of watering some flowers in a window box. Upon seeing Peter, she let out an astounded yelp, enough to startle Peter loose of the wall. The ground yawned up at him, and in his desperation he grabbed out for a drainpipe to avert the fall and perhaps even pull himself up to the roof and safety. Instead the urgency of his grip caused him to crush the pipe beneath his steel-hard fingers, and it gave way. Peter fell, his arms waving desperately around, and then he hit the ground …

  … on his feet.

  It made no sense. Falling as he had been, even if he’d landed standing up, his leg bones should have been driven somewhere up into his chest from the impact. Instead he hit the ground in a crouch, as if he’d fallen only a foot or two, and when he stood it was with no effort, no ache or pain. It was as if dropping off a building and landing unhurt on the ground were the most natural things in the world.

  The woman overhead had been moving her mouth without benefit of sound emerging from it, and finally she found her voice and let out a high-pitched scream. Peter ran from the alleyway as fast as his legs would carry him, which it turned out was pretty damned fast. And still his heart continued beating with that slow, steady calm. It was as if his body was already acclimated to his new situation and was patiently waiting for his mind to catch up.

  VI.

  THE FIRST FIGHT

  Human beings are blessed with an infinite capacity to rationalize away or ignore anything their senses cannot comprehend. Peter Parker was no exception, and as a result he had managed to explain the oddities of the morning by the time lunch rolled around. The banner had been pasted to the side of the bus, and the paste had gotten on his fingers. When the truck had been bearing down on him, he’d managed to jump out of the way but had hit his head in doing so, stumbling against the side of the building. In his concussed haze, with the events surrounding the spider bite still fresh in his subconscious, he had imagined himself as a giant spider on the side of the building.

  It all made perfect sense … certainly far more sense than that he was somehow transforming into a … well … well, that was just ridiculous.

  Utterly ridiculous. Kafkaesque.

  “As Peter Parker awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic spider.” Yeah, like that was going to happen.

  Nevertheless his newly acquired appetite could not be ignored. The cafeteria woman, who was accustomed to Peter being the lightest of eaters, gaped as he loaded up his tray with enough food to feed the marching band. He made his way over to a table, moving with unaccustomed grace as he easily balanced the overladen tray. No one else in the cafeteria gave him a second glance as he sat, which was nothing unusual. Peter Parker, after all, wasn’t someone who generally registered on most people’s radar.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mary Jane approaching, and for a moment he thought she was going to sit next to him. Instead she maneuvered toward her customary group of friends, who were seated at their table and waving her over.

  Suddenly Mary Jane skidded on a wet patch on the floor, the souvenir of a previous lunch period when someone had spilled some milk. In trying not to lose her footing and also to hold onto her tray, M. J. accomplished neither, and she started to fall with her tray angling toward the floor.

  Instantly Peter was on his feet. It was as if he were moving before the incident unfolded. With his left hand he snagged her tray, righting it so quickly that nothing spilled from it. At the same time he dropped his right shoulder so that M. J.’s flailing hand could clutch onto it. Not having yet realized what had happened, M. J. regained her footing, then looked around desperately for the tray as if hoping she could still catch it. Her eyes widened as she saw Peter holding it effortles
sly.

  She turned and looked at him as if seeing him in a new light. “Wow. Great reflexes!” she said.

  Peter himself couldn’t really believe that he had pulled it off. He’d been operating purely on instinct, and it was only now, when the moment had passed, that he fully realized what he’d done. But he also understood that nonchalance was the key at times like these. So he shrugged as if it were nothing and handed her tray back to her.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “No problem.”

  He expected her simply to walk away. But instead she was staring into his eyes … no. Not staring. She was gazing, and he felt as if some sort of electrical connection had been made. “Hey, you have blue eyes,” she observed. “I never noticed without your glasses. You just get contacts?”

  No. Actually, I’ve got eyesight that would make a hawk jealous, and for all the newfound strength I feel coursing through me, none of it means a thing when compared with the heady sensation of your eyes upon me. . . .

  “Uh-huh,” was all he managed to get out. Then his throat constricted, and while he tried to manage an oral presentation of some of the thoughts tumbling through his head, all of them crowded forward at once, and none of them managed to make it to his mouth.

  “Well … see ya,” Mary Jane said and, shrugging, she turned and walked away.

  He felt totally devastated. Forgotten once more, angry at his own uncertainty and incompetence, and then—to his astonishment—Mary Jane did something she’d never done before.

  She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled. An after-the-fact acknowledgment of him.

  He couldn’t believe it.

  Despite the fact that she then sat down at the “popular kids” table—right next to Flash, of course—he still treasured that brief look she’d sent his way. The look that promised … well, it hadn’t promised anything, really. But it had hinted at something he hadn’t even dared consider before. Namely that she found him … what? Interesting? Handsome?

  Peter sat back down at his table and started to eat with the same aggressive bulldozer approach he’d taken at breakfast. He started to set his fork down so that he could pick up the can of soda to his right.

  The fork stuck to his hand.

  He stared at it as if it was someone else’s hand. Then he tried to pull the fork free with his other hand, only to discover that a long, gooey strand of … of something … was stretching from his hand to the fork. At first it was like whitish gray mucous, as if he’d blown his nose out through his wrist. But then he pulled on it, and pulled, and it reminded him of that stuff he’d had when he was a kid: Silly String. Except the tensile strength was far greater, and somehow it was managing to secrete through his wrist, and what was he doing scientifically analyzing it when the fact was that, Holy God, he had some kind of supersnot oozing out of his forearms, what the hell was up with that?!?

  He pulled even harder on the fork, but rather than separate it from the strand, he instead managed to shoot out another strand, this time from his other hand. And suddenly all the rationalizing, all the reordering in his mind of the morning’s events, went right out the window as he realized, It’s webbing! It’s webbing! I’ve got spinnerets in my forearms, oh jeez, what if somebody notices but now it could be worse, could be worse, at least I’m not shooting webbing out my butt, which is where spiders generally secrete their webbing, and perhaps it might bear some further investigation as to precisely why the spinnerets choose to manifest themselves and Holy God, I’m shooting freaking webs outta my freaking arms!!!

  The only thing more horrific to Peter than the webs was the notion of someone spotting them. That would be it for him, over, done, no chance of normalcy, no chance of Mary Jane, no chance of nothing. If the other kids saw him oozing white gook out his arms, he might as well just put a paper bag over his head and slink out of high school forever.

  But things were just going from bad to worse, and the paper bag over his head looked to be a very probable future for him. For the strand he’d just fired shot across the aisle to the table across from him, and smacked into Liz Allen’s tray. Liz was chatting with someone and hadn’t noticed, thank heavens, but he only had seconds in which to act before she did spot it, and look to see where—and to whom—it connected.

  Hoping to yank the web strand free of the tray, Peter pulled as hard as he could. In retrospect, he should have realized what would happen, but he wasn’t thinking especially clearly. Unfortunately, the inevitable did occur. Liz’s tray took off like a rocket, arcing through the air straight at Peter. He ducked under the tray as it soared over his head. He heard the tray crash behind him, heard an uproar and shouts, and turned to see what had happened.

  Flash Thompson was sitting there, wearing the girl’s lunch. Jell-O was trickling down his shirt, milk was in his hair, pasta was on his shoulders, and murder was in his eyes. Mary Jane, sitting next to him, wasn’t helping the situation by desperately trying to cover up her laughter and failing miserably.

  M. J.’s barely stifled laughter was the only noise in the cafeteria at that moment. Like an infuriated rhino trying to find a target, Flash’s eyes swept the room, looking for the guilty party. And Peter realized that if there was one thing Thompson the football star was capable of doing, it was chart the trajectory of an incoming object. With rapid-fire calculations he could never have articulated, Flash figured out what direction the tray must have come from. He glanced in Liz’s direction, but probably realized that she didn’t have the arm strength to hurl the tray that far. So he tracked it to the closest source, and his piglike stare fell upon a sweating and loudly gulping Peter Parker.

  “Parker?!” Flash said.

  If he had discovered that Peter Parker was actually Britney Spears in a cunning disguise, he couldn’t have reacted with greater incredulity. Instantly Flash was on his feet, and that same warning of danger was buzzing in Peter’s head, except this time there was no doubt where the jeopardy was coming from. Peter jumped out of his chair, knocking it backward, and he motored out of the cafeteria, dragging the still-snagged tray behind him.

  As the doors swung closed after him, the tray didn’t make it through in time. It slid up and down the gap between the doors, tapping against them as if pleading to be let out. Finally, the strand broke and the tray fell to the floor with a crash.

  In the hallway just outside the cafeteria, Peter paused next to a row of lockers and checked the undersides of his wrists. He didn’t have a clue as to exactly what he was going to see. His shirtsleeves were rolled up, and on each of his wrists there was a single, nearly invisible slit.

  Wonderful. Just wonderful. If anyone ever spotted them, they’d think he’d tried to commit suicide. Then again, considering that Flash Thompson was on his tail, they probably wouldn’t blame him. Nevertheless he quickly rolled down his shirtsleeves as far as they would go in order to cover them.

  And that was when the warning signals that had been sounding in his head went off again, with even greater strength and clarity than before. This was beyond a simple signal that something was wrong. It was as if he was seeing outside himself, aware of everything around him—all at one time. The very movement of air was an alert to him, and in his mind’s eye, he was able to “see” a fist coming in at him, fast, from behind.

  Peter whipped around, darting to one side, just in time to avoid Flash Thompson’s roundhouse as it slammed into the locker just to the right of his head. Flash hit the locker door with such force that he left an indentation in the metal, then let out a yelp of irritation, shaking the stinging out of his fist, as Peter backpedaled to put some distance between him and the outraged sports star. Mary Jane was coming up behind Flash, and Peter saw Harry coming from another direction. M. J. was calling Flash’s name, but he wasn’t paying the least bit of attention.

  “Think you’re pretty funny, don’t you, freak?” Flash demanded, wiping some stray ketchup off his brow. Even under the circumstances, Peter was forced to admit that Flash had good fightin
g form. His fists were up and cocked, ready to unleash a flurry of punches at Peter the moment he was within range.

  “It was an accident!” Mary Jane tried to tell Flash, grabbing at one of his arms. He shook her off, never taking his eyes from his target.

  “I’m sorry. It really was,” Peter said, and the apology was genuine. Despite all the dirt that Flash had done him, he didn’t want to sink to Flash’s level… .

  Except …

  Why not? Why the hell not? It wasn’t as if Flash would ever rise to his level, and he would teach him a lesson by giving him a sound thrashing on the debating team. If Flash was ever going to learn that he should leave Peter alone, descending to Flash’s level was the only way the lesson would ever be taught.

  But … could he really do it? Defeating Flash was more than a matter of strength and agility; it was having enough confidence to believe that it was possible. And that was a pool Peter was going to wade into with very tentative steps.

  Unaware that he was in any physical peril, Flash dismissed Peter’s protests by growling, “My fist breaking your teeth … that’s an accident.”

  Flash’s cronies were closing in, but they weren’t going to give Flash any help. Why should he need it, after all? It was just Puny Parker. They did, however, close a few stray class doors to make sure the teachers within weren’t going to see what was about to happen.

  Peter felt himself moving with strength and certainty. Once again it was as if his body knew what to do and was just waiting for his brain to catch up. Suddenly he started to feel genuinely sorry for Flash, as it dawned on him that the bully very likely was going to get more than he bargained for. Endeavoring to give him an out—and yet half hoping Flash wouldn’t take it—Peter said, “I don’t want to fight you, Flash.”

  “I wouldn’t want to fight me neither.”

  Well . . . can’t say I didn’t try, Peter thought. He balanced carefully on the balls of his feet, his center of gravity low.