Flash swung a quick right, then a left. Either of them, had they connected, would have put Puny Parker down for the count … had Flash been dealing with Puny Parker, of course. But Peter easily dodged them, making it look effortless, as if he knew where they were going to be coming from and had already arranged to be elsewhere.
On some level, one of Flash’s cronies realized that this wasn’t going according to plan. Perhaps it was the befuddled look on Flash’s face when his punches failed to connect, or perhaps it was the blinding speed with which Peter was moving. Either way he decided things would go more smoothly if Parker were held immobile. So he lunged from behind with the intention of wrapping his arms around Peter’s torso and keeping him still.
Peter, however, wasn’t about to let that happen. Just as easily as he’d sensed Flash’s attack from behind, he perceived this one, as well. He ducked under the grab, leaving Flash’s pal overextended and grasping air. Peter then immediately straightened up, catching his assailant off balance, and sending him tumbling heels over head to the floor.
Flash clearly couldn’t believe it. With a roar of outrage, Flash lunged at Peter, swinging an impressive combo of punches … right jab, left jab, right roundhouse, left haymaker. Not a single one connected. Peter wasn’t even backing away. He simply twisted this way, that way, pivoted, and then leaned back as if he were a limbo dancer. With each movement, his confidence swelled all the more. It wasn’t just that he wasn’t getting pummeled. He was actually making Flash look like a fool. In comparison to Peter Parker, Flash Thompson was moving in slow motion.
He heard Mary Jane call out to Harry Osborn, “Harry, please help him!”
“Which one?” asked an obviously impressed Harry.
That was it. That was the final validation for Peter, and he was filled with a surge of complete certainty that he had nothing to fear from Flash Thompson, ever again. Every prank, every trick, every jibe Thompson had ever tossed at him throughout the years came back to him, like a bottled volcano which had been building up over a decade, then came unstoppered all at once. Flash lunged at Peter once more, and this time Peter didn’t try to get out of the way. Instead he threw a punch that landed solidly on Flash’s jaw. He’d always heard that hitting bone upon bone was painful, but he felt nothing aside from giddy and heady satisfaction.
There was a pleasing crunch as Flash sailed back, slamming against the far row of lockers with a crash that seemed to echo back through the years of torment, signaling an end to all the harassment and ushering in a new age where nobody stepped on Peter Parker’s face anymore, ever again.
Flash sunk to the ground with a moan, his eyes closed. “Jesus, Parker,” someone exclaimed, “you knocked him out!”
Damned straight I did, and it served him right! Peter wanted to shout. But he was still partly in shock, staring at his clenched fist as if it belonged to someone else. Other students were crowding forward, gaping at the unconscious Flash, and someone else said, “Parker did that? Yeah, right.”
Flash started to sit up, his hands covering the front of his face, and he was groaning. Peter scoffed inwardly, figuring that Flash was playing for sympathy. How pathetic. After all, he hadn’t hit him that hard. He couldn’t help it if Flash Thompson had a glass jaw and a tendency for melodramatics that would have been more at place in a Spanish soap opera.
Then one of his cronies, crouching next to him, pried his hands away from his face, and there was blood everywhere. All over his face, still trickling from his nose, down his chin, onto the front of his shirt. His eyes were already swelling; within the hour he’d look like a raccoon.
Peter stepped back, horrified, looking at his hands as if an alien had invaded them. The strength in them, the power that he had just displayed, which had made him feel so giddy, so alive, now terrified him.
He turned and bolted from the school. Once upon a time, the notion of cutting in the middle of the day would have been unthinkable. Now he gave it no consideration whatsoever. Instead the only thing on his mind was putting as much distance as possible between himself and the blood-soaked thing that was Flash Thompson.
Once in the street, he stopped and looked at the place on his hand where the spider had bitten him. Whereas yesterday it had been red and inflamed, by now it had subsided considerably. Well, why not? The damage had already been done. Peter’s life was totally trashed.
VII.
THE LEARNING CURVE
There was an alleyway near the school, and Peter stopped there, distracted for a moment. A glorious spiderweb, spun between a Dumpster and the alley walls captured his attention. The sun was glinting off its fresh strands.
Peter glanced right and left and saw that he was alone. Then again, somehow he had already known that. He had a feeling that if someone had been watching him, had posed some sort of danger, he would have … well … sensed it. Spider sense.
Once more he looked at the web, and then to his hand. He flexed his fists a couple of times, stretching his fingers, waggling them, and felt a sort of prickling from his fingertips. At first he thought they were becoming numb, but then he slowly brought them closer to the wall, palm upright and flat, and it was as if there were a small surge of static electricity between his digits and the surface of the wall.
He placed each hand flat against the wall, very tentatively, then pulled back ever so slightly. The palms moved freely away from the wall, but the fingers remained adhered to it.
He slid one of his hands along the wall, and it continued to stick. Then, as if jumping and trying to reach something, he pushed his other arm up and over his head, and that hand stuck, as well. He was hanging about half a foot off the ground, his entire weight supported solely by his hands.
He started to climb, his feet not actually adhering, since they were covered by fairly thick shoe soles, but not needing the additional support or thrust. He just used them for balance, and climbed higher and higher, each passing moment bringing more and more confidence. He reminded himself not to get overconfident; he’d become that way with Flash, and a teen with a rearranged face had been the result. He didn’t want it to be his turn to have parts of his anatomy rearranged.
He achieved the flat rooftop. Rather than hauling his legs up over the edge, he instead vaulted onto the roof, effortlessly swinging the lower half of his body up and over. He dropped into a crouch, then stood upright and bowed slightly as if to a nonexistent audience.
There was a series of rooftops, all approximately the same height, stretching out before him, and he studied the array with the same eagerness and sense of unconquerable confidence one usually saw in an accomplished athlete such as a surfer. And that was, in effect, what Peter Parker became: A surfer. Except instead of searching out waves, he was going to surf the rooftops.
With total abandon and a sense of fun he previously thought had been denied him, Peter started leaping from one rooftop to the next. Just for amusement, he held his arms outstretched as if he were riding a major wave.
And then he wiped out.
Not entirely, and not terminally, but damned close. He’d been barreling toward the edge of one roof, preparing to vault to the other side, when he got to one where he realized, at the last moment, that the gap was simply too wide. Or, at the very least, it was wide enough that he didn’t want to chance it. So he came to an abrupt halt, teetering on the edge. The chasm yawned before him. He could turn around, head back the way he came. Or else he could simply climb down the side of the building. Either option was available . . .
… or perhaps … there was a third option.
He looked down at the slits in his wrist, pushing aside the fact that it still looked as if he had tried to end his life. Although he had to admit the irony, considering where he was and what he was doing. One wrong move, one mistake in judgment, and he’d be putting an end to himself a lot faster than he could by hacking at his wrists.
Still, there was no reason he couldn’t try to make this webbing goop work for him. So he tried to force the web to spray out b
y sheer willpower.
Nothing.
Then he tried wiggling his wrists, but had no more success than before. He saw it as trying to crack a combination lock. It was just a matter of putting together the right assortment of numbers in the correct order.
So he opened and closed assorted fingers, combined with twists of the wrist this way and that. At one point, he tried, just for laughs, a variation on “bunny ears”: His palm facing up, he extended all five fingers, and then brought his ring and middle fingers toward his palm.
Even though he’d been trying to achieve the affect, he was still extremely startled when a loud thwip sounded from the area of his wrist, and a single strand of webbing shot out, straight up. Thankful that he didn’t snag a passing pigeon, Peter tried aiming at the building across the way, hoping that the same combination of wrist-twist and fingering would produce the same result. His wish was granted as another strand of webbing zipped out and anchored to the far side of the other building.
Peter tugged on it as hard as he could, trying to guess how much strain it would undergo if his full weight was put upon it. It seemed solid. Heck, it was more likely that the bricks would fall out of the wall than that his webbing strand would snap—now there was a cheerful thought. Nevertheless, he was still understandably apprehensive about what he was going to do.
He warned himself not to look down, promptly looked down, and then mentally kicked himself for having done so. Just to play it safe, he wrapped the trailing end of the strand around his hand once, twice. Then, muttering a prayer and fighting an urge to give out a Tarzan yell, he jumped off the roof.
He had prepared himself for the possibility of the web breaking free, but it held perfectly. The world whizzed past him, wind in his face, as he held onto the strand and experienced something akin to the exhilarating feeling of flight. This lasted for as long as it took the web line to have its arc terminated by the wall.
Peter slammed into it with jaw-rattling force and hung there, flattened, looking like the Coyote after an abortive pursuit of the Roadrunner. Or perhaps one of those plush toys some people kept suctioned against their car windows.
“Ouch,” he muttered.
“Ouch,” said Madeline Watson, Mary Jane’s mother. “One punch, you say?”
M. J.’s father was seated at the kitchen table, knocking back a beer. His night shift at the train yard didn’t start for some hours yet, and he was glowering with red eyes at Mary Jane, who was fixing herself a snack from the refrigerator.
“I don’t believe it,” he growled.
“She saw it with her own eyes, Phil,” Madeline said, pouring herself a cup of coffee.
“I did. So did everybody else, although a lot of them still don’t believe it,” M. J. said cheerfully. She swung a right cross in the air. “One shot. Bam.”
“You sound awfully chipper about it,” Philip Watson observed.
“Well, I wouldn’t say Flash had it coming, but …”
“But you’d think it without saying it?” suggested her mother. This prompted a ready grin from M. J.
Philip, however, was not grinning. M. J. noticed that he was scowling even more than before. “I’m glad you both think this is funny. The fact is that anyone can get in a lucky punch. Flash was probably taking it easy on him… .”
M. J. had been about to bite into her sandwich, but she put it down as she shook her head. “No way, Dad. No way. Peter just … just took him down, that’s all. It wasn’t luck. Flash did everything he could and never laid a hand on him.”
Her father harrumphed loudly at this, and then said, “Sounds to me like Flash needs work on his technique. Maybe I’ll give him a few pointers when he stops by.”
Mary Jane’s jaw dropped, and she exchanged a look with her mother, who appeared just as surprised. She didn’t know which comment to process first. She tried the less inflammatory one. “When is Flash ‘stopping by?’ ”
“Oh, he called. Did I forget to tell you?”
“Yeessss!” She managed to turn “yes” into a two-syllable word.
“Oh. Well, he’s coming over to pick you up,” and he glanced up at the wall clock, an annoying present from his equally annoying sister, Anna, replete with pictures of birds that gave off birdcalls every hour. “Said he wanted to show you his birthday present. Just about any minute, he should be here.”
“Thanks for telling me! And what do you mean, you’ll give him a few pointers?!”
Philip looked annoyed that she would question his intentions. “What, you think I can’t? In my day, I was all-county—”
“I know what you were, Dad, that’s not the point!” she said in exasperation, pacing the kitchen. “You want to give Flash some tips on how to pound Peter into the ground? He’s your neighbor, for God’s sake! How could you?” She dropped into the chair opposite him, her sandwich forgotten, and folded her arms resolutely. “I’m not going out with Flash tonight. I don’t feel like it.”
Bristling, Phil shot back, “I told him you were. Are you trying to make me look like a fool?”
“Not everything is about you, Phil,” Madeline snapped.
“In this house, it sure as hell is!” He leaned forward, stabbing a finger into M. J.’s face. “You better realize this right now, Mary Jane: Flash Thompson is the luckiest break you ever fell into. I’ve seen that boy play football. He’s going to be All-American. He’s going to make a ton of money. You could do a lot worse than be married to someone like him.”
And the words were out of her mouth before she could control them: “Damned right. I could be married to someone like you!”
Instantly, with a roar, Phil was on his feet, nearly knocking the table over. M. J. rolled off the chair, frantically crab-walking backward on the floor as she tried to put some distance between herself and her outraged father. Madeline quickly interposed herself between the two. “Phil, calm down! She didn’t mean it!”
“The hell she didn’t!” he bellowed, saving Mary Jane the trouble of saying much the same thing. “She’s got a future tied up in a perfect bow, and instead she worries about a loser like Peter Parker!”
“He’s not a loser!” Mary Jane cried out defiantly, pulling herself to her feet.
“And you would know about that, wouldn’t you!” he shot back. He was trembling with rage. “You go out with Flash, as I promised him you would, or don’t you bother coming back!”
“Fine!” she howled, fighting back tears, and charged out the back door, furiously kicking it shut behind her.
Between the constant practicing and the one or two brief bouts of unconsciousness, the time had totally slipped away from Peter. It was getting on evening when he finally dashed into the kitchen of his house, calling out for Aunt May and Uncle Ben. He immediately sensed that they weren’t around, however. This required no advanced spider-given technique or nearly psychic ability. He’d always been able to tell when they were out. The house seemed … sadder when they weren’t around, as ludicrous as that sounded.
His nose wrinkled as he smelled something odd. He turned and experimentally touched the wall, taking extreme care to do it delicately so that his finger didn’t stick to it. It came away with a dab of fresh yellow paint on it. Then he noticed, in the corner of the room, some buckets, a neatly folded drop cloth splattered with paint of a color identical to what was on the wall, and the ladder.
He moaned, remembering that he was supposed to have gotten home early so that he and Uncle Ben could paint the kitchen. But when he’d fled from school, he’d become disconnected from everything else he was supposed to be doing. He’d turned totally inward, and now he’d let his uncle down. He felt like a creep, and even worse when he spotted the note on the wall that read, in Aunt May’s delicate hand, “Meatloaf and vegetables in the oven. Cherry pie on the shelf. We’ve gone to play bridge at the Anderson’s.”
Great.
Not only had he broken a promise, but also, instead of leaving an angry note or even being there to chew him out, they left him a
dinner … and pie. It was the pie that hurt the most, since cherry was his favorite.
“Aw, shoot …” he muttered.
Then he heard shouting from across the street. From Mary Jane’s house.
Peter began to wonder if it had always been noisy over at her place, or whether—since a single spider had completely reordered his life—he had just become more attentive, more aware of the world around him.
He walked out onto the back steps, giving him a plain view of the back of M. J.’s house, over the fence that separated the two small yards. He heard words being shouted. Words like “loser” and “future” and, he was pretty sure, “Flash.” Figures, he thought sourly, and started to turn to go back inside when Mary Jane stomped out into her backyard. Even from where he was standing, he could see that she was trembling with fury.
She looked up at him, her eyes wet.
Suddenly he felt utterly mortified, like some sort of disgusting Peeping Tom, poking in on other people’s lives. The thing was, he wasn’t accustomed to thinking of M. J. as “other people,” but rather as an angel on earth who should, by rights, have no problems at all. He wanted to dart back into the house, but it was way too late for that. He stood there, paralyzed, and finally managed to accomplish what was, for him, a major achievement: To initiate something approaching a casual conversation with her. “Oh. Hi.”
It wasn’t much of a start, but at least it was a start.
She wet her lips, brushed away the tears that were obviously brimming in her eyes. She looked mortified, but also defiant, as if daring Peter to feel pity for her. “Were you listening to that?”
“No!” he said quickly, sounding very guilty, and when he realized how obvious the lie was, he quickly tried to amend it, words tumbling over each other. “Yeah. I … heard something but wasn’t listening. To what?”
Mary Jane blinked at the babble, then seemed to take a bit of amusement in his obvious discomfort. “I guess you can always hear us,” she said, trying her best to sound casual.