Wallflowers
A week in and Peter had a rhythm. The rhythm of a song you don't like but can't stop humming because it's stuck in your head and fighting it takes more energy than just letting it play. He woke up, ate May's breakfast, rode the bus, survived Midtown High, rode the bus home, ate dinner with two people he loved who didn't know him, and did it again.
It was getting easier to walk around in this body. He still forgot how small his hands were sometimes. He still reached for things on shelves that his old body could reach and this one couldn't. But the wrongness was fading into a permanent low-grade annoyance, like wearing prescription glasses with someone else's prescription.
The school helped less. He'd been to high school already. Once was enough. Twice felt like someone was making a point about something.
Gym was Wednesdays and Fridays. Coach Warren ran it like a man who'd been doing it for twenty years and had stopped pretending it mattered around year eight. Dodgeball. He handed out the red rubber balls, blew the whistle, and sat behind his desk with a newspaper.
Peter got hit almost immediately. Flash threw it from ten feet away, overhand, hard enough that it snapped against Peter's chest and left a mark that stung through his shirt. Peter went down on one knee. Caught his breath. Stood up.
Flash was watching him. His mouth was flat and he was staring at Peter with his head tilted slightly, like he'd been expecting something from the throw and hadn't gotten it. A flinch, maybe. Or tears. Peter had just taken it, stood back up, and looked at him, and Flash didn't know what to do with that.
Peter walked to the sideline. That was the rule. You got hit, you sat down.
Across the gym, Liz was on the other team. She'd been watching. When Peter looked over she bit her bottom lip, then caught herself and covered her mouth with her hand and looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was deeply interesting to her for about three seconds. Then she went back to dodging balls.
Her cheeks were pink. He couldn't tell if that was the gym or him. A kid with a bowl cut threw a ball that missed everyone and hit the far wall and bounced and rolled into Coach Warren's desk and Warren didn't look up from his paper.
The library was quiet. School-library quiet, which meant not very. The computers hummed. Someone was whispering three tables over about a project they hadn't started. The librarian was re-shelving books and doing it loudly enough that it defeated the purpose.
Peter had a free period. He sat somewhere and pretended to study while he watched the room. Standard.
The girl in the hoodie was in the corner. She'd migrated from the cafeteria to the library and brought her ecosystem with her. Bag on the chair next to her, curled in, taking up as little space as she could manage. She'd finished Slaughterhouse-Five. The new book was The Bell Jar. She was on page forty.
The bag was different from last week. Still a backpack, still worn. But the zipper pull had changed. She'd tied a piece of red thread around it, knotted twice, the ends fraying. The zipper was broken and the thread kept it closed.
Two tables away, Gwen Stacy was doing math.
He hadn't paid much attention to her before. Front row, headband, hand up before the teacher finished. That was about it. But in the library she was different. Less performative. No hand raised, no teacher to impress. She was hunched over a notebook, pen cap between her teeth, writing equations that Peter couldn't read from this distance but could tell from the density of the notation that they weren't sophomore-level. The textbook open next to her was thick and blue and had "CALCULUS" across the spine in gold letters.
She was doing college math. In a high school library. During a free period. Because she wanted to. He didn't know anyone who did math for fun.
She looked up, caught him looking at her notebook, and her eyebrows went up. He looked away. She went back to her equations. The pen cap went back between her teeth. She wrote something, frowned at it, scratched it out, and wrote something else, and the frown eased into a small pull at the corner of her mouth. She'd figured it out. Whatever it was.
Harry found him at lunch. "We're confirmed for the gala. Next month. Saturday. Dad's sending a car." Harry said this like it was normal. For Harry, it probably was.
"A car."
"Yeah. Like a car with a driver. Not a limo, don't get excited. Just a town car."
"Just a town car."
"You're doing the thing where you repeat what I said."
"I'm processing."
"Process faster. My dad wants to meet you before the event. Dinner, maybe. He mentioned it this morning." Harry bit into an apple. "You'll like him. He's intense but he's cool."
Peter thought: He turns into a goblin and throws bombs at people from a glider.
Peter said: "Yeah, sounds good."
He saw MJ in the cafeteria during fourth period.
She was at the big table by the windows. Flash's table, technically, though nobody called it that. Liz was there. Two other girls Peter didn't know. A kid named Kenny who laughed at everything and a kid named Sally who laughed at nothing. MJ was in the middle of a story, her hands moving, her voice carrying across half the room because MJ Watson didn't do anything quietly.
Peter was three tables away eating a granola bar he'd found in the bottom of his backpack. It was stale. He ate it anyway.
He watched MJ tell the story. She was good at it. She had timing, she had the gestures, she knew when to pause and when to drop her voice so the whole table leaned in. She was performing and the performance was seamless and if you weren't looking for the seams you'd never know they were there.
But he was looking. He'd been looking since the sundress and the lollipop and he couldn't stop.
The story ended. Everyone laughed. MJ laughed too. And right before the laugh, right in the gap between the punchline landing and MJ's reaction to it landing, her face was doing nothing. Her mouth was in a straight line and her eyes were flat and she was somewhere else entirely, somewhere behind the green eyes, and then the smile arrived and it was bright and exactly right and he watched it slot into place.
Nobody else saw it. The gap was too fast. The laugh came and it was the right laugh and it carried and the table responded to it and MJ was the center of the room. Loud, fun.
Peter finished the granola bar. The wrapper crinkled when he balled it up. He threw it in the trash on the way out.
He started shadowing Ben.
He was subtle about it. Or he thought he was. Just being in the room more. Sitting at the kitchen table while Ben did the crossword. Handing him tools in the garage when he fixed the hinge on the screen door. Watching television on the couch while Ben read a paperback with the spine cracked and the cover folded back.
The weird thing was that it wasn't hard. Ben was easy to be around. He didn't talk too much or demand conversation. He just existed in the room and the room was better for it. He smelled like Old Spice and the coffee he drank too much of and sometimes the sawdust from whatever project was on the workbench in the garage. He hummed while he worked. Badly. Not a tune anyone would recognize, just notes that wandered.
He offered to carry the groceries, asked about Ben's day. Sat through a show about bass fishing that had no reason to exist and neither of them changed the channel.
Ben noticed. He was too polite to say anything, but Peter caught him looking once, over the top of his reading glasses, with his mouth slightly open like he was about to ask a question and then decided against it.
Peter didn't have an answer for that look. So he sat on the couch and pretended to watch the fishing show and Ben went back to his book and the house was quiet in the good way. May was humming in the kitchen. The clock on the mantle ticked.
On Thursday Ben made hot chocolate. Two mugs. The WORLD'S BEST UNCLE mug for himself, the blue one with the chipped handle for Peter. He didn't ask if Peter wanted any. Just set it down next to him.
"Thanks," Peter said.
"You looked cold."
He wasn't cold. But the hot chocolate was good. Made with actual milk, not water, heated in a pot on the stove. It tasted like somebody had actually stood at the stove and cared about it.
Friday evening. The permission slip was still on the fridge, held up by a magnet shaped like the Statue of Liberty. May had put it there the first day.
ONE WEEK AWAY, someone had written on the bottom in red marker. May's handwriting, round and cheerful.
Peter stood in the kitchen and looked at it. General Techtronics Corporation. Educational Exhibition. Wednesday.
"Need me to sign that?" Ben said from the doorway. He had his reading glasses on and a pen behind his ear.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Please."
Ben took the slip off the fridge, smoothed it on the counter, and signed it. His careful block letters in blue ink.
He put it back on the fridge. Same magnet.
"Excited?"
"It's a radiation exhibit."
"So that's a no."
"It's a strong maybe."
Ben smiled. He patted Peter on the shoulder, firm and brief, and went back to his crossword.
Peter stood in the kitchen after he left. One week.