Exhibit A
The bus smelled like vinyl and somebody's tuna sandwich and the particular funk of thirty teenagers who'd been told to dress nice for a field trip and had interpreted that in thirty different ways. Harry had worn a blazer over a t-shirt. Flash had the letter jacket. Gwen Stacy was in a cardigan with her headband and a notebook already open on her lap.
Peter sat by the window and watched Queens go past. His hands were in his lap and his right hand was curled into a loose fist and he kept opening it and looking at the space between his thumb and index finger. The meat of the hand. Right there.
He'd known for two weeks. The field trip. The exhibition. The spider. He'd gotten on the bus this morning knowing that by the end of today he would be different.
The bus turned onto the expressway. A kid in the back threw a balled-up piece of paper at another kid's head. The driver didn't notice. Harry was talking about something but Peter wasn't listening. Harry's mouth was moving and words were coming out and Peter was looking at his own hand and thinking about a spider smaller than a dime.
"You okay?" Harry said.
"Yeah."
"You look weird."
"I look like I always look."
"Right," Harry said. "Weird."
General Techtronics Corporation was a grey building with too much glass in the front. The lobby had a banner that said EDUCATIONAL EXHIBITION: THE FUTURE OF RADIATION SCIENCE and under it someone had taped a paper arrow that said SCHOOL GROUPS THIS WAY. The floors were polished and they squeaked under everyone's sneakers and the air conditioning was too cold.
The exhibits were fine. Panels, models, screens running animations that looked like they'd been made in 2003. A docent in a lab coat explaining something to a group that had stopped listening four exhibits ago.
Peter walked through on autopilot, reading the placards without seeing them, nodding at things the tour guide said. Flash was somewhere behind him, shoving somebody into a display case. Gwen was taking notes. His brain was elsewhere.
He was looking for the spider.
He didn't know what it would look like. The movies hadn't been specific enough for that. A radioactive spider at a science exhibition. It could be in a case, on a display, loose in the building. He didn't know if it was already here. He knew that sometime today it would bite him on the hand and after that he'd be able to stick to walls and catch cars and the man who signed his permission slip would die because of what Peter became.
He passed a display about radiation shielding. A kid from another school was picking his nose in front of it. Peter kept walking.
He was standing in front of a display about gamma radiation, not reading it, when he heard the laugh.
It came from across the hall. Bright and short, cutting through the noise of thirty teenagers and a tour guide and humming air conditioning. Somebody had just won an argument and was happy about it.
He looked.
She was maybe thirty feet away, standing near the isotope display with another girl. Korean-American. Long black hair, pulled back but not all the way, some of it loose around her face. She had a hockey player's build, athletic and solid, and she was wearing jeans and sneakers and a green jacket zipped halfway. She was talking fast with her hands and the other girl was shaking her head and the girl with the black hair was grinning.
"It's thirty point one seven years," she said. "Not thirty. Thirty point one seven. The point one seven matters."
"Nobody cares about the point one seven."
"Cesium-137 cares."
"Cesium-137 is an isotope. It doesn't care about anything."
"That's what makes it reliable."
The other girl groaned. The girl with the black hair laughed again and it was the same laugh, bright and self-satisfied, and Peter was still looking at her. He'd stopped walking. He was standing in the middle of the exhibition floor.
She was pretty. That was the word his brain landed on. She had a wide mouth and she was using all of it to grin and her eyes were narrowed from the laughing and she was standing with her feet apart, stable, planted. She looked like she belonged exactly where she was standing.
His right hand itched.
He looked down. There was a spider on his hand.
It was small. Smaller than a dime. Brownish-red, ordinary-looking, sitting on the back of his right hand between his thumb and his index finger. It hadn't been there a second ago.
He stared at it. The spider had eyes, all of them, tiny and dark, and it was very still.
Then it bit him.
Hot needle. Into the meat of the hand, right in the webbing between thumb and finger. Sharp and deep and wrong. A hot needle pushed in and held there for a second and then pulled out. His vision blurred. His ears rang. The pain traveled up his wrist into his forearm and he inhaled through his teeth and didn't make a sound because he was standing in a room full of his classmates and a tour guide and he couldn't make a sound.
The spider fell off his hand.
It landed on the floor. Tiny. Barely visible on the grey tile. It sat there for a second, stunned or dying, and then it started moving. Across the tile, between feet, past a dropped backpack, under a bench, straight toward the isotope display. Straight toward her.
Peter watched it go. He was holding his bitten hand against his chest and his heart was hammering and his ears were ringing and the spider was crawling across thirty feet of floor toward the girl with the black hair and the bright laugh. This wasn't how the story went. The spider bit Peter Parker and that was it. It didn't bite someone else after.
It climbed her shoe. The gap between her sneaker and the cuff of her jeans. Her ankle was bare there, a strip of skin between denim and canvas, and the spider crawled onto it and stopped.
She slapped at her ankle. Quick, reflexive, the way you slap a mosquito. "Ow. What the-"
She looked down. Lifted her foot. The spider was on the floor again, on its back now, legs curling inward. It twitched once.
It stopped.
She looked up from the dead spider on the floor and across the exhibition hall and her eyes found his. He was thirty feet away with his bitten hand pressed against his shirt and she was bent over holding her ankle and he couldn't look away.
The spider was dead between them. Legs curled. Tiny.
The tour guide said something about cesium half-lives. The girl's friend tugged her arm. She looked away first. Peter looked at his hand. The bite was red and raised and warm.
The bus home was worse. He sat in the same window seat and the vinyl was the same and the tuna smell was the same but nothing else was. His skin was buzzing. Literally buzzing, a low vibration under the surface, like his cells were rearranging themselves.
His hand throbbed where the spider had bitten him. The mark was already changing. When he'd first looked at it on the exhibition floor it was red, a small raised bump. Now it was darker, purplish, and the skin around it was hot. Working-hot. Like the venom was working its way outward from the bite.
Everything was louder. Harry was talking next to him and Harry's voice was too loud and the bus engine was too loud and the kid three rows back was chewing gum. The wet click of it. The driver's radio was playing something country with static between the notes. The girl across the aisle breathing. The girl behind her turning a page of a book. The creak of the seat when the kid in front leaned back.
His glasses felt wrong. Too strong. The prescription had been barely right two weeks ago and now it was overcorrecting, the edges of everything going blurry while the center got sharper. He took them off. The world didn't go blurry. It went clear. Clearer than it had been with the glasses. He put them back on. The blur came back. He took them off again.
That was new.
The tuna had been background noise on the ride over. Now it was a wall. Under it, deodorant and sweat and the chemical orange of the air freshener dangling from the rearview mirror. Somebody had spilled something sugary on the seat behind him, probably days ago, and the sugar had soaked into the vinyl and was decomposing.
He gripped the armrest. His fingers sank into it. The metal gave under his grip and stayed dented when he let go and he looked at the five small impressions his fingertips had left in the chrome and thought, very clearly:
It's happening.
"Seriously, are you okay?" Harry said. "You're sweating."
"Carsick," Peter said. "I get carsick."
"Since when?"
"Since right now."
He put his head against the window. The glass was cool and his forehead was hot and his hand was throbbing with his heartbeat. Queens went by outside. Same streets he'd been watching for two weeks. Except now he could read the address numbers on buildings three blocks away.
The girl with the black hair was on this bus somewhere. He didn't know her name.
The bus hit a bump. The dents in the armrest caught the light.
He closed his eyes.