Side Effects
He woke up on the ceiling.
His left hand was stuck to the wall above his headboard and his right foot was hooked on the edge of the mattress and the rest of him was hanging at an angle that should have hurt but didn't, and the alarm clock was going off and he was staring at the crack in the plaster from about six inches away.
The crack had texture. Every ridge, every fork, how the plaster had separated and the paint had cracked along the gap. Yesterday it had been a line. Today it was a canyon. The paint flakes had edges. The dust inside the crack had individual particles. He was six inches from the ceiling and each one was visible.
He let go of the wall.
He didn't unstick. His hand just stayed there, palm flat against the plaster, and his skin was bonded to the surface like it had been glued on. He pulled harder. Peeled his hand off and it came away with a soft sound, like tape being removed. Just his palm, warm and tingling, with all five fingers splayed.
The alarm was still going. He reached for it and his hand closed around it and the plastic housing cracked. He pulled back. The clock was dented on one side, his fingerprints pressed into the casing. Still beeping. He hit the off button. The button stuck because the casing was warped.
He sat on the edge of his bed and looked at his hands.
His glasses were on the nightstand. He didn't put them on. The room was already sharp. Sharper than the glasses had ever made it. The serial number on the back of the alarm clock was readable from arm's length. The thread count in his pillowcase was visible. Individual threads. The world was in a resolution it hadn't been in yesterday and he kept trying to process all of it at once.
The bathroom was worse. He went to brush his teeth and his hand stuck to the faucet handle. He peeled it off, turned on the water, picked up the toothbrush, and the bristles were so loud against his teeth that it sounded like scrubbing a floor. The water from the tap was a roar. The pipes in the wall were singing. Water moving through them, joints creaking where old plumbing met older plumbing. The neighbors' pipes too. The Watsons' shower was running. The house on the other side had a toilet that ran after it flushed.
He looked at himself in the mirror. Same face, same skinny body, brown hair sticking up on one side. He wasn't bigger. He was just planted. Balanced. Standing like he could move in any direction without shifting his weight first.
He got dressed. Putting on his shirt took three tries because his hands kept sticking to the fabric.
Breakfast was May's eggs and Ben's crossword and the WORLD'S BEST UNCLE mug and the smell of coffee. The eggs smelled like sulfur and butter and the specific mineral content of the water May had used to boil them. The coffee had layers he'd never noticed and he could pick out every one. Ben's aftershave. May's hand lotion. Dish soap from last night, still on the ceramic.
"You look tired," May said.
"Didn't sleep great."
"You say that a lot."
He picked up his spoon. Squeezed too hard. The handle bent sideways. He straightened it under the table while May had her back turned and put it down carefully and used his fork instead.
His skull buzzed. Fast, sharp, a vibration at the base of his brain that made his hair stand up. His hand moved before he thought about it and caught the salt shaker that Ben's elbow had knocked off the edge of the table. He caught it an inch from the floor, moving his arm across his body and under the table in a motion that should have taken longer than it did.
Ben looked at him. "Nice catch."
"Yeah," Peter said. "Reflex."
He put the salt shaker back. His hand was shaking. The buzz had come before the salt shaker fell.
School was a disaster. The bus ride over had been bad. Everything amplified. He'd kept his hands in his pockets the entire ride because he didn't trust them near the seat in front of him.
Everything was louder. The hallway was a wall of noise. Conversations and locker slams and sneakers squeaking on tile, all of it arriving at the same volume and he couldn't sort it. He walked to homeroom with his jaw clenched and his hands in his pockets and his fingers curled into fists so he wouldn't accidentally stick to the doorframe.
Gym was third period. Coach Warren was feeling ambitious. Football.
Flash was quarterback because Flash was always quarterback. Peter was on the opposite team because Peter was always on the opposite team. The game was flag football, technically, but Flash threw passes like it was personal.
Peter was standing near the back, trying to be invisible, when Flash threw the ball at him. Hard. Overhand spiral, full force, aimed at Peter's chest. A punishment pass.
Peter's hand came up. One hand. The ball smacked into his palm and stuck there and his fingers closed around it and he was holding it. One-handed catch, no fumble, no bobble. The ball had been moving fast and his hand had just been there.
Flash was standing thirty yards away with his arm still extended.
Peter looked at the ball in his hand. Looked at Flash. Flash's mouth was open.
"Lucky catch," Peter said. He tossed the ball back. Underhanded, soft, a nothing throw. It sailed in a perfect spiral and hit Flash in the chest harder than he'd intended and Flash had to step back to absorb it.
Two rows of bleachers away, Gwen Stacy was sitting out with a twisted ankle. She had a notebook in her lap. Her pen had stopped moving. She was looking at Peter with her head tilted and her pen cap between her teeth and her eyes narrowed, focused.
Peter went back to being invisible. It didn't work as well as it used to.
Lunch. He was carrying a tray through the cafeteria. Chicken soup and a bread roll and a carton of milk. The soup smelled like sodium and carrots and the ghost of a chicken that had died in an industrial facility.
The buzz hit again. Base of his skull, sharp, insistent. He moved sideways. A kid he didn't know walked past with a tray and tripped on nothing and the soup on the kid's tray went sideways and the splash hit the floor where Peter had been standing.
The kid said "Shit, sorry" to the empty space.
Peter was three feet to the left and his heart was pounding. Nobody had seen it. Probably. He'd just been standing in one spot and then he'd been in a different spot and the soup was on the floor and not on him.
He sat down. He put his tray down. His hands were steady. He ate the bread roll. It tasted like flour and air and the faintest trace of the plastic bag it had been stored in.
After lunch he went to his locker. Grabbed the handle. Pulled. The handle came off. Not all the way. It bent ninety degrees and stayed attached by one screw and the metal had compressed in the shape of his grip.
He stared at it. He pressed it back into shape with his thumb. It went mostly flat. He opened the locker with two fingers and got his textbook and closed it quietly and walked away.
MJ hit him in the hallway.
Her scent did, anyway. He was walking past the science wing, trying to get to fifth period without touching anything or catching anything or breaking anything, and she came around the corner going the other direction and her scent arrived before she did.
Coconut shampoo. The same one from the porch, from the fence, from her hair when she was leaning on the rail. Under it, body spray, drugstore, floral and chemical, and under all of it, just her. Warm skin. The actual biological warmth of a person walking through a hallway at 2 PM on a Thursday in Queens.
His foot caught on nothing. He stumbled, caught himself on a locker, left a palm print on the metal that he wiped off with his sleeve. MJ was fifteen feet away and walking in the other direction and she hadn't seen him and he was standing in the hallway with his hand on a locker and his heart going fast and the coconut and the body spray and the warm skin underneath and it was all he could smell. The entire hallway. Thirty kids and floor wax and burned popcorn from the teachers' lounge and the only thing his nose cared about was the girl walking away from him.
She turned the corner. Gone. The scent faded, and the hallway went back to smelling like a hallway.
A freshman dropped a binder and papers went everywhere. Peter helped pick them up because it gave him something to do with his hands. The freshman said thanks. Peter said no problem. His hands were shaking.
He sat in fifth period and didn't learn anything.
His hands were under the desk. He was looking at them. The right one still had the bite mark, darker now, almost brown. The left one was clean. Both of them were the same hands he'd had yesterday except they could stick to walls and bend metal and catch footballs without trying and they could smell MJ Watson from fifteen feet away, though that last one wasn't the hands.
The girl with the black hair. The spider had gone to her. Bit her. Same spider, same exhibition, same day. She was somewhere in Queens right now, sitting in her own fifth period looking at her own hands.
She'd be going through this too. Sticking to things, hearing too much, bending stuff she didn't mean to bend. Except she didn't have foreknowledge. She didn't know what was happening to her body and she was alone with it and her hands were probably shaking the way his were shaking and nobody was going to explain it to her.
He had to find her.
He didn't know her name. He didn't know her school. He knew she was Korean-American, long black hair, argued about cesium half-lives, wore a green jacket. She'd been at the General Techtronics exhibition, which meant her school was on the same field trip roster. Her friend had been there. The spider had bitten her ankle.
She was the only other person who knew what the spider felt like, and she was alone with it.
The bell rang. He packed his bag carefully. He held the zipper between two fingers and pulled it closed without bending the track.
He had to find her.