The Other Spider
It took him two days. The field trip roster was public. He found it in the school office, pinned to a corkboard behind the secretary's desk, and he read it through the glass while pretending to wait for a hall pass. Three schools. Midtown High. Bronx Science. Queens Metropolitan Academy. The other two schools had been on separate buses. He remembered the girl's bus pulling into the General Techtronics lot at the same time as his. Same direction. Queens.
Queens Metropolitan Academy. He looked it up at the library. Public school, east Queens. Hockey team. The hockey team had a roster.
Cindy Moon. Forward. Junior.
Her address was harder but not impossible. The school directory was behind a login but the hockey booster club had published a newsletter with a fundraiser mailing list and somebody hadn't redacted the addresses. 47 Carlin Street, Woodhaven.
Saturday morning he got on the Q56 and rode it to Woodhaven.
The house was a narrow two-story with blue siding and a chain-link fence and a garden gnome by the front steps that had lost its nose. There was a Honda in the driveway with a Queens Metropolitan parking sticker on the bumper. The curtains in the second-floor window were closed.
He stood on the sidewalk trying to figure out what he was going to say. Hi, I'm the other person the spider bit. Hi, I know your hands stick to things now and you don't know me but we have the same blood running through us and I came because I didn't want you to be alone with it.
None of those were good.
He knocked.
The door opened before his hand came down the second time. Same girl. Long black hair, this time down, hanging past her shoulders. Sweatpants and a hockey jersey that said MOON 17 on the back. Dark circles under her eyes. Her right hand was behind her back and her left was gripping the doorframe. The wood was dented under her fingers. Same grip marks he'd been leaving on everything for two days.
She looked at him. Then she said:
"The spider."
"The spider," he said.
Her mouth trembled. She pressed her lips together and the trembling stopped and she stepped back from the door. Let him in.
Her bedroom was webbed.
She led him upstairs without saying anything to anyone else in the house and opened her door and there it was. Silk. White, slightly translucent, stretched from the corners of the ceiling to the bed frame to the desk lamp to the closet door handle. Thin strands, some of them, and thick ropey ones near the bed where she'd been sleeping. The desk chair was encased. One wall had a sheet of it, layered, like she'd been pressing her hands against the surface and couldn't stop.
"It comes from my fingers," she said. She held her hands up. The tips of her index and middle fingers on both hands had small slits in the skin, barely visible unless you looked. "I wake up and the room is like this. Every morning. I've been cutting it down before my parents see."
She was standing in the middle of her own bedroom looking at the webbing on the walls and her jaw was clenched and her eyes were wet and she wasn't crying.
"My mom thinks I'm sick. I told her it was a stomach bug. Three days of a stomach bug." She laughed. Short, hard. "She's going to call a doctor."
Peter looked at the webs. They were different from what he'd expected. Finer. More organic. His powers were all under the skin. Hers came out. The silk was real, physical, coming from inside her body.
"How strong is it?" he asked.
"What?"
"The silk. How strong."
She looked at him. "I stuck my desk to the ceiling on Thursday. The desk weighs forty pounds."
"That's strong."
"Yeah. I know." She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. The hockey jersey was too big for her and the sleeves fell past her wrists. "Who are you?"
"Peter. Peter Parker. Midtown High."
"Cindy Moon." She sniffed. "How did you find me?"
"Hockey booster newsletter. Your address was on the mailing list."
She stared at him. "That's creepy."
"Yeah," he said. "I know. I'm sorry. I didn't know how else to-"
"No." She shook her head. "I mean, it's creepy, but also thank god. I thought I was losing my mind. I thought I was the only-" She stopped. Sat down on the edge of her bed. The mattress had silk strands stuck to the sheets. She pulled one off her pillow and it stretched before snapping. "Have you been sticking to things?"
"Walls. Faucets. My alarm clock."
"Hearing everything?"
"The pipes in the wall. My neighbor's shower."
"My mom's heartbeat. From the other room. Through a closed door." She was looking at her hands. "What happened to us?"
He sat on the desk chair. The silk crunched under him. "A radioactive spider bit us. Both of us. It gave us powers."
"Powers."
"Strength. Speed. Sticking. Your silk thing. Enhanced senses. There's a- I get this buzz in my head before something bad happens. You might get that too."
She was quiet for a while. Her room smelled like clean shampoo and the faint chemical tang of the silk, organic and sharp. Her hands were in her lap and her fingers were long and the pads of her fingertips were calloused from hockey sticks.
"How do you know all this?" she said. "You're acting like you expected it."
"I read a lot."
She didn't buy it. Her eyes narrowed. But she didn't push.
The backyard was small. Patchy grass, a rusted swing set, a fence with a neighbor's dog pressed against the chain-link watching them. Cindy's parents were out. Her younger brother was at a friend's house. They had maybe two hours.
"Okay," Peter said. "Show me what you can do."
She shot a web at the swing set. It came from her fingertip, fast, and stuck to the crossbar and held. She pulled it and the whole frame creaked forward an inch.
"I can't control how much comes out," she said. "Sometimes it's a thread. Sometimes it's a sheet. I webbed my brother's door shut on Wednesday."
Peter tried to stick to the fence. He put his palm against the chain-link and it held. He climbed up two feet, then three, then hung upside down from the top rail. The neighbor's dog lost its mind.
"Show-off," Cindy said.
"Just testing."
They spent an hour. She was faster than him. He was stronger. She could produce the silk from her fingers on command when she concentrated but it went everywhere when she was startled or upset. He could stick to any surface but couldn't always unstick on the first try. They were both learning the edges of it. Where the power responded and where it didn't.
He was showing her a stance. Wider base, lower center of gravity. His body had wanted to stand like this since the bite. She was trying it and her feet were too close together so he stepped behind her and put his hands on her hips to adjust her position.
A hum in his blood. Low and warm, starting at his palms where they were touching her hips and spreading up his arms into his chest. His heart rate spiked. Her heart rate spiked. Both heartbeats speeding up, falling into the same rhythm.
She went very still under his hands.
"Do you feel that?" she said. Quiet. Almost a whisper.
"Yeah."
Her hips were warm through the sweatpants. His thumbs were on the curve just above her waistband and his fingers were wrapped around the front of her hip bones and he was standing close enough that her hair was touching his chin and it smelled like clean shampoo, no product, just the soap and her, and his hands were on her body and his heart was hammering and her heart was hammering at the same speed and he wanted to step closer when he should have been stepping back.
He let go. Stepped back. The hum faded when they separated. His hands were tingling.
Cindy turned around. Her cheeks were flushed and she was breathing through her mouth. She looked at his hands, then at his face, then at his hands again.
"What was that?"
"I don't know."
"Your heart-"
"I know."
"It was going at the same-"
"I felt it."
They stood in the backyard.
"Hey!"
The voice came from the side gate. A kid was coming around the corner of the house. Tall, dark-haired, wearing a letterman jacket from a different school and carrying a paper bag from a bodega. He walked in like he belonged.
"Hector," Cindy said. She stepped away from Peter. The distance between them went from two feet to five. "Hey. This is Peter. He goes to Midtown."
Hector looked at Peter. Peter looked at Hector. Hector was taller by about three inches and broader by about twenty pounds and he was carrying the bodega bag in one hand and his other hand was free and he held it out.
"Hey."
Peter shook his hand. The grip was firm. Peter's grip was firm back, careful, controlled, don't squeeze, don't crush, but the assessment was already happening. Hector was strong for a teenager. Peter was stronger than Hector would ever be and the handshake lasted too long.
"Cool," Hector said. He let go. Looked at Cindy. "Your mom said you were sick."
"Getting better."
"In the backyard?"
"Fresh air."
Hector looked at Peter again. Peter's hands were in his pockets. Cindy's arms were crossed.
"I brought soup," Hector said. He held up the bodega bag. "The good kind. From Mrs. Ruiz."
"Thanks," Cindy said. She took the bag. Her fingers brushed Hector's when she grabbed it and nothing happened. Peter noticed.
Cindy noticed him noticing.
"I should go," Peter said. "It was good to, uh. Meet you."
"Yeah," Cindy said. "You too."
He walked to the side gate. Hector was already heading inside with Cindy. At the gate Peter looked back and Cindy was looking back too, over Hector's shoulder.
The Q56 took forty minutes back to Forest Hills. Peter sat by the window and looked at his hands. His palms were still tingling from her hips. Clean shampoo. Calloused fingertips. Heartbeats matching. And then Hector's hand, warm and ordinary.
The bus stopped at Forest Hills. He got off.