Fabrication
The web-shooters got better. He rebuilt the casing twice. The second version was thinner, two bands of shaped steel with the cartridge housing recessed against the underside of his forearm. The trigger pad sat against the base of his palm, double-tap activation, middle and ring finger. He could fire it without thinking about it now. Almost. The chemistry came naturally. Peter's contribution was the testing. Try it, break it, fix it, try again.
A twist of the nozzle changed the spray pattern. A single line for swinging and grabbing, strong enough to hold his weight out to about forty feet. A spread of webbing that bloomed on impact, good for covering a surface or wrapping something up. A compressed ball that hit like a fist and hardened on contact. He'd dented the plywood testing that one and then had to sit in the dark for five minutes making sure the noise hadn't woken anyone up.
He tested them on the garage wall at 1 AM. The line held his weight from the ceiling beam. The net spread evenly across the brick. He also put a crack in the garage window with a bad shot and had to cover it with tape before Ben noticed.
The costume was worse. May had a sewing machine in the closet. She'd used it for curtains and the occasional Halloween costume and it hadn't been touched in two years. Peter set it up on his desk at midnight and spent four hours fighting with fabric he'd bought at a craft store on Northern Boulevard with cash from his lawn-mowing fund. The lady at the register had asked if he was making a Halloween costume and he'd said yes even though it was March.
Cherry-red for the body. Blue for the legs and arms, but the fabric had a purple tint to it under certain light that he hadn't noticed in the store. He cut the pieces from a pattern he'd sketched on notebook paper and pinned them together and fed them through the machine and the machine jammed three times and the thread broke twice and the stitching was uneven and the seams were crooked and by 4 AM he had something that technically qualified as a suit.
It was terrible.
The eyes were lopsided. He'd cut them from white mesh and sewn them onto the mask and the left one sat higher than the right. The web pattern on the red sections was supposed to be raised but he'd used a fabric marker instead and it looked flat and the lines wobbled where his hand had gotten tired. The ankles bunched where he'd measured wrong and the waist was too loose and the shoulders were too tight. The left glove didn't fit right. When he put it on and looked in the mirror he looked like a dollar-store superhero designed by committee at 3 AM.
The spider on the chest was the best part, and it was still crooked.
He took it off. Folded it. Put it under his mattress next to the web-shooters. It was bad. It was honestly embarrassing. But it existed, and somebody had to start somewhere.
Cindy came over on Wednesday. They trained in the backyard. Ben was at work, May was at her volunteer thing at the church. The neighbor's dog was in its usual spot at the fence, watching them with an expression of permanent concern. A squirrel ran across the top of the fence and the dog lost interest in them for about thirty seconds.
They'd been doing this twice a week since Cindy's backyard. Peter showed her footwork. She showed him speed. Her reflexes were faster than his, which was annoying, and she took every opportunity to remind him. Her silk was getting more controlled. She could fire a line from her fingertip and hit a target at twenty feet more often than not. She was still accidentally webbing things when she sneezed, which had happened once during lunch at her school and she'd had to pretend she spilled yogurt on the table.
"Ready?" she said. She was bouncing on her toes. She'd started doing that since the second training session, a boxer's bounce, and it made her ponytail swing back and forth.
"Go."
They sparred. No powers, except they couldn't turn the powers off, so it was regular sparring with superhuman speed and strength and the constant awareness of where the other person was in space without looking. Spider-sense made it weird. They could both feel each other before contact, a buzz at the back of the skull that telegraphed every strike.
Cindy was fast. She came in low, ducked his jab, pivoted on her left foot and swept his legs out from under him and he hit the grass on his back and she was on top of him before he could roll, her knees on either side of his ribs and her hand on his chest and her hair falling forward and brushing his face.
"Pinned," she said.
The bond hit.
Immediate. A flush of heat through his chest where her hand was pressing, spreading outward, his heartbeat accelerating and hers matching. She was sitting on his stomach and her hand was on his chest and her thighs were on either side of his rib cage and the sweatpants she was wearing were thin and her weight was warm and real and the hum was loud.
Her eyes went wide and her lips parted.
They scrambled apart. She went left, he rolled right, both of them on their feet in under a second, three feet of grass between them, breathing hard. The hum faded. Not all the way. Enough.
"Again," Cindy said. Her voice was steady but her cheeks were red.
"Yeah," Peter said. "Again."
They went again. Neither of them talked about it. They sparred for another forty minutes and Peter won twice and Cindy won three times and by the end they were sitting on the grass breathing hard and not touching and the neighbor's dog had fallen asleep against the fence.
"Same time next week?" Cindy said.
"Yeah."
She left through the side gate. At the gate she turned around and her eyes went to his chest, where her hand had been during the pin, and then she left. Her shampoo lingered in the yard after she was gone.
Thursday afternoon Peter was in the backyard doing pull-ups on the bar Ben had bolted to the garage overhang years ago. The bar was rusty and it creaked under his weight but it held. His shirt was off. It was warm and the shirts that used to fit loose were starting to pull at the shoulders. He'd grown since the bite. Just more solid. A change you wouldn't notice unless you'd seen him three weeks ago.
He was on his fourteenth pull-up and not tired. That was new. Before the bite he couldn't do three. Now he could probably do a hundred if he wanted, but he stopped at twenty because doing a hundred pull-ups in a suburban backyard where the neighbors could see was the kind of thing that raised questions.
He heard her before he saw her. The screen door on the Watson side. MJ's side. The creak of the spring and the soft slap of bare feet on the porch boards.
He kept going. Fifteen. Sixteen. His arms worked and his stomach tightened with each pull and the sun was warm on his back and he didn't look over. But his hearing was on. She stopped walking. Her breathing was a little fast. The porch railing creaked when she leaned on it.
She was watching.
He got to twenty and dropped off the bar and shook his arms out and finally looked over. MJ was on her porch, leaning on the rail, a glass of something in her hand. She was wearing shorts and a tank top and her red hair was down and she was looking at his stomach. Specifically. Her eyes tracked from his waistband to his chest and her bottom lip caught between her teeth and then she looked away, at the fence, at nothing, and took a sip of her drink, and looked back.
She didn't say anything. A mailman walked past on the sidewalk carrying a package and whistling something off-key.
Peter put his shirt on. MJ went inside. The screen door closed behind her.
Harry showed up Saturday morning in a town car.
Riding. The driver dropped him off and Harry got out and stood on the Parker sidewalk in khakis and a polo and said "You busy?" like he'd walked from next door and not driven from the Upper East Side.
"Not especially."
They sat on the porch steps. Harry had brought bagels. Sesame for Peter, everything for himself. He ate while he talked and the seeds fell on the steps and a pigeon showed up to investigate.
"So the gala's in three weeks," Harry said. "My dad's sending the suit measurements thing again. He wants to make sure you have a good tie."
"I have ties."
"My dad's idea of a tie and your idea of a tie are probably different things."
"My idea of a tie is that I don't want to wear one."
Harry grinned. "He's like that. Once he decides something's happening, it happens. I told him about you and now he's, like, interested." Harry tore off a piece of bagel. "He asked about your grades. Whether you play sports."
"What did you tell him?"
"That you're smart and weird and you caught a football once."
Peter ate the bagel. It was a good bagel. The sesame seeds were warm and the cream cheese was the kind that came from an actual deli, not a plastic tub from the grocery store. Harry brought good food.
Norman Osborn was interested in him. In the movies Peter remembered, the man put on a green mask and flew around on a glider and threw pumpkin-shaped bombs at people and killed himself on his own weapon. Right now he was just Harry's dad. A rich guy in a suit who wanted to buy Peter a tie and had asked about his grades.
"Tell him I said thanks for the tie."
"You can tell him yourself. At the gala." Harry kicked the pigeon gently away from his bagel crumbs. "It'll be fine. Free food. Open bar, not that we can drink. My dad does a speech and then everybody ignores him and talks to each other."
"Sounds great."
"It's not. But the food really is good."
They sat on the steps. The pigeon came back. Peter thought about pumpkin bombs and shaking a man's hand in three weeks and smiling like he didn't know.
The bagel was good, though.