Exposure
The Pentax was thirty years old.
Peter turned it over in his hands on his bedroom floor at 2 AM, the house quiet, Ben's snoring a low rhythm through the wall. Manual-focus SLR with a cracked leather grip and a lens that still worked and a shutter that sounded like a small gunshot when it fired. Ben had used it in college. Had probably taken pictures of May with it, back when they were young and didn't know they'd end up raising someone else's kid in a house in Queens.
He'd found it in the hall closet behind a box of Christmas ornaments. Ben wouldn't miss it.
The web-tension shutter took three nights. A strand of web from his shooter, attached to the shutter button at one end and anchored to a fixed point at the other. When the web stretched, it tripped the shutter. Him moving through the frame pulled the line taut and the camera fired. He'd have to get good at aiming it before he started swinging, but the photos would be real. External angles. Spider-Man in action, shot by a camera that happened to be in the right place at the right time.
He tested it twice in his room. Webbed the camera to the top of the bookshelf, ran a tension line to the door handle, opened the door. Click. The print showed mostly his desk lamp and the edge of his ear, but the mechanism worked.
Five hundred dollars for exclusive Spider-Man photos. That was what the Bugle website said. Freelance rate for enhanced-individual content. Five hundred would buy web fluid chemicals and replacement parts for the shooters. Maybe new cartridges for the printer May kept asking him to fix. He wrapped the Pentax in a hoodie, put it in his backpack, and went to bed.
The Daily Bugle occupied the seventh through twelfth floors of the Goodman Building on Thirty-ninth and Second. Peter had looked it up on the subway ride over. He'd also looked up the editor-in-chief, and every photo he found featured the same mustache and the same cigar. Formal shots. Candids. Award ceremonies. Always the cigar.
The elevator opened on seven and the sound hit him before anything else.
Phones and voices and keyboards. A man yelling behind glass at the end of the newsroom, loud enough that the glass wasn't doing much. Someone near the copy machine was on the phone saying "I know, I know" in the tone of a person who did not know. The carpet was industrial grey. There was a water stain on a ceiling tile above the printer, and someone had taped a handwritten sign to the printer that said OUT OF ORDER - FOREVER in block letters with a smiley face.
The woman at the first desk was the only person in the room who didn't look like she was waiting for a building to fall on her.
Brunette. Cardigan, cream-colored, sleeves pushed to her elbows. She had a coffee stain on her left cuff that she'd tried to blot with a napkin and given up on. She was sorting files into a system that used colored tabs. Blue, green, yellow, red. Her fingers moved fast, automatic, not thinking about it. Behind her, the filing shelves were the most organized surface in a building that appeared to be held together by caffeine and low expectations.
"Hi," Peter said. "I'm looking for-"
"Editorial intake is on nine. Classifieds are on eight. If you're selling Girl Scout cookies, I already bought four boxes from the woman in accounting and I can't eat any more Thin Mints."
"I have photos."
She looked up.
Brown eyes. She had a pen behind her ear and a second pen in her hand and the nameplate on her desk said BETTY BRANT next to a small cactus in a blue pot. Her chin was slightly raised.
"Spider-Man photos?" she said.
"Yeah."
"You're the fourth one this week." She put the pen down. "Mr. Jameson will look at anything, but the last freelancer photoshopped his from a YouTube video, so the bar is very high and also very low at the same time."
"These are real."
"They always say that." Her eyes went to his backpack, to the shape of the camera through the fabric. "How old are you?"
"Old enough to own a camera."
The corner of her mouth moved. It got interrupted by the glass door at the end of the newsroom slamming open hard enough to rattle the frame.
"BRANT!"
The man who came through the door was shorter than Peter expected. Thick mustache, flat-top haircut, tie loosened, cigar in his right hand trailing smoke that the building's ventilation had given up on years ago. He walked fast and he walked like nobody else was supposed to be in his way.
"WHERE ARE THE MORGENSTERN PROOFS?"
"On your desk," Betty said. "Under the sandwich."
"WHAT SANDWICH?"
"The one you asked me to get you twenty minutes ago."
He stared at her. She didn't blink. Then he turned to Peter, and the cigar pointed at him like an accusation.
"Who's this."
"He has Spider-Man photos," Betty said.
"Everyone has Spider-Man photos. Everyone has terrible, out-of-focus, shot-on-a-phone Spider-Man photos that I wouldn't use to line a birdcage. EVERYONE IN THIS CITY thinks they're a photographer because they pointed their phone at a rooftop." He was already walking back toward his office. "Show me."
Peter followed. The office smelled like cigar smoke and old paper. There were newspapers on every surface. Three phones on the desk. One was ringing. Jameson did not answer it.
Peter put the photos on the desk. Six prints. Shot two nights ago during a mugging stop on Northern Boulevard. In three of them Spider-Man was mid-swing, the web line taut, the costume a red blur against brick. In two the muggers were webbed to a wall. The sixth showed a woman clutching her purse, looking up at where Spider-Man had been, cops approaching behind her.
J. Jonah Jameson picked them up. Looked at them. Held one sideways. Held another one upside down.
"These are crap."
"You're holding that one upside down."
Jameson turned it right-side up. Looked at it. Put it down. Picked up another. His cigar had gone out and he hadn't noticed.
"Who are you?"
"Peter Parker."
"You're twelve."
"Fifteen."
"You're twelve and these are crap but they're less crap than everything else I've seen." He dropped the photos on his desk and leaned back in his chair. "How'd you get these angles? These aren't phone shots."
"I set up cameras in advance. I know the areas he patrols." True enough. He knew because he was the one patrolling. But that part Jameson didn't need.
The ringing phone stopped. Another one started.
"Three hundred," Jameson said.
"The website says five hundred."
"The website says a lot of things. Three hundred. Take it or the door's behind you."
He picked up the ringing phone, said "WHAT" into it, and Peter took that as the end of the negotiation.
On his way out he passed Betty's desk, and from behind the glass door Jameson's voice erupted again. Not at Peter. At the phone, or the room, or nobody in particular: "AND NOW STACY, Captain George Stacy, this NYPD genius, is spending my tax dollars on an 'Enhanced Crimes Unit.' ENHANCED CRIMES. What's next, a task force for jaywalking by people who can fly?"
Betty handed Peter the payment envelope at the front desk. Their fingers touched when he took it. Hers were cool. She pulled back quick, and the blush started at her jaw and climbed to her ears and she looked at the filing system behind her like it suddenly needed reorganizing.
"Same time next week?" she said. To the filing. Not to him.
"If I have anything worth bringing."
"He'll buy them." She still wasn't looking at him. The blush was fading but her ears were still pink. "He complains about everything and buys it anyway. That's just how he is."
Peter put the envelope in his backpack. Three hundred dollars. Web fluid for a month, minimum.
He stopped at the elevator. Turned around.
"Your filing system," he said.
She turned. The pen was back behind her ear.
"That's not filing," he said. "That's project management."
She looked at him. The look held. Like nobody in this building had ever bothered to say that to her, which, given the building, was probably accurate.
The elevator doors closed.
He found her on West Twenty-second Street.
Three hours into patrol, a purse-snatching stopped on Sixth Avenue, twenty minutes on a water tower in Chelsea eating a granola bar from his web-pouch. The city did its night thing below. Taxis, music from a bar with its door propped open, someone walking a dog that was too small for the leash it was wearing. A woman on the sidewalk was arguing into her phone in what sounded like Russian and her free hand was making shapes in the air that meant the person on the other end was losing.
The spider-sense didn't ping. She wasn't a threat.
She was on the roof of a jewelry store, crouched by the ventilation unit, same catsuit, same mask. Her white hair was pinned up tonight. She'd figured out it got in the way.
He watched her for two minutes.
She was casing the building. Not entering. Moving along the roof edge, checking sight lines, counting something. Windows, maybe, or security camera rotations. She moved differently than their first night. The swagger was still there but it had settled, less performance, more her.
She stood up. Turned. Looked directly at where he was crouching.
"Two minutes," she said. Across forty feet of rooftop. "You watched me for two minutes before I noticed. Last time it was thirty seconds."
"You're getting better at knowing when you're being watched."
"Or you're getting worse at hiding." She was smiling. The smile was different too. Less rehearsed. "Hello, Spider."
He dropped from the water tower and landed on the far end of her roof. Thirty feet between them. She didn't run. Her weight shifted to her toes but she held.
"You mapped this whole block," he said. Ventilation unit at her back, three escape routes visible, the fire escape on the west side within grappling-hook range. She'd been here before tonight. She'd walked these rooftops in daylight, probably in civilian clothes, and planned every step.
"A girl likes to be prepared."
"A girl is standing on a jewelry store she's about to rob."
"Was thinking about it." She tilted her head. The mask shifted on her cheekbones. "Haven't decided."
Then she ran.
Six blocks. She'd mapped every one. She hit the first roof edge, grappling hooks deployed from the fur trim at her wrists, and she swung across the gap with a gymnast's tuck that cleared the opposite parapet by inches. She rolled, came up running, and she was thirty feet ahead of him before he'd finished his first web-line. She cut through a gap between two ventilation ducts that he barely fit through. Dropped down a fire escape, caught a third-floor railing one-handed, swung through an open window into a dark apartment, out the window on the other side. He followed. An orange cat on the kitchen counter watched them cross the room with zero concern. Someone had left a television on.
He caught her on a fire escape on Twenty-eighth Street.
Or she let him catch her. He wasn't sure. She was on the landing, one hand on the railing, breathing hard, and she didn't look surprised when he landed on the railing above her.
Close. Closer than the water tower. He was on the railing and she was on the landing and between them was two feet of air. The leather smell was there, warm and new, and under it the exertion and that perfume he still couldn't name. The zipper at her collar was lower than last time. He noticed because he had eyes and they worked.
"You're faster," she said. Her breathing was slowing down. The catsuit caught the streetlight and the leather creaked when she shifted her weight.
"So are you."
"I've been practicing." She stepped closer. The fire escape groaned under them. "Have you?"
"Every night."
She reached up. Her hand found his chest. Fingertips this time. She found the spider on his costume and traced it. Slow. One claw-tip following the shape, around the body, down one leg, up another. The pressure was light but the claw was sharp enough that the path was a thin bright line through the fabric, warm where it moved.
His breathing changed. He let it.
"You're getting better," she said. Quiet. Her green eyes through the mask, close enough that the flecks in the irises were visible, and her finger was still moving along the spider's last leg, and the fire escape was swaying slightly under their combined weight, and a siren opened up four blocks south.
They both turned toward it. Red and blue lights moving fast.
He looked back and the landing was empty. A grappling-hook line swung from the building across the street, already retracting. He could still smell the leather. Then the wind came through and he couldn't.
Peter sat on the fire escape. His chest was warm where she'd traced the spider. The symbol on his chest.
He sat there until the siren faded and the orange cat in the apartment below jumped off the counter and the street got quiet.
Thursday morning. Kitchen table. Ben's crossword, May's eggs, the newspaper folded open.
HERO OR MENACE?
The photo under the headline was his. The Northern Boulevard shot, cropped so you couldn't see the woman with her purse or the arriving cops. Just Spider-Man caught mid-landing, the web visible, the mask angled toward the camera. Jameson had chosen the angle that made it look like a lunge. Like a threat.
The article used the word "vigilante" three times in the first paragraph. Peter stopped reading.
"That Spider-Man thing," May said, reading over his shoulder. "Your uncle thinks he's helpful."
"Does he."
"I think he needs a better outfit."
Peter ate his eggs. The $300 was in his sock drawer upstairs. The photo that had paid for it was on the front page calling him a menace. That was funny. He was going to have to decide at some point whether it was funny enough to keep doing.
His phone buzzed. Unknown number.
I'm sorry about the headline. He does this. He buys the photos and then uses them to say the opposite of what they show. I should have warned you.
He saved the number. Typed back: It's fine. The check cleared.
Three dots appeared. Then: Same time next week, Peter.
Peter. She'd used his name.
He put his phone away.
Below the fold, a smaller headline: NYPD FORMS ENHANCED CRIMES UNIT. A photo of a man Peter didn't recognize. Grey-haired, square jaw, captain's badge on his belt. The caption read Captain George Stacy to lead new unit focused on superhuman activity.
Stacy.
He knew that name. Couldn't place it. Something from the movies, maybe. It sat at the back of his head without giving him the rest.
He folded the paper. Finished his eggs. The $300 upstairs was earmarked for web fluid. The woman on the fire escape was still behind his eyes, one claw tracing a spider on his chest. And the woman at the desk was there too. Pink ears, a filing system nobody noticed, his name in a text.