Normal
She burned the eggs. He could hear her swearing in Korean from the bed. The clock on her nightstand said past seven and the moonlight was gone and the room was ordinary daylight now, the plaster crack on the wall visible where his spider-grip had spidered out from a single handprint, the web strands from last night dissolved to nothing on the ceiling. Smaller in the daytime. A teenager's room with textbooks and a hockey stick and a boy in her bed who needed to leave before her mother's shift ended at eight.
He got up. Found his jeans on the floor. His shirt was somewhere. The flannel was on Cindy.
The kitchen was narrow. Two people could use it if they knew where the other one was, and they did. She was at the stove with a pan and the eggs were brown on the bottom and she was scraping them with a spatula that was too big for the pan and Peter moved around her to the coffee maker without touching her. She shifted left when he reached for the cabinet. He stepped back when she turned with the pan. They didn't bump.
"Those are dead," he said.
"They're fine."
"They're charcoal."
"Eat your charcoal." She scraped the eggs onto a plate. They were brown and flat. The coffee was good though. He sat at the small table by the window and ate the eggs and they were terrible and the coffee was good and she sat across from him in his flannel with her hair in a knot on top of her head and stole his toast right off his plate.
"That's mine."
"You keep saying that about things I'm wearing."
"And eating."
She bit the toast. Drank his orange juice. Her feet were on his chair, between his legs, bare, and the bond sat at three and the morning was quiet.
The web-line marks were still on his wrists. Thin pink lines where the silk had pressed into his skin during the first round, the headboard, when she'd told him to stay and he'd mostly stayed. They'd fade by noon. Spider healing. But right now they were visible and he looked at them and she looked at them and neither of them said anything about them.
He kissed her at the door. Quick, mouth closed, the kind of kiss that belonged in a doorway in the morning.
"Same time?" she said.
"Yeah."
"Bring eggs."
"Deal."
He walked home. The morning was cold and clear and a woman on Kissena Boulevard was walking a pug that stopped at every single fire hydrant and the woman was on her phone and not paying attention to the pug and the pug was not paying attention to the woman and they were both doing exactly what they wanted.
MJ was at the fence.
She was in a denim jacket over a T-shirt, hair up, no makeup, holding a to-go cup from the bodega on the corner. She was leaning on the fence, elbows on the top rail, weight on one hip. She looked like she'd been there long enough to have finished half the cup.
"Morning, Tiger."
"Morning."
"Good night?"
"Studying."
"With your hands?"
He stopped. She was looking at his wrists. Both of them. The pink lines, thin, matching, the same width and the same position on each wrist. He'd forgotten to pull his sleeves down.
"Chemistry," he said.
"Mm." She took a sip of her coffee. "Both wrists. Same width. Same position. Like something was wrapped around them." She wasn't smiling. Her green eyes were sharp. "Must have been some chemistry."
"Lab partner is thorough."
"I'll bet." She pushed off the fence. Took her cup. "See you at school, Tiger."
She walked toward her back door. He watched her go. The denim jacket hit her mid-thigh and her legs were bare below it. Unhurried. Hips present. Halfway to the door she slowed down.
She didn't look back.
The screen door opened and closed. Peter looked at his wrists. Pulled his sleeves down. Went inside.
Flash punched his locker during second period.
The sound carried down the hallway. Metal on metal, the specific hollow boom of a fist hitting a locker door, and then Flash was standing in front of it with his hand at his side and his jaw working and the locker had a dent the size of his fist in it. A teacher looked over from the end of the hall and decided not to get involved.
Peter heard the rest from Harry at lunch. Flash and Liz were done. Official. Two weeks of arguments since Derek Whitman's party had ended in a parking lot conversation that lasted four minutes. Flash said something about not being enough. Liz said something about that being the problem. Neither of them said the real thing, which, per Harry, was that Liz had stopped looking at Flash the way she used to and Flash had noticed and didn't know what to do about it except hit a locker.
In the hallway between fourth and fifth, Liz brushed Peter's arm.
Not accidental. Her fingers trailed from his elbow to his wrist as they passed each other, a deliberate slide of contact, and when he looked at her she gave him a smile that made it all the way across her mouth this time. Both sides. Her eyes stayed on his for a beat and then she was past him, blonde hair swinging, and she didn't look back.
Two girls in one morning who didn't look back. Peter went to fifth period.
The cafeteria TV was on during lunch. Usually nobody watched it. It played the local news on mute with captions and the caption person couldn't spell and nobody cared about whatever was happening on Long Island.
Today was different. The footage was phone-camera, shaky, someone filming from behind a car in a parking lot. A mall. Westchester, the captions said. A girl was standing in the middle of the parking lot and she wasn't burning. She WAS fire. Flames coming off her body in waves, heat distortion visible even on the phone camera, the asphalt around her feet darkening and buckling. She was maybe sixteen. Red hair. She was screaming and her hands were out in front of her and the flames were getting bigger and a parked car behind her caught and the fire spread to the car next to it and then she ran. The footage tracked her for three seconds before she was too far away and the camera swung to the burning cars and someone was yelling in the background.
The caption said MUTANT INCIDENT AT WESTCHESTER GALLERIA. TEEN SUSPECT FLED SCENE. NO INJURIES REPORTED.
Peter watched the footage loop. Red hair. Sixteen. Flames. His foreknowledge caught on it, vague, the MCU equivalent of a word on the tip of his tongue. He knew this girl. Not the name, not the details. A sensation. Like seeing an actor in a movie and knowing you've seen them somewhere else but you can't remember where.
Firestar. The word came from nowhere and went nowhere. It didn't connect to a movie or a face. Just a word.
Three tables away, in her usual corner, Jessica Jones was watching the same footage.
Her hood was up. Her book was facedown on the table. She was staring at the TV with both hands flat on the table and Peter could see the tendons in her right hand from across the cafeteria. Standing out. Tight. Her jaw was clenched.
The footage looped again. The girl, the fire, the running. Jessica's hand curled into a fist under the table. She looked down at it. Opened her fingers. Looked at them like they belonged to someone else.
She picked up her book. Put her hood tighter over her face. Went back to reading. Or pretending to.
Gwen found him in the chem lab after school.
She was staying late to finish a titration. Peter was staying late because he'd forgotten his web-shooter parts in his bag and needed the lab bench to reassemble a valve that had come loose during patrol. He was pretending it was a pen when she sat down across from him.
"That's not a pen," she said.
"It's a complicated pen."
"It has a pressure valve."
"Very complicated pen."
She didn't push it. She went back to her titration. The lab was empty except for them and the hum of the fume hood and the drip of her burette.
"My dad's working late again," she said. Not looking up from her flask. "The Enhanced Crimes thing. It's all he talks about at dinner. Spider-Man this, enhanced activity that."
"Must be annoying."
"He thinks Spider-Man's young." She added a drop. The solution turned pink. "A kid, maybe. He said the response patterns suggest someone who's still in school. Active at night, quiet during the day, concentrated in residential neighborhoods instead of commercial districts."
"Smart guy."
"He worries." She wrote a number in her notebook. "My dad worries about everyone. It's his thing. But he worries about this one specifically. He says a kid with powers and no oversight is going to get hurt or get someone else hurt and nobody will see it coming until it's too late."
Peter watched the burette drip. The solution went from pink to clear.
"Your dad sounds like he gives a shit," Peter said. "That's more than most cops."
"He does." She looked up. Blue eyes, headband, her whole face in the conversation. "He's a good man. He just- he thinks he can help everyone. And he can't. And it makes him angry when he can't."
Peter thought about Captain George Stacy. The newspaper photo, the square jaw, the captain's badge. The Enhanced Crimes Unit.
He was getting closer.
"He'll figure it out," Peter said.
Gwen's burette dripped. The fume hood hummed. Outside the lab window, the afternoon was fading and the lights in the parking lot were coming on one at a time.