Lab Partners
Wednesday. The chemistry lab smelled like sulfur and Windex and somebody had left a Bunsen burner on during second period and the whole wing had that scorched-copper edge underneath everything else.
Peter had crate marks on his palms from last night. Faint ridges from where the plastic had cracked under his grip. He'd looked at them in the bathroom mirror this morning and thought about an alley in Midtown and Cindy's hand over his mouth and then he'd gone to school because that's what Peter Parker did on Wednesdays.
Mr. Warren was eating a granola bar and reading off a clipboard at the front of the lab. He'd been eating the same brand since September. Oats and honey. He chewed and read.
"Liu and Marcos. Torres and Kim. Parker and Stacy."
Gwen slid her stool next to his before he'd finished processing the pairing. Her bag went on the floor. A project planner came out of it. Blue cover, color-coded tabs along the edge, her careful block letters on the front: POLYMER SYNTHESIS PROJECT.
"Looks like you're stuck with me," she said.
"I'll survive."
She opened the planner. The first page had a timeline broken into weekly milestones. Green tabs for research. Yellow for lab work. Pink for write-up. The due date was already filled in.
"When did you make this?"
"Last night."
"The project was assigned thirty seconds ago."
"Mr. Warren uses the same project list every semester. I asked a senior." She pulled a pen from her headband. It was slotted through the fabric like she'd designed the headband to hold it. Maybe she had. "Our topic is synthesizing a polymer chain with combined tensile strength and adhesive properties."
Peter looked at the project description on the handout. Tensile strength. Adhesive properties. A polymer that sticks to things and doesn't break.
He was going to have to be very careful about what he wrote on the lab sheet.
"You're good at chemistry," Gwen said. "I'm good at chemistry. We should be good at this."
"Hard to argue."
"I know."
She said it without edge. Just fact. Gwen said what was true and moved on. It was disorienting if you spent most of your time around people who measured every word.
They fell into it. She wanted to build a theoretical framework first, then move to synthesis. He wanted to start mixing things. They went back and forth about it for five minutes and he could tell she was used to winning these arguments because her eyebrows did a specific thing when she realized he wasn't giving in. The left one went up. Just the left.
They compromised. She built the framework on her side of the bench while he sketched molecular structures on scrap paper, and when her theory matched one of his drawings they'd stop and compare. She had neater handwriting. He had better instincts for where a chain would fail under stress. Together they covered more ground in twenty minutes than he'd expected.
The problem was that he kept almost writing the real thing.
Three times his hand started a chain structure that was too close. Too specific. The cross-linking pattern that he'd worked out at two in the morning three months ago, hunched over Ben's workbench in the garage with a flashlight and a stolen chemistry textbook and the smell of sawdust. The formula that went into the cartridges strapped to his wrists right now, under his sleeves, under the flannel, under the act.
He erased the third one. Gwen was watching.
"You keep doing that."
"Exploring options."
"You're erasing good work." She leaned forward to look at his page. "That chain you just erased had better adhesion potential than anything in the textbook. Where did you get that structure?"
"Came to me."
She looked at him. Blue eyes, steady. The pen cap was between her teeth. She took it out.
"Okay," she said. And let it go.
But the green notebook was in her bag. He knew the P.P. column was getting a new entry.
She was fast. He'd sketch a structure and by the time he looked up she'd already checked his bond angles and flagged the one that was wrong. At one point she took his pen out of his hand, corrected a hydrogen placement on his diagram, and gave it back. Her fingers were cold from holding the Erlenmeyer flask. The pen was warm from his hand.
Behind them, a kid knocked over a beaker of something yellow and spent the rest of the period cleaning it up with paper towels that disintegrated on contact. The yellow spread. Mr. Warren didn't look up from his granola bar. Gwen glanced back, then at Peter. Her left eyebrow went up. He almost laughed.
They worked through the period. The bench between them filled with scrap paper and labeled diagrams and her planner and his scratched-out false starts.
"Your calculation is off," she said.
"No it isn't."
"Point-three."
She leaned over his shoulder to look at his page. Her hair swung forward. Blonde strands against the side of his neck. She smelled like vanilla and laboratory ethanol. Individual hairs against his skin, warm, and his hand stopped writing. Twelve hours ago Cindy had webbed his wrists to a wall in an alley and he was thinking about that now and he needed to stop thinking about that now.
She pointed at a number. "You carried a six. Should be nine."
He looked. She was right. He'd carried a six because the real web-fluid formula had been running underneath the project formula like a second program in the background and the six was from the wrong equation. A mistake he couldn't explain to the girl whose hair was still touching his neck.
"Don't worry, Parker." She straightened up. The hair left his skin. "I won't tell anyone."
Her mouth was smiling. Her eyes were serious.
He recalculated. Got the right answer.
"There he is," she said. Quiet.
He went to the deli on Parsons during the break between fourth and fifth. Two blocks. He walked fast because the tea would cool and he'd timed the round trip at seven minutes and the break was ten.
Tea, cream, no sugar. He'd noticed her order because she'd bought one for him two weeks ago and he'd watched her order hers and her "no sugar" had been specific. Not "without sugar." "No sugar." Like she'd considered it and rejected it.
She looked up when he put the cup on the bench next to her project planner.
"Tea," he said. "Cream. No sugar."
"How do you know my order?"
"You made a face when I put two sugars in my coffee last week. A face. Your nose did a thing."
"My nose did not do a thing."
"It did a thing. A scrunch. Like you were personally offended by the sugar."
Her mouth twitched. "Two sugars is a lot."
"Two sugars is correct."
She picked up the cup. Wrapped both hands around it. Her fingers were still cold from the flask.
"Thank you, Peter."
She'd been calling him Parker since September.
He didn't say anything about it. He drank his coffee. Black, two sugars. She drank her tea. The lab filled back up around them and neither of them moved their stools apart.
Seventh period. They were the last ones in the lab. Mr. Warren had left at the bell with the rest of his granola bar and the custodian was pushing a mop down the hallway outside and the fume hoods hummed.
Gwen had her chin resting on her hand and her stool pulled close to the bench. She was looking at Peter's molecular diagram. She gave everything that focus. She didn't multitask. She picked a thing and gave it everything and then she picked the next thing.
"My mom died when I was nine," she said.
He looked at her.
"Sorry." She shook her head. Her headband shifted. "That's not- you mentioned your parents last week. That they were gone. And I didn't say anything because I didn't know what to say, and I spent the whole weekend thinking about what to say, and the thing I came up with is: my mom died when I was nine. Cancer. It was slow. My dad raised me and my brother after that. Phil. He's twelve. He calls my dad 'Captain' at the dinner table and my dad hates it and Phil knows he hates it and does it anyway."
She was looking at the molecular diagram while she said all of this.
"I want to study biochemistry at ESU," she said. "Because of her. She was a nurse. She spent three years in treatment and none of the doctors could explain what was happening to her in a way that made sense and I was nine and I kept asking and nobody would answer me. So I decided I'd learn it myself. All of it. Until I could answer my own questions."
She picked up her pen. Put it down. Picked it up again.
"We're going to be lab partners for the semester. I think you should know one real thing about me that isn't chemistry."
Peter watched her. Blue eyes on the paper. Jaw set. The pen in her hand wasn't moving.
"I'm sorry about your mom," he said.
"It was six years ago."
"Yeah. I'm still sorry."
She looked at him. Held the look longer than she probably meant to. Then she went back to the diagram.
"Your cross-link structure is too complicated," she said.
"It works."
"It works but it's inelegant. You've got redundant bonds holding together a structure that would be stronger with fewer connections." She drew an arrow on his diagram, rerouting two polymer chains. "See? Same tensile strength, half the cross-links. Your web-fluid doesn't need all of this."
His hand stopped.
The fume hood was too loud. His pen was tight in his fingers and Gwen was looking at the diagram and not at him.
"My what?"
"Your web-fluid. The polymer solution." She tapped the diagram with her pen. "That's what we're calling it, right? Because it's sticky and it has tensile properties and 'polymer chain synthesis with adhesive bonding' is a mouthful." She looked up. "Unless you have a better name."
"Web-fluid works," he said. His voice sounded normal. He was impressed by that.
"Good. So your web-fluid has too many cross-links. Simplify." She went back to drawing.
Peter breathed. His hand unclenched. She meant the project. She meant the project and she'd picked the word because it was efficient and she was Gwen Stacy and Gwen Stacy picked the most efficient word every time.
But he'd been sitting next to her for six hours wearing the secret she was accidentally naming and his pulse hadn't settled since she'd said it.
They packed up at four thirty. She put the project planner back in her bag and zipped it and swung the strap over her shoulder. She stood at the bench. He stood at the bench.
"Same time Friday?"
"Friday works."
She nodded. Started toward the door. Stopped. Her hand was on the strap of her bag and her knuckles were white on it.
"You're different," she said. "From what I expected. When I started the column in my notebook I thought you were going to be an equation. Observe enough variables, solve for Peter Parker." She paused. The headband was slightly crooked. She didn't fix it. "You don't solve. Every time I think I have you figured out, you do something I didn't predict. I think-" She stopped. Started over. "I think that's good. I think that's what makes you worth the column."
He didn't have a joke for that. He usually had a joke. With MJ he'd have a sideways comment. With Cindy his mouth would move before his brain caught up. With Felicia he'd match whatever she threw.
With Gwen he had a girl in a doorway telling him he was worth the column and meaning every word and he didn't have a defense for that.
"See you Friday, Gwen."
She smiled. Both sides of her mouth, all the way to her eyes. She meant it.
"See you Friday."
She left. Her footsteps went down the hallway. The door at the end opened and closed. The fume hoods hummed.
Peter sat at the bench. Her empty tea cup. His empty coffee cup. Two cups on a lab bench, side by side.
He liked her like the first warm day. You walk outside and the air is different and you didn't know how cold you'd been until the cold stopped.
He folded the molecular diagram. Her handwriting and his on the same page. Put it in his bag.
The parking lot was empty except for the custodian's car and a kid on a bicycle going in circles near the flagpole, standing on the pedals, not going anywhere. Peter watched him for a second. Then he walked home.