Spiderman 1 (13 page)

He raised his arm, watched it move up and down in the

mirror, matching the gesture. He turned his head slowly left
and right, never removing his gaze from his reflection. For a moment he thought he might still be dreaming. He dug a fin
gernail into his finger and felt the pinch. Then, just out of cu
riosity, he tried flexing his pecs as he'd seen muscle men do.

They jumped like a couple of cheerleaders.

Peter let out a shriek and jumped back, still never taking
his eyes off the reflection of someone who could never, ever,
under any circumstance, be addressed as Puny Parker.

Then there was an insistent knocking at the bedroom door. Peter had been so distracted by the mirror that he
hadn't heard Aunt May coming up the stairs. She'd probably been alerted by such little clues as Peter's annoying girllike
scream. "Peter? Are you all right?"

"Fine!" he called back, his voice an octave too high, and
he forced himself to lower it. "I'm fine! Just fine!"

"Any better this morning?" she asked tentatively. "Any change?"

He flipped his glasses into the garbage can, even as
he called back unevenly, feeling shell-shocked. "Change?
Yes ... yes, big change."

He grabbed some clothes at random from a drawer and,
as he did so, happened to glance out the window and across
the way. He couldn't believe it; his vision was even better than 20/20, maybe 20/10. And what Peter was seeing now was Mary Jane, standing in her bedroom window, doing a
last minute check of her hair. He watched, mesmerized. Finally she tucked her hairbrush into her purse and darted out
of view.

Suddenly all the setbacks of the previous day, all the con
descension that he'd had to endure, came roaring back to him.
Something in him cried out for justice, for the ability to put
everyone on notice that things were going to be different from now on. There was a minor buzz of warning in the back of his

mind that he should still be panicked. He had, after all, undergone some bizarre metamorphosis. His life had changed
overnight.

Then again, it had only changed for the better, so what could there really be to be nervous about? Maybe the smart
thing to do was just accept this, go with it, and milk it for all
it was worth.

Peter pulled on a sock, and then discovered there was a
huge hole in the heel
. . .
so large that it would be visible
over the top of his shoe. "Wonderful," he muttered, and
yanked the sock off again.

It ripped.

He stared down at it in confusion. For some bizarre rea
son, the toe end of the sock had torn clean off and was stick
ing to the end of his foot. "What is up with that?" he
muttered as he pulled the material off his toes and yanked on
a new pair of socks. He finished dressing, shoved the edges
of his clean T-shirt into the tops of his jeans, and sprinted out
the door and down the stairs. He vaulted the banister, land
ing behind Uncle Ben with the poise and confidence of an Olympic gymnast who just nailed a complicated dismount. He was desperate to run out the door after Mary Jane, but Aunt May was just emerging from the kitchen with a plate
of pancakes and strips of newly made bacon. Peter wanted to
stay and savor it. In many ways, it was as if he was truly alive
for the first time in his life. Still, he didn't want to let Mary Jane get away. So he compromised, grabbing food off the table and shoveling it down with the efficiency of a black
hole. Uncle Ben, sitting at the table, was taken aback, and
made a point of keeping his fingers away from Peter lest they
be consumed as well.

"Hi. Gotta go," said Peter between mouthfuls.

Ben looked on, hypnotized by the rapid motion of food to
mouth. "We thought you were sick."

"I was. I got better." Except this time he wasn't waiting for his mouth to be clear of food, so it came out more like,
"Iduz, Igobedder."

"Sit down, dear," Aunt May suggested as an entire plate
of eggs disappeared into Peter's mouth.

"Can't. See you later." Peter slung his books over his shoulder, leaving behind a table of dishes that he'd had an
impact on—not unlike the impact a tornado has on a trailer
park.

"Don't forget, we're painting the kitchen today! Home
right after school, right?" called Ben.

His voice disappearing into the distance, Peter called,
"Sure thing, Uncle Ben, don't start without meeeee . . . ."

And then he was gone.

May and Ben stared at each other. "What was
that
about?" asked May.

Ben stared down at his own empty plate. "He ate my
bacon."

Peter had just emerged from his house when he spotted Mary Jane coming out of hers. She was walking as quickly
as she could, and her father was leaning against the door
frame. He was speaking with the kind of slur that indicated he'd been drinking.
At this time of the morning?
Peter won
dered, astounded.

"I don't care what your mother said! It's not okay with
me!" M.J.'s father called after her. "You're trash! You'll al
ways be trash! Just like her!"

Peter stopped in his tracks, paralyzed, all of his energy
forgotten. How could anyone, much less her own father, say something like that to M. J.? M. I, the most perfect, the most
wonderful of females? How could someone who should be loving and adoring her and thanking God for blessing him
with her—okay, maybe that was a bit over the top, but
still . . . —be speaking to her in that manner?

"I have to go to school," M. J. said quickly, turning on her
heel.

"Who's stopping ya?" her father said with a sneer.

From over his shoulder, M.J.'s mother stepped up and
said angrily, "Leave her alone!"

M. J. didn't wait around to see how the confrontation be
tween her parents was going to work out. Instead she bolted
down the sidewalk. Her movement snapped Peter's own
paralysis, and he hurried after her.

Everything he'd been planning to say to her had gone out the window, because in his imagination, she'd been the smil
ing, bright, chipper M. J. that he knew so well from school.
An M. J. who was emotionally overwrought, who had to deal
with parents—or at least a father—who didn't appreciate her
for who and what she was, was outside of Peter's ability to
handle. With all the energy bursting in his sinews, he was
sure he could overtake her in a heartbeat, but his own uncertainty slowed him. "Talk to her, talk to her," Peter kept saying to himself as he drew closer to her at a steady but cautious pace. But she was wiping away tears, and Peter's
usually nimble mind wasn't able to come up with anything
to say, given her emotional stress....

There was a loud honking from behind them, and a car packed with her girlfriends pulled up alongside. If Peter
thought the transformation he'd undergone from the night before was remarkable, that was nothing compared to the
lightning-fast transformation of M.J.'s face. Immediately all
the despondency and frustration vanished, to be replaced by
a broad smile and a party-girl demeanor. The car slowed
enough for M. J. to hop in and, like Cinderella off to the ball, she was gone. With the girls laughing merrily, the car zipped
away, angling around the school bus....

School bus?!? Aw, crap!

Peter bolted down the street. Once upon a time, such a
hurried, determined sprint would quickly have left him

breathless, but not this time. His breathing was slow, steady,
and sure, as was his heartbeat. It was as if he wasn't even
straining himself, as if the rapid clip at which he was mov
ing was only a fraction of just how quickly he could truly
move.

Even so, it wasn't quite fast enough as, with a belch of
smoke, the bus moved off from the curb. Peter was starting
to wonder if the driver was actually waiting until he spotted
Peter coming and then gunned the engine and roared away.

Peter got to the side of the bus just as it angled away from the curb. There was a
go wildcats
banner on the side. Run
ning into the street after the bus, he slammed his hand
against the banner, with the intention of pounding repeatedly
on the bus in order to get it to stop.

The bus pulled away.

The banner stayed behind.

To be specific, the banner was sticking to his fingers, in much the same way the sock had clung to his toe but much
more forcefully. He tried to pull the banner clear of one
hand, but found it adhering to the other one. Why the hell
was the banner so blasted sticky? It was as if it were made
out of flypaper.

Except his eyes told him there was nothing unusual about
the material that the banner was made from. It just was
clinging to his fingers....

No...

No ... that wasn't it at all. His fingers ...
were clinging
to the banner.

And suddenly something pounded through his head,
something with such force that it almost split his skull in
two. It was a warning, a sensation, a fight-or-flight response, all clamoring for attention simultaneously, and as he tried to
sort it out, a horn blasted above all of it. But the horn was
outside his head, not inside, and he whirled just in time to
see a truck bearing down on him. He could feel the heat

coming off the radiator, could practically smell the rubber of
the tires, it was that close.

With a scream, Peter leaped out of the way, all the while
knowing that there was no way,
absolutely
no way, that he
was going to be able to get out of the way in time, even as the brakes locked and the tires screeched.

And then it was gone, the heat, the smell—all gone, to be replaced by a dizzying sensation as if he were flying. He an
gled up, up, the breeze of his acceleration hitting him in the
face, and below him the ground sped by as if he were a jet
lifting off from a runway. That sense of glorious freedom, of
not being bound by such trivialities as gravity.

And that was when he hit the wall of the building. It
wasn't a particularly tall building, a three-story office structure that housed a law firm. But its bricks were just as solid as any Manhattan skyscraper, and when Peter slammed into it, forty feet above street level, it almost knocked him un
conscious. In his dizzy, confused state, he did something that made absolutely no sense at all: He reached out and
tried to hold on to the side of the building, so that he
wouldn't fall.