Spiderman 1 by Peter David

understood that nonchalance was the key at times like these. So he shrugged as if it were nothing and handed her tray back to her.
    "Thanks," she said.
    "No problem."
    He expected her simply to walk away. But instead she was staring into his eyes ... no. Not staring. She was gaz ing, and he felt as if some sort of electrical connection had

    been made. "Hey, you have blue eyes," she observed. "I never noticed without your glasses. You just get contacts?"
    No. Actually, I've got eyesight that would make a hawk jealous, and for all the newfound strength I feel coursing through me, none of it means a thing when compared with the heady sensation of your eyes upon me.. ..
    "Uh-huh," was all he managed to get out. Then his throat constricted, and while he tried to manage an oral presenta tion of some of the thoughts tumbling through his head, all of them crowded forward at once, and none of them managed to make it to his mouth.
    "Well . . . see ya," Mary Jane said and, shrugging, she turned and walked away.
    He felt totally devastated. Forgotten once more, angry at his own uncertainty and incompetence, and then—to his as tonishment—Mary Jane did something she'd never done be fore.
    She glanced over her shoulder at him and smiled. An after-the-fact acknowledgment of him.
    He couldn't believe it.
    Despite the fact that she then sat down at the "popular kids" table—right next to Flash, of course—he still treas ured that brief look she'd sent his way. The look that prom ised ... well, it hadn't promised anything, really. But it had hinted at something he hadn't even dared consider before. Namely that she found him . . . what? Interesting? Hand some?
    Peter sat back down at his table and started to eat with the same aggressive bulldozer approach he'd taken at breakfast. He started to set his fork down so that he could pick up the can of soda to his right.
    The fork stuck to his hand.
    He stared at it as if it was someone else's hand. Then he tried to pull the fork free with his other hand, only to

    discover that a long, gooey strand of . . . of something ... was stretching from his hand to the fork. At first it was like whitish gray mucous, as if he'd blown his nose out through his wrist. But then he pulled on it, and pulled, and it re minded him of that stuff he'd had when he was a kid: Silly String. Except the tensile strength was far greater, and some how it was managing to secrete through his wrist, and what was he doing scientifically analyzing it when the fact was that, Holy God, he had some kind of supersnot oozing out of his forearms, what the hell was up with that?!?
    He pulled even harder on the fork, but rather than separate it from the strand, he instead managed to shoot out an other strand, this time from his other hand. And suddenly all the rationalizing, all the reordering in his mind of the morning's events, went right out the window as he realized, It's webbing! It's webbing! I've got spinnerets in my forearms, oh jeez, what if somebody notices but now it could be worse, could be worse, at least I'm not shooting webbing out my butt, which is where spiders generally secrete their webbing, and perhaps it might bear some further investigation as to precisely why the spinnerets choose to manifest themselves and Holy God, I'm shooting freaking webs outta my freak ing arms!!!
    The only thing more horrific to Peter than the webs was the notion of someone spotting them. That would be it for him, over, done, no chance of normalcy, no chance of Mary Jane, no chance of nothing. If the other kids saw him oozing white gook out his arms, he might as well just put a paper bag over his head and slink out of high school forever.
    But things were just going from bad to worse, and the paper bag over his head looked to be a very probable future for him. For the strand he'd just fired shot across the aisle to the table across from him, and smacked into Liz Allen's tray. Liz was chatting with someone and hadn't noticed,