Homecoming: The Junior Novel

by Jim McCann

  How long was I out? No time to think about it. I had to get out of this awesome suit, pack my stuff, and hit up the breakfast bar before Happy came to get me. No way could I fly back to New York with an empty stomach plus a grumpy Happy.

  The plan was going all right so far. I was inches away from the fluffiest Belgian waffle I’d ever seen when a familiar shadow seemed to cover the entire breakfast bar. Without a word, Happy nodded for me to follow him as he turned and walked to his table. Looking back at the glorious waffle, I made a silent promise: One day…

  I flopped into the seat opposite Happy, and we had a ten-second stare-off. Ten. Long. Seconds. Finally, he cut into a waffle (no fair!) and didn’t even look at me before his interrogation began.

  “Late night Spider-Man-ing,” he said. It wasn’t a question. Somehow he knew. Of course he knew.

  I stared at the waffle longingly before I realized he was waiting for an answer.

  “It was nighttime, and just a few people saw me,” I explained. “They cheered and waved. No one here knows Spider-Man. And, anyway, I look wayyyyyy different now.” I was talking faster than I could think. “Oh, and some club kids might start dressing up as me, but that’s it, I promise!”

  Happy lifted a newspaper off the table. “Just a few people?”

  The headline was in German so I had no idea what it meant. “Der Klebrige Junge Rettet Bundeskanzler!” I read aloud, trying not to butcher each word too much. “Huh?”

  “Sticky Boy Saves Chancellor,” Happy translated.

  “Ohhhhhh! That old lady was the chancellor? No wonder she tried to give me such a big tip,” I joked, trying to lighten the mood. “Well, at least no one got a photo, right?”

  Happy unfolded the paper. The bottom half had a splash image of me swinging on a web line, the chancellor tucked under my arm. My empty stomach dropped.

  “Soooo,” I said sheepishly, “I guess I’m probably grounded from the breakfast bar, huh?”

  Happy wiped his mouth with his napkin, stood, grabbed his suitcase, and headed for the exit. I took that as a “yes.”

  The jet ride back to the States wasn’t as fun. Thankfully, Stark had some food on the plane, if you can even call fish eggs and crackers food. I downed some juice and actually managed to sleep a little on the flight. My all-nighter finally caught up to me, I guess.

  Even the limo ride back to May’s apartment in Queens wasn’t as fun. Happy kept the privacy screen up the entire time. This time Tony Stark was actually sitting in the back with me, but he was on his phone most of the time. I was afraid I’d blown everything by making front-page news. Finally, we pulled up a safe distance from the apartment, so we didn’t attract too much attention.

  We sat in some seriously awkward silence for a moment before Mr. Stark finally said something.

  “Ya did good, kid,” he said.

  I did good? I did good!

  “Does this mean I’m an Avenger now?” I asked, probably a little too eagerly.

  “It definitely does not.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to look too crushed as I opened the door.

  “Don’t forget the box,” Stark called out as I turned to leave.

  The box! The suit! That meant… “I didn’t blow it with the whole chancellor thing? I can keep it?”

  “It’s yours,” Stark replied. “You earned it.”

  My heart was going a mile a minute. “Awesome!” was all I could reply. Then it hit me. The suit was mine to keep. Iron Man himself was giving me a new uniform.

  I was going to be an Avenger.

  “So when’s our next mission?” I asked, all smiles, as if that was something I asked every day.

  “We’ll call ya,” Stark said, signaling it was time for me to get moving.

  “Guess I’ll be seeing you around, Happy,” I called out as I stood on the sidewalk. The driver window lowered slightly, but there was no answer.

  No matter. I waited until the limo had rounded the corner before taking out my phone, turning on the camera, looking right into the lens, and adding one final, important update:

  “They’re gonna call me!”

  CHAPTER 2

  Four months, five days, and eightee—nineteen minutes,” I muttered, flinching as someone on the train sneezed right behind my back. “No calls yet…”

  The weather had just turned crisp, and everyone in the jam-packed train looked either sick, tired, or sick and tired. I had managed to avoid catching a cold since getting my spider-powers, but I sort of knew how they felt.

  I looked at the cracked screen on my phone and went back to a happier time, in Germany, when I was totally an Avenger… for, like, ten minutes.

  Suddenly, my screen lit up with an incoming call. BLOCKED ID flashed as it rang. It was them! They were calling! I fumbled to answer.

  “Parker here! Go for Peter! Parker!” I waited for an ultra-top-secret assignment to come from Mr. Stark. Instead, my shoulders drooped. “No, there’s no Lulu here.… Ma’am, I can’t book your coloring because this isn’t a hair salon. Really sorry, though.”

  I hung up with a heavy sigh, knowing that somewhere a woman with her roots coming through couldn’t find Lulu, and I still wasn’t an Avenger. Thankfully, we were approaching my train stop.

  Taking up almost an entire city block, Midtown School of Science & Technology loomed large as I walked up the sidewalk. It was probably the only place in the city where I fit in. You had your overachievers, genius-level-yet-stressed-out-obsessive-compulsives, inventors of the next Big Thing, all with at least one overflowing backpack, all filing in to forge new ground and show the world that nerds really would inherit the earth.

  Just then, a car sped past me and skidded into the parking entrance. The vanity plate on the car read FLASHDRV. Oh right. And Flash was a student here, too. If I were an Avenger, he’d be my ego-driven, obnoxious arch-villain.

  Glancing down at my phone one last time, I entered the school building. I was surrounded by students showing off their newest advances in AI technology, “rebels” furiously hacking their way to exposing corruption online, friends discussing string theory and the probabilities of Stephen Hawking’s multiverse. I had to duck to avoid a drone as I stopped at my locker.

  “Guess who got the complete solar system—including all of Jupiter’s moons?” a voice rang out. I recognized the speaker even before he leaned against the locker next to mine. Ned, my best friend. And a nonbeliever in personal space. “All for hours of interstellar fun!”

  I looked at him in disbelief, my mind blown. “No way!” I said. “That thing’s gotta have—”

  “Three thousand eight hundred and three pieces.” Ned beamed back. “And I built a minihover stand so it not only floats, but the moons circle in orbit when assembled!”

  “Sick!” I had been waiting for months for that building set to come out.

  “Right?” Ned replied, practically shaking with excitement. “So? Wanna build it tonight?”

  I did. I really did. But there was something else I wanted to do even more. “I can’t,” I said. “I got the—”

  “Stark internship. I know.” I could see his bubble bursting. “You’ve always got the Stark internship.”

  “Yeah, and pretty soon it’s going to lead to a real job with him,” I said, trying to convince both him and myself.

  Ned’s face lit up. “That would be so sweet, working for Iron Man!” he said. “He’d be all, ‘Good job on your spreadsheet, Peter. Here, have a gold coin.’” I wasn’t sure which was worse: Ned’s Iron Man impression or his idea of gainful employment. “I don’t really know how jobs work,” he confessed.

  I laughed along with him. “No, I’m sure that’s exactly it.”

  “Okay, how about this?” Ned compromised. “I’ll knock out Saturn, and then swing by your place so we can finish the rings and moons together.”

  “Yeah, rings and moons…” I repeated, or I think that’s what he said. Another voice had caught my attention.

  “… I�
��ll check in on the decorations at lunch, but then I have a meeting with the painters. We need to make sure the right shade for the backdrop…” Liz walked by with the rest of the Homecoming committee, and the entire world seemed to melt away around her.

  The ringing of the school bell jolted me from my thoughts.

  “Saturn, my place, later,” I confirmed with Ned as we parted ways and headed off to another day at school.

  8:30 AM. Could this day go any slower? We were only halfway through physics class. While most students were taking notes on their fancy tablets about whatever Ms. Warren was teaching, I turned back to my computer screen to watch more videos. The video of the Avengers fighting aliens in the Battle of New York had millions of views, not counting my 314, roughly. It was five years old, but people were still leaving comments.

  “Now, how about calculating thrust? Where do we start? Yes, Flash?” Ms. Warren droned on.

  “With the binomial,” Flash answered confidently.

  “Almost,” Ms. Warren replied, the word seeming to take Flash down a notch. I chuckled under my breath, moving on to another video.

  “Peter, still with us, I assume?” Ms. Warren’s voice rang out.

  Busted. Okay, think, Parker, you got this. I looked at the impossibly long equation on the whiteboard. The answer was… somewhere… and it was…

  “Um… thrust?” I repeated, stalling for time. “Yeah. Ah, solve for x, then determine the binomial.” Whew. That was close.

  “Right as always,” Ms. Warren said, her praise causing Flash to stare daggers at me. Whatever. The bell was going to ring in three… two…

  Lunch. Finally. Sitting at the back table away from the popular kids (yes, there are still popular kids, even at a genius school), Ned was telling me some calculus joke when Liz and her best friend, Betty, started to hang Homecoming banners across the room. I wanted to go tell Liz that it was a little crooked on the left, but Betty whipped out a level and fixed it. Thanks a lot, Betty.…

  “And then I died,” Ned suddenly said.

  “Sorry,” I said. Obviously that was not the end of the joke. “It’s just… did Liz get a new sweater?”

  “No, we’ve seen that one before,” Ned replied. “Not with that skirt, though.” He cocked his head slightly. “It’s working for her.”

  I stared at her outfit and agreed that it was definitely working for her. Then I caught myself and noted, “We should stop staring before it gets creepy.”

  SLAM! A stack of books hit the table, followed by a dry voice, calling us out. “Too late.”

  It was Michelle, the arty kid in a school of science kids. “You two are such losers,” she declared.

  “Then why are you sitting with us?” Ned asked, annoyed.

  “’Cause I don’t have any friends.” She shrugged. It was true. “Plus, we’re having decathlon practice during lunch.” Wait—

  “What?” I was not prepared for the onslaught of people who suddenly filled the table. Unfortunately, one of them was Flash. But way more fortunately, another was Liz.

  “Not so fast,” Liz said as I stood up to make room. “I’ve trapped you in my web.” Awkward. “We figured if you’re gonna flake on every practice after school, Parker, we’ll just have to practice during school.”

  She was thinking of me. The warm fuzzies started, followed by the guilt, then interrupted by Flash’s condescending snort: “I can’t believe we’re catering to him. We don’t need this dork.”

  Good. There was my opening to break it to them that—

  “As team captain, I disagree,” Liz cut in. “If we’re gonna win nationals, we need every dork at this table.”

  Oh boy. This was going to make it tougher to rip off the Band-Aid. “About nationals,” I started, causing everyone at the table to stare at me. “I can’t go.”

  My words hung in the air for a second before being met with a chorus of protests (and an insult from Flash), but it was Liz’s voice that cut through the noise.

  “Why?!” She sounded personally betrayed.

  Because I’m Spider-Man! I did absolutely not say, even though I wanted to.

  “I’m just… I’m really busy right now,” I mumbled. My answer was weak. Even I didn’t believe it.

  “Doing what?” Michelle asked. “You already quit Computer Club and Robotics Lab.” She was right. “Not that I’m obsessed with him; I’m just observant,” she told the rest of the table quickly.

  Liz looked confused. I could tell she was not pleased. At all. “You can’t bail on us a week before nationals,” she insisted. “You’re our anchor on physics.”

  “You have… Flash,” I offered.

  The sound of his name inflated his ego even more. “Yeah, you do!” he crowed, high-fiving the air. “Neil deGrasse Tyson’s got nothing on me!” I had unleashed a decathlon monster. Everyone else seemed to agree.

  “Peter, you’re our go-to. We’re better off with you,” said Abraham, another member of the team.

  I tried to reassure them, though I was looking mostly at Liz. “Look, they wouldn’t do a physics challenge two years in a row,” I reasoned. “You guys have this.” I turned to the rest of the group. “I’m really sorry. But you’re all awesome. Good luck.” I grabbed my backpack and started to walk away, but Liz caught my arm before I could leave.

  “Peter, look, I get it. It’s hard to juggle everything, especially sophomore year,” she said, trying to be understanding. “But we were counting on you.” I could feel her grip tighten a little.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, not able to meet her eyes.

  “Don’t you wanna go to DC?” she pressed. “See the White House? Stay in a fancy hotel?”

  “I do. But I… I just can’t.” I freed my arm from her grip and ran off.

  I could faintly hear Liz’s voice as she turned to the rest of the team. “What does Peter Parker have to do that’s so important?”

  It was time for me to make some more web fluid. Also known as chemistry class. While the teacher talked excitedly about the solutions we’d be mixing today, I was at my lab station in the back, working on my own solution.

  This was the one class I looked forward to, mainly so I could keep concocting my special formula here and not have May walk in on me refilling these bad boys. I took out a pair of metal cartridges and filled them with my own science project. And just in time, because the bell would be going off any—

  RIIIIIIIIIIIING!

  Freedom! I was out the door and three blocks away before Flash could even get to his car. I hopped on the train and made it back to Queens, where I made my regular pit stop at Mr. Dalmar’s bodega. Five dollars got me my usual—a pack of gummi worms and a number four sandwich, pressed flat with extra pickles.

  Next, it was off to my “Stark internship.” I hated lying to Ned and my friends, but I justified it by rationalizing that I was kinda-sorta technically an Avengers intern. I ducked into an alley and pulled my Spidey suit out of my backpack. Then, it was just one… foot… in front of the—ew, foot in garbage! Foot in garbage!—watching out for the dumpster, definitely didn’t need a concussion half dressed like this.

  Finally—once my suit was on—came the part I loved the most. I pushed the spider-button on my chest, and the suit practically came to life, whirling and contracting skintight. I tossed my backpack with my regular clothes into the air and—THWIP!—webbed it to the dumpster, out of sight. I had to set my watch alarm; I did have a curfew, after all. Then I crawled up the side of the building and looked out over pretty much the entire neighborhood. In Queens, you can do that from about four stories up.

  Looking out, I saw the city. My city. Ready to be made better by Spider-Man. I grinned under my mask. “Let’s get to work.…”

  CHAPTER 3

  I pictured my eyes narrowing (the lenses built into this suit actually changed shape with my expression!) as I searched for criminals, delinquents, and ne’er-do-wells wherever they lurked. It wasn’t long at all before…

  Shots fired! Gun
shots!

  … from a video game. Crisis averted.

  A scream from the alley behind me! I flipped backward, ready to take on my foe.… A man taking out the trash from the pizzeria, who screamed again.

  Rats—literally. Two huge rats stood between him and the dumpster. I sighed. It was going to be a long day.

  CLINK! THUNK! Now, those noises I recognized. Looking down the block confirmed it—yup, we had a robbery in progress. Someone had just cut the chain off a bike.

  Time to be a hero.

  I jumped into action, web-swinging down the block, closing in on the thief. Man, this was the stuff. The kind of action I lived for, that made me count the hours down at school. The stuff that would make me an Avenger (or at least get a callback). Flipping through the air, I landed right in front of the would-be bicycle bandit, stopping him in his tracks.

  “That’s not your bike,” I said in my best Super Hero voice.

  “Says who?” the guy challenged.

  Huh. They usually ran away at this point. “Says…” I searched my brain for what to say next. Aha! Evidence right there in his pocket. I pointed to his jeans. “Says the bolt cutters sticking out of your pants.”

  Now he started to run, dropping the bike and sprinting away. THWIP! My webbing quickly latched on to him, and I yanked him back like a yo-yo. I set him against the wall of a nearby building and webbed him to it. He was trapped. I grabbed the bolt cutters from his pocket and—CRACK—snapped them in two.

  “That should put an end to your bike-burgling days, mister,” I told him as he struggled against the web. Now it was time for the applause.

  “Umm, whose bike is this?” I called out to the people passing by. “Anyone know who locked their bike up over there? Hello? New York?” The city’s afternoon commuters kept walking. I turned back to the thief. “Do you have a pen?”