Chapter Text
“So, you guys excited to be heading off to MIT? MJ, pretend that you’re not excited.”
“Mmm, I can’t,” MJ laughed, “wish you were coming with us, though.”
“Eh, it’s a small price to pay,” Peter shrugged. It was disappointing, but it was also the logical consequence of the memory spell; of course MIT couldn’t be expected to grant Peter Parker a slot when nobody in the whole world (well, mostly) knew who Peter Parker was.
So MJ and Ned were headed off to MIT, while Peter was going to remain in the city. Probably for the best; Boston wasn’t New York, and Spider-Man definitely belonged to New York.
As for Peter, well, he’d already gotten some GED textbooks, and was in the middle of studying hard in preparation for taking them. If he did well, then ESU would probably accept him, and ESU was hardly a bad school; not MIT to be sure, but a very prestigious university in its own right. Plus, there were rumors that the university’s faculty would soon be swelled by the addition of some celebrities, and Peter could hardly wait.
Another thing to come out of the spell was the fact that they could finally go home; with nobody knowing who he was, the Parker apartment was now safe to stay in again, and Peter had been utterly glad to move back into his own room and lie on his own bed (well, for the first few nights, May, Peter, and Jean had camped out in the living room while they’d aired out the rooms and threw everything into the laundry; not having been back in the apartment for months meant that the air was stale and the bedding smelled).
For her part, Jean seemed to be bouncing back from her trauma of being kidnapped and experimented on by Damage Control (something which still caused Peter to clench his fists every time he thought about it). Something to come out of it, though, was Jean experimenting with her powers, under Peter’s eye and very carefully (nobody wanted people finding out that she had powers). She was now powerful enough to voluntarily (as opposed to involuntarily; Peter had realized, and when he had, had shared his conclusions with the rest of their little family, as well as Ned and MJ, that part of Jean’s being so persuasive in the past was an involuntary application of her powers, to make everyone else more prone to agree with her; assuming that Metzger had been telling the truth about having kept an eye on Jean, that unconscious use of her power might have been what prompted Damage Control’s suspicion in the first place) reach out and touch, and even jump into, people’s minds, within a short but growing distance from herself, and to lift fairly heavy objects telekinetically. And she was still only eleven; given time, Peter thought that she may well become the most powerful person on the planet.
That said, though, Jean had a similar problem as Peter; since nobody in the world knew who she was, finding a school for her had been difficult. Luckily, Peter, MJ, and Ned had come together one night to scour the internet for somewhere suitable, and had settled on a decent-seeming place, in upstate New York (both Peter and May had originally not liked the idea of Jean going to a boarding school, but Jean had said that she had had a “good feeling” about the Institute for Gifted Youngsters, and since Peter’s tingle hadn’t made any protest as to the place, they had agreed on a trial basis).
In any case, MJ and Ned had said their good-byes, and Jean seemed to be adjusting well to her new surroundings (at least according to their FaceTime call earlier that morning), so Peter hopped on the subway train. Traveling to ESU didn’t take too long; just a little under forty minutes, which was plenty of time for him to hit the registrar, get his class schedule, and make his way to the lecture hall that was (apparently) the venue for his first class.
Which was already half-full.
“Sorry, sorry,” Peter looked around, and saw a decent seat, a few rows down. “Excuse me?”
“Yeah?”
“Can I-”
“Oh, yeah, sure, of course, but uh, can you sit one down? I’m saving this seat for my girlfriend,” the other guy said with a slightly sheepish smile.
“Of course!” Peter left the indicated seat vacant and sat in his chosen spot, dropped his backpack, and turned to face the guy who’d allowed him into the row. “Hi, I’m Peter Parker,” he held out his hand, allowing the other guy to grab it in a firm handshake.
“Nice to meet you, Peter,” the other guy said with a smile, as a beautiful blonde woman came up from behind him, holding a pair of coffees, “oh, thanks babe. Sorry, Peter, right? I’m terrible with names. Oh, speaking of. Harry. Lyman. Harry Lyman, that’s my name,” he laughed at himself, before looking and forth between his girlfriend and Peter. “And, Peter Parker, meet Max Stacy.”