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Peter pressed his palms to his eyes in an attempt to dampen the sensory hell.
His bedroom fan made a really, really loud clicking sound. Every time it rotated in one complete motion, there was a click of varying pitch when the fan blade passed the same point. Every three-point-two seconds. Which was extremely annoying.
He would shut the fan off, except that it felt so oppressively hot in his bedroom that having the fan off was comparable to that time he thought it would be smart to wear a black t-shirt and black shorts to Coney Island in the middle of August. Which was to say: It was very hot.
Peter rolled over onto his back, flopping his arms and legs out to the sides in a starfish position as he stared up at the dark ceiling. The only light was the evening sun peeking through the mostly-closed window blinds. Unable to get comfortable, he rolled over once again, this time onto his face.
“Make it stop,” he moaned into his pillowcase, flinching slightly when the fabric moved with the breath of his exhalation.
The tactile sensations were strangely heightened as well. It was like the small hairs on his arms and legs were hooks that would catch on even the slightest movement of fabric against them. He squirmed his legs to try and get comfortable, only to feel the sensation of little tiny pinpricks slicing across his leg. It vaguely occurred to him that this must be what girls feel like a few days after shaving their legs.
Realistically, lying facedown on his bed wasn’t helping things. Peter was a man of science. And the first thing a man of science would do in any strange scenario would be to observe.
“Come on, Peter,” he muttered to himself. “Get up and analyze.”
Reaching onto the floor and into his backpack, Peter pulled out one of his school notebooks, flipping to the back of the book so he could start a list of everything that was in his head. He pulled the pencil out of the spiral binding and started with, Heightened hearing, when he winced at the sound of the pencil scratching across the paper.
He started drawing a glucose molecule on the corner of his page out of boredom, but stopped when the sound became too grating. He rubbed his finger across the line of graphite and furrowed his eyebrows- the pencil marks felt raised to the touch, like Braille.
It was when his hands came up to his mouth again that he realized he was once again hungry. Over the last several days he had emptied the fridge more times than he could count, never leaving food behind at meals and nabbing snacks off of his classmates whenever he could. He had even bought fast food once or twice and eaten it on the train ride home. Peter felt bad spending so much money on something that wouldn’t even last him a few hours. But the calories seemed to help, so he had added some sugary snacks to Aunt May’s shopping list. To his own list, he added, Intense hunger- high caloric intake.
His eyes flickered up to the door with no prompting, his pencil already sailing towards it point-first like a javelin before the knock had even echoed through his room.
“Peter, you in there?” Uncle Ben’s voice asked from the other side of the door, too loud and omnipresent all at once even through a solid barrier.
“Yeah, you can come in,” Peter replied after a moment, just watching the pencil roll across his floor. Had the door actually been opened, he would have certainly impaled whoever had walked through it before they could even register what was happening. Not that being stabbed with a dull pencil would do much damage, but it was the notion that concerned him, not the action.
Uncle Ben stepped into Peter’s room and stepped directly on the pencil.
“Can I, uh, have that?” Peter asked awkwardly. “I- um- I threw it. Got frustrated.”
With a small chuckle, Uncle Ben returned the pencil to Peter. “What’re you working on?”
Peter quickly closed the notebook under the guise of showing Uncle Ben the front of the book, which had
SCIENCE
messily Sharpied on the front. “Just some school stuff.”
“That’s all over my head, unfortunately, so I’m afraid I can’t help you there,” Uncle Ben chuckled.
“It’s alright,” Peter shrugged.
“I just wanted to let you know that dinner should be ready in about fifteen minutes, so if you’re finished, wash up and come down.”
Peter nodded mutely, biting on his tongue to try and keep his salivating to a minimum. “I’ll be right there,” he said after a long pause. Even the thought of food was enough to make his stomach grumble intensely.
Uncle Ben exited the room as Peter spun the pencil in his hand, promptly dropping it onto his bedspread. The sound of the fabric moving yet again caused his head to turn.
Once he was finally able to pick his head up and resume his notetaking, he added several lines of text:
Heightened sense of touch
Improved eyesight- glasses no longer needed
Hands & feet stick to things
Crazy reaction time
Knowing things will happen before they happen????
The last note was written in a scribbled fit of frustration as he once again flinched to look at his window blinds fluttering in the slightest breeze. It was like some sort of sixth sense keying him in to every motion in the immediate vicinity. If he closed his eyes and took slow breaths, he could predict when the next wind would blow through his room.
He could also hear his own heartbeat thudding in his ears, though whether that was from anxiety or heightened senses was still left to be discovered.
Dinner would be ready soon. He could predict the shifting breezes in his tiny bedroom some other time. The irresistible hunger was starting to take over his brain again, it briefly occurred to him that a caterpillar would endlessly consume leaves before cocooning itself and emerging as a butterfly. Anxiously fingering the spider bite at the base of his neck, Peter desperately hoped that something as terrible or worse wouldn’t happen to him.
Peter buried his face in the pillow and screamed.