Chapter Text
There are pros and cons to switching to working at a specialized science high school after years at a traditional middle school. The kids are about just as mean to me, but they’re nicer to each other—I think it’s because they’re in that weird transitional phase between childhood and adulthood. My pay isn’t much better even though I work at a fancy science school now, but the cost of living is better in New York than it was in San Francisco. Best of all, I get to teach science classes to students who are actually passionate about it!
Some kids are more committed than others, of course. Plenty of kids are only here because their rich parents paid for them to go, but I’d like to think that even those kids can’t suppress their curiosity in my class. I teach lab biology, so we do a lot of hands-on work, which tends to pique more interest than droning on about equations each class.
I can admit that I carry a bit of favoritism towards the kids who are truly passionate about what I teach, but I’m a professional, and I don’t let it show.
Unfortunately, teaching groups of nerds all day really doesn’t stop them from getting themselves into trouble. They’re still teenagers, after all.
I’ve been assigned to chaperone my first period freshman biology class during their field trip to Oscorp. They’ve been ecstatic all week, raving about what they might see, but all I can think about is all the nonsense I’ll have to deal with the whole day. It’s not that I’m not excited at the prospect of getting to see the Oscorp, but I won’t have time to soak in all the cool stuff when I’m supervising a group of twenty teenagers.
My worries are proven true very quickly. Multiple children come up to me as we’re leaving, begging me to let them come.
“You didn’t sign the form on time,” I say each time with a sigh.
I think I might lose my voice with how much I have to raise it on the bus ride. Some kid brings a speaker and starts blasting ‘Party in the U.S.A.,’ and the bus driver practically begs me to get them to stop. I don’t blame her. They sound like a choir of dying chickens.
I manage to funnel all the children into the building with little complication, but of course, that doesn’t last for long. I have to go over attendance again practically with each new room we enter.
We spend the first two hours listening to interns at the labs talk about what they do all day. They show their current projects, and the kids get to ask questions about them. I’m zoned out at first when an intern explains a project related to amputees, but when they start to talk about phage therapy, even I get invested and ask questions.
Before I know it, we’re ushered into the giant cafeteria. The kids gasp as they look around. There’s Chinese, Italian, and Mexican food, a salad place, a smoothie bar, each with its own stand like a mall food court. The children were told plenty of times to bring their own money for lunch, but I know without a doubt that at least a few kids will have forgotten anyway, and I’ll be the one paying for it.
“Ah-ah!” I shout over the commotion, stopping the kids in their tracks before they can rush off. “We’ve got to take attendance first.” The kids groan. “I know, I know. But I’ll be paying the price if I lose one of you guys.”
I pull out my clipboard with the laminated class roster on it.
“Madison Ames?” I call.
The girl in question sticks her hand up. “Here!”
I nod and move down the list. Each kid eagerly shouts in response, more than ready for their lunch. As I reach the end of the list with no issues, I’m lulled into a sense of security.
“Peter Parker?” Nobody calls out or raises their hand. I scan the faces of the children, peeking over the shoulders of the taller ones. “Peter?” I try again, dread settling in my stomach.
Peter is a good kid, despite all of his absences. I can’t imagine he would have run off on purpose—he’d hate to worry me—but he could have gotten caught up in a crowd on the way to the cafeteria and couldn’t find his way back. My mind races with countless worst-case scenarios in a second.
“Mr. Grace?” one of my students says, but I’m hardly paying any attention. I wave the closest teacher down, and she begins to make her way over, looking concerned. “Mr. Grace!” he says again, and I turn to him, trying not to direct my panic at the students.
“Yes, Flash?” The kid is a whiz and one of the best students we have on the school’s academic decathlon team, but he is also an expert at getting on my nerves.
“I saw him go down the hall behind us in that room with the robot arms.”
“And you didn’t think to tell me?” I throw my hands up in the air, exasperated.
Flash crosses his arms defensively. “I thought he was just going to the bathroom or something! But of course he had to get lost, and now we have to wait to eat.”
I don’t grace him with a response. I simply shoot him a glare that I’ve practiced many times now throughout my years as a teacher, and he shuts up.
“What happened?” whispers the teacher from the next class over.
“I am so, so, sorry,” I tell her, wincing, “but can you watch my class for the next… five minutes? One of the kids is missing.”
Her eyes widen and she nods. I feel terrible for placing the burden on her, especially at lunch, one of the most chaotic moments in a school day, and in an unfamiliar environment, but the quicker I find Peter, the better.
I point to the table to the left of us. “That’s the table we were assigned. But I’d understand if you want to merge our class’s tables to keep a better eye on them.”
Before she can respond, I turn around and rush out of the doors. I take a left, then another left, and find myself at the elevator. If I remember correctly, we were one floor above here… I’m starting to realize I should have asked an employee for help, but I don’t want to waste any more time now. When the elevator doors don’t immediately open, I hit the button a few more times, despite rational thought telling me it doesn’t speed up the process at all.
When the doors finally ding and open, I rock back and forth impatiently on the balls of my feet as a group of men and women in suits with briefcases file out. When I’m sure everybody that needed to leave has gone, I rush inside, scanning the dozens of buttons. Next to the number ten is a star, a ‘You Are Here,’ so I click the button next to the eleven.
None of this has really taken that long, but each second that passes without me laying eyes on Peter, I feel another ton of anxiety weighing on me. He’s not an athlete, but he’s scrappy; still, I think of somebody taking advantage of his vulnerable position. I touch each one of my fingers to my thumb in order, back and forth, a nervous habit.
The elevator dings, and I’m rushing for the door before I can even walk out. I brush past a small crowd of people outside the elevator and into the main lab the kids were just in. I scan the room until my eyes land on a small hallway, empty of people. It’s long, with plenty of doors on each side. I worry for a moment that I’ll have to open every door looking for Peter, but then I notice one cracked open halfway down the hall.
My breath heaves—now that I take the subway instead of my bike to school, I’m much more out of shape—but I push forward, throwing open the door. I see the back of a head with short brown curls.
“Peter!”
He turns to face me, eyes wide. “Mr. Grace! I’m so sorry, I went to go find a bathroom, but I couldn’t, and then I didn’t know where you went—”
“It’s alright,” I say, holding my hands up placatingly. Despite knowing everything is fine now, my hands still shake with excess adrenaline. “I’m just glad you’re okay.”
It’s only now that I get a good look around the room. There are many glass containers stacked on top of each other holding rodents and insects alike. I shiver at the sight. The walls and glass boxes are littered with random letters and numbers, some sort of code or identification. Clearly, nobody but trained staff was meant to be in here. Images transcend all coded language, however—I see an image of a man touching a rat with a big ‘X’ over the top.
“What the heck did you think you were doing in here, though?” I say, resting a hand on Peter’s shoulder and starting to inch towards the door.
A spider crawls up the wall of its enclosure, and I force myself to look away from its creepy, spindly legs.
“I was looking for you guys, and I got distracted,” he says meekly.
“Right.” It doesn’t matter, I remind myself, because he’s okay now. That’s all that matters. Still, images of all the terrible things that could have happened to Peter plague my mind. “We’re upstairs in the cafeteria. You’ll have to eat your lunch quickly, but you have time.”
Peter nods and walks out the door. Standing in the doorway, I take one last look at the room. Although I squirm at the sight of the long, pale tails of the rats and the many legs of the spiders, I pity them. They got plucked out of their habitats and dropped into a world full of experiments, needles, and observation. All for the progression of scientific knowledge, of course, but—
“Ouch!” It’s only a small pinch, really, like a flu shot, but it’s unexpected. I look down at the back of my hand to find a spider that dropped down from a web on the ceiling. In my panic, I slap it, and it falls to my feet, likely dead.
“Mr. Grace? What’s wrong?” Peter turns to look at me, and subsequently at my hand, which I’m holding up to the light. There are no visible marks or rashes. I take a moment to answer, lowering my shaking hand.
“Nothing,” I say, unconvincingly. I’ve always been a terrible liar. Redirection is easier, however. “Are you hungry? I’m hungry. They’ve got a whole food court in that cafeteria. It’s crazy.” I nudge Peter forward, and we begin to walk towards the elevator.
“Really?” he says, but he doesn’t exactly sound excited.
“Really. There’s Chinese food, salads, Mexican food, the whole lot. Did your aunt give you money for lunch?”
Peter shakes his head as we stop in front of the elevator. “No, but I made a sandwich.”
Peter’s parents died when he was young, leaving him in the custody of his aunt, May Parker. I met her during the last Back-to-School Night. She was a nurse, constantly working shifts to make ends meet, but she still freed up the time for Peter and his education.
“You can’t eat a sandwich when there are all of those options around you! I’ll pay for your food, alright?”
Peter’s head snaps up towards me. “You don’t have to do that.”
I wave a hand. “Of course I do. As long as you don’t spend all my money on tons of things, I’ll be fine, yeah?”
The elevator dings and we walk in. It’s empty.
“Aunt May is going to want to pay you back.” Peter wrings his hands.
“Well, she doesn’t have to have to know.” Peter glances nervously at me, so I backtrack. “Tell her I don’t want her money, alright?”
“Alright,” he says. He finally lets a smile slip through. I take that as a win.
When we make it back in the cafeteria, the teacher I employed to watch over my class is visibly relieved. She probably thought we were going to have to file a Missing Persons Report. Peter decides on the Chinese place, and I follow behind him, ordering my food from there too so that I don’t have to wait in two separate lines. He doesn’t grab a lot, but it already took some convincing for him to let me buy him food at all, so I don’t push it. I swipe my card and lead him to our class’s table.
They bombard him with questions about his absence, and he shrinks into himself, clearly uncomfortable.
“Alright, guys, no questions for Peter.”
The kids protest, but I hold steady. I make eye contact with Peter when the conversation moves on and nod, and he gives me a small smile back.
For the rest of the trip, I itch at the back of my hand. It’s red and slightly puffy now, but I chalk it up to my incessant scratching.
The bus ride back is loud but more contained now that the kids have got their energy out. We make it back to the school with half an hour to spare before dismissal, so I simply throw on a Bill Nye video for the kids to pass the time. The energy in a school at this time of year is contagious, and I can’t help but be distracted from everything that happened during the trip.
With a few minutes left in the day, I quick-fire questions at the kids with my Earth hacky sack. High schoolers pretend they’re over this kind of stuff, but they love it just as much as my middle school students did.
The bell rings after a few rounds, and the kids toss their backpacks over their shoulders and rush for the door. I drop the hacky sack on my desk and sit down, ready to spend the next hour or so filling in grades for the last report card of the year. I tend to stay after school to do whatever work I have to do so that I can wait out the traffic.
I spin in my seat, procrastinating getting started. I resist scratching at my hand, knowing that itching it will only make it worse. After a few minutes of doing nothing but telling myself to get started, I hear a knock at the door.
“Come in!” I say, craning my neck to try to see who it is through the window.
The door cracks open, and Peter Parker walks in, mumbling apologies.
“Peter!” I say, suddenly feeling uneasy. He had gotten lost on a field trip and I had gotten caught up in end-of-the-year festivities and forgotten all about it! “Is everything okay? I know everything that happened earlier must have been scary, but I didn’t get the chance to ask if you were alright.”
“I’m fine, Mr. Grace,” Peter reassures me. “I just wanted to say thank you. Mostly for making sure those kids didn’t talk to me, but for everything else too.”
“Oh!” I say, only relaxing slightly. “Of course, Peter! And make sure your aunt doesn’t try to pay me back, yeah?” My laugh feels forced, my conscience weighed down by even more guilt than when I had first realized Peter was gone.
“Yeah, okay.” Peter pushes his glasses up his nose and makes his way back to the door. “Just… Thank you again for everything. Bye, Mr. Grace!”
He shuts the door behind him, and now that the school is emptied of most of its students, I can hear his sneakers squeaking as he runs down the hallway.
When I get home at night, I let all of the emotions I’d been holding back hit me. All of the things that could have gone wrong, all of the ways Peter could have been hurt… It somehow hits me harder now, even though it’s solved.
Panicking is tiring, however, so after I shower, making sure to scrub the back of my hand especially, I go to bed before eleven at night.