Chapter Text
My name is Ryujin Shin.
I was bitten by a radioactive spider.
And for the past year and eight months, I have been New York’s one and only Spider-Man.
Yes.
Spider-Man.
Oh, don’t even get me started. I didn’t get to pick the name, okay? I’ve got no idea why everyone’s convinced I’m a dude.
Could I clear it up? Sure.
Will I?
…Eh.
They seem happy.
At some point, I realized arguing with an entire city would be a spectacular waste of energy. They were going to call me Spider-Man whether I liked it or not, and I had far more important things to worry about than convincing strangers that the person swinging between skyscrapers wasn’t a dude.
Like making it to first period after stopping a robbery.
Like explaining why I keep coming home with bruises in places that are very difficult to get bruises from if you’ve supposedly spent the evening “studying.”
Like college applications.
Homework.
Midterms.
You know.
The really terrifying stuff.
Besides, after almost two years, the name has caught on a little too well. It’s on the news, social media, homemade T-shirts, questionable Halloween costumes, and more menu boards than I care to count. Someone named a burger after me. Another place sells a Spider-Man breakfast special. I haven’t had the courage to ask what’s in either of them.
So… yeah.
I’m Spider-Man.
You probably know the rest.
I stick to walls. I can lift things that should require construction equipment. I sense danger before it happens, which sounds incredibly useful until you realize my spider-sense doesn’t distinguish between “supervillain about to throw a truck at you” and “there’s an algebra exam today you forgot to study for.”
And, yes, my heart rate spikes for both.
I designed my own web fluid, built the launchers strapped beneath my wrists, and learned how to cross half of Queens without touching the ground. Which sounds a lot cooler than admitting I also learned which gargoyles are loose, which rooftops have terrible footing, and which pigeons take personal offense to being interrupted.
Pigeons are mean.
New York pigeons?
They’re fucking spiteful.
I’ve stopped robberies, broken up car chases, pulled people out of burning apartment buildings, caught falling cars before they became tomorrow morning’s headline, and once helped an old lady carry groceries because she insisted Spider-Man looked like “a nice young man.”
I didn’t have the heart to correct her.
I’ve rescued cats from trees. I’ve rescued firefighters who got stuck rescuing cats from trees.
Don’t ask.
It’s a long story.
One afternoon, I spent almost an hour chasing a balloon shaped like Elsa because a six-year-old, through tears, informed me that if I didn’t catch her, “…she’s gonna freeze New York!”
I caught the balloon.
Elsa was fine.
New York remained unfrozen.
You’re welcome, lovely citizens of New York.
Another time, I carried a very angry German shepherd down fourteen flights of stairs after the elevator stopped between floors.
The dog bit me.
Twice.
I should probably leave that part out.
Looking back, introducing myself while holding him probably wasn’t the right move. I don’t think a frightened dog appreciated being rescued by someone wearing a red bodysuit with giant white bug eyes.
The point is… Being Spider-Man isn’t just punching bad guys and swinging through the skyline while dramatic music plays.
Most days, it’s running late, missing meals, and making excuses that get harder to believe every week. It’s trying to finish homework with sore shoulders, trying to explain mysterious bruises or trying to remember which backpack has my calculus notes and which one has spare web cartridges.
You’re probably wondering how any of this happened.
It wasn’t destiny.
It wasn’t some ancient prophecy.
And I definitely didn’t wake up one morning and think, ‘You know what would really improve my life? Secretly becoming a masked vigilante while trying to pass high school.’
That’s not how this works.
Trust me.
If I’d actually been given a choice, I would’ve picked a much less stressful extracurricular. Debate club, maybe. Though growing up with my best friend meant most of my life already felt like one long debate. We argued over which route to take to school, whose turn it was to choose a movie, whether stealing food still counted as stealing when she knew I would share, and every other subject she decided required her personal ruling.
At least those arguments never ended with me getting thrown through a window or punched by someone twice my size.
But then again, debate clubs never gave anyone superpowers.
It all started on an ordinary Tuesday.
…I hate Tuesdays.
Seriously.
I couldn’t really tell why. They always feel like the day most likely to ruin your week. Mondays at least have the decency to announce they’re going to be miserable. But if something in my life is about to go spectacularly wrong, statistically speaking, it’s probably a Tuesday.
And this one?
This one came with a radioactive spider.
Our entire sophomore class had been herded onto buses for a field trip to Osborn Research Center, because apparently nothing says “educational experience” like letting a bunch of sleep-deprived students wander around a building full of experimental technology and several researchers who clearly regretted agreeing to supervise a group of teenagers.
I wasn’t completely unsupervised. I was taking photos for the school paper. That was my best friend’s idea. Back then, she wasn’t even the student council president yet.
She was, however, president of telling me what to do.
The paper needed pictures for its feature on the field trip, and somehow I’d been volunteered as a photographer despite insisting that “volunteered” wasn’t the right word when someone else filled in your name.
Before we got off the bus, she’d handed me a neatly organized shot list.
Entrance.
Robotics wing.
Renewable energy exhibit.
Group photo in front of the main atrium.
“And don’t disappear,” she’d added, pointing a finger at me like she already knew I’d find trouble.
That was the whole plan for the trip.
Follow the guide.
Take photos.
Don’t touch anything.
Don’t wander off.
Definitely don’t enter any room with a red AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY sign bolted to the door.
I… did not stay with the group.
I had wandered off looking for a better angle of one of the research wings. One hallway became another, then another, until I found myself standing outside a laboratory that definitely wasn’t on Ms. Dictator’s shot list.
…
To be clear, it was a photography shot list.
Not… whatever that sentence accidentally implied. My best friend was bossy, not a war criminal. She just had an aggressively organized itinerary and very strong opinions about following it.
There was a restricted laboratory, an unsecured door, and a genetically modified spider that escaped its enclosure at the exact moment I wandered away. The thing crawled onto the back of my hand before I even realized it was there. Then it bit the skin between my thumb and index finger. I yelped, flung my hand on instinct, and the spider disappeared beneath one of the display cases before I could even think about catching it.
I stared at the tiny red mark on my hand. Two pinpricks that barely looked worse than a mosquito bite. I pulled my sleeve down over it, stepped out of the laboratory, and slipped back into the tour just as our guide began leading our group toward the robotics wing.
My best friend glanced at the camera hanging around my neck once she found me again. “Please tell me you got the atrium.”
“Oh, I got something, alright,” I said.
Technically, that wasn’t a lie.
By the time we boarded the bus back to Queens, I had already convinced myself I had overreacted. The spider had probably escaped because someone left its enclosure unsecured. It had probably bitten researchers before. If it had been dangerous, the entire building would have been in lockdown.
…Right?
Well, I went home with a fever.
At first, I blamed it on the laboratory.
The building had been freezing, the tour had lasted almost three hours, and half of our class had spent the bus ride back coughing without covering their mouths. A cold made sense. The tiny red mark on my hand did not seem important enough.
When I reached home, every muscle in my body hurt. My skin felt too warm beneath my clothes, but the smallest draft made me shiver. The lights in my room were painfully bright. I remember someone sitting beside my bed for a while, trying to convince me to drink water and finish the medicine I’d already decided tasted terrible. I don’t remember much of what I said back.
Fever has a convenient way of stealing conversations.
I was starting to think it was making me delirious.
Eventually, the room grew quiet. Whoever had stayed with me must have gone home. I pulled the blankets over my head, promised myself I’d tell someone if I still felt this awful in the morning, and fell asleep.
The next morning, I woke up attached to my bedroom ceiling.
I wish I could say I handled it well.
I opened my eyes, realized my bed was several feet below me, and screamed loudly enough for the neighbor’s dog to start barking. My hands were stuck beside the light fixture and both feet were firmly attached to the ceiling like gravity had just decided to quit. My blanket was crumpled on the floor, and my pillow had landed inside the wastebasket. I stayed exactly where I was and tried to understand how I had gotten there.
Sleepwalking did not explain it.
Neither did the fever.
I had never climbed anything in my sleep, and I was fairly certain people were not supposed to cling to ceilings without ropes, equipment, or several years of specialized training.
Very carefully, I tried to lift one hand.
It didn’t budge.
I frowned and pulled harder.
Nothing.
My fingers remained stubbornly attached to the plaster.
When my hand finally came loose, the rest of me followed. I fell directly onto my bed, broke two wooden slats beneath the mattress, fell onto the floor, and landed beside the blanket I had apparently abandoned during the night. The impact should have hurt, but I managed to sit up immediately and stare at the broken frame beside me.
The fever was gone.
So was the headache.
My vision had never been clearer. I could see individual specks of dust drifting through the sunlight near the window. I could hear water moving through the pipes inside the wall and footsteps crossing the hallway.
Then my alarm started ringing.
I reached toward the nightstand to turn it off and crushed the clock in my hand.
That was when I started to suspect the spider bite had done more than give me a fever.
By lunchtime, I could hear conversations from the house beside ours, read the smallest print on a cereal box from across the kitchen, and jump high enough to hit my head against the ceiling.
I spent the following week pretending everything was normal.
It was not convincing.
I did try, though.
I told myself the ceiling incident had been some bizarre fever dream, right up until I broke three doorknobs, bent a locker shut, and accidentally threw a basketball hard enough to crack the backboard in our school gym. I told everyone the equipment was old. They believed me because our school had been requesting a renovation budget since before I was born.
At that point, denial started feeling a little ambitious. Turns out, controlling super strength isn’t something your brain figures out overnight. Neither is pretending you’re still an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl.
The wall-crawling came next.
I discovered that one at school.
My best friend and I were walking to chemistry when someone slammed a locker farther down the hallway. The sound startled me badly enough that I reached for the nearest wall.
My hand stuck.
She stopped beside me while I stared at my palm pressed flat against the painted concrete. “What are you doing?” she had asked.
“Stretching.”
She looked at the wall, then at me. “Against a wall?”
“It’s good for the shoulder.”
I had no idea whether that was true.
She watched me struggle to pull my hand free, her expression growing more suspicious with every second. When it finally released, I shoved both hands into my pockets and walked toward class as though none of it had happened.
She followed.
I could feel her staring at the side of my face all the way down the hall.
By the end of the week, I had super strength, heightened senses, impossible reflexes, the ability to stick to walls, and a growing collection of excuses my best friend clearly did not believe.
I still had no idea what I was supposed to do with any of it.
There was no manual for suddenly becoming stronger than everyone around me. No helpful list explaining how to keep from ripping doors off their hinges or crushing whatever happened to be in my hand. I couldn’t ask anyone without explaining the spider bite, and explaining the spider bite meant admitting that I had wandered away from the school tour and entered a restricted laboratory in the first place.
So I decided to figure it out on my own.
Without destroying the house, exposing myself to the neighborhood, or ending up in the emergency room with an injury no doctor could explain, of course.
There was a lot of trial and error.
Mostly error.
Learning to control my strength took months.
Learning to climb walls took ten minutes.
Getting down was harder.
A lot harder.
It turns out sticking to a vertical surface is one thing. Figuring out when and how to stop sticking is something else entirely. I spent one afternoon clinging to the side of our house because I couldn’t convince my hands to let go of the siding. Half an hour later, I was still there, negotiating with my own fingers while hoping none of the neighbors looked out their windows.
Eventually, I fell into Mom’s flower bed.
She was more upset about the flowers than the fact that I’d somehow fallen off the side of the house.
My best friend looked over the fence separating our backyards and asked why there was dirt in my hair. I told her I’d tripped. She glanced at the flower bed, then at the side of my house, and gave me a look that suggested she knew those two things were somehow connected.
She never pushed.
That was one of the things I loved about her.
After that, I kept most of my practice away from home. It wasn’t because I was afraid of getting caught.
Well… not entirely.
I was more worried about my best friend.
Our houses sat right next to each other. If I launched myself off the roof at midnight, there was a decent chance she’d hear it before anyone else. If I misjudged a landing and crashed through a fence, she’d probably be the first person outside asking whether I was okay.
She had always been like that.
If I showed up to school with a scrape on my knee, she’d notice before first period. If I sounded even slightly sick, she’d bring extra medicine from home without asking. Once, when I sprained my wrist falling off my bike in middle school, she spent an entire week carrying my backpack because she thought I wasn’t telling her how much it hurt.
The last thing I wanted was for her to catch me hanging upside down from the side of a building.
So I started sneaking out after dark.
Once my parents were asleep and the lights in my best friend’s room had gone out, I’d climb through my bedroom window and disappear into the city. Empty alleys became obstacle courses. Abandoned warehouses became climbing gyms. Rooftops became places to learn where my limits were before someone else forced me to find them.
She started noticing I looked tired.
“You’ve been yawning through first period all week,” she said one morning on our walk to school. “Are you staying up playing video games again?”
“Something like that.”
She frowned. “Ryujin.”
“I’m kidding.”
“You’d better be.”
I smiled, changed the subject, and hoped she wouldn’t notice the scrape hidden beneath my sleeve from misjudging the edge of a rooftop the night before. Once I stopped panicking every time my feet left the ground, the rest came faster. I learned how far I could jump, how long I could hold myself against a wall, and how much force it took to land without cracking the pavement beneath me.
The problem was that climbing around New York in regular clothes attracted attention.
It also ruined several pairs of shoes.
My best friend was the first person to notice that, too.
She sighed so deeply when she saw my new pair wrecked again that I thought she might actually give up on me. She shook her head and kept walking beside me. That was when I realized ordinary clothes weren’t going to survive whatever my life had become.
So I made my first suit.
It was made from an old red sweatshirt, blue athletic leggings, swimming goggles, and a mask I ordered online using a prepaid card because I was terrified that someone would trace the purchase back to me. I sewed everything together in my bedroom after midnight, hiding the fabric whenever I heard footsteps in the hallway and pretending I was working on a school project whenever Mom asked why the light was still on.
The finished suit looked better in my head.
The stitches came apart whenever I moved too quickly. The goggles fogged up during winter patrols. The mask shifted every time I turned my head, and the fabric absorbed rain until the entire suit weighed twice as much as it had when I left home.
It was uncomfortable, unreliable, and barely survived its first week.
Still, it worked.
Mostly.
My first public rescue happened six months after the spider bite. A fire had spread through an apartment building three streets from our house, trapping a little girl on the seventh floor. The firefighters were still trying to reach her when I climbed the back wall, broke through the window, and carried her down the outside of the building.
Someone filmed it.
By the time I returned home, the video had already been viewed several million times.
Most of the footage showed flames pouring from the apartment window while people shouted from the street below. Then I appeared through the smoke with the little girl held against my chest, one of her arms wrapped tightly around my neck. I climbed down the outside of the building with my free hand pressed to the brick, moving carefully enough that she would not look down.
The person filming screamed when I jumped from the second floor.
For the record, I knew I could make that landing.
Probably.
About 45% sure.
The video ended after I placed the girl in her mother’s arms and climbed back up the wall before the police could reach me. The whole thing lasted less than a minute. My face stayed covered, my voice was never recorded, and the suit looked even worse on camera than it had in my bedroom mirror.
That should have left the entire city with several reasonable questions.
Who was behind the mask?
Where had the powers come from?
Why was someone dressed like a poorly designed traffic sign climbing an apartment building?
By the evening broadcast, I had somehow become a mysterious male vigilante with an athletic background, extensive combat training, and, according to one former police consultant, “a clear disregard for authority.”
That last part was clearly absurd.
I stared at the television from the edge of my bed, still wearing the same oversized sweatshirt I had thrown on after climbing back through my window. The footage was blurry, and the smoke hid most of the suit, but I still couldn’t understand how an entire city had looked at me and drawn completely different conclusions.
One reporter estimated I was six feet tall.
I was five foot five on a good day.
Another described me as “broad-shouldered.”
The sweatshirt had padding.
So it was safe to say they were wrong about a lot of things.
But you wanna know the most offensive assumption out there?
That I was a teenage boy.
Me?
A teenage boy?
Not even an adult man.
A teenager.
A prepubescent boy.
Some kid whose voice probably cracked every other sentence. Just thinking about it makes my skin crawl. In hindsight, I should probably be grateful they settled on Spider-Man instead of Spider-Boy. God, I don’t think my dignity would’ve survived that one.
Well, they got the age almost right.
Everything else was deeply insulting.
Nobody even considered the possibility that Spider-Man could be a girl. Which, to be fair, worked out wonderfully for my secret identity.
It just did absolutely nothing for my ego.
I considered correcting them.
Then I remembered that the entire point of wearing a mask was to keep people from looking too closely at the person underneath it. If New York wanted to spend its time searching for some mysterious athletic boy from Queens, I was more than happy to let them.
The assumption spread quickly. Reporters said he. Witnesses said him. Online forums argued over whether Spider-Man played basketball, ran track, or had been trained by the military. Apparently, no one thought a girl could climb a wall unless she was being chased by something.
It was insulting.
Also incredibly convenient.
Nobody guessed the truth.
At the time, I could climb walls, jump farther than any normal person should, and cross several rooftops before my legs started complaining. That was impressive until I reached the edge of a building and discovered the next one was too far away.
Being Spider-Man involved a surprising amount of climbing back down.
Then, one Saturday afternoon, I got bored.
My best friend was busy with a family dinner. My homework was finished, the weather was terrible, and I had already spent an hour crawling across my bedroom walls to see whether I could do it without knocking anything over. That left me sitting at my desk, staring at a sketch of the spider that had bitten me.
Spiders did more than climb.
They made webs.
The city had already named me Spider-Man. I figured I might as well commit to the theme. The spider gave me strength, reflexes, heightened senses, and the ability to stick to almost any surface. It did not give me a convenient supply of webbing or instructions on how to travel across New York without taking the subway.
I had to figure that out myself.
My first attempt was made from a synthetic adhesive I mixed in the garage after my parents went to bed. I wanted something strong enough to support my weight, flexible enough to stretch without snapping, and temporary enough that the city would not spend the next several decades scraping it from buildings.
The first batch hardened inside the container.
The second dissolved the plastic spoon I used to stir it.
The third stuck my glove to the workbench for four hours.
Progress was slow.
I filled several notebooks with formulas, crossed most of them out, and spent more money than I would ever admit ordering chemicals through different accounts so nobody would question why a high school student needed industrial polymers delivered to her house.
If you’re wondering how a sixteen-year-old managed to afford all of that…
Fair question.
Turns out, New York pays surprisingly well for exclusive Spider-Man photos.
The Daily Bugle, in particular, was willing to pay for rooftop photos of New York’s newest masked vigilante, especially when those photos came from angles no other photographer could reach.
Getting the pictures was easy.
I owned a camera, knew the best rooftops, and had exclusive access to a subject who could be persuaded to hold still whenever rent (for industrial polymers) was due. I would secure the camera somewhere nearby, set the timer or remote shutter, move through the frame in costume, and sell the least embarrassing shots under a fake name.
After enough trial and error, I got pretty good at making it look like someone else had taken the pictures.
The Bugle didn’t ask too many questions as long as the pictures were good, and I didn’t volunteer any answers. Every photo they bought paid for another cartridge, another circuit board, another bottle of chemicals, or another attempt at building equipment no teenager had any reasonable need to own.
Convenient, right?
I got paid.
The Bugle got exclusive Spider-Man photos.
Everybody walked away happy.
…Or so I thought.
There was just one tiny flaw in my otherwise brilliant business model.
The editor of the Daily Bugle absolutely despised Spider-Man.
Every time I sold them another photo, there was a decent chance I’d open the paper the next morning and find my own picture printed above a headline accusing me of being a menace, a vigilante, or the reason New York couldn’t have nice things. I’d spend all night stopping a robbery. Then I’d wake up to read that I was apparently destroying the moral fabric of society.
Mr. Jameson had a remarkable talent for looking at the exact same photograph I had taken and turning “Spider-Man saves thirty people” into “Masked Menace Endangers Entire City.”
Spider-Man stopped an armed robbery?
Masked vigilante terrorizes local business.
Spider-Man rescued someone from a burning apartment?
Menace interferes with emergency responders.
Spider-Man prevented a car from falling off a bridge?
Who damaged the bridge in the first place?
Sometimes he would circle me in red ink and print an arrow pointing at my face like readers might otherwise overlook the person crawling the side of a building in the center of the page. Other times he’d zoom in so aggressively that half the front page became my goggles accompanied by a headline:
WHAT IS HE HIDING?
A face, Mr. Jameson.
I was hiding my face.
That was the entire purpose of the mask.
I started buying copies of the paper just to see what he had done with my photographs or what he would come up with next. It was probably unhealthy, but curiosity kept winning. Every morning became a game of guessing how he would transform whatever I had done the night before into a threat against public safety.
I’ll admit some of them were creative.
Insulting, but creative.
I was literally being paid to provide evidence for my own slander.
But… the checks still cleared.
So I kept sending the photos.
Industrial polymers aren’t exactly cheap for a high school student whose primary source of income is lunch money and birthday cash.
The Bugle thought they had found an unusually committed freelance photographer. In reality, they were funding the web fluid they would later complain about me leaving all over Manhattan.
I tried not to think too hard about the ethics of that arrangement. Funding Spider-Man by selling photographs of Spider-Man feels a little ridiculous, but it also kept the experiments going. Every failed mixture went into an old metal cabinet at the back of the garage, where my parents believed I kept abandoned science projects.
Technically, they were not wrong.
The fluid came together before the launchers did. It left the cartridge as a liquid, solidified the instant it contacted air, and began breaking down after several hours before eventually dissolving on its own, giving the city enough time to scrape criminals off walls without leaving webbing behind forever. My first working strand held a cinder block above the garage floor overnight.
I celebrated too early.
The next morning, the web dissolved exactly as designed and dropped the cinder block onto my foot.
Building the shooters required smaller parts, steadier hands, and several weeks of trying to hide burns along my fingers. I designed the trigger to respond to pressure from my middle and ring fingers, letting me fire without using my entire hand. The cartridges sat beneath my wrists, small enough to disappear under my sleeves and durable enough to survive the force of a full swing.
The first time I tested one outside, the web attached to a tree across the backyard.
I pulled.
The branch came off.
The second test attached me to the fence.
The third worked.
For three full seconds, I swung above the grass and understood exactly why people enjoyed roller coasters.
Then I hit the side of the shed.
After enough bruises, broken cartridges, and late nights in the garage, the webs became reliable. I learned how much fluid each swing required, how to adjust the pressure for different distances, and how to fire wide nets, narrow lines, or enough adhesive to keep a moving car from reaching an intersection.
I finally got to test them out during a jewelry store break-in barely fifteen minutes from home.
I wasn’t looking for trouble.
I was on my way back from another night of testing the web shooters when I heard glass shatter three blocks away, followed by the unmistakable sound of a store alarm.
Curiosity made the decision before common sense could object.
By the time I reached the roof across the street, the front windows had already been shattered, and the first 911 calls were only beginning to come in.
It probably wasn’t my smartest decision.
It was, however, the first time I genuinely felt like Spider-Man.
Inside, glass covered the floor, reflecting the store’s flashing security lights. Three men in dark clothes were emptying display cases into canvas bags while a fourth stood near the entrance with a handgun.
I stayed outside for a moment, pressed against the brick beside the broken storefront, trying to decide how someone with actual experience would handle the situation.
Then the man near the door looked up.
Our eyes met through my goggles.
So much for planning.
He raised the gun, and I fired my right web shooter before he could aim. The strand caught the weapon and ripped it from his hand so quickly that both of us stared after it. The gun struck the wall and stayed there, secured beneath a thick layer of webbing.
It worked.
It had actually worked.
I was still celebrating when he grabbed a metal display stand and threw it at my head. My senses warned me before it left his hands. I pushed away from the wall, flipped over the stand, and landed inside the store with far more confidence than I felt.
The three robbers stopped moving.
I straightened and looked around as though I had planned the entrance.
“Uh, hi everyone.”
One of them tried to reach into his jacket.
I fired both shooters again.
They struck his chest, and I pulled him forward, sending him face-first into an empty display case. Before he could recover, I webbed him to the wall.
The third robber charged at me with a crowbar. I ducked beneath his first swing and caught his wrist on the second. The spider bite had made it easy to forget how strong I was. I twisted his arm, expecting resistance, and accidentally sent him spinning across the room. He crashed into a chair, rolled over it, and landed beneath a jewelry advertisement featuring a model who looked genuinely disappointed in him.
“Sorry!” I said.
He answered by throwing the chair.
I caught it with one hand.
That seemed to upset him more.
A web caught his ankle as he tried to run. I pulled, and he shot backward across the tile before I webbed him upside down from a ceiling fixture, his canvas bag still clutched against his chest.
That left one of the men by the display cases.
By the time I reached the particularly mouthy robber near the back counter, half the display cases were empty, and his partner was dangling above us while loose necklaces rained out of the bag. The store alarm had been ringing long enough to become part of the background. Somewhere beyond the broken windows, police sirens were getting closer.
He tightened both hands around a baseball bat. “You’re smaller than you look in the pictures,” he said.
I stared at him through the mask.
That was his opening line?
I had dropped from the wall, disarmed his partner, stuck the other onto the wall, and suspended another man above the store. He had watched all of that happen and decided my height was the most relevant observation.
“I’m still growing.”
He swung.
My body moved before I finished processing the warning in my head. I leaned aside, letting the bat pass inches from my mask, then fired a web at its end.
The strand connected.
I pulled.
This dude refused to let go. The bat dragged him across the floor until he slammed into the counter hard enough to knock several empty ring stands onto the tile. He staggered upright, still holding the bat. He pulled against the strand several times, testing whether brute force might solve a problem that had already survived his partner’s full body weight.
It obviously did not.
He rushed at me again.
I jumped, planted one foot against the wall, and pushed off. My body carried me over his head. I landed behind him, fired both shooters, and caught his shoulders with two separate strands.
He tried to turn.
He barely had time to look back before I crossed my arms and pulled.
The webs yanked him off his feet and slammed him into a padded chair. Another series of webs wrapped around his waist and legs, and I secured both wrists behind him before he could stand again.
He strained against the webbing until the chair creaked beneath him. Then he stopped, sniffed once, and looked at the strands around his arms before glaring at me.
“This stuff smells weird.”
“It’s experimental.”
He tilted his head in confusion.
…I probably shouldn’t have told him that.
Not the smartest thing to tell the guy currently being held together by my homemade chemistry project.
I cleared my throat and nodded toward the shattered display cases, hoping to steer the conversation somewhere less concerning. “Most people stop committing the crime after they get caught.”
He lifted his chin as much as the webbing allowed. “I’m not caught.”
I looked pointedly at the chair, then lifted my gaze to his partner, who was still turning slowly from the ceiling.
“You’re attached to a chair,” I pointed out.
“This stuff won’t hold.”
I tipped my head toward the man overhead. “That’s what your friend thought.”
The hanging robber twisted around just enough to glare at me. The movement sent the necklaces inside the bag clattering together.
“I didn’t say that,” he countered.
“No,” I said. “You just had the same look on your face.”
He frowned down at me, genuinely trying to work through the thought. “What, you telekinetic too?”
I stared at him for a second. “You mean telepathic.”
He frowned even harder, apparently unwilling to surrender the point. “…No.”
I sighed behind the mask. “You definitely mean telepathic.”
He tried to argue, but the movement made the canvas bag slip from his grip. It struck the floor beneath him, spilling more bracelets and watches across the tiles.
The robber on the chair watched the jewelry scatter. His jaw tightened beneath the edge of his ski mask before he looked back at me. Whatever plan they had made before entering the store had clearly ended somewhere between the broken window and his partner becoming part of the lighting.
“You think you’re funny?” the mouthy robber asked me.
“I think I’m stopping a robbery. The humor is a free service.”
“You’re just some kid in pajamas,” he said, his voice rising as the sirens drew nearer. “You think that makes you a hero?”
I glanced down at the suit I had spent several nights sewing together. The fabric had already torn near one knee, and the red sweatshirt had belonged to me since middle school. Calling it pajamas was insulting, although it was difficult to argue with the evidence.
“They have reinforced stitching,” I said. “That makes them tactical pajamas.”
He looked at me more carefully than he had since I crashed in. His eyes traveled from the goggles to the oversized sweatshirt, then down the rest of the suit before flicking around the store. One partner was still webbed to the wall beside the shattered display cases. Another continued turning slowly from the ceiling. The man who had been guarding the front door was nowhere to be found.
His attention settled on me again, trying to reconcile the person standing in front of him with the one who had dismantled their robbery in less than a minute.
“What are you supposed to be?” he asked. “Some boy who hasn’t hit puberty yet?”
I stared at him through the goggles.
“Now that’s just offensive.”
The robber laughed, encouraged by the fact that I had answered at all. “Hit a nerve, did I?”
“Several, actually.”
A metallic scrape echoed from the front of the store.
I turned just in time to see the man who had been guarding the entrance step back into view. Sometime during my conversation with this loud one here, he’d managed to slice the webbing off his handgun with a pocketknife and pull it free from the wall.
He looked far too pleased with himself.
I sighed.
“See, this is why people can’t have nice conversations.”
A flick of my wrist sent another strand of webbing across the room. It wrapped around the gun before he could raise it. I yanked it clean from his hand and carried it the rest of the way into the shattered display case behind me. Another quick shot followed, pinning the weapon beneath a fresh layer of webbing before he could even think about chasing after it.
The man blinked at his now-empty hand.
Before he could decide on another terrible idea, I fired a strand that wrapped around his chest and both arms, pinning them tightly against his sides before he could reach for anything again.
“Oh, come on—”
I crossed the store while he struggled, grabbed the webbing around his torso, and lifted him off the floor.
“What are you doing?” he asked, kicking his feet uselessly beneath him as I carried him toward the center of the room.
“Relocating you,” I said as I adjusted my grip, looked up at the ceiling, and threw him.
He hit the ceiling with a muffled grunt. Before gravity could remember he belonged on the ground, I fired again. Fresh strands spread across his shoulders, waist, and legs, securing him to the ceiling.
He blinked.
He struggled.
Nothing moved except his feet.
I lowered both wrists and looked between the two men now suspended overhead.
“There,” I said. “Now you have a friend.”
“I didn’t ask for one,” the newly webbed robber snapped, giving the restraints another futile tug.
“I was doing just fine by myself,” the first robber butted in.
“You didn’t look like it,” I replied. “You were hanging there all alone. It was starting to get sad.”
The first robber turned his head and studied his new neighbor. “You look like a cocoon.”
The second robber twisted toward him as far as the webbing allowed. “Shut up.”
“No, seriously.” The first one squinted. “Give it a few days. Maybe you’ll turn into a butterfly.”
“At least I can still move my feet.”
The first robber, still hanging upside down by his webbed ankles, twisted toward him and raised both hands.
“Yeah?” he said. “Well, I can do this.”
He extended both middle fingers.
I pinched the bridge of my nose.
Seriously?
The two of them continued bickering, each apparently determined to prove he was having the worse day. I gave them another moment before clearing my throat.
“Excuse me, gentlemen,” I said. “As much as I appreciate you keeping each other occupied, I was actually in the middle of a conversation.”
The second robber turned his head toward me. His expression suggested he regretted surviving long enough to witness any of this. After a long, defeated groan, he fixed me with a glare.
“I hate you,” he muttered.
“That’s fair,” I admitted. “I did just throw you to the ceiling.”
He tested the webbing again, accomplishing nothing except making himself sway a few inches.
“Get me down!”
I shook my head. “That would defeat the entire purpose of putting you up there.”
From behind the register, the clerk finally lifted her head. She looked from me to the man webbed to the wall, to the two men secured overhead, then toward the robber still webbed to the chair.
“…Is this normal for you?” she asked.
I looked around the store. I took in the shattered windows, the broken display cases, and the jewelry scattered across the floor before glancing back up at the other two robbers who had already resumed glaring at each other.
“Honestly?” I said. “This feels kinda like my first day.”
The clerk blinked. “…Oh.”
I nodded once before turning back to the chatty robber still webbed to the chair.
“Now,” I said, stepping closer, “going back to our conversation before we were so rudely interrupted…”
He stopped tugging at the webbing just long enough to glare at me.
“Can I ask you something?”
“What?” he asked impatiently.
“What exactly makes you think I’m a teenage boy?”
His eyebrows pulled together.
I gestured toward myself, inviting him to explain. “Is it the goggles? The sweatshirt? The deeply intimidating tactical pajamas?”
“Why do you care?”
“Because everyone keeps saying it.” I leaned one hip against the display case. The police were close enough now that I could hear sirens echoing off the buildings. “The reporters called me a teenage boy. The people online called me a teenage boy. One guy spent minutes explaining why I probably play high school varsity basketball.”
Above us, one of the robbers shifted against the webbing, making the ceiling fixture creak. “You sound like one,” he called down.
I turned my head toward him. “I didn’t ask you.”
“I know,” he said, managing a small shrug. “I just wanted to contribute.”
I stared up at him through the goggles. “I… sound like a teenage boy?”
He hesitated. Until then, he had seemed perfectly comfortable contributing from the ceiling. Now he looked as though he regretted reentering the conversation at all.
“Your voice is high,” he said eventually.
The robber secured to the chair snorted. “And you never stop talking,” he added.
I looked down at him. “That’s your evidence?”
“You make stupid jokes while people are pointing guns at you.”
“That sounds more like poor survival instinct,” I said.
“You’re cocky too,” he added.
I walked toward him and rested one hand against the back of his chair. “So are you, and you’re webbed to furniture.”
Both robbers overhead laughed.
The man in the chair glared up at them. “Neither of you is helping.”
One of the robbers overhead pulled against the webbing around his shoulders, then let his head fall back against the ceiling.
“We’re stuck up here,” he said. “What exactly do you want us to do?”
“I don’t know,” the robber in the chair muttered. “Just… stop agreeing with him.”
Neither of the men overhead looked particularly interested in doing that. I let the silence hang for a moment before looking between all three of them.
“So,” I said, “your case so far is that my voice hasn’t dropped yet and I’m young, sarcastic, and reckless.”
“And skinny,” the robber in the chair added without missing a beat.
I scoffed at that.
Excuse me, I had perfectly well-defined abs beneath the sweatshirt, thank you very much.
I worked hard for these.
Granted, most of that work came from getting launched into walls, running across rooftops, and swinging around New York like I had absolutely no regard for my own safety, but they still counted.
The sweatshirt just happened to be three sizes too big.
That was hardly my fault.
I looked back at the robber. “The sweatshirt just looks big on me.”
He gave me a skeptical once-over. “…Sure.”
“You don’t have to sound so unconvinced.”
The robber leaned as far over the counter as the webbing allowed. His shoulders strained against the restraint, though he had already proven twice that pulling harder accomplished nothing. Frustration had begun replacing the confidence he had walked in with, and he seemed determined to recover some of it by making me uncomfortable.
“Then come on, kid,” he said. “Take off the mask. Let’s see what we’re dealing with.”
I looked at the black ski mask covering everything except his eyes and mouth.
“Uh, you first.”
“I’m not the one hiding.”
“You’re wearing a ski mask… inside a jewelry store.”
His eyes moved toward his partners on the ceiling, perhaps hoping for support, but they had become far more interested in watching the conversation.
“It’s not the same,” the robber finally said.
“You’re right.” I tapped one finger against the edge of my goggles. “Mine has cool goggles.”
His patience broke.
He threw his weight backward, trying once more to tear his wrists free. The webbing stretched slightly, then snapped him firmly back against the chair.
“When I get out of this,” he said, breathing harder now, “I’m going to break every bone in your body.”
I considered that while checking the street through the shattered front windows. Police lights flashed against the glass scattered across the floor, and the sirens were close enough to make the remaining jewelry tremble inside the cases.
“That could take a while,” I told him. “There are two hundred and six.”
He followed my gaze toward the approaching cruisers and mistook it for worry. A grin returned to his face, weaker than before but still smug enough to be irritating. “You keep talking like that because you think the cops are going to save you.”
I looked back at him. “I was under the impression they were coming for you.”
The sirens grew louder as several patrol cars pulled up outside. Officers moved behind the doors with their weapons raised, shouting instructions through the ruined entrance. The clerk had already begun waving from behind the register, pointing toward the two men secured inside and the other two on the ceiling.
My work was finished.
I backed toward the shattered window and raised one wrist toward the building across the street. The robber attached to the chair watched me prepare to leave, his frustration deepening when he realized the police were only seconds away from finding him webbed to expensive furniture.
“Yeah, run away,” he called after me. “That’s right, you little—”
I fired without turning around. The web struck him across the mouth. His insult dissolved into a furious, muffled yell as the strand sealed his lips and kept him from finishing the sentence.
I tilted my head as though I were considering it.
“Compelling argument.”
His partners began laughing openly from the ceiling. The robber on the chair turned his glare toward them, then back toward me. He tested the web across his mouth with his tongue and immediately regretted it.
“It dissolves eventually,” I told him. “Until then, try breathing through your nose.”
He responded with another furious noise. I webbed away as the police entered through the shattered storefront. It was way easier than explaining.
First, the web shooters worked perfectly under pressure.
Second, tactical pajamas were still pajamas.
By the time I reached home, the tear near my knee had spread halfway up my leg. One sleeve had started separating from the shoulder, the sweatshirt was stained with dust and glass, and the goggles had fogged so badly during the fight that I had spent several seconds relying almost entirely on my spider-sense.
The suit had survived.
Barely.
I climbed through my bedroom window, caught my reflection in the mirror, and understood why the robber had looked so unimpressed.
The outfit had been useful when I was testing my powers after dark. It covered my face and kept my regular clothes from getting destroyed. That had seemed good enough when my biggest concern was falling off a roof where nobody could see me.
It was different now.
People had seen Spider-Man.
The police had seen Spider-Man.
Cameras had caught flashes of red fabric, swimming goggles, and a sweatshirt I had owned long enough for my best friend to recognize it if the footage ever became clear.
That last thought made me tear the suit off immediately.
I spread every piece across my bedroom floor and started over.
The new suit needed stronger fabric, reinforced seams, flexible protection around the joints, and a mask that would stay in place when I moved. It also needed to hide anything that could point back to me. No old clothes. No recognizable shoes. Nothing my best friend had borrowed, insulted, repaired, or seen folded inside my closet.
I spent the next three weeks sketching designs during class and pretending they were chemistry notes whenever she leaned over.
I ordered fabric through three different accounts, paid with prepaid cards, and had everything delivered to a locker across town. I rebuilt the goggles with white lenses that widened and narrowed with my expressions, then added a thin protective layer strong enough to survive impact without blocking my vision.
The suit took several attempts.
The first version restricted my shoulders.
The second tore when I climbed the side of an abandoned warehouse.
The third fit properly but made breathing through the mask feel like inhaling through a sock.
By the fourth, I finally had something that moved with me.
Red across the mask, shoulders, and torso. Blue along the sides and legs. Reinforced gloves around the web shooters. Lightweight protection beneath the fabric where punches usually landed. A black spider emblem stretched across the chest, large enough to be seen from a distance.
It looked like a real suit.
More importantly, it looked like it belonged to Spider-Man.
Not Ryujin Shin.
The city may have created an entire person beneath the mask who was somewhere between sixteen and twenty-five depending on which witness had been interviewed. Online detectives began searching for male students who lived near the fire. News stations interviewed boys from nearby schools. Entire discussion forums appeared to analyze the height, weight, and possible identity of New York’s newest masked hero.
But my name never appeared once.
So I let them believe it.
Every wrong guess placed another layer between Spider-Man and Ryujin Shin.
It was the safest accident that had ever happened to me.
The reporters could keep calling Spider-Man he. Criminals could threaten to break his neck. As long as nobody looked toward the seventeen-year-old girl from Queens slipping into class with wet hair and bruises beneath her sleeves, I had no reason to complain.
There were rules to maintaining a secret identity.
Never change near a security camera. Never leave web cartridges in your school bag where someone might borrow a pen and find them. Never use your powers without your suit. Never let anyone notice that Spider-Man shows up whenever you disappear.
Most of those rules were easy enough to follow.
I knew where the cameras were. I kept the cartridges hidden beneath a false panel in my bag. I had learned how to catch falling objects without making it obvious that my reflexes had moved before everyone else’s.
The last rule was more complicated.
Thanks to one Yeji Hwang.
You know…
The best friend I kept telling you about.
Yeah.
That one.
Yeji lived next door. Our families had shared the same quiet neighborhood for as long as either of us could remember. Our houses were separated by nothing more than a white picket fence that had somehow stopped meaning anything years ago. They stood close enough that we could talk through our bedroom windows.
We grew up racing bicycles down the same sidewalks, climbing the same trees, and spending summers wandering back and forth between our backyards until our parents had to call us home for dinner. We had spent most of our childhood moving between each other’s homes, borrowing clothes, stealing snacks, and climbing through windows whenever one of our parents decided we had spent enough time together for the day.
By the time we reached high school, not much had changed. We still walked to school together every morning. She still sat beside me in chemistry. She still stole food from my lunch whenever she claimed hers looked less interesting.
Yeji knew me better than anyone.
She knew how long I took to answer when I was lying. She noticed whenever I skipped breakfast, slept through class, or showed up with a bruise I could not explain. She remembered every excuse I used, which became a problem once I started repeating them.
Keeping Spider-Man hidden from the rest of New York was one thing.
Keeping Spider-Man hidden from the girl who had known me since I still needed help tying my shoes required more planning than fighting criminals ever had.
That girl noticed everything.
Unfortunately, she also happened to be the person I spent most of my time with.
She had been my best friend since we were kids.
She also had a very enthusiastic interest in Spider-Man.
I knew this because she told me.
Frequently.
According to Yeji, Spider-Man was this brave, clever, selfless, and unfairly charming guy who happened to hide behind a mask. She followed every news report, saved videos of his rescues, and defended him during arguments. She insisted Spider-Man wasn’t reckless. She insisted the city needed him. She insisted his jokes were funny.
They weren’t.
…Okay, maybe some of them were.
The Daily Bugle was public enemy number one for her.
Yeji had an almost personal rivalry with that newspaper. Every time Mr. Jameson published another article calling Spider-Man a menace, she’d march straight into the comments section like she had been personally summoned.
She’d quote eyewitness accounts, link videos they’d conveniently ignored, and point out factual errors. She’d correct timestamps, correct locations, correct… grammar. Once, she wrote a response so long I genuinely wondered if she’d accidentally submitted a college essay.
Another time, she spent twenty minutes explaining to me why the Bugle had deliberately cropped one of my photos to make it look like Spider-Man had caused more damage than he actually had.
She was right.
I’d been there.
Obviously.
Watching her defend me was…
Weird.
She’d spend an entire afternoon dismantling every point in an article I’d unknowingly helped publish by selling them the photograph in the first place. Meanwhile, I’d be sitting next to her, nodding along, thinking, ‘Yeah… that’s actually a pretty good argument.’
Sometimes she’d look over and ask, “Back me up here.”
I’d clear my throat. “I mean… maybe Spider-Man could’ve handled that a little better.”
She’d gasp like I’d committed a crime.
“Ryujin.”
“What?”
“You sound like Jameson.”
That was usually where I decided it was safest to stop talking.
Hearing Yeji praise Spider-Man should have been flattering. Every compliment belonged to me, even if she had no idea she was giving it to the girl sitting beside her. Whenever she called him brave or charming, I had to keep my face neutral and pretend my heart hadn’t started racing.
She’d say things like, “Spider-Man always shows up.”
I’d nod.
“He really cares about people.”
I’d nod again.
“I think he’s willing to risk everything for complete strangers.”
Still nodding.
I also couldn’t look too pleased.
So I usually settled for staring at whatever was in front of me and hoping Yeji wouldn’t notice that my ears had turned red.
The whole conversation felt like sitting through my own performance review. Except the person giving the review had no idea I was in the room.
Keeping a secret identity isn’t just about hiding the suit.
It’s about pretending you don’t know things you definitely know. It’s biting your tongue when the news gets the story wrong. It’s listening to your best friend spend ten minutes explaining why Spider-Man made the only possible choice in a situation…
…when you remember standing on that rooftop wondering if you were about to make the worst decision of your life.
And every now and then, Yeji would smile after defending Spider-Man for the hundredth time and say something that caught me completely off guard.
“I hope he knows people appreciate what he does.”
She’d say it so casually like she was talking about the weather. Then she’d go back to eating lunch.
I’d sit there in silence.
Because for one brief second… it felt like she was talking to me.
The problem was that Yeji wasn’t talking about me.
She was talking about the person she imagined beneath the mask. Some mysterious boy who swung through New York, saved people, and always knew what to say. He definitely did not fall asleep on top of his homework or walk into the same doorframe twice in one morning because Yeji had smiled at him.
Meanwhile, the real Spider-Man was sitting beside her in chemistry, borrowing her notes and trying not to look too pleased whenever she called my own masked alter ego attractive.
It was humiliating.
It was also the closest I had ever come to hearing Yeji admit she might like me.
Because I had been in love with her for years.
God, even saying it out loud sounds kinda pathetic.
I had super strength, heightened reflexes, and the ability to cling to the side of a skyscraper. None of it helped when Yeji tucked her hair behind her ear and asked why I was staring.
I could dodge bullets.
I could not dodge that question.
My brain would completely abandon me.
I’d look away like I’d just been caught committing a crime, mumble the first excuse I could think of, and hope she bought it.
But the truth was simple. I liked looking at her.
I liked the way she frowned whenever she concentrated, the little wrinkle that appeared between her eyebrows when she read, the way she always stole food off my tray without asking because she somehow considered my lunch part of a shared meal.
I had known Yeji for most of my life, which meant I had also spent most of my life learning every detail that made loving her inconvenient.
I knew she hated the crusts on sandwiches but refused to cut them off herself.
I knew she preferred blue pens for class notes, black pens for student council paperwork, and that she always carried two extras because she knew I’d forget mine.
I knew she became louder when she was nervous and pressed her lips together whenever she was trying not to smile.
I knew the sound of her laugh before I turned a corner.
I knew the rhythm of her footsteps walking up the driveway between our houses.
I knew all of those things.
What I didn’t know was how to tell my best friend that I’d been hopelessly in love with her long before I started swinging across Manhattan. Somewhere along the way, my best friend became the first person I looked for every morning and the last person I wanted to say goodnight to.
Yeji would rest her head against my shoulder during the bus ride home, and I would spend the entire trip sitting perfectly still. Whenever she smiled at me across a classroom, the rest of the room became harder to notice.
I had never told her.
Instead, I listened while she talked about Spider-Man.
She sent me clips of rescues I had barely survived and replayed my own jokes as though I had not made them while hanging upside down from a streetlight. She defended Spider-Man when I tried to criticize him, praised his courage when I knew how frightened I had been, and wondered what it would be like to meet him without realizing she saw me every morning.
Sometimes she would lean closer, lower her voice, and admit that she thought Spider-Man was very… likeable.
I would nod as though the information meant nothing.
Then I would go home, climb through my bedroom window, remove the mask she admired, and wonder how I had managed to become jealous of myself.
Sometimes I wondered if telling her would finally make everything simple.
Then I remembered the mask wasn’t just protecting me anymore.
It protected my parents. It protected our home. It protected everyone close enough to become a target simply because they knew my name. Including Yeji.
So every time she smiled at me and wondered aloud what Spider-Man was really like beneath the mask, I smiled back… and lied.
She still believed Spider-Man was a boy.
And I was still hopelessly in love with her.
Those two facts had turned my life into a joke that only the universe seemed to enjoy.
Still, I had managed.
For one year, eight months, and twelve days, I protected New York, concealed my identity, and listened to my best friend gush about the masked hero she had no idea was sitting beside her.
It was exhausting.
It was humiliating.
It was working.
Then, on a Friday morning in October, two armed men entered a deli three blocks from our school.
And everything began to fall apart.