Chapter Text
Peter Parker knew I was looking at his paper. He was pretending he didn't, which only made it considerably more obvious.
For the last thirty seconds, his arm had been sitting at an angle no human being would ever naturally choose, half-covering the top corner of his test while he copied something from the board that Mr Harrington had already told us twice we didn't need to write down. Every time I shifted in my seat, Peter somehow managed to shift with me without actually looking in my direction.
I leaned slightly to the left.
His elbow moved.
I leaned further.
So did his elbow.
“Oh, come on.”
“I'm working.”
“You're hiding it.”
Peter continued writing with the sort of concentration usually reserved for a bomb disposal. “I'm literally not.”
“You literally are.”
That finally got him to look at me. He was caught somewhere between annoyed and amused, which was a fairly common expression whenever I was involved “Can you just wait until he gives you yours?”
“No.”
“Why?”
“Because I want to know now.”
“That sounds like a you problem.”
Across the table, Ned glanced up from his own paper. “She got a hundred.”
My head snapped towards him at exactly the same moment Peter's pen stopped moving.
“Ned.”
“What?”
Peter looked genuinely betrayed. "Ned."
“What?” he repeated, although the guilt creeping into his voice made it significantly less convincing the second time.
I held a hand out towards Peter. “Move.”
He stared at me as though pretending not to understand might somehow save him.
“Your arm, Parker.”
“Oh.”
He moved it.
Ninety-nine.
The grin spread across my face before I could even pretend to be gracious about it, and Peter immediately looked like he regretted ever allowing me within three feet of the paper.
“That's ugly.”
“What is?”
“That face.”
“My face?”
“The one you're making right now.”
I sat back in my chair, still smiling. “I'm not making a face.”
“You are. It's a smug face.”
“I have absolutely no idea what you mean.”
“You've been waiting three days for this.”
“I've been waiting twenty minutes. I didn't know the scores three days ago.”
“You told me yesterday you were going to beat me.”
“And loot at that. I was right.”
Mr Harrington reached our table before Peter could come up with a response and placed my test face-down in front of me. I didn't need to turn it over; Ned had already ruined any possibility of suspense. Still, I flipped it anyway, mostly because I wanted Peter to see the large red 100 written across the top.
Ned laughed under his breath.
Peter looked personally offended.
“Peter, you were one point behind me.”
“One whole point,” he said, as if I'd somehow underestimated the scale of the tragedy.
“You missed three on the last one.”
“And you missed four,” he shot back immediately, far too quickly for somebody pretending he hadn't been keeping track. "And before you say anything, yes, I remember."
“Yeah but that was chemistry,” I argued.
“That doesn't make it any better.”
“It was one question.”
“It was four marks,” Peter tapped the corner of his paper with the end of his pen. “And I got the extra credit.”
I opened my mouth, prepared to argue, but there wasn’t really anywhere useful to take that without admitting he had a point. Peter noticed the exact moment I realised it too, which was irritating enough that I shut my mouth and looked back down at my paper before he could enjoy it.
Still, I was one point ahead of him, and there was something deeply satisfying about beating Peter Parker.
Not because he was unbearable about grades. He wasn’t, really. Flash was unbearable about grades, usually for reasons that had very little to do with whatever grade he'd actually received. Peter just cared. Quietly, intensely and more than he liked admitting. He was the sort of person who would shrug when somebody asked whether he was nervous about a result and then refresh the online portal every twelve minutes until it appeared.
The problem was that I cared too.
Neither of us had set out to make everything a competition. It had started with one test, then a lab report, then Peter beating me by two marks in calculus and making the mistake of looking far too pleased with himself afterwards. From there, it had apparently become an unspoken agreement that anything remotely measurable was fair game.
Ned called it our academic cold war.
MJ called us both annoying.
I preferred to think competition encouraged personal growth.
Peter thought that was bullshit.
“Enjoy second place,” I said.
His pen stopped again, and there was a beat before he turned towards me. "You're the worst."
“You’ll recover.”
“I beat you in calculus.”
“Last semester.”
“It still happened.”
“History is important, Peter, but we can’t live in it.”
Ned made a strangled noise into the sleeve of his jumper while Peter pointed his pen at me.
“This is exactly why nobody likes you.”
“You like me.”
Peter went completely still.
It took me a second to realise why.
Ned stopped laughing beside him, and when I looked over, Peter was staring at me like I'd just asked him a question he hadn't studied for. The tips of his ears had started turning red.
I frowned. “That was a joke.”
“Yeah.”
“Okay.”
“I knew that.”
“Did you?”
“Obviously.”
He sounded so painfully unconvincing that I almost felt bad for him.
Almost.
I glanced towards Ned, perhaps hoping for some explanation, but he had abruptly discovered a deep fascination with the periodic table pinned to the wall behind Mr Harrington's desk.
Right.
Peter was being weird again
It had become enough of a regular occurrence lately that I'd mostly topped asking about it. He’d always been awkward; that wasn’t exactly breaking news. Peter spoke too quickly when he was nervous, forgot what he was saying halfway through saying it and had once spent an entire conversation with me holding a cereal bar he’d apparently forgotten he’d opened.
But there seemed to be a particular kind of awkwardness reserved specifically for me.
It wasn’t constant, which made it more confusing. sometimes we could sit together for an hour arguing over a lab report, leaning over the same sheet of paper and stealing each other's pens without Peter so much as blinking. Other times I’d ask whether he had a spare pencil and he’d react like I’d proposed marriage.
I’d thought about asking MJ what she made of it.
Then I remembered that MJ would tell me exactly what she made of it, probably while maintaining uncomfortable levels of eye contact, and I decided I valued my peace too much.
The bell rang before Peter could managed to return to a normal colour, and the entire room seemed to move at once as chairs scraped back and bags were dragged from beneath desks.
“Decathlon meeting at lunch,” Mr Harrington called over the noise. “And I do mean everybody this time. Mr Leeds.”
Ned paused with his backpack halfway over one shoulder. “I had a dentist appointment.”
“You were eating pizza in the cafeteria.”
“I got hungry on the way back.”
Mr Harrington stared at him with the exhausted expression of someone who had heard every excuse Midtown had to offer.
Peter laughed and shoved his thing into his bag, and Ned responded by pushing him towards the door. I took slightly more care putting my test away than was strictly necessary, smoothing the edge before sliding it between my notes.
Peter noticed.
Of course he did.
“Are you framing it?”
“I might.”
“Of course you are.”
I zipped the folder into my bag. “One day you’ll look back on this and be proud you came so close.”
He stared at me for a long moment, his expression flattening with every second that passed.
I smiled.
“Second place,” I reminded him.
Peter pulled his bag onto his shoulder. "Keep talking, Mercer."
“Oh I plan to.”
He rolled his eyes, but there was a smile threatening at the top of his mouth as he followed Ned out into the corridor.
I watched him go for half a second before catching myself and reaching for my own bag.
Maybe competition did encourage personal growth after all.