Walking the Wire | PETER PARKER [1]

| 9 |

He shrugs and looks away. "It's nothing."

Eloise's eyes linger on him for a while before Ned sends her a look and shakes his head. She gets the memo not to talk about it and instead chats about how hard her Spanish test was. Ned then starts to talk about how his cousin was a foreign exchange student in Spain for a semester, and it goes on from there, Peter never really saying anything.

She has to bite her tongue from bombarding him with questions that she's sure he doesn't want to answer. She could always ask Ned, but he's Peter's best friend; he wouldn't spill all of Peter's secrets and problems to her.

So, Eloise doesn't push either of them to tell her anything. She just continues on with the casual conversation all the way up to their apartments.

🕸

Park East is playing against Midtown. Eloise shouldn't be surprised, really; I mean, if she was paying attention at all to the school's weekly schedule, she'd have known this since Monday.

Midtown fans made up of students, parents, family, friends, etc. have taken over the one set of wooden bleachers. There's no bleacher space left, which happens all the time, but instead of sitting in the grass or in fold-up chairs, the fans complain. Some take their complaints to our principal, who doesn't take them seriously and continues his crossword puzzle.

Meanwhile, Eloise finds a spot in the Park East student cheer block. Even though their school is small and many of Park East's students have bigger responsibilities to be tending to, the student cheer block is considerably big. The cheer block is standing in between the two teams' benches and is full of teens just wanting to have fun, hang out with friends, and support the team.

Some Midtown students throw some nasty words at the block as they pass. Flash, the rude boy whom Eloise ran into in front of their school a week or so ago, is in front of the pack of hollering Midtown-ers.

Eloise ignores their distasteful words and finds Elena in the cheer block. She didn't have work today, but Lucy did and Alev is at home with her mother, so it's just the two of them.

A few minutes pass and the Park East soccer boys jog out onto the field. Their side whoops and cheers. Elena harmonizes her cheer with the crowd and holds up her homemade sign with Luis's jersey number written in red. Luis, in the small crowd of boys in their hand-me-down jerseys, throws a thumbs-up at his sister and winks as he jogs by.

As the team starts to stretch and warm up, Midtown's team comes out and more screams ensue. They jump up and down and make different signs with their hands. Then, as they pass by Park East's boys, a few laugh at them and trash-talk them, calling them poor mutts and such.

It's comforting to know that not all of Midtown students act like that.

On Park East's team, there are seven players: Luis, Cliff—the team's only player that isn't swimming in his jersey—Noah Fraser, Leo Gunther, Dami D'Adamo, Ben Johns, and Jeremy Paal. With an exception of Cliff, all of the boys are scrawny; however, together, they are strong. With their work ethic and their close bond as more than just a high school sports team, they can win this game and school Midtown.

Hopefully.

The game soon starts and the players on each side take their places on the field. There are certain patches of dirt in the field, and a few of the other team's players smirk smugly at it. Their field is flawlessly trimmed and is a bright green color. The faded white lines and crooked goal posts aren't helping Park East.