Peter woke up, his senses bobbing up and down like something floating in water. He really needed to go out soon.
He yawned, stretching himself awake and blinking the sleep from his eyes.
Peter glanced at his phone, picking it up as he did every morning
-
Pretty Boy (3 hours ago)
Good morning Princess
KingOfSpiders
Wtf were you doing up at 4 in the morning
Pretty Boy
I got bored!
And that was when I went to sleep
KingOfSpiders
Dude it's a school night
Why were you up so late?
Pretty Boy
I was working on our project
I've got some ideas I want to talk to you about in first period
But only if you let me see that sick scar
KingOfSpiders
I said if you were nice. I can come up with my own ideas by myself if you want 🤷
Pretty Boy
No wait I'll be nice I swear
KingOfSpiders
Guess we'll find out
Cya in class
Pretty Boy
K
-
Peter got ready for school before heading to the kitchen, putting some toast in the toaster and hopping up on the counter while he waited.
"Heya, sport" Tony waltzed into the room with a coffee, looking like he'd stayed up all night.
"Mornin', mr Stark" Peter nodded, pulling his legs up from their dangling position into a criss-cross one.
"Morning already?" Tony squinted at the light, "coulda sworn I had two more hours" He uttered, confirming Peter's suspicions.
The toast popped out of the toaster, and Peter stuck butter on them before sitting over at the island counter.
"Yeah, school starts in twenty minutes, I'm about to head out" Peter scrolled through his phone, replying to more of the PPPS comments he'd been ignoring that week.
"Ahh yes, the celebrity life" Tony sighed, looking over Peter's shoulder, "replying to comments for hours on end. I gave up on that a while ago. Every now and again I'll go on there just to mess around with people here and there, but I'm too busy to waste my day on that darn app again" he sighed.
"Your screen time says otherwise" Peter lifted a brow, "6 hours and 42 minutes just yesterday"
"You went through my phone??" Tony asked, "when? I had it on me all day"
"I just asked Friday" he shrugged, taking a bite of his toast.
"Darn whippersnappers knowing how to do stuff" Tony grumbles, grabbing a plain bread slice and taking a bite from it.
Peter laughed, grabbing his bag and finishing off his second piece.
"I'm gonna head out now, see you after school" he waved, making his way towards the door.
"Have fun!" Tony called from the kitchen, "good luck getting that girlfriend!"
"Whatever!" Peter called back, stepping into the elevator.
Peter arrived to the school early, contrary to the first day when he was last in class. Well, second to last.
He sat down next to Flash, who was taking a photo of his empty worksheet.
Peter rolled his eyes, sitting down.
He pulled out his phone again and opened clash of clans, doing a quick raid and retraining his troops. (Total pro here, totally knows what he's doing).
"Hey, Parker" he felt someone push his head lightly, looking over to see Harley slide into his seat.
Peter nodded a hello, blinking a couple times as he looked back down to his phone.
"Awe come on, where's Evil Peter gone?" He whined, acting as if he didn't remember Peter basically telling him it didn't exist.
"Gone for another three-to-five business days, I'm afraid" he shrugged, turning off the phone he knew he would constantly be interrupted from.
"Darn, he was kinda hot" Harley leaned back in his seat, glancing over to Peter's reaction.
Peter choked a bit, covering his mouth while Harley chuckled to himself.
"Alrighty kids, I've already handed out worksheets to the desks, get it done. I don't want to see any phones out, even if you finish. If you're going to talk, talk quietly to your neighbor, there are other students still working!" Ms Jenkins instructed, mostly the usual for class days.
Peter got to work, ignoring Harley's nagging about the scar and what he'd come up with last night.
He finished it relatively quickly, having done a lot of this subject when he was bored at the house.
Harley finished soon after, mentioning something about this being something he could do when he was twelve. Peter shook his head.
"Okay so anyways, last night. Did we decide on wheels or legs?" He asked, referring to the robot they were designing, "because I made ideas for both just in case"
"Wheels are so much easier, but legs are more impressive. I don't think we decided, but I can add a third option" he sighed, speaking for the first time since they'd started.
"Right right, flying is always fun, but I wouldn't be able to take it home to work on it if needed because I have cats and they love flying things" he didn't want to add a third option when they couldn't even decide between two.
"That's fair. Which do you prefer?" Peter spun his pencil around in his hand, looking at Harley.
"Let's flip a coin" he said after a second, pulling a quarter out, "heads we do legs and tails we do wheels" he decided, tossing it in the air.
"Bet" Peter sat, watching Harley catch it smoothly and look over it.
"Autobots, roll out" Harley smiled, shoving the going into his pocket.
"Nice. I've got plenty of parts back home in the lab for that. What kind of wheels are we thinking?" He asked, drawing circles with the pencil eraser on the desk.
"Hold up, you've got a lab?" Harley asked, shifting in his seat to face Peter.
Peter had that moment of realization that this was the outside world, and that he might've just screwed up a bit.
"Uh.. my adoptive parent's lab. Spare parts sort of thing" he shrugged, technically not lying.
"Dude, that's so cool. What kind of job do they work at to get a whole freaking lab?" Harley pulled out his binder again, flipping through some pages.
"Uhm.. Stark Industries" he rubbed the back of his neck, wondering if he was going too far with this.
"Dude— no way!" Harley grinned, sifting through some of the papers he'd pulled out, as if he was sorting them "I wanna work there someday".
Peter just smiled, peeking over at what Harley was doing.
"What are those?" He asked, this quite possibly being the first time that he's engaged in conversation outside of schoolwork on purpose.
"The ideas I got, the ones for the wheels. All we gotta do is impress them right? Doesn't have to be long term" he thought aloud, tossing some of the sheets over while he looked through the rest.
"True, but part of being impressive could make it long term, or less maintenance" he accepted the papers, looking at the neat handwriting and very well scaled drawings, "how do you have time to get clean handwriting" he squinted, aware that most of his 3am brain tangents resulted in handwriting that looked like someone gave a pencil to a bird and asked it to rewrite The Song Of Achilles while it cried.
"I rewrote them this morning, went through everything and just made cleaner copies so you could read them and make sure they were accurate" Harley held up some of the papers he didn't pass over, showing some very sloppy handwriting, akin to Peter's average, "about half of these notes are garbage anyways".
Peter felt bad that he didn't put more effort into the project now. They'd only just started and Harley already had a miniature thesis on it.
Harley was only trying to impress Peter though, and it was definitely working.
Peter carefully read through all of the ideas, a quiet whistle blowing when he moved to the next page.
It was some small drawings of the group, Ned, MJ, Eugene, and Peter. There were also two solo ones here and there, one of a face Peter didn't recognize, and one of Peter smiling facing another direction.
"You're really good at drawing" he complimented, knowing he didn't look nearly that good in person.
"Ah— shit" Harley scrambled over between the gap of the desks, carefully removing it from Peter's hand and stuffing it in the binder, "didn't mean to give you that one" he chuckled, seemingly embarrassed, "it was just some face studies. I uh.. you've got a cool face. To draw, I mean " he closed the binder, shaken up a bit.
"They look really cool dude, are you in an art class?" Peter asked, a little confused by his reaction but flattered at the artistic integrity.
"Nah, they're to filled this year" he put his head down on the now closed binder, staring at the board up ahead with semi-wide eyes.
"Darn, probably because you're too good for them" Peter yawned, popping his elbow on the desk.
"Yeah, I am pretty great" he mumbled, not talking as loud because his jaw was being pushed down on by the weight of his head.
One kid started cleaning up, which set off the familiar dominos effect of leaving time.
"Keep the papers, finish reading over them next period and tell me what you think" Harley pushed back the stack Peter had tried giving back, winking at him as he stepped out of the door.
Peter took a hot second to return to earth, walking out the door where Eugene was waiting.
"Is that work for Mr Burley's?" Flash asked, peeking over Peter's shoulder to read over the papers.
"Yeah, just some ideas" he glanced down at the papers, hoping he had time next period to actually look over them the next two periods so that he didn't waste time.
His next period with Ned, they chatted while they wrote down notes from yesterday, moving from Spiderman, to the secret non-existent crush, to the notes Peter had forgotten about on the desk.
"Dude, why is his handwriting so neat" Ned asked, holding up two of the papers side by side, "I'd kill to learn how to write like that".
"Same." Peter leaned back, "He just handed it to me as if he didn't just give me the word equivalent to 100 dollars. It's like.. damn, he can do everything" Peter sighed, mulling over the written debate of wether or not a thicker or thinner tire would be best for what they want.
Ned gave Peter a side glance, Peter catching his eye.
"What?" He asked, lowering the paper he was nose deep in.
"Nothing" Ned shrugged, looking at his own to papers "you're right".
Peter gave him a weird look before returning to the argument. We're they going for carpet/rough terrain or smooth tile sort of thing? How big were they going to make it? Peter wanted it to be large so he could add a small speaker in at least for fun, but that might add weight to it. He'd have to bring it up with Harley later.
The next class was slow. The teacher didn't want the kids loudly at all, so that made it go by 4x slower for the group project they were assigned, seeing as if anyone went over a whisper, they'd get yelled out.
Peter wondered if the teacher was hungover or something, because they kept rubbing their head and smelled a little bit like May on Friday nights.
He shuddered.
MJ was pretty cool though, she drew mr Johansson bawling his eyes out, and Peter mentioned the smell, hoping to make something distractive out of a bad thought. She added a poorly drawn beer bottle next to him, and some storytelling drool to his face. The two of them snickered.
"Hey, you two. Michelle and Paul. Quiet" Johansson snapped across the room.
Peter tried hiding a smile, 'Paul' being a new one for Johansson on guessing the teen's name.
They indeed quieted down, and evidently finished the three day assignment. It wasn't uncommon that the kids finished early in this class, because it was designed to just be one to keep their minds sharp. Peter pulled out the notes again and some empty paper, writing his own down on how to incorporate different pieces Harley suggested into the singular bot. It'd be hard work, but they had better supplies they could work with, along with the world's best engineer around to give pointers.
Harley didn't know that of course, but on days Peter brought it home by himself, he'd be able to do quite a bit.
The bell rang and the two of them said their goodbyes, MJ giving him a song recommendation to try out later before being swept away by the waves of kids.
Peter stepped into mr Burley's seeing Clara across the room already in her seat. Mr Burley grunted a hello, to which he responded with his usual nod. He sat down and waited for Harley, excited to show him the improvement he'd made.
"Hey Parker" Harley grinned, sitting down next to Peter.
He had a black eye
—
Wahoo, another one gone. Heck yeah baby
I'm gonna miss being able to write whenever I want to lol, this has been fun. Just three more days or so and I'm back in state and falling behind in classes
Glad you've all enjoyed so far, it's been fun
Anywhoosies, have a great day or I will drop kick you like a hamster running on crack cocaine.
Love you all 💛💛💛
Sincerely, a clueless fool