RIVER ➢ PETER PARKER

ii

CHAPTER TWO

"Are you freakin' kidding me, Parker?"

There's a hole in the tarp.

There's a smoking hole in the tarp that covers the hole in the wall.

While a ten-year-old tarp happens to be more easily replaceable than a wall, Diana can't find it in herself to be thankful that it was only the tarp that received the brunt of the damage. This is the second occasion in less than a damn week where she finds herself faced with Peter Parker's apparently poor chemistry skills.

Peter's kneeling on the floor of his bedroom, surrounded by wiring and little electronic gadgets that she can't be bothered to try and identify. His face is flushed, most likely from the heat of whatever it is that exploded, and his hairline is beading with sweat. Diana raises a brow as she gets up from in front of her TV.

"I swear this isn't on purpose," he spits out as soon as she approaches, scrambling to shove a blanket over what appears to be his "project". She tries to get a better look at just what exactly caused the explosion, but he's adamant on keeping just whatever it is a secret.

"Has it occurred to you that maybe you should leave the experiments at school?" Diana asks, gesturing to the ragged edges of the newly torn tarp, which is covered in something that she can't name. She presses a finger against it, wrinkling her nose when her finger gets stuck against the blue fabric. "What is this, exactly?"

The stuff sticks to her finger to the point where she has mild difficulty freeing her finger from it. The substance snaps back against the tarp as soon as she frees her finger, and before she knows it, Peter stands from his spot on the floor and walks over to the gap, leaning over it to grab her by the shoulders gently. Diana freezes in her place.

He laughs nervously, pushing her backwards away from his room. When she's a few feet away, he stops shooing her away, only to pause and take a look at the damage, most likely realizing that she can still see everything in his room.

"This is a problem," he admits, and she glares at him. His brown eyes flicker up to meet hers. "You got another tarp?"

"No," Diana says flatly. Peter nods.

"Neither do I," he says, not offering anything more on the matter. She rolls her eyes.

"Well, do you have anything else you could use? A blanket? A quilt?" Peter just stares at her. Diana sighs. "My mother would kill me if I used one of her good blankets."

"Aunt May would be pissed at me too." He seems to completely forget about the blue blanket covering his little science project, but hey, if it's that important to him, who is she to point it out? "She wouldn't like me using one of her good quilts."

Peter hesitates in his next words, as if he's unsure of how she's going to react. "Do you . . . have money for another one?'

Diana gawks, but she's moving over to her kitchen counter where her purse sits. Peter sticks his head in and watches her. "Uh-uh, no way, Parker! You did this, so you're going to pay for it!"

"What?" He asks incredulously. "I'm not exactly made of money. . ."

Peter doesn't finish what he's about to say and Diana turns her head to glance back at him and raise an eyebrow. "You gonna finish your sentence, or what?