Extraordinaries • {Peter Parker}

Chapter 4

"So how long are you grounded for again?" I asked Jess over the phone as I walked to school, a half-eaten breakfast burrito in my hand. It had been a week since the incident in the lab and Jess had been grounded for most of it.

Surprisingly, when the three of us woke up after the explosion—we actually weren't sure what it was—nothing was severely damaged, thank goodness. We were able to recreate the lab into the scene it was before we showed up. Luckily, it already looked like a mess. The only things destroyed were the hybrid plants huddled in the corner. After the explosion, they looked as if no one had watered them for weeks. They were dead.

    Remembering the plants made shiver, and I recalled the feeling of having a hundred barbs on the back half of my body.

The only reason Jess happened to get grounded was because her parents caught us in the lab at the tail-end of our clean-up job.

They had no idea what really happened.

    "I have a few days left until I'm ungrounded, so like a week and a half? To be honest, I don't really know. I've been so sick lately that I don't even care," Jess replied from the other line, coughing. She sounded sick and it made me feel queasy myself.
    There must have been some bug going around because the three of us had all been sick this past week. I hadn't even shown up to school since last Friday, I was too busy spilling my guts out into the porcelain throne.

"But I think I'm starting to feel better," she said again after I took too long to respond. "I could actually stand up this morning without needing to hurl."

    I nodded, even though she couldn't see me. "That's good. Yeah, I forced myself to go to school today. I have probably have so much make up work and I figured it best to not prolong the agony."

Jess tried laughing, but it came out a cough instead. "Well I definitely am not feeling up to school. So you'll have to suffer it alone."

    I feigned offense, "Wow, you jerk."

She scoffed, or maybe it was a cough, I couldn't be sure, "Don't get your panties in a wad, I'll still be going through my own personal hell here."

I smiled at her comment and replied, "Alright, I guess that's okay."

"You know, sometimes I hate you." I felt her glare through the phone.

"Hate you too," I snickered, taking a bite of my burrito. "By the way, do you know how Meg's holding up?"

Neither Jess or I had heard much of anything from Megan this past week and I was slightly worried. We knew she was sick, she told us when she first started feeling under the weather.

"No, she hasn't called or texted since Sunday. I think she's slept the whole week away, honestly."

"That's weird," I responded, furrowing my brows. Megan must have been really sick, cause she never missed school. She even went to school when her grandma died.

"She's gonna start feeling better soon and have an aneurysm when she realizes how much homework she has to make up."

"Maybe we contracted some version of the plague while we were in your dad's lab. Like some weird bacteria or something like that," I suggested. I was mostly joking, but in a world full of superheroes and aliens, anything was possible.

"Well if that's case, then I hope it kills me fast because this sucks," Jess groaned frustratingly.

"I have a feeling that you wouldn't survive in the apocalypse very long, Jess," I chuckled. I probably shouldn't be laughing at my friends misery, especially when I was still sick myself, but I couldn't help but laugh at her irritated voice.
    "To be honest, I don't want to last very long. All you survivors can hash it out, but it doesn't sound like a good time to me," she answered.