Spider-man: Alone in New York

~ Chapter 17 ~

During Chemistry, we were supposed to be working in pairs on the worksheet the teacher had handed out. For Ned and me, it was the perfect time to sneak a look at the bixons. The two of us huddled around it, wondering why the drug was a weird brittle type of black powder. 

"It's not ash, right?" Ned said, poking the outside with the eraser of his pencil and watching the black particles move.

I narrowed my eyes at it. "No, ash looks different. This seems to have a different texture. Besides, why would anyone buy ash? You can just burn some paper or wood for ash."

"True." He nodded.

I glanced around the room and made sure no one was paying attention to us. The teacher was snoring in the back of the classroom, head in his arms on the table. That's Mr. Tate for you. He was well-known as a teacher who gave worksheets and then spent the rest of the class sleeping. Horrible teacher, but at least Mr. Tate gave everyone hundreds, whether the students did the work or not.

The rest of the class was either working on the classwork or fooling around. I could see some students with computers out, playing a game. On the side of the room, next to the windows, students were reciting Spanish vocabulary words and their definitions, prepping for a test. At the front, three people were clustered around the whiteboard, trying to solve a difficult math problem.

"Maybe it's extracted from a flower?" Ned suggested, drawing my attention back to the bixons.

I looked at the drug. "That's a possibility."

"Could we take it out and look at it under the microscope?" Ned asked.

I rose an eyebrow at him. "And expose all of the people in this building to possibly breathing it in, including us?"

His eyes widened and his head bobbed up and down. "Okay, yeah, that's a bad idea."

"So now what?" I sighed, placing my head in my hands. I didn't notice the sleeve slip down, portraying the white bandage around my wrist.

"Peter, what is that?" Ned asked, eyes on my wrist. I quickly tugged the sleeve down, holding it with my fingers, and then stuffed my hand into my hoodie pocket.

I blinked. "Nothing."

"Peter, you said you were okay yesterday."

I avoided his gaze. "I was okay, still am."

"Peter..." He sighed. "I'm not going to judge you. I just want to help."

"As much as you would like, you can't help with everything." I bit out, not thinking. I glanced up at him and felt regret immediately as I saw how wounded he looked at my words. I shook my head and clenched my hands into fists in my hoodie pocket, nails digging into my skin. "I'm sorry, Ned. I didn't mean it. It just came out. I'm really so-."

He gave me a smile. "It's okay, Peter." Somehow, that made me feel even guiltier. Why wasn't he angry at me? "If you don't want to talk about it, you can say so. It's not right for me to push you."

"I..." My mouth became dry. He should know. It wasn't even that big of a deal. I didn't know why I didn't tell him in the first place. "It happened when I was fighting, that's all. Let's just focus on the bixons for now."

He stayed silent for a moment before he nodded. "Okay. If we want to look at it, we need the right equipment. You know, like lab type equipment so we can look at it without worrying about it affecting us. I have no idea where we could get it from. The school certainly doesn't have it."

"I don't know either." I shrugged, defeated. Even if we did figure out what it was, what did it matter? It's not like I could find Zenon with it and then defeat him in addition to it. It was hopeless.