Chapter 37 – Part 5: Public Education and Private Catastrophes
Midtown School of Science and Technology was, by all appearances, a normal school.
This was a lie.
At least, it was a lie for Peter Parker.
And now, by unfortunate extension, for Ned Leeds, Harley Kenner, Princess Shuri of Wakanda, and one deeply stressed administrative staff trying to process the fact that Doctor Stephen Strange had personally delivered two new students that morning like some sort of exhausted guardian.
By second period, the news had spread.
There were whispers in the hallways.
Glances.
Phone screens lighting up.
One teacher had openly stared at Harley's name on the attendance sheet, then at Harley, then back at the sheet like reality had filed incorrect paperwork.
Harley, naturally, thought this was hilarious.
"This place is weird," he muttered as they headed toward lunch. "I like it."
"You like anything that looks one bad decision away from combustion," Peter said.
"That's not true," Harley replied. "Sometimes I like things that are already on fire."
Shuri, walking between them with the perfect posture of someone entirely above this and secretly delighted by all of it, looked around the cafeteria with open fascination.
"The social behavior here is deeply inefficient," she observed. "And yet strangely consistent."
Ned nodded solemnly. "That is the most accurate thing anyone has ever said about high school."
Lunch was where the real introductions happened.
MJ was already at the table when Peter, Ned, Harley, and Shuri approached. She looked up from her book, took in the entire group in one long, assessing sweep, and somehow managed to look both unsurprised and mildly offended by the universe.
"Wow," she said dryly. "Peter brought backup."
Peter dropped his tray onto the table. "Hi, MJ. So. This is Harley. And Shuri."
MJ looked at Harley first.
He grinned.
"Hi. I've heard you're the only sane one here."
MJ considered him for a beat. "That's incorrect, but flattering."
Then she turned to Shuri.
For the first time all day, someone at the table looked genuinely careful.
Not intimidated exactly.
Just aware.
Shuri met her gaze with easy confidence and a slight tilt of her head.
"You are Michelle," she said. "Peter speaks of you often."
Peter nearly choked.
"I do not!"
MJ slowly looked at him.
Then back at Shuri.
Then back at Peter.
"Interesting," she said.
Peter wanted the floor to open and swallow him whole.
Ned, traitor that he was, was already grinning so hard his face looked painful.
Harley leaned back in his chair like he'd just been handed front-row seats to free entertainment.
"Wow," he said softly. "He walked right into that one."
Peter pointed at all of them. "I hate every single person at this table."
"That's healthy," MJ said, opening her drink.
The friendship happened fast after that.
Not loudly.
Not dramatically.
Just the kind of rapid, strange chemistry that happens when smart people realize they've all been dealing with the same circus from different sides of the tent.
MJ liked Harley's dry humor immediately.
Harley liked that she didn't seem impressed by anything, including him.
Shuri asked MJ three questions about the school's internal social hierarchy, and MJ answered all three with the cold precision of a documentarian studying a failing ecosystem.
Ned was thrilled by all of it.
Peter, despite the mortification, was happy.
Right up until Flash Thompson showed up.
Because of course he did.
Flash moved through the cafeteria with the kind of confidence only possible in someone who had never once been forced to reflect on himself for more than six seconds.
He stopped near their table, looked Peter up and down, and then noticed Harley and Shuri.
His expression shifted into something smug and unpleasant.
"Well, well," Flash said. "Penis Parker got exchange students now?"
Peter closed his eyes.
Nope.
Absolutely not.
Not today.
Harley looked up slowly.
"What did he just say?"
Ned muttered, "That. That's a thing he does."
Flash kept going, because self-preservation was clearly not one of his gifts.
"Let me guess," he said, gesturing vaguely. "These your Stark internship charity cases? What is this, like, a poverty support group?"
Shuri blinked once.
Then smiled.
It was a small smile.
A dangerous one.
"Are all American males this loud when underdeveloped?"
Ned made a strangled noise into his juice.
MJ lowered her book just enough to watch the fallout.
Flash frowned. "What?"
Harley leaned forward onto the table, delighted.
"She called you dumb," he translated cheerfully.
Flash puffed up immediately. "I know what an insult is."
"Bold claim," MJ said.
Peter buried his face in his hands.
"Why is this my life?"
Flash looked offended on a spiritual level now, which only encouraged the table.
He pointed at Peter. "You always hang out with weirdos, Parker."
Harley straightened in his chair.
"Man, that's rich coming from a guy who looks like he introduces himself to mirrors."
Shuri actually laughed at that, quick and bright.
Flash's ears turned red.
He looked to Peter for support, explanation, surrender, something.
Peter looked up, met his eyes, and for once didn't even seem nervous.
Just tired.
"Flash," he said, "please go away before they decide to study you."
MJ took a sip of her drink.
"Too late. I've already started."
That did it.
Flash muttered something under his breath and stalked off, deeply wounded by the devastating and highly unusual experience of not winning a cafeteria encounter.
There was silence at the table for exactly two seconds.
Then Ned burst out laughing.
Harley followed immediately.
Peter groaned but he was smiling now too, helplessly.
Even MJ looked faintly pleased.
Shuri sat back like a queen satisfied with a tiny battlefield victory.
"This school," she declared, "is entertaining."
The rest of the day passed in a blur of classes, staring students, annoyed teachers, and the increasingly obvious fact that Harley and Shuri were settling in much faster than anyone had expected.
Harley handled Midtown the same way he handled most things: with reckless charm and zero respect for social intimidation.
Shuri approached it like an anthropological field study.
By the end of the last period, she had already concluded that the school's STEM budget was inadequate, the classroom computers were offensively outdated, and at least two teachers deserved grants.
Peter and Ned were too used to surviving Midtown to be properly impressed.
MJ, however, had begun to look at Shuri with the quiet fascination of someone realizing she might actually have found another person on this campus who viewed nonsense with the appropriate amount of disdain.
When the final bell rang, the whole group spilled out of the building in one exhausted wave.
Happy Hogan was waiting at the curb beside the car, already wearing the expression of a man who knew the next few hours were going to be somebody else's fault and somehow still become his problem.
He looked at all four of them.
Then at Peter.
Then at Ned.
Then at Harley and Shuri.
"No one stole anything today?" he asked.
"Emotionally," Harley said, "Flash lost a lot."
Happy sighed. "I'm counting that as a maybe."
They piled into the car.
Backpacks.
Complaints.
Overlapping stories.
Shuri asked three questions about American public transportation policy before they were even out of sight of the school.
Happy drove them to Greenwich in grim silence broken only by periodic muttering and one deeply suspicious glance in the rearview mirror when Ned and Harley started debating whether magic circles could theoretically be graphed.
Peter noticed the change in direction first.
"…Uh, Happy?"
Happy didn't look at him.
"Your wizard dad left instructions."
Peter blinked. "My what?"
"You heard me."
Harley immediately lost it.
Ned folded in half laughing.
Shuri, because the universe was cruel, looked thoughtful.
"Technically accurate," she said.
Peter slumped in his seat.
"I hate this family."
"No, you don't," Happy said.
Peter muttered, "No. I really don't."
They stopped outside the Sanctum.
The old building loomed against the street like it existed one degree to the left of ordinary reality.
It was quieter than the Tower.
Older.
Stranger.
The air itself felt different, like the city noise softened around the edges of it.
Happy got out, looked at the front steps, looked at the kids, and clearly decided he was not paid enough to supervise whatever happened next.
"I'm dropping you off," he said firmly. "I'm not going in there. Last time I stepped inside, a staircase moved and there was a hole in the ceiling."
"That is so cool," Ned whispered.
"It was not cool," Happy snapped. "It was hostile architecture."
He pointed at them all.
"Don't blow the place up."
The four of them stared at him.
Happy closed his eyes.
"…That was unfair of me. Just try not to unleash anything."
Then he got back in the car and left before any of them could ask follow-up questions.
The Sanctum doors swung open the moment Ned touched one.
All four teenagers froze.
Peter looked at Ned.
Ned looked at his hand.
"I swear I didn't do anything."
"Yet," Harley said.
Inside, the Sanctum felt empty.
No footsteps.
No voices.
No Cloak of Levitation trying to judge anyone.
Just silence, polished wood, old magic, and the kind of shadows that belonged in places with too many secrets.
Curiosity won instantly.
Which was, in retrospect, the problem.
Ned stepped forward first.
"Well," he said, in the tone of someone making a terrible decision sound educational, "we should probably look around."
Peter should have stopped him.
He really should have.
Instead, he followed.
Harley came next, peering at relics and staircases and chandeliers with the bright-eyed interest of someone three seconds away from asking whether any of it was flammable.
Shuri moved with quiet grace, observing everything.
The four of them climbed the stairs and found the library.
It was enormous.
Shelves rose impossibly high, stacked with ancient books and strange artifacts and objects that looked like they had no business being left where teenagers could find them.
The room smelled like old paper, dust, candle wax, and secrets.
Ned went still.
"Oh," he whispered.
Harley slowly turned in place.
"Okay, this is insane."
Shuri stepped further in, eyes gleaming.
"This," she said softly, "is a proper library."
Even Peter, who had been inside the Sanctum before, felt something in his chest go quiet with awe.
Books were everywhere.
Huge ones. Tiny ones. Ancient leather-bound tomes with cracked spines and gilded symbols. Narrow volumes full of diagrams. Scroll cases. Manuscripts. Shelves of theory, history, dimensional studies, magical geometry.
It was paradise.
Naturally, every single one of them immediately went for different sections.
Ned found a text on theoretical energy frameworks and yelled for Shuri and Harley before he'd even finished skimming the first page.
Harley was pulled in within seconds.
Shuri arrived right after, and within a minute the three of them were hunched over the same open book, arguing in increasingly dangerous whispers.
"No, see, the output curve assumes stable transfer," Ned said, pointing.
Harley scoffed. "Only if the person who wrote this had never built anything in a real lab."
Shuri leaned over both of them, eyes sharp. "You are both wrong. The flaw is in the containment theory. It assumes magical energy behaves like obedience instead of momentum."
Peter, meanwhile, had drifted to a quieter corner.
He found a book with an absurd title stamped across the spine:
The Idiot's Guide to Making Space Pockets
He stared at it for a full second.
Then burst out laughing.
"Okay," he muttered, pulling it off the shelf. "Well, now I have to."
He sat in the corner, cross-legged on the floor, completely absorbed within minutes.
The book was ridiculous and brilliant and surprisingly readable. Whoever had written it was either a genius, deeply sarcastic, or both. Probably both.
Peter turned pages faster and faster, eyes wide behind his glasses.
Miniature dimensional folds.
Storage fields.
Pocket compartments anchored to fixed points in space.
This was amazing.
He was so focused he didn't hear the others getting louder.
Didn't notice Harley's voice rising in indignant disbelief.
Didn't clock Ned saying, "Hypothetically, though, what if we did try it?"
Didn't see the exact moment Doctor Stephen Strange stepped into the doorway.
What Strange found was this:
Ned, Harley, and Shuri clustered around a book on energy theory, arguing like three newly weaponized graduate students and standing exactly one sentence away from a catastrophic idea.
Peter Parker, sweet terrifying child that he was, sitting peacefully in the corner reading The Idiot's Guide to Making Space Pockets with the kind of deep, scholarly concentration that usually preceded disaster of a completely different flavor.
Stephen stood there in total silence.
Looked at the three near the table.
Then at Peter.
Then back at the book in their hands.
For one long second, he considered pretending he had never come upstairs.
Then Ned pointed at a diagram and said the words:
"No, but if you combine this with the new energy shield prototypes Mr. Stark was working on…"
Stephen closed his eyes.
And immediately knew peace had never been an option.