The school was called Brooklyn Visions Academy, and it was exactly as intense as the memories told him it would be.
He sat through the first two periods in a state that probably looked like tiredness from the outside, which was fine because sixteen year olds were tired all the time and nobody questioned it.
On the inside he was doing something more like cataloguing. The classroom. The faces. The particular social geography of a school hallway that you can read in about thirty seconds if you've been through enough of them.
Who moved with ease, who moved carefully, who had somewhere to be and who was performing having somewhere to be.
He was doing alright at it until third period, when he sat down next to someone who immediately slid a phone across the desk toward him without looking up from his own notebook.
On the screen was a video, already paused at the first frame. The shaky rooftop footage from the news. The figure in red and black.
"Tell me that's not the most insane thing you've seen this week," the person said.
He looked at the phone and then at the person next to him. Broad build, easy posture, the kind of face that defaulted to open rather than guarded. He was sketching something in the margin of his notebook that looked like a schematic, though not a very serious one.
The memories supplied a name. Ned Leeds.
"It's pretty insane," he said carefully.
Ned looked up. "Pretty insane. That's your response." He took the phone back and watched a few seconds of the footage.
"That guy cleared like thirty metres between those buildings. Thirty. I looked it up on maps this morning."
"You looked it up on maps."
"Of course I looked it up on maps. Someone has to." He paused the video again. "I've been following the sightings for two weeks.
There have been six confirmed ones and probably four more that didn't get filmed. Always Harlem, always at night or early morning.
Whatever he is, he's local."
He nodded slowly, because Ned was right and because agreeing was easier than explaining how he knew that already.
The teacher came in and Ned put his phone away without being asked, which told him something about Ned.
He just also paid attention to the things that interested him, at the same time, in parallel, and saw no reason to apologise for it.
They didn't talk again until after class, when they ended up leaving at the same time and it turned into walking in the same direction, which turned into walking together, which seemed to be how it had always worked between them if the memories were anything to go by.
"You were quiet today," Ned said.
"I'm always quiet."
"You're usually quiet. Today was different."
He said it without accusation, just observation. "You good?"
He thought about how to answer that. "Mostly," he said. "Just tired."
Ned accepted that without pushing, which was another thing about him that was immediately apparent.
He knew when to leave something alone.
They talked about other things.
Ned was rebuilding something, an old piece of hardware he'd found at a market, and he described the problem he was having with it in enough detail that it became clear this was not a casual hobby.
He thought in systems. He could see how things fit together and more importantly how they didn't, and he talked about it the way people talk about things they genuinely loved rather than things they were good at, which wasn't always the same.
By the time they reached the corner where their routes separated, he had said maybe forty words and Ned had done most of the talking, and somehow it hadn't felt unbalanced at all.
"Same time tomorrow," Ned said, which was apparently how they said goodbye.
He watched him go and stood on the corner for a moment before turning in the direction of home.
The street was busy in the late afternoon way, the school rush mixing with people heading home from work and the general organised chaos of a city neighbourhood that knew itself well.
He was about half a block from the corner when he heard it.
A sharp sound, somewhere above the normal noise. Something that didn't fit.
He stopped.
Across the street, three men were pushing a fourth one toward a car. Not subtly. The kind of scene that everyone around was clocking and recalculating their route to avoid.
The fourth man was saying something, hands out, and the three were not listening.
Then the web hit.
It came from above and to the left and it was fast, faster than anything on the news footage had suggested, and it pulled two of the three men sideways off their feet before they'd had a chance to process what was happening.
The third one stumbled back and looked up, and then looked up further, and the figure dropped from the building above and landed on the roof of the car between them with a sound like a single clean note.
He stood completely still on the pavement.
Up close the suit was different than it looked on a phone screen. The red and black had a texture to it, a weight.
The mask gave nothing away. The figure stood on the roof of the car with an ease that was almost casual, head tilting slightly toward the two men who were already trying to get the webbing off their arms, and then said something he couldn't quite hear from this distance that made the third man take two very fast steps backward.
It was one thing to know Spider-Man was real.
It was another thing entirely to be twenty feet away from him on a Tuesday afternoon.
The fourth man, now free, was already moving.
A couple of onlookers had their phones out. Someone nearby made a sound that was half laugh, half disbelief. The three men were reassessing their options with some urgency.
He stayed where he was and watched the whole thing play out, which took less than two minutes from the first web to Spider-Man swinging off the top of the car and back up into the space between buildings, gone before the phones had even finished filming.
The street went back to normal almost immediately, the way streets do, everyone filing the experience into whatever category they'd built for it and moving on.
He stood there a little longer.
The pressure in his chest had shifted during those two minutes. Not spiked, not surged. Just moved, the way something moves when it recognises something else. He put his hand against his sternum without thinking about it and felt it settle back down, slow and steady.
He started walking home.
He didn't know what came next. He didn't know how any of this was supposed to work, what shape his own role in it was meant to take, or whether he even had one. What he knew was that the city was real, the people in it were real, and whatever was in his chest was real too.
He also knew Ned was going to want to talk about the Spider-Man sighting tomorrow.
He was already looking forward to it.