September 18, 2007
Morning
A September morning in New York always carried a faint edge of autumn. Dew clung to the manicured lawns of Midtown High School, catching the early sunlight in bright, scattered flashes.
The front gates were already choked with students hauling heavy backpacks. The chaotic noise of a typical high school blended with the low rumble of idling bus engines. The combination made my temples throb.
I slipped into the crowd, keeping my pace slow and deliberately sticking to the edges of the walkway.
My plain white hoodie swallowed my overly slender fra. Faded blue jeans and a pair of spotless white sneakers completed the look. I had dressed to be the most invisible person on campus.
My hair ruined the effort entirely.
Snow-white strands cascaded all the way down to my waist. The tips were still damp from a morning shower, making the natural pale-blue highlights stand out even more. Keeping my head down did not help much. It only drew attention to my sea-blue eyes.
Today was my first day of classes.
When I processed my enrollnt paperwork a few days ago, I had already checked my schedule in the administration system. I was assigned to the freshman advanced track.
Right in the sa horoom as Peter Parker.
I had stared at the screen for a full minute, fighting the overwhelming urge to rewrite the database on the spot.
It felt like a sick joke. I had spent days erasing my digital footprint to survive as a ghost, only to be dropped right next to the future Spider-Man. The narrative gravity of the Marvel universe was apparently inescapable.
In the end, I left the system alone.
Changing my own schedule was too loud. A newly enrolled rit scholarship student demanding a transfer for zero logical reason would only generate a paper trail.
I just had to build a ntal firewall. It was only a shared classroom. As long as I kept my mouth shut, avoided eye contact, and stayed completely out of his orbit, everything would be fine.
I kept my head down and headed for the main building.
Then a burst of obnoxious laughter erupted from behind . A voice dripping with unearned confidence cut straight through the morning noise.
"Hey! Snow White! Wait up a second!"
My footsteps faltered. I felt a headache forming behind my eyes.
The classic high school bully encounter had arrived right on schedule.
I glanced sideways and saw a group of boys in varsity jackets swaggering over. The guy in the center was tall, heavily built, and wore a lazy smirk. I recognized his face imdiately from the school database.
Eugene Thompson.
Everyone called him Flash. He was the future Spider-Man's dedicated torntor and the reigning tyrant of the freshman class.
I sighed internally.
A pack of hormone-poisoned teenagers trying to intimidate an existence running on super-AI logic felt profoundly absurd.
I had no intention of engaging. I kept walking, smoothly altering my path to bypass them. The front gates were crawling with witnesses. A public scene would only leave the kind of mories I was trying to avoid.
I wanted to dodge trouble, but trouble was highly motivated.
Flash closed the distance in three long strides and threw his arms out to block the path. He let out a piercing whistle and looked up and down.
"New blood, huh? Never seen you around. Is that hair dyed, or are you just a mutant?"
The boys behind him laughed on cue. One of them threw out a crass comnt about my face, asking if I wanted soone to show around the locker rooms.
The temperature in my blue eyes dropped to absolute zero.
I kept my temper locked down and offered exactly two words.
"Move aside."
"Oh, she has an attitude." Flash laughed, stepping half a pace closer. "Too good to talk to us? I run things around here. Be nice to , and nobody touches you. How about that?"
My fingers twitched inside my hoodie pocket.
I could execute his social death in a hundred different ways right now. I could hijack his phone and broadcast his private cara roll to every screen in the building. I could overcharge the battery in his pocket until it burst into flas. With a single thought, I could short-circuit his entire digital life.
But I could not do any of it.
Retaliation left data traces. S.H.I.E.L.D. monitored dostic networks, and even in 2007, they were not entirely blind. Exposing my true nature over a high school athead was terrible math.
I was just calculating the exact angle needed to walk past him when a thin, nervous voice cut through the crowd.
"Leave her alone, Flash! Stop ssing with the new kids!"
The surrounding students parted slightly.
A skinny boy in a faded plaid shirt and jeans stood there. He had an old backpack slung over one shoulder and clutched a vintage film cara to his chest. He wore thick, black-rimd glasses. He looked terrified, and the tips of his ears were bright red.
Peter Parker.
I raised an eyebrow, genuinely surprised.
The kid had not even been bitten by a radioactive spider yet. He was Flash's favorite punching bag, but he still stepped up to defend a total stranger.
Flash looked just as surprised. His mocking grin vanished, replaced by an ugly sneer.
He closed the distance to Peter, grabbed a fistful of his plaid shirt, and hoisted him upward. Peter's sneakers barely scraped the pavent.
"Well, if it isn't Puny Parker." Flash leaned in close. "Did you forget your dication today? Or do you actually want to take a beating for the weird girl?"
Peter went pale. The grip on his collar was cutting off his air. He grabbed Flash's thick wrist with both hands, but he could not break the hold.
Despite the panic in his eyes, he gritted his teeth and stared back.
"I said let it go. We are right in front of the school."
Flash's expression darkened. He pulled his right arm back and threw a heavy, vicious punch straight at Peter's face.
Several girls gasped. A few of Flash's friends cheered, eager to see Peter hit the pavent.
Peter squeezed his eyes shut and braced for the impact.
The impact never ca.
A sharp, flat smack echoed across the concrete.
A pale hand, looking far too slender and delicate to belong in a fight, had intercepted Flash's wrist in mid-air.
The kinetic interception was flawless. My fingers locked exactly over his tendons. It was not a martial arts block. It was a hydraulic clamp. Flash's fist stopped dead two inches from Peter's nose, completely robbed of its montum.
The courtyard went dead silent.
The cheering stopped instantly. Dozens of eyes shifted toward .
I had barely moved. I stood in exactly the sa spot, my posture relaxed, one hand casually gripping the bully's wrist. My expression remained entirely blank. I looked at Flash the way soone looks at a stubborn pop-up ad.
Flash stared at my hand in shock.
The shock rapidly mutated into humiliated rage. He was a varsity athlete pushing six feet tall. His punch had just been stopped cold by a girl who looked like she weighed ninety pounds soaking wet.
He gritted his teeth and tried to rip his arm back.
My grip did not shift a single milliter. It felt like his arm had been welded to a steel girder. I applied a microscopic fraction of pressure with my fingertips, pressing directly into the nerve cluster.
A violent spasm of numbness shot up Flash's arm, draining the strength right out of his shoulder.
"Let go of !" Flash yelled, his face flushing crimson as his pride evaporated.
I finally spoke. My voice was completely flat, devoid of any fluctuation, yet heavy enough to freeze the air around us.
"Drop him."
I shifted my gaze to the hand holding Peter in the air.
"I have zero interest in watching a fight on my first day. Drop him and walk away."
"You little freak, I'll—"
I pressed slightly harder into the nerve.
Flash flinched as the numbness turned into a sharp, vibrating pain. His tough-guy act crumbled under basic biology. Recognizing that he was hopelessly outmatched, he cursed under his breath and released Peter's shirt.
Peter stumbled backward, catching his balance just in ti. His glasses had slid down his nose. He stared at with wide, disbelieving eyes.
The second Flash let go, I released his wrist. I stepped back, brushed a stray hair from my shoulder, and acted as though the entire incident had never happened.
Flash rubbed his aching arm, glancing nervously at the silent crowd. His face cycled between red and white.
"You got lucky, new girl!" he spat, trying desperately to salvage his dignity. "Don't think you're special just because you know a parlor trick!"
He spun around and stord off toward the gym, his friends hurrying after him in confused silence.
The ambient noise of the courtyard slowly returned, though a good portion of the crowd kept whispering and stealing glances in my direction.
I ignored all of it. I adjusted my backpack strap and walked straight toward the main building. I just wanted to quarantine this event in the past and move on.
"Wait! Thank you!"
Peter jogged to catch up with , hastily pushing his glasses back into place. His face was still flushed, but his voice was packed with earnest gratitude.
"Seriously, thank you for that. He was absolutely going to break my nose."
I stopped and looked at him.
The boy standing in front of was completely genuine. His eyes were clear and completely devoid of malice. But I knew exactly what that innocent face was destined for. He was the friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. He was a magnet for supervillains, alien warlords, and cosmic-level disasters.
Any connection to him was a liability.
I gave a faint, dismissive shake of my head.
"Don't ntion it. I just hate loud noises in the morning."
I did not give him a chance to reply. I turned around and walked briskly through the double doors, keeping my back straight and my pace fast.
Peter stood on the pavent, clutching his cara to his chest. He watched disappear into the hallway, blinking in a daze.
"Incredible," he muttered to himself.
When the warning bell rang for horoom, the teacher escorted into the classroom.
The noisy room went completely silent. Thirty pairs of eyes locked onto . I felt a spike of annoyance at the collective staring, but I kept my face blank.
"Settle down, everyone," the teacher said, clapping his hands. "This is our new transfer student, Mira Vale. She just moved here from out of state and will be joining us for the rest of the year. Let's make her feel welco."
A round of scattered, polite applause filled the room. A few guys in the back row whistled, staring openly at my white hair.
I stood by the podium, offering a microscopic nod to the room. I scanned the desks quickly.
My eyes landed on the only empty chair in the room. It was right next to the window.
The student sitting in the adjacent desk was Peter Parker.
I stared at the empty seat. The universe was definitely laughing at .
The teacher smiled and pointed toward the back.
"Mira, you can take that empty spot. Sitting next to Peter is a great place to start."
I locked my complaints away behind a ntal firewall.
"Understood."
I walked down the aisle and dropped my bag next to the desk. Peter watched approach, his face flushing red all over again. He hurriedly cleared a stack of notebooks out of my way and offered a shy, awkward smile.
"Hi again."
I sat down, pulled out a notebook, and gave him a single syllable.
"Hi."
I kept my expression glacial. I projected an aura of absolute unapproachability. Peter picked up on the sudden drop in temperature and awkwardly scratched the back of his neck. He turned forward and did not try to speak again, though he kept stealing glances at out of the corner of his eye.
His curiosity made perfect sense. I was the strange transfer student with ani hair who had effortlessly paralyzed the school bully. I was a walking comic book trope.
I noticed his staring, but I ignored it.
To the rest of the room, I looked like a diligent student staring at the whiteboard.
In reality, my consciousness was split into three parallel processing threads. I was remotely patching code vulnerabilities for three different corporate clients at once. My fingers tapped rhythmically against my thigh beneath the desk. Lines of flawless code compiled themselves purely through my neural connection.
For a tactical brain like TB, running basic software engineering on three servers was barely a warm-up.
I even had enough processing power left over to silently invade the school's security grid. I audited my own forged enrollnt files to ensure they were airtight. While I was in the system, I scrubbed the front gate security caras, permanently deleting the footage of my altercation with Flash. I even purged the backup servers just to be safe.
I finally let out a quiet sigh of relief.
"Miss Vale," the math teacher suddenly called out, interrupting his own lecture. "Would you mind coming up and solving this equation?"
The room fell silent again.
Everyone looked at . A few kids grinned, expecting the new girl to fail spectacularly. The equation on the board was advanced calculus, well beyond the standard freshman curriculum.
Peter looked nervous. He leaned over, trying to slide his notebook toward to show the base formula.
I was already out of my seat.
I walked to the board, picked up a piece of chalk, and did not pause to think. My hand moved in a blur. Crisp, perfectly structured equations filled the slate. The logic was flawless. I provided two separate thodologies to reach the answer, both of which were infinitely more efficient than the standard textbook approach.
I dropped the chalk in the tray and looked back at the teacher. My expression had not changed once.
The classroom was dead quiet. The teacher stared at the board for five full seconds before his jaw dropped.
"Flawless," he breathed out. "Both thods are absolutely brilliant. Miss Vale, your mathematical foundation is staggering."
A collective murmur of awe rippled through the classroom. The stares directed at shifted from curious to openly impressed.
I did not care. I walked back to my desk and sat down, treating the entire display like a mild inconvenience.
Peter looked at , his eyes practically shining with admiration.
I looked back at him, gave another tiny shake of my head, and turned my eyes to the front of the room. I ntally cranked my anti-social aura up to maximum output.
By the end of my first day, I had learned a very hard lesson about high school.
The tallest blade of grass is always the first one to get cut.
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