Michelle catches him behind the school with a concrete barrier balanced on his chest, trying to hold himself down and keep from blowing away, and maybe smush whatever is wrong back into place at the same time. Two birds with one stone, etc. etc. He's not having much luck.

What he is feeling, instead of the relief he was hoping for, is squished and lightheaded and pretty stupid (although he's not actually absurdly panicky at this particular moment, so maybe something about this arrangement is working out for him after all?). When he notices her, he closes his eyes really tight, just to see if she'll go away. He hadn't exactly wanted anyone to see him like this. But if it had to be someone, Michelle is definitely better than Flash or one of his friends. That would've been really bad.

"What the fuck, weirdo," she says, ignoring any and all signs that he's not in a talkative mood just like she usually ignores his feelings and opinions. It's not a question that's looking for an answer, at least — Michelle never asks anymore, no matter how strange he acts.

He's too out-of-breath to answer her properly — this thing is maybe a little heavier than his initial calculations led him to believe — but after a minute he shoots her a little grin instead. He hopes it's dashing. He suspects it's probably closer to delirious.

"Your veins are popping out of your forehead," she says with an expertly raised eyebrow, completely unimpressed. Then she turns on her heel and walks away.

Thank God.

(Although … he wasn't aware of how quiet it was out here until she broke the silence and then promptly left him alone.)

(Silence maybe isn't his favorite thing right now.)

(He starts to hum to himself — in his head, because he doesn't have the breath to do it out loud. Music is good. It makes him feel a little better. Maybe he should go crawling back to band.)

(Would they let him back? He's not sure.)

(Does he even remember how to read music at this point?)

Seconds or hours later — he's kind of lost track of time — she wanders back. She stares at him for a long while, then rolls her eyes and sits on the pavement beside him with an exaggerated huff. "Aren't you worried someone will see you under there?" she asks him after a few minutes.

He blinks, both at the question and the fact that she asked it. He and Michelle don't really talk — they mostly just shoot one-liners back and forth and then go back to ignoring each other — and he's not really sure how to do it. Not when there's no one else around to distract them when things get awkward or antagonistic. Especially not when they get dangerously close to things he doesn't talk about with anybody but Ned. Superhero things, that is.

And yet by this point he's like 93 percent sure she knows he's Spider-Man too, and if he's right about that, then she's also completely flabbergasted that no one else has figured it out. What with his lack of stealth skills and the fact that Ned is his best friend and all. In his head, assuming this is true, she seems frustrated by that fact. He's not sure if she wants people to find out to prove some kind of point, or because she just thinks it'll be funny. But she actually sounds a little concerned right now, under her usual sarcasm, which makes him wonder.

He considers the risks for a second, then shakes his head. Nobody really remembers what happened, but kids have been going straight home after school these past few weeks. There's a general sense of uneasiness in the air — people want to be close to their families. It makes sense. You never know how much time you have left.

Peter wants to be close to his family too. Except he's terrified of scaring May any more than he already has, and he also accidentally peeled the wallpaper off the walls in the kitchen while literally climbing them from anxiety. He's trying this new thing where he gives her some space, so they can really lean on each other when they both actually need it.

(That, and he's terrified she'll find out about the Thing They Never Talk About. However much he imagines that moment, he knows he's not prepared.)

"Do you require some kind of assistance?" Michelle is still there, still staring at him, like he's both crazy and something that needs to be protected. She's never given him that look before — well the crazy part, yeah, but not the other part. It takes him a minute to recognize it, and it leaves a funny feeling in his chest — or maybe that's just the concrete barrier. Anyway, he's weirdly glad she's here all of a sudden.

"Yes," he whispers honestly. Still, he knows she can't actually help him, so he doesn't elaborate.

Michelle waits. She waits some more. Finally she stomps her feet in front of her a few times, some sort of impatient habit, and huffs a little breath.

"That's not a lot to go on, Parker," she says.

He shrugs. "I'm starting to work through some things, I think," he says. That's something a normal person could admit to, right? Everybody has things that they work through, even if they're not anything like his upon closer inspection. "At this point, I don't have a lot to go on either."

"This isn't some kind of weird suicide ritual, though, right? Should I say something profound?"

Peter flinches, quick and automatic. "Do I look like I'm dying? I'm not dying. I'm fine." His voice comes out faster than he wanted it to. Higher, too.

Michelle's mouth puckers a little. "You kind of look like you're freaking out, actually."

He laughs, then chokes, then finds himself uncomfortably blinking tears out of his eyes. "I don't want to blow away," is what eventually comes out of his mouth, entirely without permission.

He cringes — that's a really, really weird thing to say. Without context, it makes about zero sense. But Michelle, bless her, takes it all in stride. (She also pretends not to notice he's crying all of a sudden, which he mentally stores away to appreciate later.)

"Aha," she said, with a little nod that makes him feel, if not logical, at least not completely crazy. Then she rises to her feet and climbs on top of the barrier resting on his body, sitting cross-legged above him.

His remaining breath leaves him in a whoosh. He thinks he feels his ribs creaking.

He somehow feels so, so much safer.

"Am I squishing you?" she asks, blinking down at him with a vague approximation of concern — like she tried to care, but not too hard, because that would just be lame.

"A little," he says, adding, before she can move, "it's perfect."

Michelle snorts. "You're such a weirdo."

In reply, Peter just smiles. He's starting to realize that, when she says things like that, it's not meant to be mean. Something about her teasing is almost … affectionate? Not that she'd ever admit it, of course, but he can sense a subtle, hesitant fondness all the same.

Actually, he's maybe starting to count Michelle as one of his friends.

He takes a moment to consider some details he hasn't really gathered together in the past: 1. Michelle doesn't actively hate him. 2. Michelle almost definitely probably knows he's Spider-Man. 3. Michelle will, on occasion, go slightly out of her way to talk to him. 4. Michelle seems mildly concerned when he happens to be noticeably falling apart at the seams.

That's a person you can talk to, right? Ned is all of those things, and Peter talks to him. Something weird inside of him is starting to whisper that talking might actually be good right now. In a split second, he decides Michelle is someone he can trust. He rolls with it.

"I used to be scared of concrete," he says randomly.

Hmm. Maybe not the ideal place to start, but let it be known that he made an effort.

"That's random," Michelle replies.

"Concrete buildings," he explains, already kind of wishing he hadn't opened his mouth. "When I was inside one, I would just … picture all the ways it could fall down. I'd imagine people getting trapped. Getting hurt. It was …" Terrifying. Soul-crushing. "Kinda bad."

They blink at each other. "Were you going somewhere with that, or …"

"I think …" Was he? "I think I just meant that, like, I've dealt with things on my own before. So you don't have to—" Worry? "Bother."

"You know what I think?" she asks, poking at a loose rock in the concrete until it wiggles free. It bounces off his forehead, but he doesn't comment on that. She'd probably do it again just to annoy him.

"What?"

"I think you're not scared of concrete anymore. You've got a big chunk of it sitting in the middle of your chest."

He shrugs as best he can with said concrete restricting his movement. "Other things kind of came up. They took precedence."

"Well I also think, if you got over that, you'll get over this too." This time when a pebble hits his forehead, Michelle is grinning — she totally did it on purpose. "You're gonna be okay."

"Thanks," he says.

She shrugs.

"Do you have to get home or something?" Peter asks after a few minutes of barely-awkward silence, because he is starting to feel bad that she's out here with him when she could be doing something worthwhile like homework or reading or sleeping or literally anything else. Unless maybe she wants to be. But people like Michelle are happiest when they're alone — right? They don't actually need someone like him.

"Not really." Michelle shakes her head. "Nobody's there anyway. I'm good." The way she says that, though … there's a note of something in her voice that sounds a little not-good.

Peter squints at her for a second, studying. He's sure he's being subtle.

"Got something to say?"

Well. Apparently not so subtle, then.

"I just think you might be lonely sometimes," Peter offers, stupidly probably, because that's not the kind of thing you say to a person like Michelle.

She smirks at him. "And I think you have a hero complex."

Um. Um. "Wh—what?" he stutters, over the sound of her laughter at what he's sure is a priceless expression on his face. He's almost sure she knows, so why does it stress him out so much when she says things with sneaky double meanings like this? "I don't know what you mean."

"I mean, you're the one laying under a slab of concrete bursting into tears every thirty seconds. Worry about your damn self and let me be lonely or not in peace."

"Oh," he says. That's valid. "Sorry."

"Besides," she says, offering him a little smile. "You're my friend, right? So why would I be lonely?"

"I don't know," he says slowly, but actually, he kind of does. Maybe because when he thinks about his two friends, he's uncomfortably aware that he spends almost every waking minute with one, watching movies and playing games and working on projects and coming up with crazy inside jokes, and he maybe acknowledges the other three times a week. Upon reflection, that doesn't exactly seem fair. He's definitely going to change that now.

It's stupid — he never really thought Michelle had feelings to hurt, but she's a person, so of course she does.

"We're definitely friends, though," he assures her, because her saying it first seems like permission to acknowledge it without being lame or mushy or whatever. "I mean, Ned and I — we'd like to be your friends. That's cool. Just so you know."

"Okay, Parker," Michelle says, sliding to the ground and motioning for him to get up, too. "Whatever you say. So are you adequately distracted now?"

Peter blinks at the change in her tone. "What do you mean?"

"I mean, you no longer look like you're about to vomit, faint, or shoot steam out your ears in a brain explosion of epic proportions. Have I been sufficiently strange and obnoxious enough to distract you from your overwhelming teenage misery?"

Oh. That's what she was doing. He didn't even realize — it's definitely a different technique than the one he's used to Ned using — but it actually did kind of work. He feels a lot better.

"I think I'm okay now," he tells her. Then he takes a deep breath and starts to wriggle out from under the concrete. It takes him a hot minute — the barrier is really heavy. But when he finally raises it off himself, he still feels solid, together, which is nice.

Michelle watches him with a weird expression on her face. He likes to imagine she's staring at the superhero muscles in his arms, but in all probability she's just watching his hands shake like a leaf in the breeze.

"I'll walk you home," she says once the concrete is safely on the ground again, throwing his backpack at him and starting to drag him down the sidewalk by his sleeve.

"Isn't it supposed to be the other way around?"

The thing that happens to Michelle's face in the seconds after he asks this question is probably the closest real-life comparison to vampires growing fangs on the spot. She looks positively murderous. "Because I'm a girl?"

"Of course not," he says, backpedalling furiously. "It's just because I'm— because I can—"

"Relax," she says, snickering, her face softening. "I'm messing with you."

"Oh."

She punches his arm lightly. "Why don't you let someone look after you for a change?"

Really, he doesn't really have a good answer to that. And so, just like she said, Michelle walks him home.