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Cindy will scream to the heavens until the day she dies that she was the first, and for a time (aside from Ned—the traitor—who denied that he totally had an inside scoop on the matter) the only one on the AcaDec team to witness the fact that Peter Parker is secretly fucking ripped.
It’s a delightful accomplishment to have to her name, to be sure, and not just because she ran smack into Abe and got to spill the information immediately after coming across it to his disbelieving ears. It went like this.
Cindy was coming back from the bathroom, and Peter had to be excused from practice because he’s Peter and he had a “really super important phone call, MJ, please—“
That happened just before Cindy had to pee, but details aside, the important thing is that Peter wasn’t with the rest of the team and neither was Cindy. So she’s coming back from the bathroom, as you do, and she saw Peter alone in the hall. He’d hung up on the phone but had shoved his head into his hands for whatever reason. Again, he’s Peter. Cindy had learned to just roll with the punches, and that’s what she did. She turned on her heel to go the other way because Peter looked distressed, and she was probably the last person on the face of the Earth equipped to deal with that. Except then, she heard a faint cry of irritation.
Dutifully, she had peeked back around the corner to see Peter pulling his shirt halfway up his stomach to examine some sort of stain he must’ve had on it, grumbling all the while. “Aw man, Mr. Stark got me this one!”
Cindy ignored the whole Stark thing. Extra information in the scheme of things, really, considering that inspecting a stain? Okay, whatever. That’d be fine, a typical enough thing to do if doing so, if lifting a shirt with some stupid joke about pi on it, didn’t reveal the most man-crush-Monday-worthy set of abs Cindy—who was pretty sure she was a lesbian—had seen in her entire life. She might’ve choked on her own spit a little, but that didn’t stop her from bolting down the hallway and taking the long way back to practice so Peter didn’t know what she’d seen. She had to use her inhaler afterwards, but dear god, who wouldn’t?
It was not everyday Cindy found out a kid she had known since, like, sixth grade, was a pint-sized Captain America. She kind of panicked. She didn’t know what to do with that revelation, and so she told Abe who told Charles who told Sally who brought it up to Ned “a goddamn disgrace of a liar if there ever was one” Leeds.
MJ overheard it from the beginning and merely turned the page of a book she was reading on the psychology of social class in the Babylonian empire. She knew everything though, so nobody took it too personally.
Cindy also leaked it to Betty, which, come on, was only fair because she had dealt with Peter being Peter for even longer than Cindy. Then Betty, despite how much Jason got on her nerves, told him, and eventually, it got to Flash, who scoffed and did a really bad job pretending not to eavesdrop on all conversations pertaining to the subject.
If not for Ned’s nervousness around the matter, Cindy might’ve had less credibility, but hell, whenever Ned got antsy, everyone knew something was up. Betty cornered him and threatened to steal his hat if he let on to Peter that they knew, and with a very frightened nod, the game began.
Every time someone was able to verify with their own two eyes that Peter Parker was indeed swole as hell, they were awarded a point. Cindy was immensely satisfied to have a lead before the pieces were even set, but less so when she, under the slightly vindicated stares of her classmates, became mediator of the event. Flash claimed to not be playing, but Jason reported his disappointed expression every time he left the locker room with no sighting to his name.
It really wasn’t as creepy as it sounded.
Cindy had begun the game with a stern glare and Betty behind her to make it actually hold some weight. “Anyone actually harassing Peter gets sent straight to MJ,” she threatened gravely. “All witnesses of secret beef must be accidental. Peter,” a harder look sent Flash’s way, who shrugged in denial, “is a nice person who is not technically consenting to this, so we’re going to be polite about our observations. Are we in agreement?”
Sally, despite the faintly amused smile on her face, looked at Cindy with an eyebrow raised in disbelief. “Is this necessary? I think we can manage. We’re not stupid.”
Betty shrugged. “Listen, we don’t make the rules.” That was a blatant lie. She and Cindy had stayed up until three the previous night discussing how to officially go about the task at hand. “Either agree or you don’t get squat for a glimpse of a six-pack.”
Sally sighed, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you guys are roping me into this.”
“You’re free to quit literally whenever you want,” Charles pointed out helpfully.
Sally scowled. “Shut up. I’m playing. If anyone’s gonna’ lose, it’s Flash.”
“I second that bet,” Jason chimed in.
Flash looked away from his spot examining his reflection in the window briefly. “I resent that. I have this in the bag. You’re all just jealous that my insanely cool demeanor and suave personality are going to work in my favor.”
Abe, then. “Flash, your personality doesn’t do anything if you’re still a dickwad to Peter in the meantime. Why are you here, anyway?”
Flash scoffed. “To prove you all wrong, obviously. The day Peter has a single noteworthy muscle is the day that internship of his is real. I’m here to watch him go up in flames.”
“Once a dickwad, always a dickwad,” Abe announced solemnly.
Flash squawked in indignance, and Cindy smiled triumphantly. Game on.
The whole thing was somewhat harder than originally planned as it became obscenely, embarrassingly clear that Cindy got lucky. Peter was kind of oblivious, to be sure, but that was his whole shtick. There was no outward sign that he looked like he was sculpted from stone underneath his baggy clothes. It was a real inconvenience for Cindy.
“Betty, I swear,” she proclaimed, head resting across her lap. They were taking a break from studying for a big physics test they had coming up, and dear god, Cindy was one stupid science pun t-shirt away from murder. “I know what I saw. Peter has abs. Not even just for days. For, like, a whole week.” A groan. She pressed her hands over her face. “This is horrible. Why can’t he just be a typical teenage boy with no shame?”
Betty ran her hands through her hair in sympathy. At the very least, it felt nice and was something to console her. “We believe you. He has to mess up at some point, right?”
Cindy nodded miserably. “I guess.”
Sally looked up from her notes, watching Betty continue to comfort Cindy. “That’s gay,” she told them affectionately. Cindy might’ve made some sort of attempt to dispel that line of thought had her phone not buzzed.
Her brow quirked, wondering who it was since all of her closest friends were currently with her. She was surprised to see something from MJ, and the feeling only grew when she saw what it read.
“No. Fucking. Way.”
Cindy breathed out a laugh, and brandished their chat to the other girls, grinning from ear to ear. “Get on it, losers.”
Scrawled in a blue bubble, three words could be clearly read.
Point two, me.
Cindy hadn’t even known she was playing.
Abe scored the next point watching him take off his sweatshirt, and had come in to practice early actually sweating at the sight. “You weren’t kidding,” he muttered, obviously in disbelief. Cindy grinned smugly. MJ refused to disclose how she’d caught a glimpse herself, but one accusation from Flash that she was lying had him practically shitting himself at the mere glare that followed. Collectively, their resolve to literally never piss her off solidified further.
Then there was Charles (tucking his top back into his pants and smoothing out wrinkles), Cindy again and Betty simultaneously (he had his shirt on backwards, but instead of taking it off to fix it, just kind of folded his arms in to shift it around like a dying caterpillar), and Sally (his spectacularly sticky backpack tried to bring his clothes along with it one day as he shrugged it off). It was generally clear that Peter Parker was some kind of mutant, their reason being that with that kind of muscle he could undoubtedly take Flash the hell out without a second thought. Even with his obvious strength, however, he’d yet to do so. Perhaps an angel would be a better descriptor. Regardless, Cindy was firmly convinced something more was up with Peter. Little Peter, who had carried an inhaler with him since first grade, didn’t just up and get jacked.
Flash, who played at being skeptical despite his increasingly obvious desire to not be the last to score a point in the game he said he wasn’t playing, was kind of totally pissed about it. “It just doesn’t make sense,” he cried.
They’d decided to move practice to a nearby park for the day since it was nice out. Peter and Ned had told Mr. Harrington wildly conflicting but allegedly interdependent reasons for why they couldn’t make it. He lacked the backbone to call them on it and didn’t feel like being outdoors himself, so practice turned into a discussion of the game, complete with Jason and Betty’s presence.
“Up until, like, a year ago or something, he kept trying to hide in the locker room for all of P.E., you know. I’m not convinced you guys aren’t just screwing with me and Jason.”
Jason was losing a little more casually, to his credit. “I just can’t see it, man. Peter is basically a saltine in human form, you know?”
Nobody knew, but Cindy wasn’t about to start that with Jason. After a moment, MJ. “Yeah, I feel that.”
They all jumped, and Cindy pressed a hand over her heart with a little gasp. Betty rubbed her shoulder. MJ wasn’t the type to do a lot of socializing, and on the off chance she showed up, she had a tendency to blend into the background. Then, she’d make some sort of remark stubbornly reminding them of her presence, and gave everyone a heart attack. It was part of her charm.
Jason had stars in his eyes. “Michelle, you are my favorite person in the entire world.” Jason was easy to please like that.
She gave a close-lipped smile and intoned monotonously, “Your standards are too low.”
Betty stopped that before it could descend any further into MJ-ness. “Anyway, as I was saying before Flash started whining, we need something to call this. Preferably something that can be abbreviated or made into an acronym I can text easily, and has an emoji that goes naturally with it. I’ll need it to name the group chat properly,” she explained.
Flash cut in. “I do not whine,” Flash whined loudly. His indignance was ignored.
“It should have Peter’s name in it,” Charles decreed.
“And mention his beef. Or just, like, anything to express that homeboy is built,” Abe added.
A notebook and colored pen had appeared in Betty’s hands. Cindy glanced over and saw, scrawled in her meticulous print, neat bullet points bearing what had just been said. She dotted the page with a sparkly purple dash before looking up. “Any other contributions?”
“OCPA,” Sally declared, brow creased in thought. “Operation Confirm Peter’s Abs.”
“Respectfully!” Cindy chimed in.
Betty dutifully put Cindy’s addition in parentheses as she listed it out. Her lips twisted to the side, pen tapping on her cheek. “No emoji that readily comes to mind,” she drawled, a little displeased, “but I’ll figure something out.” She clicked her pen and put it back into her pouch, shutting the notebook with a faint slap of paper. She began shoving her things back in her bag. “Expect a group chat to be formed later, along with a spreadsheet of points. I’ve been meaning to get to it for a while now. Try to change the name or score tally and I will kick you out. Questions?”
Betty’s smile was bright, but Abe, Charles, and Flash all cowered at the sight of it. Mostly Flash, who gave a shaky nod. “Yeah—yeah. Sure thing,” he told her like he wasn’t shaking in his Converse.
Cindy smiled back. She always thought Betty did a great job organizing this sort of thing, though her nose wrinkled as the breeze blew her bangs into her face. “Where’d you get the pens?” she asked, putting her head over Betty’s shoulder as she started organizing contacts.
Betty didn’t look up, not that her apparent lack of attention bothered Cindy. She was busy, after all. “Target. You know how I keep an eye out for coupons?”
Cindy did know and, as a matter of fact, had a few stashed in her backpack that Betty had given her. She nodded. “Yeah. Good deal?”
“Great deal,” Betty corrected her gently. “Also, I looked for those popsicles you like, and they’re all out. I googled it and, apparently, the company’s getting sued or something over copyright.”
Cindy gasped, loud enough to draw the attention of her casually squabbling teammates. Tears had sprung to her eyes. “Spider-Man isn’t copyrighted!” she cried.
“Yo, Cindy, you alright?” Jason asked warily. Cindy was really starting to cry now—big, fat, crocodile tears of despair. If Spider-Man was copyrighted, never again would she roll with laughter over how badly some frozen juice could botch his appearance. It was one of her favorite pastimes, other than movie night with her sisters and AcaDec practice. She was furious and now, of course, craving one of her favorite snacks. When Cindy got hangry, she tended to cry, though usually not so publically.
“No! I’m not alright. I’m gonna’ sue the company who sued my Spidey popsicle supplier, and I’m gonna’ win! I took mock trial for two years to put it on scholarships; I can do it.”
Betty had abandoned her systems of organization to console her, but her efforts were in vain. Cindy thought she might never be the same.
Cindy was feeling amazing. Utterly unstoppable, on top of the entire freaking world, and if she wasn’t still pretty sure she was a lesbian, she would’ve kissed Peter Parker.
He was probably her favorite person in the entire universe, really. Cindy’s affection stemmed from the box of popsicles he was holding in his hands, slightly melted through they were when she tore hers open and (after curling her lips over her teeth in a not-bad imitation of a turtle) took a bite.
Her eyes closed in delight, shoulders going slack with the taste. “God, Peter, where did you find these?” In an attempt to debunk Betty’s claims, she’d gone around tearing through grocery stores, and then when those ran out, gas stations, looking for them. In her frantic search, she had found nothing. Not a single one. Zero. Zilch. Nada. Goose eggs. She had then FaceTimed Betty to cry some more about it, but everything was cool now.
Peter laughed a little nervously, glancing over to Flash, who was over-dramatically inspecting his like it was contagious. “Uh—well—my—uh—Mr. Stark is a Spider-Man fan. He got pretty mad that the company’s not allowed to make them for a while, so he bought what he could and gave some to me! To share. And I found that out, like, a half hour ago, but I kind of asked a lot of questions about the whole thing because Happy—that’s his driver—doesn’t show up too often without warning, so now they’re a little melty but still good, I think? And yeah. Now everyone has popsicles.”
Flash scoffed, reluctantly removing his from its packaging after feeling around for what end had the stick. “Yeah, like Tony Stark and his personal chauffeur know when you have AcaDec and bring you snacks for it. Nice try, Pen—”
Cindy was not a particularly threatening creature, but like hell was she let someone harass the kid who had just given her blue-raspberry-flavored mana. She strode over and snatched the popsicle from his hands entirely. Flash cut off very suddenly, making grabby hands as Cindy climbed on top of the table and held it out of his reach. “Apologize,” she instructed him sternly.
Flash rolled his eyes. MJ threw a pencil with surprising precision at the back of his head. He yelped, turning back around to glare at her. “MJ, the hell was that?”
She shrugged. “Making fun of Peter doesn’t sound like something someone who wants a popsicle should do, is all.” She took a lick of her own for emphasis, flashing an icy, thin smile.
When Flash tried to protest, another pencil appeared in her hand and landed on his forehead. “Quit being stupid and apologize,” Cindy reiterated from above his head, ignoring the syrup starting to sticky her fingers.
Peter was trying to protest. “Guys, really, this isn’t—you can just give him—”
“Hey, Peter?” Sally cut in, seated beside MJ. She didn’t give him a chance to respond. “Pipe down for a second, will you?” She wasn’t even trying to hide her amusement.
Flash was busy trying to climb up on the table himself.
MJ sighed. “You’re about to lose MJ privileges, you know. It’s gonna’ be really sad if you do, being the only one who calls me Michelle—yet another thing I’ll be forced to make fun of you about.”
“MJ—”
“Shut up, Peter.” That was Sally again, mild mannered as ever.
Flash groaned, looking about five seconds away from stomping his foot like a child at any given moment. He got back down, his eyes trained on the floor and arms crossed. “I’m sorry for saying your thing about Tony Stark is stupid,” he ground out, sounding like the admission took no small amount of pain.
MJ hummed thoughtfully. “Hardly genuine, but then again, that’s the douchenozzle I know. Go ahead and give it to him, Cindy.” Flash only barely caught it when Cindy unceremoniously let go.
Abe and Charles had just walked in and gotten their own snack when it happened. As things were, Flash was still pissy and his baleful stare remained on Peter, who was obliviously rambling with Ned about some LEGO set when it was pointed out to him that his popsicle had dripped onto his shirt.
What was it with Peter and stains? The thought would cross Cindy’s head later, but the second his hands went to the hem of his shirt and lifted it to try and rub the cherry-flavored blotch out of the fabric, the team collectively sucked in a breath.
Uno, dos, tres, all the way up to seis—Cindy could count the muscle packed onto his stomach a mile away. Holy shit. Holy shit.
Flash’s popsicle splattered onto the floor, and Cindy could swear there was a tear or two shining in his dark eyes. Abe’s fingers were already flying across his phone screen, scrambling to send an update on the situation into the OCPA(R) chat.
Betty and Jason were going to lose their shit.
By the time Peter looked back up, Ned was the only one doing a bad job of acting like anything at all had happened. Peter was too oblivious to even notice.