Chapter Text
Peter groaned, laying his head down on his arms. It was only the second week of the new school year, but he was just done.
“That bad, huh?” Ned asked, setting his lunch tray down on the table and sitting down next to Peter.
“You have no idea.” Peter grumbled through his arms.
“Is he already dead? That was fast.” MJ said as she poked his shoulder a little.
“Your lack of concern hurts me.”
“Get over it, loser.”
Peter gave her a glare as he sat up and started disinterestedly picking at the food in front of him. The three friends fell into an easy silence, each lost in their own thoughts. There were very few things that were nice about being the least popular people in school, but having a table all to yourself in the lunch room was one of the few perks.
Peter was pulled out of his thoughts by Ned bumping him with his elbow. “Dude, do we have Lang homework?”
“Huh? No, I don’t think so.” Peter shrugged, trying — rather unsuccessfully — to remember what they had done in Lang that morning.
“What do you mean you don’t think so? Haven’t you already had Lang?”
“Well yeah, but I may not have been paying attention the entire time.” Peter shrugged again. “I’m pretty sure it’s just that ‘Getting to Know You’ survey. Right MJ?” He asked, glancing over at MJ. “MJ?”
“Hm?” MJ was paying absolutely no attention to the conversation Peter and Ned were having and was instead completely focused on the cafeteria door closest to the table where they were sitting. Peter glanced over, trying to see what she was looking at.
“Hey, isn’t that one of the kids from Physics?” Ned asked, looking over too.
Peter, Ned, and MJ were all taking a newly offered class that year called Advanced Physics Principles and Mentorship. Three days a week it met as a normal junior level class, albeit more in depth than a standard high school physics class, and the other two days they had combined classes with one of the eighth grade Physics classes at Midtown. It was touted as an opportunity for the juniors to get to explore more advanced physics topics while also giving them an opportunity to work with and mentor the eighth graders.
“That’s an eighth grader?” Peter asked disbelievingly.
The girl standing in the door was tiny and definitely not an eighth grader. She looked Japanese, with her long black hair pulled back into a simple ponytail, and her hands were gripping the straps of her backpack so tightly that her knuckles were turning white. Actually, she just looked terrified overall. Even from where he was sitting, Peter could see how her shoulders were tucked in close to her body, how her hands were shaking where they were clenched around her backpack.
“What was her name again? Na- something?” Ned asked, his brow furrowing as he tried to remember.
“Natsuko.” MJ said, still not looking away from the door.
“She looks like she needs somewhere to sit. We should invite her to our table.” Peter glanced over at MJ to see what she thought.
“Yeah, sure.” She said nodding. “Also forewarning, she pretty much doesn't talk, so don’t be idiots.” With that said, she raised her voice a little and called out Natsuko’s name.
Natsuko looked up, surprised, from where she was standing in the doorway. It took her a second to find who had called her name, but once she was looking at them, MJ made a waving motion with her hand, inviting her over. Natsuko hesitated for a second, looking uncertain, before slowly making her way over to their table.
As she walked over, MJ smiled a little at her and said, “We thought you looked like you needed somewhere to sit.”
Natsuko gave them a small smile and ducked her head a little, clearly her way of saying thank you before she sat down next to MJ. Peter noticed a few things right off the bat as she sat down. For starters, she was still uncomfortable — she was holding herself stiffly, with her arms wrapped around her body — and even though she sat down next to MJ, she had left more than a foot of space in between them.
Peter smiled at her a little, hoping to show that she was welcome and didn’t have to be nervous. “Hi, I’m Peter, and this is Ned.” He said gesturing to Ned, who was busy frantically pulling his spanish homework that he had forgotten to do out of his backpack. “It’s nice to meet you.”
Natsuko ducked her head again a little in answer. Sensing her discomfort, MJ guided the conversation away from Natsuko and started talking about the movie that she had watched that weekend.
~
Over the next couple of weeks, they started falling into a rhythm. Natsuko would come sit with them at lunch and work on her homework or just listen to what they were talking about. As Natsuko started sitting at their table more and more often Peter noticed that while she came to the lunchroom every day, she never actually ate anything. He considered the possibility that she was eating her lunch in one of her other classes, but he could see that she didn’t get the school lunch and didn’t seem to have a lunch box or food of any kind in her backpack. While he couldn’t be completely sure, Peter had an aching suspicion that she didn’t have any sort of lunch. His suspicion that she wasn’t getting enough food was only further confirmed by how small she was — not just skinny, but small in every sense of the word — and how he could often hear her stomach growling. It was quiet enough that the others didn’t notice, Peter didn’t think he would have been able to hear it if not for his super hearing, but it still made Peter worry.
He was torn, because he wanted to give her some of his food at lunch, but he was worried that might scare her off. In the end, he decided that he needed to try to do something, so on Monday of Natsuko’s third week of sitting with them, he decided to take action. Taking action really only meant offering her his apple at lunch, but hey, you’ve got to start somewhere.
The school lunches always tried to give out a piece of fruit in a desperate attempt to encourage their student body to eat a balanced diet, so instead of eating his apple like he usually would, Peter shrugged and said, “You know, I’m not really hungry anymore. Natsuko do you want my apple?” He could see the completely incredulous look Ned was giving him out of the corner of his eye — since the spider bite Peter was pretty much always hungry—, but Ned seemed to understand what Peter was trying to do and thankfully didn’t say anything.
Natsuko froze for a second, surprised, before hesitantly smiling and reaching out to take the apple Peter was offering her. He had no doubt that she saw right through him, but as long as she took the apple, he wasn’t going to complain.
After that, it started being more common place for one of them to give Natsuko some of their lunch. It was usually just a piece of fruit, or a bread roll; nowhere near enough to be a full meal, but better than nothing.
Still, their real breakthrough on the food front came in a rather unexpected form: Ned’s cooking class. Through a series of complicated circumstances that no one, Ned included, understood, Ned ended up taking a cooking class as his elective for all of first semester. The class, called “An Introduction to Food”, was completely as ridiculous as it sounded, but the single positive of Ned’s enrollment in the class was that it meant that almost every day he had something that they’d made in class to share at lunch. Ranging from tacos to puppy chow and everything in between, it was the perfect opportunity to give Natsuko some extra food. Ned firmly maintained that his mom didn’t want him cluttering up their fridge with his “cooking adventures”, and as long as someone else took the first piece of food, Natsuko was perfectly happy to snack away on whatever Ned had brought.
Slowly Natsuko started to come out of her shell. She would more and more often participate in their conversations, nodding along and sometimes even laughing when one of them said something funny. She was definitely starting to get more comfortable around them, but even after two weeks of sitting with them, Natsuko had yet to say a word. Peter was worried that they were doing something wrong or accidentally doing something that was making her uncomfortable, or even that they should be trying harder to get her to talk, but when he brought up his concerns at dinner, Pepper assured him that they were doing everything right, they just had to give her time.
So, rather than trying to force Natsuko to speak, Peter endeavored to wait and let her speak in her own time.
~
Aside from lunch, the only other time Peter saw Natsuko during the day was in Physics. Their joint Physics classroom was set up with all of the desks arranged in pairs; the idea was that there would be one junior and one eighth grader at each pair of desks, so that they could be lab partners and just generally work with each other on days when both classes were together. Earlier that week, they had changed seats, and Peter was now paired with Natsuko, something about which he was quite happy. Even though she still hadn’t spoken and mostly didn’t participate in their conversations at lunch — at least not in the traditional sense —, Peter still felt like the two of them had grown closer over the last few weeks of her sitting with him, Ned, and MJ.
That day they were having a lab day, focusing on the inherent magnetic properties of specific materials. After running a few experiments, the juniors and eighth graders were each given a worksheet to work on. Truth be told, it was not the most interesting topic ever, and after finishing his worksheet in a matter of minutes, Peter considered getting out his other homework or doing something productive, but opted instead to doodle in the margins of his worksheet. After about five minutes of mindlessly drawing, Peter felt something poke his arm. Glancing over, he saw Natsuko looking up at him.
“What’s up?” He asked, glancing quickly at her paper.
She was almost done with it; there was only a single question left blank in the middle of the sheet. Assuming that that was the issue, he leaned over a little to read the question. It asked, “How could you measure the attraction between the two magnets?”
“Okay…” Peter said looking up again, “what part don’t you understand?”
Natsuko frowned as she pointed down at the word “attraction”.
Peter paused for a second, confused. “You don’t know the word attraction?” He felt her stiffen next to him and shrink back a little, and he cursed himself for asking such a stupid question and quickly tried to backtrack. “I mean that’s totally fine. Alright, um … well, so, attraction is when two things are attracted to each other. Shoot, that was an awful definition. Let me try again.” He took a deep breath and let it out. “Attraction is when there’s force between two objects. Like, do you remember how the two magnets stuck to each other? Like they were pulling on each other?” Natsuko nodded a little. “Well, that’s called attraction. So this question is just asking how you would measure how strongly the two magnets are pulling on each other. Does that make sense?” She nodded again. “So, how would you do it?”
Natsuko though for a second, before lifting up her hands and mimed pulling them apart, looking up at Peter questioningly.
Peter let out a little huff of laughter. “Yeah, that works.”
As she looked down to write her answer, Peter thought about what had just happened. There were a couple of explanations he could think of for why she didn’t know the word “attraction”. He knew she was smart — for starters, she was at Midtown, and besides that, you could just tell by how she acted— so that obviously wasn’t it. He also knew that she was Japanese, but he had just assumed that she was Japanese-American; it had never occurred to him that English might not be her first language. As he looked a little more closely at her paper, he saw immediately that this explanation was correct. While most of the answers of the worksheet were simply numbers and calculation, the questions that needed full length answers were written in a rather random combination of English and Japanese. Peter concluded that she must have moved to the US from Japan rather recently for her to still be that uncomfortable with the language.
Once Peter realised that Natsuko had only recently come to America (and told Ned and MJ about it), it was really quite obvious. Peter felt kind of stupid for not realizing it sooner. One of the more humorous instances of Natsuko being unfamiliar happened at lunch one day. Ned had a bag of Cheetos with him that he had brought from home, and when he saw Natsuko looking at them curiously, he offered a couple. Looking doubtful, she grabbed a single Cheeto from the bag and held it up to look at. After a second of inspecting it suspiciously, she very cautiously took a bite from one end. After about a second of chewing, she wrinkled her nose in disgust and, as tactfully as possible, spit the rest of the Cheeto out into a napkin. Peter couldn’t help but smile at how offended she looked as she looked down at the rest of the Cheeto in her hand. After carefully putting the rest of the uneaten Cheeto on the napkin as well and carefully folding it up, Natsuko looked up at Ned disbelievingly, who was still happily munching away on his cheetos.
“Why?” she asked, seemingly genuinely confused as to why anyone would ever willingly eat Cheetos.
Peter was so surprised he almost fell off his chair. MJ, bless her, showed no outward signs of being surprised and responded without missing a beat. “Sometimes it's better not to ask.”
Natsuko did not look remotely satisfied with this answer, but let it go for the time being, turning back to the banana bread muffin (the latest project from Ned’s cooking class) that she had been eating before the whole ‘Cheeto incident’. After that the conversation moved on, as Ned and MJ started talking about the new topics for Academic Decathlon, but Peter was still reeling. Natsuko spoke to them! Sure, it was only one word, but still, Peter finally felt like they were making progress.