➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 2
GUESS WHO WAS SUPER PUMPED TO START NANOWRIMO AND THEN PROMPTLY GOT HERSELF A FEVER AND A STUFFED-UP HEAD?
This girl. It is Sickness Central in my house. I feel like people need to be fumigated before they step through the door.
(Halloween was fun, though! My favorite costume was one little girl who came to our door dressed like a gumball machine; she'd wrapped clear plastic around her and stuffed it with multicolored balloons until she was vaguely spherical. IT WAS THE CUTEST THING.)
ANWAY. Let's get this show on the road!
NOTE: I like my layout. My layout sucks when it comes to reading fic. Please feel free to read it in the light format, because it is better for your eyes.
➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 2
for soxdamnxcute. RPF. Andrew Garfield, Logan Lerman, and Jesse Eisenberg, university AU where Andrew has Spiderman abilities. 6600 words.
Because one does not simply ask Kat why she wants a thing. They just do it for her.
Fact!
[also available @ AO3]
1 | ❦
HORT 221, Methods of Plant Propagation, is, bizarrely, located on the bottom floor of the Communications building, and it doesn't matter that it takes Jesse and Logan twenty minutes to find the correct corridor that gets them there -- shockingly, they've never had to go into the Communications building before, except maybe once during orientation -- because it takes the professor nearly that long to figure out how to hook his computer to the complicated projection system.
His TAs are quick to rescue him, and they've got their heads bent over inputs and outputs, flicking switches to see what they do, when Jesse and Logan slink into the only open pair of seats, smack in the front row.
Methods of Plant Propagation is a cross-sectional lecture-and-lab offered only in the fall and is required by so many different majors that Jesse set a timer for himself on registration day so that he wouldn't miss his window to get in, and casting a quick glance around the lecture hall, he sections people off into fives and counts up to a total of 83, himself and Logan included, which is thirteen more than the registration cap.
He sees Emma W. three rows back and waves before he can stop himself, keeping it tucked close to his body because he isn't sure if she's actually looking at him, but she sits up a little bit and waves back, her teeth a quick wink of white across the distance. He spots Rooney, too, way up in the back, and he only knows it's her because she's asleep, scrunched low in her seat with her uniform jacket thrown over her arms. Next to her, Ryan goes fishing under the jacket for her hand, pulling it out and waving it at Jesse for her.
"Man," mutters Logan in an undertone, turning Jesse's attention front and center, where he's pointing at the outlets located under each seat. "Why aren't we Comm majors? They get all the cool toys."
At that moment, both the TAs yelp in triumph, and Jesse looks up to see the big screen finally projecting the syllabus.
The professor coughs embarrassedly into his microphone and says, "There's a reason my grandkids don't trust me to do anything more complicated on my -- whattyacallit -- iPod? Than make phone calls," he fumbles what's clearly an iPhone and holds it up to show them, and everybody in the classroom under the age of thirty cringes simultaneously at the affront to Apple culture.
"Um," he scratches at his nose, which is so red and bulbous that it sits on his face like a toadstool. Jesse had him last semester for Intro to Landscape Design. "Many thanks to my TAs. Everybody memorize their faces now, so you know who to assassinate if you fail this class --"
One of the TAs, who, like every other Hort major that Jesse knows, is dressed in cargo shorts made up of mostly pockets and a print-screen shirt from Threadless, grabs the other TA by the hand and they both take exaggerated bows. In the low light, their hair glints darkly auburn, and when they straighten up, Jesse finally recognizes Emma Stone, and Logan jabs him hard in the side with his ballpoint pen, making him stifle a yelp and throw a startled what?! look sideways. Logan looks like he swallowed a fish, his eyes huge.
"-- although you shouldn't, because we don't like failing you as much as you don't like failing. Also, I shouldn't have to remind you that this class isn't open to nondegree students: don't think I don't see you back there, Mr. Timberlake." The class swivels around as, standing way far in the back since there aren't any open seats left, the offending party abruptly tries to become one with the wall behind him. "Declare your major or quit wasting our time."
The professor pauses delicately, and after a beat, Timberlake gives up on subtlety and makes a jaunty salute, sidling sideways out the back exit. To Jesse's surprise, at least five other kids saunter out after him.
Who'd want to sneak into a Plant Prop class? he wonders. There isn't even enough room for those who have to take it.
"Right. Now, out of those of you who can actually read the course catalog, how many of you are here for Horticulture?" Jesse's hand goes up, and belatedly, because he's still looking like he's wrestling with that fish, Logan's does too. "Landscape Design?" Solid class majority for that one, including Emma W. "Forestry Management? Agronomy?"
With the class accounted for, the professor drums his fingers along the edge of his podium and smiles.
"Good. Let's not pretend we're here for anything different. This, class, is Plant Sex Ed."
2 | ❦
Personal relationships are the kind of thing that Jesse just lets happen, instead of trying to go out and forge any himself, and it's only when he glances through his phone and realizes that his conversation threads with Logan Lerman are three times longer than they are with anybody else, his mother included (though this might be because Jesse's mother doesn't get how T9 texting works, and if she did, those text-bombs of hers would probably be a lot more frequent, because Jesse's mother doesn't understand character limits,) that he's able to unravel the course of their friendship backwards.
Logan's an LA native who migrated north because he says that everything in SoCal is "so fake, bro, it's painful," but he couldn't actually imagine himself leaving the state, because really, is there anything interesting that could possibly exist outside California?
"Well, besides you," he allows with a generous tilt of his head to Jesse, who smiles bemusedly and watches Logan pin the ripped, faded remainders of concert tickets to his cork board with the loving care he imagines most mothers would put into scrapbooking their children's important firsts.
And, on another occasion, while they're waiting in line for burritos at the caf in the student union because they seriously make them the size of newborn babies, it's the best thing, "Actually, it's probably Dan Rad's fault. You remember, our freshman RA with the swag glasses?" He demonstrates helpfully, mimes slits in front of his eyes.
Jesse thinks about it. "The one we elected to Student Council kind of on accident?"
"Yeah, him. He's friends with Emma, remember?"
"Emma ... ?"
"Watson. Yes, hi," he goes, turning to the employee in the hairnet before Jesse can do anything more than panic internally, because bringing up Emma Watson in a conversation with Logan is entering DANGER WILL ROBINSON territory. He only existed on the peripheral edge of Logan's infatuation his first semester, but the fallout went through their mutual friends with the force of a nuclear detonation. Jesse still doesn't know how to address it with respect; his experience with broken hearts comes largely from late-night runs of Arrested Development on Netflix Instant and might potentially involve a broom. "I want everything. Everything you could possibly fit into a tortilla and still get it to close. Actually, no, I'm not picky."
"Sour cream or cheese?" goes the employee, on whom the concept of "everything" is apparently lost.
The next employee, who's watching Logan's mutant burrito minefield, looks at Jesse in trepidation.
"Vegetarian, please," he tells her kindly.
"But really," Logan continues, mouthing at the end of his straw as they go trekking back across campus to the dorms, lanyard bouncing against his sternum and enormously fat foil burrito tucked haphazardly under his arm. "I knew Emma through Intro to LD --" Air raid sirens sound off in Jesse's head, but Logan's already continuing, "And she's known Dan Rad since they were, like, eleven or something, and you knew him --"
"He was our RA!"
"-- because you," Logan talks over him gleefully. "Are a super-cute little duckling who imprints on the first creature that shows him kindness."
"Shut up, I was in Intro to LD with you too."
This throws Logan. "Wait," he blinks. "You were?"
"Yes," says Jesse patiently. "And Intro to Hort, and Ecology last semester." He'd pretty much just let his freshman advisor do everything for him, so his first two semesters at UC Davis were spent taking sensible introductory courses and some gen eds Jesse couldn't remember the names of five minutes after sitting for the final exams. Logan, on the other hand, had jumped in feet first and signed himself up for all the introductory Horticulture classes on top of some 300-level business classes, and had freaked out about it until Emma Stone had helpfully shown him how to drop and still get a refund.
"... huh," says Logan. And then, "Hey, do you think we'll get Andrew as our lab instructor?"
"Andrew who?"
3 | ❦
"Oh," he says, very faintly, when he and Logan walk into lab on Thursday to find the mystery TA from Plant Prop sitting on the desk in the front of the room, handouts on his lap and a pen tucked into the collar of his shirt, cheerfully swinging his legs as he picks at some kind of white resin on his wrist, and Jesse finally, finally remembers where he knows that face from. "That Andrew."
4 | ❦
"I didn't know!" Jesse gets in defensively, before anyone else can say a word.
Logan goggles a him, incredulous. "How could you not have noticed that our TA for Plant Prop was Spiderman?"
"Because I ... just didn't?"
He casts a quick look around the table. It's lunchtime on a Friday during the first week of school, well before students have really settled on which classes they're going to skip for the rest of the semester, so the student union is crowded and noisy. Between the two of them, Dan Rad and Emma S. have mastered the art of politely getting underclassmen to vacate an area by claiming they need it for Student Council Badassery reasons, because it really is the best table in the student union: it's right next to an outlet, and Joe and Brenda usually bring an extension cord, so they can wire in and play Skyrim and scare off any potential table-poachers by their combined enthusiasm and good-humored disregard for routine hygiene. Ellen's already voted them most likely to get married and train their kids to use lightsabers and put down "Jedi Knight" under Affiliated Religion on their US Census forms. Jesse still isn't entirely sure how he earned himself a place in this circle (Ryan jokes that you have to have dimples.) Like most everything in Jesse's life, it was probably accidental, however it happened.
"Don't worry," says Emma S. cheerily. "He grades super easy."
Logan looks over, curious. "How do you know?"
Jesse almost face-palms, and Emma S. stares at him for a beat over the lid of her Macbook Air, where Jesse can just make out the audio coming from a Newsground video, before she says baldly, "Because I'm the other TA, you moron."
"So can we lay off Jesse for not recognizing Andrew Garfield, thanks?" Jesse wants to know, as Logan tries valiantly to die of embarrassment on the spot. "I recognized you," he adds for Emma S.'s benefit.
She beams at him. "Thank you, Jesse," she says primly. "Just for that, you get the rest of my fries."
She pushes the basket over.
"Oh, hey, thanks," Jesse goes. "Glad to be of service."
"Male undergrads are my dispose-all system," she agrees.
5 | ❦
Jesse's life plan, if anybody should bother asking, is to someday open a nursery in one of the sunny California valleys and sell ornamental plants, whirligigs, fertilizer, and vegetable seeds to amateur gardeners and retirees with too much time on their hands, because he likes the idea of spending his life caring for living things and teaching other people to do the same.
It's a dream that Logan has, apparently, invited himself along with, because he refers to it as "our shop," is minoring in Finance, and insists on taking four semesters of Business Spanish to make them marketable when they graduate.
"Advantages of asexual reproduction?" he prompts Jesse.
The late September sunlight falls in bars across their windowsill, illuminating the veins in the big umbrella leaves of the Ficus benjamina crowded underneath the sill and making the petals of the Gaillardia pulchella and the hanging Plecthantrus australis glow, and the refraction sets the whole room to a rosy green overlay. All of the plants in Jesse and Logan's dorm room are ones they rescued from the greenhouse at the end of last semester's Intro to Hort lab, where they otherwise would have been tossed. Jesse considers it equivalent to rescuing an animal from the shelter before they put it down, because who wouldn't want to take their plant home after a whole semester spent learning how to name it, plant it, and keep it alive?
Granted, Intro to Hort was a largely non-major class, filled with Humanities kids who needed to scratch off their Physical Science requirement and didn't want to take anything difficult, like physics or chemistry, so maybe not everybody had the same feeling about plants that Jesse did.
As long as you don't grow anything illegal, Dan Rad had said, when he caught them lugging the Ficus pots up the stairs. I don't care what you put in your room.
"Less expensive," Jesse responds, and then, more thoughtfully, "And less chance of transferring seed-borne diseases among a cultivation. On the other hand, the advantage of sexual reproduction is that you can combine plant traits for a hardier, more desirable plant. Asexual reproduction is just cloning."
He stands, crossing behind Logan's chair to fetch his mug from beside their shoes (why was it over there?) and pauses on the way back.
"That's not right," he goes, pointing over Logan's shoulder at the cross-section he's drawn on his lab worksheet.
Logan studies it, and then, belligerently, "Why not?"
"Endo, exo. The endocarp is the boundary around the seed -- the innermost layer, see? And then exocarp is the skin -- the outermost. The mesocarp's that fleshy tissue in between, and the pericarp --" he takes Logan's pencil from him and crosses it out where he'd written in place of the mesocarp. "Is the collective term for all of them."
"That's stupid," Logan mutters, without heat. "When I'm eating a simple fleshy, I'm not going to go, 'Oh, this drupe has a fantastic mesocarp, you should try some,' I'm going to say, 'ah, fucker, seed.'"
Jesse laughs. "Andrew's pretty lax with grading, but he's not going to be that lax."
"Oh?" Logan swings his head around, lifting his eyebrows. There's an expression on his face that Jesse can't place. "It's 'Andrew' now, is it?"
Andrew Garfield is the least academic TA Jesse has ever met. He cares a lot more about making sure his lab section keeps their plants happy and healthy than he does about making sure they know exactly which of the five major plant hormones is responsible for apical growth (hint: it's auxins,) which is great in the practical world, but less helpful when they're facing a 120-question Scantron exam and the only helpful thing Jesse can remember is that Andrew can crawl across the ceiling when he needs to get from one end of the room to the other.
He's the Spiderman -- everybody's heard about how he got himself bit by one of those crossbreeds that the grad students in the Bio department were messing around with, since the horticulture labs are actually just the shabby cast-offs from the bio labs, given that UC Davis gives approximately two shits about its Horticulture & Agronomy department.
Joke's on them, of course, because nobody found the spider that bit Andrew and nobody can recreate the scenario that led to him being able to produce sticky web material from the sweat glands on his wrist and a having a predilection for literally climbing walls when uncomfortable, and he refuses to do anything with his new mutation besides continue to work on his graduate degree.
His continued existence is something of a needle under the nail beds of the collective university science circuit, because he makes no sense.
It does, at least, explain why people like Justin Timberlake kept trying to sneak into the Plant Prop lecture. Human mutants are the stuff of comic books.
Abruptly, Jesse realizes what the expression on Logan's face is.
"Oh, no," he goes.
"What?" says Logan.
"No, no, no, and no," Jesse points at him, fierce. "Don't you even think about it!"
"What!"
6 | ❦
Logan Lerman has an exasperating tendency to crush hard on at least one person a semester.
(And then he has the gall to accuse Jesse of imprinting. Honestly.)
Last semester, it was Alex Daddario, the upperclassman from 204 who always wrote where she was going on the whiteboard on her door whenever she went out, signing it with a flourish and a cartoon heart that Logan thought was simply the coolest thing. Jesse remembers going out of their way a lot, coming and going from the dorms, just so they could pass the second floor and she what she wrote this time. She's studying mechanical engineering so that she can build motorcycles.
The semester before that, it was Emma Watson from Intro to Landscape Design, a brown and mousey girl who used to swap clomping construction boots with Rooney Mara and frequently wore A-line dresses with grandfather cardigans pulled over them. She sat at their table a lot for lunch, but eventually she switched her concentration to pomology and mostly hangs out with Emma Stone and the Agriculture kids these days. Jesse's pretty sure both Emmas are angling to go into business together and buy a pretentiously sophisticated vineyard in Napa Valley and be filthy rich. Sniffing wine is absolutely a thing they can pull off without looking ten kinds of fool.
Logan still sees Emma W. at those parties he goes to that Jesse most emphatically does not, because last time Jesse went to a party, it resulted in photographic evidence of him making out with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Zac Efron (and who brought that with them to uni?) and Jesse still hasn't passed the expiration date of his shame over that whole situation.
So, in all honesty, it doesn't surprise Jesse overmuch when, somewhere around their sixth week of lab, Logan starts going up on his tiptoes whenever he has to talk to Spiderman about the ratio of soil media in the new pots or even just to ask where the tape is.
There's nothing wrong with this, honest, never mind the fact that Andrew is their lab instructor and also their TA, a fact that is continually placed in the forefront of their minds by Emma S.'s cheerful insistence that anything they say can and will be used against them in the determination of their grades.
Logan may crush, but he isn't actually stupid enough to flirt, and Andrew is a sweet person, he remembers everybody's names, and he fumbles a lot when answering questions after lecture, but most people who stay behind to talk to him aren't really looking for the answers, per se, so that's fine. He wears cable-knit sweaters with the wrists worn out, pulled over "Some People Are Gay, Get Over It!" shirts, and he sits behind the professor's podium during lecture and bounces his pen in a way that Jesse can almost keep time with.
You should let Logan make his own mistakes, his mother sends him, and Jesse sits in the back of another class and thumbs his phone every time it tries to go to sleep to read the message again.
That's fine, it's all fine, except Jesse can't actually hold a grudge against anything that makes Logan bounce around in his brand-new white Air Jordans with the thick tongues, pulling his guitar down from on top his wardrobe, warbling happy things into his cornflakes. He can't think it's a mistake, and instead finds himself bizarrely grateful for Andrew Garfield's existence in their lives, if it makes Logan that sunny.
7 | ❦
Layering, Andrew tells them in the next lab, is the horticulturist's most useful propagation tool, because it encourages root formation on the stem itself by cutting through the phloem and keeping the xylem intact, thus creating a whole new plant that is still attached to the mother plant's nutrition.
Of the five types of layering, they did air layering in Intro to Hort, which is how he and Logan wound up with the Ficus benjamina now crowding them for space in their dorm.
"I feel like I should recognize them," he says, as the mother Ficus are brought out of the greenhouse for another round. He pats the plant at his and Logan's station in what he hopes is a sympathetic, commiserating kind of way. At least Jesse isn't regularly cut upon and his regrown limbs severed off in the name of university courses.
Since it requires an upright stem, air layering is the most useful type of layering for woody plants. Logan holds their plant steady for him as Jesse takes a knife and scrapes through the bark on all sides, until it's nothing but whitish xylem. He sponges up great handfuls of damp sphagnum moss and wraps it around the wound. Usually, at this stage, they bind it up with black plastic and tape it down, to trick the plant into rooting, but they've got something easier.
"Why don't you fight crime?" Logan asks out of the blue, as Andrew comes around to coat the moss in a gluey, stretchy white substance that comes from his wrists and sticks surprisingly well to the bark.
Jesse, who remembers how incredibly difficult it had been to get everything taped down the last time he did air layering, wishes wistfully that there was some way he could box Andrew up to use him sparingly whenever he needed to propagate woody plants, because he doesn't look forward to doing it again in the future.
Andrew's mouth makes a curious shape. "What do you mean?"
"You could do anything with that," Logan makes a pointed gesture with his wrist that is probably supposed to mean webslinging, but mostly just leaves Andrew looking incredibly amused and Logan red around the ears. "So why are you slumming around with us state university kids?"
"Because I'm also a state university kid," Andrew answers. "Because I want to finish my graduate studies and I want to open a nursery --" he glances over when Jesse stifles a yelp, startled. Jesse manages a flinch of a smile in response, his eyes watering and his foot throbbing from where Logan trod on it eagerly. "-- and I really want to make enough money that I don't have to worry. That's all."
"Would you ever consider using your powers to fight crime?" Logan presses.
"Me? Do I look like a superhero to you?" he gestures to himself, inviting and up-and-down appraising look, and Jesse doesn't miss the way Logan's throat bobs. "Nah, I wouldn't be very good at it at all. Besides, we're all crimefighters in our own ways, and it's important for everybody to be crimefighters, not just us mutants," he smiles wryly. "I think I'll keep doing that."
8 | ❦
Andrew doesn't live in the dorms. His parents run a buy-it-and-fix-it real estate business in Sacramento, so he and his older brother shuttle themselves between largely unfurnished properties, babysitting them until they're ready to go on the market.
The one Andrew's living in now is on the other side of the interstate from campus, and Alex and Logan volunteer themselves after Andrew's contracted electrician turns out to be laundering money through to Russia and winds up in jail, leaving Andrew's family with a half-finished wiring job in the garage and no money left to pay another contractor. Jesse isn't one hundred percent sure how the series of events go, starting with his perfectly normal plans for a Saturday afternoon being derailed and ending with him sitting on the porch of a two-story house with a fantastic view of the surrounding suburb, holding Andrew's thermos of coffee for him as Andrew yanks his shoelaces into submission, while Alex and Logan bang happily away in the garage.
Although, let's face it, it's probably mostly Alex doing all of the work, because she is violently possessive when it comes to projects.
He wonders when somebody's going to point out the potential pit falls of letting an undergraduate do electrical work without the proper paperwork. Alex, however, doesn't let herself make mistakes. It's not in her nature.
And maybe the Garfields are totally shady, too, what does he know?
"You know, I think I forgot what it's like to be in an actual house," he comments, letting Andrew have his coffee back and stretching out on his back, tugging his sweatshirt down before it can expose skin.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Andrew's face scrunch up as he quickly tallies the math in his head. In order to take Plant Prop, a 200-level class, Jesse would have to have taken one of the introductory classes (Jesse took all four,) which would make him at least a sophomore.
"Did you not go home over the summer?"
Jesse shakes his head. "Ironically, it was less expensive for me to stay here than it was to fly home and back, so I've been in the dorms awhile."
Andrew's teeth flash. "Well, I can't promise my house is very exciting, but at least there aren't any communal bathrooms."
Jesse sits bolt upright.
"Ohmygod," he blurs out, all in a rush. "I forgot real houses have real bathrooms! The toilet isn't a stall?" Andrew shakes his head. "It has a door?" A nod. "That actually looks?" Another nod. Jesse makes grabby hands. "Give me your coffee, I want to pee in it at least once before we leave."
Andrew stares at him for a beat, before he throws his head back and barks laughter, a bright, loud noise that comes out of him like a sunburst.
Jesse's face flames.
"Shut up," he gets out. "That's not what I -- I meant your bathroom. Oh my god. Nope, I'm just going to stop talking."
"No, don't do that!" Andrew protests, surrendering his thermos immediately.
"Nope. Nope, nope, nope," he swings his legs around, putting his back to Andrew and crossing his ankles over his knees, flipping the drinking tab on the thermos. "Wake me up when this humiliation passes, which will be, oh, never."
Fingers touch his spine through the fabric of his shirts, brief, like the touch of a nurse, and for a second, Jesse's afraid that they're going to stick, or barb, or something, like spider's legs, before they're gone again.
"Don't do that," Andrew says again, gentler now. "Hey, tell me. Why did you want to major in Horticulture?"
"Totipotency," Jesse deadpans.
He's awarded with another one of those sunburst laughs.
"That's what Martin told us to tell you if you asked us why we want to major in Horticulture."
Jesse wonders who Martin is, before remembering that it's Professor Sheen's first name. He's never actually talked to the man, for all that he's the senior member of their department and frequently makes a joke out of how many times he has had to say, "no, you can't fanboy Spiderman," to Justin Timberlake.
He turns around, and Andrew is sitting far too close on the porch step. "It's true, though," he goes, stuttering only a little bit over his surprise at the proximity. "Totipotency is the ability --"
"Of a single cell to replicate its entire host organism from scratch," Andrew finishes for him. "It's why we can layer and cut and stem and chip bud a plant and successfully produce an entirely new one. Hypothetically, with just one tree --"
"-- you can eventually grow an entire forest."
Andrew's smile softens at the corners, warm and melted like sunlight, and he's looking at Jesse like he's architecture, like he's landscape, like if Andrew takes something of Jesse's now, he can wrap it in sphagnum moss and grow something hopelessly bright. And Jesse can acknowledge this, acknowledge that it's happening, just like he can acknowledge that he's a grown adult and this isn't worth it, what's happening right here and the mess he'll make of his personal relationships, if he let's this happen now.
He changes the subject, asking why Andrew chose UC Davis of all places, and what's the most interesting thing that's happened to him since he became Spiderman ("I got to shake hands with the Governator, that was pretty boss,") and lets Andrew touch his hair three times in the course of the meandering conversation that follows, crinkle-eyed and laughing with his whole body, before his composure breaks.
"I'm going to --" and he gets up, handing the still-full thermos back.
Logan's in the garage, of course, holding a ladder for Alex, who's straightening out a mess of color-coded wires with the blissful look Jesse imagines some Zen masters would wear while contemplating their rock gardens.
Logan watches her, and the expression on his face makes something detonate inside the pit of Jesse's stomach, sour and betrayed, because it would be nice if Logan would just pick one crush and stick with it. Jesse has enough trouble navigating personal relationships without worrying about treading on somebody else's unspoken territory.
He goes home alone, because it feels like the safest option.
9 | ❦
Andrew apologizes for his inappropriate behavior the next he sees him. As this happens Monday morning, about five minutes before the start of lecture, in front of 80 students who can see them but not hear them, it's probably the most uncomfortable conversation of Jesse's entire life. Andrew's holding the attendance sheet as he talks, and he probably doesn't realize he's doing it, but Jesse is perfectly, painfully cognizant of it. The acknowledgement and apology is nice, and a far more mature response than Jesse was honestly expecting, but really, what answer besides "Oh, no, it's fine!" could he possibly give while Andrew was holding the attendance sheet.
"What was that about?" Logan asks when Jesse finally takes his seat.
He looks worried, and Jesse can't parse out why.
"Nothing." And he tells his stupid squirming stomach to stop feeling guilty, because he did nothing. Absolutely nothing, which is exactly what he was supposed to do.
10 | ❦
He contemplates skipping lab on Thursday, but that would probably be the stupidest decision in an already stupid situation, and if he did, he would probably spend the whole three-hour block feeling the acute disappointment of generations of his ancestors, whom he has obviously never met, but if he had, they would probably tell him it was his responsibility to get the education they never got the chance to and shame on him for thinking about skipping without a legitimate reason.
Afterwards, he texts Rooney back (two days late) and leaves a giddy Logan to go hang out with her in the theater, where she's manning the lighting booth for late-night rehearsal.
The production, as far as Jesse's able to tell from the snatches of dialogue he hears coming up from the stage, is about female sex trafficking and genital mutilation. It involves a lot of angry yelling and flagrant use of the "f" word.
"They tried to make it a musical," Rooney tells him, catching his expression. "But Fincher put his foot down."
"Ah," says Jesse faintly.
Rooney's wearing big combat boots with steel toes, and has enough piercings through the cartilage of her ears to set off every metal detector in a mile radius. She's a Forestry Management major, and works for the Sacramento Fire Department. Last semester, she took all of her exams early and cut the last two weeks of classes, because she volunteered herself to go with the emergency crews called out to Colorado Springs. Jesse turned in her final paper for Perspectives of Meteorology, since it was the only class that required her to turn in a hard copy.
"I haven't seen you in class," he says. "Did you drop Plant Prop?"
Rooney shrugs. "I already took it last fall. Forgot. Dropped it so I could get more of those weird-ass gen eds done with," she waves a hand down at the stage.
Jesse doesn't think she's fooling anyone. Rooney's mostly interested in who in the drama department knows what tattoo artist and where she could potentially get discounts.
"Logan has a crush on the TA and the TA has a crush on me and I don't want to hurt either of their feelings what do I do," comes out of him in one great blurt.
Rooney blinks.
"How are you?" Jesse tries instead.
"I thought Logan had a crush on Emma. My Emma, I mean, not the redheaded one who has everybody's balls in the palm of her hand."
Jesse had forgotten that most conversations with Rooney usually left him with mental images that scarred his brain for days afterwards.
"No."
"Oh. Good, because she's dating Ezra Miller. Or just banging. Or enjoying mutual sexual satisfaction, I don't know the details. And he's ... there," she points down. "In the yellow dress with the pillow pregnancy. That's him."
Ezra has a beaky face and long hair, and Jesse recognizes him vaguely from a picture Logan has pinned to his cork board, in between his collection of concert tickets, both of them with guitars laid across their laps. Emma's in that picture too, he remembers.
"It never ceases to amaze me," he muses. "Just how quickly two people can manage to have sex when you're not paying attention." Rooney's eyebrows leap up her forehead, and Jesse amends, "Or, rather, just, how quickly relationships can change when you've got your back to them. It's like cooking eggs -- you have to constantly watch them or something bad happens."
Jesse Eisenberg's best friend in the world (besides his mother, obviously) is Logan Lerman, when a year he ago he wouldn't even have been able to tell you clearly who that was. Back then, his best friend was Justin Bartha, who's double-majoring in History and Women's Studies, and he doesn't talk to Jesse much these days except to ask him if they've covered how to grow ganja and not get caught, because that's the only interesting thing you can learn in horticulture, come on.
A year ago, Jesse wouldn't have imagined even having someone like Rooney in his phone. Rooney figured out early that she didn't have to truck with that "be ladylike" bullshit, got all sorts of backlash for it, and spends her working hours lugging fifty to a hundred pounds of equipment up and down staircases when she's not actually in the field fighting fires. She could tie him in a knot like a cherry stem.
"We're friends, right?" he asks, just to be sure.
"No," Rooney deadpans, and then ruins it by smiling. "Get out of my nest, Napoleon Dynamite."
"Okay, just checking."
11 | ❦
The week leading up to the practical final, which Andrew cheerily tells them will be not unlike an obstacle course and will involve more examples of plant sex than anyone probably feels comfortable with, Jesse starts desperately wishing he'd majored in Classical Lit or something that didn't require so much hands-on lab time.
Ellen, who actually does major in Classical Lit, looks amused. "I think that came out a lot dirtier than you meant it to."
Jesse flaps his hands at her.
"Objectively," he says. "I know that if we all just ... do nothing, then nothing will happen, and we'll forget this was even a thing in a few years, so I shouldn't let it be a big deal now."
"Hey, guys," Ryan materializes behind them. He's wearing a fur-lined, hot pink bra over his nylon underarmor, and a feather boa is looped around his shoulders. "Do you want to donate a dollar to breast cancer research? All proceeds go to helping a woman in need receive a free mammogram."
Jesse and Ellen go for their wallets. Ellen tucks a bill into Ryan's bra, and he flutters his eyelashes at her coquettishly.
When he's gone, she turns back to Jesse. "Logan and you are bros, babe, and Spiderman can't websling his way through that even if he wanted to."
"I know," says Jesse, who does. "I just don't like the position it puts me in. I shouldn't be expected to have feelings when I don't. I shouldn't be expected to grab at a chance for, like, a relationship or something just because it's being offered, and I shouldn't be expected to back off because of another person who's not doing anything. I don't want ..." he starts, and then settles on. "I don't want."
"Okay," says Ellen agreeably.
"It's ... isn't it weird, just how much potential we have with people, every minute of every day? I don't even think we realize it, just how much we just let happen, or let not happen. Nobody has to get together with anybody."
She's back to looking amused. "I thought you were a plant major."
"Plant majors have feelings!" Jesse protests immediately. "Deep feelings! Whole root systems of feelings, even!"
Between them on the carpet, Jesse's phone lights up and starts buzzing with enough force to scoot it away from them like it's desperate for escape. PLZ DELETE b/c Logan hates group pjcts is calling, and somebody set Logan's picture as one where his mouth's full of food. Jesse never bothers to change anything.
He looks at Ellen. Ellen lifts her eyebrows at him.
Jesse picks up. "If you bring us baby burritos within the next ten minutes, Ellen promises to elope with you to Vegas."
"Ellen Page? I accept!" Logan says stridently, as Ellen squawks and shoves his notes on plant hormones to the side so she can sit on him.
12 | ❦
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW 12/07/12
SUBJECT: GARFIELD, Andrew (24)
A: No, I have no interest in submitting myself for testing, thank you for offering. No, I don't feel like I owe it to science, and I don't want to pioneer anything, especially not anything that might get other people hurt. Because that's what you want. To test on people, so that there are more people like me and you can put us to use. I don't want to, thank you. I'm Andrew. I now do exceptionally well at rock climbing contests and can shoot webs from my wrists, which is kind of gross, but super handy for hanging up decorations, and all I want to do with my life is finish grading exams for Martin Sheen and visit someplace cool like China and take Emma Stone to a football game and kiss Jesse Eisenberg's face without him panicking about it and if I was brave, I would. That's all I want, is just to be a little bit braver. Mutant powers doesn't give that to people. It doesn't make you brave. Remember that, next time you try to make people do what you want.
(File last accessed 01/03/13, CLEARANCE CODE: 005-SAV-2LB-USA-***-***-***01, US Department for Homeland Security)
SEE CORRESPONDING FILE(S) IN DIRECTORY "/THE SPIDERMAN PROGRAM":
1] EISENBERG, Jesse
2] SHEEN, Dr. Martin
3] STONE, Emily
DELETE FILE? Y/N
-
fin
I miiiiight just post tomorrow's NaNo over at veritasrecords, because it's already 10k+ and it's easier to do long entries on communities. So, MTV, this is my life.
This girl. It is Sickness Central in my house. I feel like people need to be fumigated before they step through the door.
(Halloween was fun, though! My favorite costume was one little girl who came to our door dressed like a gumball machine; she'd wrapped clear plastic around her and stuffed it with multicolored balloons until she was vaguely spherical. IT WAS THE CUTEST THING.)
ANWAY. Let's get this show on the road!
NOTE: I like my layout. My layout sucks when it comes to reading fic. Please feel free to read it in the light format, because it is better for your eyes.
➲ NANOWRIMO: NOVEMBER 2
for soxdamnxcute. RPF. Andrew Garfield, Logan Lerman, and Jesse Eisenberg, university AU where Andrew has Spiderman abilities. 6600 words.
Because one does not simply ask Kat why she wants a thing. They just do it for her.
Fact!
[also available @ AO3]
1 | ❦
HORT 221, Methods of Plant Propagation, is, bizarrely, located on the bottom floor of the Communications building, and it doesn't matter that it takes Jesse and Logan twenty minutes to find the correct corridor that gets them there -- shockingly, they've never had to go into the Communications building before, except maybe once during orientation -- because it takes the professor nearly that long to figure out how to hook his computer to the complicated projection system.
His TAs are quick to rescue him, and they've got their heads bent over inputs and outputs, flicking switches to see what they do, when Jesse and Logan slink into the only open pair of seats, smack in the front row.
Methods of Plant Propagation is a cross-sectional lecture-and-lab offered only in the fall and is required by so many different majors that Jesse set a timer for himself on registration day so that he wouldn't miss his window to get in, and casting a quick glance around the lecture hall, he sections people off into fives and counts up to a total of 83, himself and Logan included, which is thirteen more than the registration cap.
He sees Emma W. three rows back and waves before he can stop himself, keeping it tucked close to his body because he isn't sure if she's actually looking at him, but she sits up a little bit and waves back, her teeth a quick wink of white across the distance. He spots Rooney, too, way up in the back, and he only knows it's her because she's asleep, scrunched low in her seat with her uniform jacket thrown over her arms. Next to her, Ryan goes fishing under the jacket for her hand, pulling it out and waving it at Jesse for her.
"Man," mutters Logan in an undertone, turning Jesse's attention front and center, where he's pointing at the outlets located under each seat. "Why aren't we Comm majors? They get all the cool toys."
At that moment, both the TAs yelp in triumph, and Jesse looks up to see the big screen finally projecting the syllabus.
The professor coughs embarrassedly into his microphone and says, "There's a reason my grandkids don't trust me to do anything more complicated on my -- whattyacallit -- iPod? Than make phone calls," he fumbles what's clearly an iPhone and holds it up to show them, and everybody in the classroom under the age of thirty cringes simultaneously at the affront to Apple culture.
"Um," he scratches at his nose, which is so red and bulbous that it sits on his face like a toadstool. Jesse had him last semester for Intro to Landscape Design. "Many thanks to my TAs. Everybody memorize their faces now, so you know who to assassinate if you fail this class --"
One of the TAs, who, like every other Hort major that Jesse knows, is dressed in cargo shorts made up of mostly pockets and a print-screen shirt from Threadless, grabs the other TA by the hand and they both take exaggerated bows. In the low light, their hair glints darkly auburn, and when they straighten up, Jesse finally recognizes Emma Stone, and Logan jabs him hard in the side with his ballpoint pen, making him stifle a yelp and throw a startled what?! look sideways. Logan looks like he swallowed a fish, his eyes huge.
"-- although you shouldn't, because we don't like failing you as much as you don't like failing. Also, I shouldn't have to remind you that this class isn't open to nondegree students: don't think I don't see you back there, Mr. Timberlake." The class swivels around as, standing way far in the back since there aren't any open seats left, the offending party abruptly tries to become one with the wall behind him. "Declare your major or quit wasting our time."
The professor pauses delicately, and after a beat, Timberlake gives up on subtlety and makes a jaunty salute, sidling sideways out the back exit. To Jesse's surprise, at least five other kids saunter out after him.
Who'd want to sneak into a Plant Prop class? he wonders. There isn't even enough room for those who have to take it.
"Right. Now, out of those of you who can actually read the course catalog, how many of you are here for Horticulture?" Jesse's hand goes up, and belatedly, because he's still looking like he's wrestling with that fish, Logan's does too. "Landscape Design?" Solid class majority for that one, including Emma W. "Forestry Management? Agronomy?"
With the class accounted for, the professor drums his fingers along the edge of his podium and smiles.
"Good. Let's not pretend we're here for anything different. This, class, is Plant Sex Ed."
2 | ❦
Personal relationships are the kind of thing that Jesse just lets happen, instead of trying to go out and forge any himself, and it's only when he glances through his phone and realizes that his conversation threads with Logan Lerman are three times longer than they are with anybody else, his mother included (though this might be because Jesse's mother doesn't get how T9 texting works, and if she did, those text-bombs of hers would probably be a lot more frequent, because Jesse's mother doesn't understand character limits,) that he's able to unravel the course of their friendship backwards.
Logan's an LA native who migrated north because he says that everything in SoCal is "so fake, bro, it's painful," but he couldn't actually imagine himself leaving the state, because really, is there anything interesting that could possibly exist outside California?
"Well, besides you," he allows with a generous tilt of his head to Jesse, who smiles bemusedly and watches Logan pin the ripped, faded remainders of concert tickets to his cork board with the loving care he imagines most mothers would put into scrapbooking their children's important firsts.
And, on another occasion, while they're waiting in line for burritos at the caf in the student union because they seriously make them the size of newborn babies, it's the best thing, "Actually, it's probably Dan Rad's fault. You remember, our freshman RA with the swag glasses?" He demonstrates helpfully, mimes slits in front of his eyes.
Jesse thinks about it. "The one we elected to Student Council kind of on accident?"
"Yeah, him. He's friends with Emma, remember?"
"Emma ... ?"
"Watson. Yes, hi," he goes, turning to the employee in the hairnet before Jesse can do anything more than panic internally, because bringing up Emma Watson in a conversation with Logan is entering DANGER WILL ROBINSON territory. He only existed on the peripheral edge of Logan's infatuation his first semester, but the fallout went through their mutual friends with the force of a nuclear detonation. Jesse still doesn't know how to address it with respect; his experience with broken hearts comes largely from late-night runs of Arrested Development on Netflix Instant and might potentially involve a broom. "I want everything. Everything you could possibly fit into a tortilla and still get it to close. Actually, no, I'm not picky."
"Sour cream or cheese?" goes the employee, on whom the concept of "everything" is apparently lost.
The next employee, who's watching Logan's mutant burrito minefield, looks at Jesse in trepidation.
"Vegetarian, please," he tells her kindly.
"But really," Logan continues, mouthing at the end of his straw as they go trekking back across campus to the dorms, lanyard bouncing against his sternum and enormously fat foil burrito tucked haphazardly under his arm. "I knew Emma through Intro to LD --" Air raid sirens sound off in Jesse's head, but Logan's already continuing, "And she's known Dan Rad since they were, like, eleven or something, and you knew him --"
"He was our RA!"
"-- because you," Logan talks over him gleefully. "Are a super-cute little duckling who imprints on the first creature that shows him kindness."
"Shut up, I was in Intro to LD with you too."
This throws Logan. "Wait," he blinks. "You were?"
"Yes," says Jesse patiently. "And Intro to Hort, and Ecology last semester." He'd pretty much just let his freshman advisor do everything for him, so his first two semesters at UC Davis were spent taking sensible introductory courses and some gen eds Jesse couldn't remember the names of five minutes after sitting for the final exams. Logan, on the other hand, had jumped in feet first and signed himself up for all the introductory Horticulture classes on top of some 300-level business classes, and had freaked out about it until Emma Stone had helpfully shown him how to drop and still get a refund.
"... huh," says Logan. And then, "Hey, do you think we'll get Andrew as our lab instructor?"
"Andrew who?"
3 | ❦
"Oh," he says, very faintly, when he and Logan walk into lab on Thursday to find the mystery TA from Plant Prop sitting on the desk in the front of the room, handouts on his lap and a pen tucked into the collar of his shirt, cheerfully swinging his legs as he picks at some kind of white resin on his wrist, and Jesse finally, finally remembers where he knows that face from. "That Andrew."
4 | ❦
"I didn't know!" Jesse gets in defensively, before anyone else can say a word.
Logan goggles a him, incredulous. "How could you not have noticed that our TA for Plant Prop was Spiderman?"
"Because I ... just didn't?"
He casts a quick look around the table. It's lunchtime on a Friday during the first week of school, well before students have really settled on which classes they're going to skip for the rest of the semester, so the student union is crowded and noisy. Between the two of them, Dan Rad and Emma S. have mastered the art of politely getting underclassmen to vacate an area by claiming they need it for Student Council Badassery reasons, because it really is the best table in the student union: it's right next to an outlet, and Joe and Brenda usually bring an extension cord, so they can wire in and play Skyrim and scare off any potential table-poachers by their combined enthusiasm and good-humored disregard for routine hygiene. Ellen's already voted them most likely to get married and train their kids to use lightsabers and put down "Jedi Knight" under Affiliated Religion on their US Census forms. Jesse still isn't entirely sure how he earned himself a place in this circle (Ryan jokes that you have to have dimples.) Like most everything in Jesse's life, it was probably accidental, however it happened.
"Don't worry," says Emma S. cheerily. "He grades super easy."
Logan looks over, curious. "How do you know?"
Jesse almost face-palms, and Emma S. stares at him for a beat over the lid of her Macbook Air, where Jesse can just make out the audio coming from a Newsground video, before she says baldly, "Because I'm the other TA, you moron."
"So can we lay off Jesse for not recognizing Andrew Garfield, thanks?" Jesse wants to know, as Logan tries valiantly to die of embarrassment on the spot. "I recognized you," he adds for Emma S.'s benefit.
She beams at him. "Thank you, Jesse," she says primly. "Just for that, you get the rest of my fries."
She pushes the basket over.
"Oh, hey, thanks," Jesse goes. "Glad to be of service."
"Male undergrads are my dispose-all system," she agrees.
5 | ❦
Jesse's life plan, if anybody should bother asking, is to someday open a nursery in one of the sunny California valleys and sell ornamental plants, whirligigs, fertilizer, and vegetable seeds to amateur gardeners and retirees with too much time on their hands, because he likes the idea of spending his life caring for living things and teaching other people to do the same.
It's a dream that Logan has, apparently, invited himself along with, because he refers to it as "our shop," is minoring in Finance, and insists on taking four semesters of Business Spanish to make them marketable when they graduate.
"Advantages of asexual reproduction?" he prompts Jesse.
The late September sunlight falls in bars across their windowsill, illuminating the veins in the big umbrella leaves of the Ficus benjamina crowded underneath the sill and making the petals of the Gaillardia pulchella and the hanging Plecthantrus australis glow, and the refraction sets the whole room to a rosy green overlay. All of the plants in Jesse and Logan's dorm room are ones they rescued from the greenhouse at the end of last semester's Intro to Hort lab, where they otherwise would have been tossed. Jesse considers it equivalent to rescuing an animal from the shelter before they put it down, because who wouldn't want to take their plant home after a whole semester spent learning how to name it, plant it, and keep it alive?
Granted, Intro to Hort was a largely non-major class, filled with Humanities kids who needed to scratch off their Physical Science requirement and didn't want to take anything difficult, like physics or chemistry, so maybe not everybody had the same feeling about plants that Jesse did.
As long as you don't grow anything illegal, Dan Rad had said, when he caught them lugging the Ficus pots up the stairs. I don't care what you put in your room.
"Less expensive," Jesse responds, and then, more thoughtfully, "And less chance of transferring seed-borne diseases among a cultivation. On the other hand, the advantage of sexual reproduction is that you can combine plant traits for a hardier, more desirable plant. Asexual reproduction is just cloning."
He stands, crossing behind Logan's chair to fetch his mug from beside their shoes (why was it over there?) and pauses on the way back.
"That's not right," he goes, pointing over Logan's shoulder at the cross-section he's drawn on his lab worksheet.
Logan studies it, and then, belligerently, "Why not?"
"Endo, exo. The endocarp is the boundary around the seed -- the innermost layer, see? And then exocarp is the skin -- the outermost. The mesocarp's that fleshy tissue in between, and the pericarp --" he takes Logan's pencil from him and crosses it out where he'd written in place of the mesocarp. "Is the collective term for all of them."
"That's stupid," Logan mutters, without heat. "When I'm eating a simple fleshy, I'm not going to go, 'Oh, this drupe has a fantastic mesocarp, you should try some,' I'm going to say, 'ah, fucker, seed.'"
Jesse laughs. "Andrew's pretty lax with grading, but he's not going to be that lax."
"Oh?" Logan swings his head around, lifting his eyebrows. There's an expression on his face that Jesse can't place. "It's 'Andrew' now, is it?"
Andrew Garfield is the least academic TA Jesse has ever met. He cares a lot more about making sure his lab section keeps their plants happy and healthy than he does about making sure they know exactly which of the five major plant hormones is responsible for apical growth (hint: it's auxins,) which is great in the practical world, but less helpful when they're facing a 120-question Scantron exam and the only helpful thing Jesse can remember is that Andrew can crawl across the ceiling when he needs to get from one end of the room to the other.
He's the Spiderman -- everybody's heard about how he got himself bit by one of those crossbreeds that the grad students in the Bio department were messing around with, since the horticulture labs are actually just the shabby cast-offs from the bio labs, given that UC Davis gives approximately two shits about its Horticulture & Agronomy department.
Joke's on them, of course, because nobody found the spider that bit Andrew and nobody can recreate the scenario that led to him being able to produce sticky web material from the sweat glands on his wrist and a having a predilection for literally climbing walls when uncomfortable, and he refuses to do anything with his new mutation besides continue to work on his graduate degree.
His continued existence is something of a needle under the nail beds of the collective university science circuit, because he makes no sense.
It does, at least, explain why people like Justin Timberlake kept trying to sneak into the Plant Prop lecture. Human mutants are the stuff of comic books.
Abruptly, Jesse realizes what the expression on Logan's face is.
"Oh, no," he goes.
"What?" says Logan.
"No, no, no, and no," Jesse points at him, fierce. "Don't you even think about it!"
"What!"
6 | ❦
Logan Lerman has an exasperating tendency to crush hard on at least one person a semester.
(And then he has the gall to accuse Jesse of imprinting. Honestly.)
Last semester, it was Alex Daddario, the upperclassman from 204 who always wrote where she was going on the whiteboard on her door whenever she went out, signing it with a flourish and a cartoon heart that Logan thought was simply the coolest thing. Jesse remembers going out of their way a lot, coming and going from the dorms, just so they could pass the second floor and she what she wrote this time. She's studying mechanical engineering so that she can build motorcycles.
The semester before that, it was Emma Watson from Intro to Landscape Design, a brown and mousey girl who used to swap clomping construction boots with Rooney Mara and frequently wore A-line dresses with grandfather cardigans pulled over them. She sat at their table a lot for lunch, but eventually she switched her concentration to pomology and mostly hangs out with Emma Stone and the Agriculture kids these days. Jesse's pretty sure both Emmas are angling to go into business together and buy a pretentiously sophisticated vineyard in Napa Valley and be filthy rich. Sniffing wine is absolutely a thing they can pull off without looking ten kinds of fool.
Logan still sees Emma W. at those parties he goes to that Jesse most emphatically does not, because last time Jesse went to a party, it resulted in photographic evidence of him making out with a life-sized cardboard cut-out of Zac Efron (and who brought that with them to uni?) and Jesse still hasn't passed the expiration date of his shame over that whole situation.
So, in all honesty, it doesn't surprise Jesse overmuch when, somewhere around their sixth week of lab, Logan starts going up on his tiptoes whenever he has to talk to Spiderman about the ratio of soil media in the new pots or even just to ask where the tape is.
There's nothing wrong with this, honest, never mind the fact that Andrew is their lab instructor and also their TA, a fact that is continually placed in the forefront of their minds by Emma S.'s cheerful insistence that anything they say can and will be used against them in the determination of their grades.
Logan may crush, but he isn't actually stupid enough to flirt, and Andrew is a sweet person, he remembers everybody's names, and he fumbles a lot when answering questions after lecture, but most people who stay behind to talk to him aren't really looking for the answers, per se, so that's fine. He wears cable-knit sweaters with the wrists worn out, pulled over "Some People Are Gay, Get Over It!" shirts, and he sits behind the professor's podium during lecture and bounces his pen in a way that Jesse can almost keep time with.
You should let Logan make his own mistakes, his mother sends him, and Jesse sits in the back of another class and thumbs his phone every time it tries to go to sleep to read the message again.
That's fine, it's all fine, except Jesse can't actually hold a grudge against anything that makes Logan bounce around in his brand-new white Air Jordans with the thick tongues, pulling his guitar down from on top his wardrobe, warbling happy things into his cornflakes. He can't think it's a mistake, and instead finds himself bizarrely grateful for Andrew Garfield's existence in their lives, if it makes Logan that sunny.
7 | ❦
Layering, Andrew tells them in the next lab, is the horticulturist's most useful propagation tool, because it encourages root formation on the stem itself by cutting through the phloem and keeping the xylem intact, thus creating a whole new plant that is still attached to the mother plant's nutrition.
Of the five types of layering, they did air layering in Intro to Hort, which is how he and Logan wound up with the Ficus benjamina now crowding them for space in their dorm.
"I feel like I should recognize them," he says, as the mother Ficus are brought out of the greenhouse for another round. He pats the plant at his and Logan's station in what he hopes is a sympathetic, commiserating kind of way. At least Jesse isn't regularly cut upon and his regrown limbs severed off in the name of university courses.
Since it requires an upright stem, air layering is the most useful type of layering for woody plants. Logan holds their plant steady for him as Jesse takes a knife and scrapes through the bark on all sides, until it's nothing but whitish xylem. He sponges up great handfuls of damp sphagnum moss and wraps it around the wound. Usually, at this stage, they bind it up with black plastic and tape it down, to trick the plant into rooting, but they've got something easier.
"Why don't you fight crime?" Logan asks out of the blue, as Andrew comes around to coat the moss in a gluey, stretchy white substance that comes from his wrists and sticks surprisingly well to the bark.
Jesse, who remembers how incredibly difficult it had been to get everything taped down the last time he did air layering, wishes wistfully that there was some way he could box Andrew up to use him sparingly whenever he needed to propagate woody plants, because he doesn't look forward to doing it again in the future.
Andrew's mouth makes a curious shape. "What do you mean?"
"You could do anything with that," Logan makes a pointed gesture with his wrist that is probably supposed to mean webslinging, but mostly just leaves Andrew looking incredibly amused and Logan red around the ears. "So why are you slumming around with us state university kids?"
"Because I'm also a state university kid," Andrew answers. "Because I want to finish my graduate studies and I want to open a nursery --" he glances over when Jesse stifles a yelp, startled. Jesse manages a flinch of a smile in response, his eyes watering and his foot throbbing from where Logan trod on it eagerly. "-- and I really want to make enough money that I don't have to worry. That's all."
"Would you ever consider using your powers to fight crime?" Logan presses.
"Me? Do I look like a superhero to you?" he gestures to himself, inviting and up-and-down appraising look, and Jesse doesn't miss the way Logan's throat bobs. "Nah, I wouldn't be very good at it at all. Besides, we're all crimefighters in our own ways, and it's important for everybody to be crimefighters, not just us mutants," he smiles wryly. "I think I'll keep doing that."
8 | ❦
Andrew doesn't live in the dorms. His parents run a buy-it-and-fix-it real estate business in Sacramento, so he and his older brother shuttle themselves between largely unfurnished properties, babysitting them until they're ready to go on the market.
The one Andrew's living in now is on the other side of the interstate from campus, and Alex and Logan volunteer themselves after Andrew's contracted electrician turns out to be laundering money through to Russia and winds up in jail, leaving Andrew's family with a half-finished wiring job in the garage and no money left to pay another contractor. Jesse isn't one hundred percent sure how the series of events go, starting with his perfectly normal plans for a Saturday afternoon being derailed and ending with him sitting on the porch of a two-story house with a fantastic view of the surrounding suburb, holding Andrew's thermos of coffee for him as Andrew yanks his shoelaces into submission, while Alex and Logan bang happily away in the garage.
Although, let's face it, it's probably mostly Alex doing all of the work, because she is violently possessive when it comes to projects.
He wonders when somebody's going to point out the potential pit falls of letting an undergraduate do electrical work without the proper paperwork. Alex, however, doesn't let herself make mistakes. It's not in her nature.
And maybe the Garfields are totally shady, too, what does he know?
"You know, I think I forgot what it's like to be in an actual house," he comments, letting Andrew have his coffee back and stretching out on his back, tugging his sweatshirt down before it can expose skin.
Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Andrew's face scrunch up as he quickly tallies the math in his head. In order to take Plant Prop, a 200-level class, Jesse would have to have taken one of the introductory classes (Jesse took all four,) which would make him at least a sophomore.
"Did you not go home over the summer?"
Jesse shakes his head. "Ironically, it was less expensive for me to stay here than it was to fly home and back, so I've been in the dorms awhile."
Andrew's teeth flash. "Well, I can't promise my house is very exciting, but at least there aren't any communal bathrooms."
Jesse sits bolt upright.
"Ohmygod," he blurs out, all in a rush. "I forgot real houses have real bathrooms! The toilet isn't a stall?" Andrew shakes his head. "It has a door?" A nod. "That actually looks?" Another nod. Jesse makes grabby hands. "Give me your coffee, I want to pee in it at least once before we leave."
Andrew stares at him for a beat, before he throws his head back and barks laughter, a bright, loud noise that comes out of him like a sunburst.
Jesse's face flames.
"Shut up," he gets out. "That's not what I -- I meant your bathroom. Oh my god. Nope, I'm just going to stop talking."
"No, don't do that!" Andrew protests, surrendering his thermos immediately.
"Nope. Nope, nope, nope," he swings his legs around, putting his back to Andrew and crossing his ankles over his knees, flipping the drinking tab on the thermos. "Wake me up when this humiliation passes, which will be, oh, never."
Fingers touch his spine through the fabric of his shirts, brief, like the touch of a nurse, and for a second, Jesse's afraid that they're going to stick, or barb, or something, like spider's legs, before they're gone again.
"Don't do that," Andrew says again, gentler now. "Hey, tell me. Why did you want to major in Horticulture?"
"Totipotency," Jesse deadpans.
He's awarded with another one of those sunburst laughs.
"That's what Martin told us to tell you if you asked us why we want to major in Horticulture."
Jesse wonders who Martin is, before remembering that it's Professor Sheen's first name. He's never actually talked to the man, for all that he's the senior member of their department and frequently makes a joke out of how many times he has had to say, "no, you can't fanboy Spiderman," to Justin Timberlake.
He turns around, and Andrew is sitting far too close on the porch step. "It's true, though," he goes, stuttering only a little bit over his surprise at the proximity. "Totipotency is the ability --"
"Of a single cell to replicate its entire host organism from scratch," Andrew finishes for him. "It's why we can layer and cut and stem and chip bud a plant and successfully produce an entirely new one. Hypothetically, with just one tree --"
"-- you can eventually grow an entire forest."
Andrew's smile softens at the corners, warm and melted like sunlight, and he's looking at Jesse like he's architecture, like he's landscape, like if Andrew takes something of Jesse's now, he can wrap it in sphagnum moss and grow something hopelessly bright. And Jesse can acknowledge this, acknowledge that it's happening, just like he can acknowledge that he's a grown adult and this isn't worth it, what's happening right here and the mess he'll make of his personal relationships, if he let's this happen now.
He changes the subject, asking why Andrew chose UC Davis of all places, and what's the most interesting thing that's happened to him since he became Spiderman ("I got to shake hands with the Governator, that was pretty boss,") and lets Andrew touch his hair three times in the course of the meandering conversation that follows, crinkle-eyed and laughing with his whole body, before his composure breaks.
"I'm going to --" and he gets up, handing the still-full thermos back.
Logan's in the garage, of course, holding a ladder for Alex, who's straightening out a mess of color-coded wires with the blissful look Jesse imagines some Zen masters would wear while contemplating their rock gardens.
Logan watches her, and the expression on his face makes something detonate inside the pit of Jesse's stomach, sour and betrayed, because it would be nice if Logan would just pick one crush and stick with it. Jesse has enough trouble navigating personal relationships without worrying about treading on somebody else's unspoken territory.
He goes home alone, because it feels like the safest option.
9 | ❦
Andrew apologizes for his inappropriate behavior the next he sees him. As this happens Monday morning, about five minutes before the start of lecture, in front of 80 students who can see them but not hear them, it's probably the most uncomfortable conversation of Jesse's entire life. Andrew's holding the attendance sheet as he talks, and he probably doesn't realize he's doing it, but Jesse is perfectly, painfully cognizant of it. The acknowledgement and apology is nice, and a far more mature response than Jesse was honestly expecting, but really, what answer besides "Oh, no, it's fine!" could he possibly give while Andrew was holding the attendance sheet.
"What was that about?" Logan asks when Jesse finally takes his seat.
He looks worried, and Jesse can't parse out why.
"Nothing." And he tells his stupid squirming stomach to stop feeling guilty, because he did nothing. Absolutely nothing, which is exactly what he was supposed to do.
10 | ❦
He contemplates skipping lab on Thursday, but that would probably be the stupidest decision in an already stupid situation, and if he did, he would probably spend the whole three-hour block feeling the acute disappointment of generations of his ancestors, whom he has obviously never met, but if he had, they would probably tell him it was his responsibility to get the education they never got the chance to and shame on him for thinking about skipping without a legitimate reason.
Afterwards, he texts Rooney back (two days late) and leaves a giddy Logan to go hang out with her in the theater, where she's manning the lighting booth for late-night rehearsal.
The production, as far as Jesse's able to tell from the snatches of dialogue he hears coming up from the stage, is about female sex trafficking and genital mutilation. It involves a lot of angry yelling and flagrant use of the "f" word.
"They tried to make it a musical," Rooney tells him, catching his expression. "But Fincher put his foot down."
"Ah," says Jesse faintly.
Rooney's wearing big combat boots with steel toes, and has enough piercings through the cartilage of her ears to set off every metal detector in a mile radius. She's a Forestry Management major, and works for the Sacramento Fire Department. Last semester, she took all of her exams early and cut the last two weeks of classes, because she volunteered herself to go with the emergency crews called out to Colorado Springs. Jesse turned in her final paper for Perspectives of Meteorology, since it was the only class that required her to turn in a hard copy.
"I haven't seen you in class," he says. "Did you drop Plant Prop?"
Rooney shrugs. "I already took it last fall. Forgot. Dropped it so I could get more of those weird-ass gen eds done with," she waves a hand down at the stage.
Jesse doesn't think she's fooling anyone. Rooney's mostly interested in who in the drama department knows what tattoo artist and where she could potentially get discounts.
"Logan has a crush on the TA and the TA has a crush on me and I don't want to hurt either of their feelings what do I do," comes out of him in one great blurt.
Rooney blinks.
"How are you?" Jesse tries instead.
"I thought Logan had a crush on Emma. My Emma, I mean, not the redheaded one who has everybody's balls in the palm of her hand."
Jesse had forgotten that most conversations with Rooney usually left him with mental images that scarred his brain for days afterwards.
"No."
"Oh. Good, because she's dating Ezra Miller. Or just banging. Or enjoying mutual sexual satisfaction, I don't know the details. And he's ... there," she points down. "In the yellow dress with the pillow pregnancy. That's him."
Ezra has a beaky face and long hair, and Jesse recognizes him vaguely from a picture Logan has pinned to his cork board, in between his collection of concert tickets, both of them with guitars laid across their laps. Emma's in that picture too, he remembers.
"It never ceases to amaze me," he muses. "Just how quickly two people can manage to have sex when you're not paying attention." Rooney's eyebrows leap up her forehead, and Jesse amends, "Or, rather, just, how quickly relationships can change when you've got your back to them. It's like cooking eggs -- you have to constantly watch them or something bad happens."
Jesse Eisenberg's best friend in the world (besides his mother, obviously) is Logan Lerman, when a year he ago he wouldn't even have been able to tell you clearly who that was. Back then, his best friend was Justin Bartha, who's double-majoring in History and Women's Studies, and he doesn't talk to Jesse much these days except to ask him if they've covered how to grow ganja and not get caught, because that's the only interesting thing you can learn in horticulture, come on.
A year ago, Jesse wouldn't have imagined even having someone like Rooney in his phone. Rooney figured out early that she didn't have to truck with that "be ladylike" bullshit, got all sorts of backlash for it, and spends her working hours lugging fifty to a hundred pounds of equipment up and down staircases when she's not actually in the field fighting fires. She could tie him in a knot like a cherry stem.
"We're friends, right?" he asks, just to be sure.
"No," Rooney deadpans, and then ruins it by smiling. "Get out of my nest, Napoleon Dynamite."
"Okay, just checking."
11 | ❦
The week leading up to the practical final, which Andrew cheerily tells them will be not unlike an obstacle course and will involve more examples of plant sex than anyone probably feels comfortable with, Jesse starts desperately wishing he'd majored in Classical Lit or something that didn't require so much hands-on lab time.
Ellen, who actually does major in Classical Lit, looks amused. "I think that came out a lot dirtier than you meant it to."
Jesse flaps his hands at her.
"Objectively," he says. "I know that if we all just ... do nothing, then nothing will happen, and we'll forget this was even a thing in a few years, so I shouldn't let it be a big deal now."
"Hey, guys," Ryan materializes behind them. He's wearing a fur-lined, hot pink bra over his nylon underarmor, and a feather boa is looped around his shoulders. "Do you want to donate a dollar to breast cancer research? All proceeds go to helping a woman in need receive a free mammogram."
Jesse and Ellen go for their wallets. Ellen tucks a bill into Ryan's bra, and he flutters his eyelashes at her coquettishly.
When he's gone, she turns back to Jesse. "Logan and you are bros, babe, and Spiderman can't websling his way through that even if he wanted to."
"I know," says Jesse, who does. "I just don't like the position it puts me in. I shouldn't be expected to have feelings when I don't. I shouldn't be expected to grab at a chance for, like, a relationship or something just because it's being offered, and I shouldn't be expected to back off because of another person who's not doing anything. I don't want ..." he starts, and then settles on. "I don't want."
"Okay," says Ellen agreeably.
"It's ... isn't it weird, just how much potential we have with people, every minute of every day? I don't even think we realize it, just how much we just let happen, or let not happen. Nobody has to get together with anybody."
She's back to looking amused. "I thought you were a plant major."
"Plant majors have feelings!" Jesse protests immediately. "Deep feelings! Whole root systems of feelings, even!"
Between them on the carpet, Jesse's phone lights up and starts buzzing with enough force to scoot it away from them like it's desperate for escape. PLZ DELETE b/c Logan hates group pjcts is calling, and somebody set Logan's picture as one where his mouth's full of food. Jesse never bothers to change anything.
He looks at Ellen. Ellen lifts her eyebrows at him.
Jesse picks up. "If you bring us baby burritos within the next ten minutes, Ellen promises to elope with you to Vegas."
"Ellen Page? I accept!" Logan says stridently, as Ellen squawks and shoves his notes on plant hormones to the side so she can sit on him.
12 | ❦
TRANSCRIPT OF INTERVIEW 12/07/12
SUBJECT: GARFIELD, Andrew (24)
A: No, I have no interest in submitting myself for testing, thank you for offering. No, I don't feel like I owe it to science, and I don't want to pioneer anything, especially not anything that might get other people hurt. Because that's what you want. To test on people, so that there are more people like me and you can put us to use. I don't want to, thank you. I'm Andrew. I now do exceptionally well at rock climbing contests and can shoot webs from my wrists, which is kind of gross, but super handy for hanging up decorations, and all I want to do with my life is finish grading exams for Martin Sheen and visit someplace cool like China and take Emma Stone to a football game and kiss Jesse Eisenberg's face without him panicking about it and if I was brave, I would. That's all I want, is just to be a little bit braver. Mutant powers doesn't give that to people. It doesn't make you brave. Remember that, next time you try to make people do what you want.
(File last accessed 01/03/13, CLEARANCE CODE: 005-SAV-2LB-USA-***-***-***01, US Department for Homeland Security)
SEE CORRESPONDING FILE(S) IN DIRECTORY "/THE SPIDERMAN PROGRAM":
1] EISENBERG, Jesse
2] SHEEN, Dr. Martin
3] STONE, Emily
DELETE FILE? Y/N
-
fin
I miiiiight just post tomorrow's NaNo over at veritasrecords, because it's already 10k+ and it's easier to do long entries on communities. So, MTV, this is my life.