It was the first truly hot day of the year, so Eva was up on the rooftop allotment with some of the kids from her apartment block, planting tomatoes and carrots in the soil. One of them had also brought up a small inflatable pool, so she was in shorts and a bikini and ducking the spray of water guns whenever she could. The success rate on this was about fifty-fifty, but at least the water was helping keep her cool.
"Aaliyah," she said, pushing her sunglasses back up the slightly sweaty bridge of her nose. "You're only supposed to bury the part with the roots. Not the leaves." She crouched down and helped the girl uncover the sprout's greenery. "See?"
"Sorry," she said. "I got distracted by Spider-Man."
"You got – oh, for hell's sake," she said, looking up and seeing the red-and-blue figure swinging between the tower blocks around them. Am I never gonna be free?!
Inevitably, the friendly neighbourhood hero swung closer, dodging the spray from water pistols with ease. "Hey," he said, landing on the greenhouse roof, "this looks awesome!"
"You're Spider-Man!" Sadiq from the fourth floor exclaimed, pointing at him. "You blew up Coney Island two days before my birthday!"
"Oh," said Spider-Man, "sorry. I didn't mean to."
"That's okay," Sadiq shrugged, "you're too cool for me to be annoyed."
Spider-Man's shoulders straightened. "You think I'm cool?" he asked, and Eva could hear the excitement in his voice.
"Alright, guys," she said, "let the dude get back to superhero-ing."
He looked round at the sound of her voice, and his white eye-slits widened. "You work at that coffee shop!" he said. "Hi! Eva, right? Oh, this is awesome. You live here?"
"On this rooftop?" Eva asked. "Yeah. I sleep in that greenhouse."
"Would you like some lemonade, Mr Spider?" Aaliyah asked. "My mom made it."
"Idiot," her friend hissed. "It's Mr Man, obviously."
"Yes please!" said the super before they could argue any further, and the two girls ran over to the cool box. He crawled down the side of the greenhouse and came to stand next to Eva, arms crossed like a parent at the schoolgate.
"Kids, huh?" he said.
"How old are you, again?" Eva asked, as Aaliyah came back over with a glass of lemonade and a curly straw. "Because you sound like a little girl."
He unfolded his arms and sagged. "I'm not," he mumbled, taking the lemonade. Eva hid a grin as he lifted it up to drink from it, then realized that there was the problem of his mask being in between the straw and his mouth.
"I won't look," she promised. He turned around, hiding his face as he pulled up his mask to take a sip. When he turned round the glass was half-empty and his identity was still completely secure. "Nice?"
"Super-nice," he replied, and she rolled her eyes. "This garden thing is awesome, by the way."
"Thanks," she said. "Vision sorted it out for me a couple years ago. It's a Stark-funded community project, actually. You could probably get him to extend it into Queens if you asked him nicely."
"I will totally do that. Are you a gardener, then?"
"Trying to be. Not really a city of opportunities for that kinda career path, though."
"Why don't you move?"
"Because I love to suffer," she said. "Look – I don't have time to stand around and chat. You can either swing off on your merry way, or help me plant these runner beans. What's your choice?"
"Please stay, Spider-Man!" Sadiq called over, as he filled up his water gun.
"I guess that it's a pretty slow crime day," he said – and got caught square in the chest with an arc of slightly lukewarm water. "Hey! Give me that!" A dart of sticky web flew out of his wrist and latched onto the water pistol, which the Queens kid pulled out of Sadiq's grasp and used to shoot him back. "You wanna take me on? You think you can beat me?!"
There was a lot of screaming as an all-out water war descended on the rooftop, dramatic enough to rival the Battle of New York itself. Nobody managed to escape unhurt, and the lemonade went flying almost immediately.
There were worse ways to spend an afternoon, Eva decided that evening, as she tidied up the mess with her hair drying in a towel. Even if there had been a superhero involved.
A/N Tom Holland on the Graham Norton show to plug Infinity War while simultaneously knowing absolutely nothing about Infinity War was remarkably similar to me in a seminar on a book I have neither read nor attended the lecture for. I think we both did quite well, considering. You should totally go and find that clip and, indeed, every clip of the Graham Norton show on youtube, because it's such a good chat show I have been known to yell tearfully about how much I love it when I'm drunk, which is an honour very rarely bestowed upon anything.