Five Issues In Search of an Arc 2

A few days later was the funeral. Aunt Anna knew better than to ask Mary Jane to come along. None of her clothes were fit for a somber occasion and she hadn’t really known Ben Parker. Didn’t have any idea what it would be like to have a father who you could tell your problems to, who asked what was wrong when something was wrong, who tried to give you what you needed instead of wielding you like a weapon of guilt against your mother.

You wanted a kid and look what happened, look, now the house is never clean and we never have enough money and when is it ever quiet?

It was quiet now. And if Mary Jane thought too hard about the fact that there were guys like that out there, guys who made good fathers, and she’d just rolled snake eyes… her heart would crack open.

But maybe it was better than this. Peter’d had his Uncle Ben and what’d happened? He’d just been taken away. Now they were in the same boat, identical handfuls of nothing, only she knew how to style hers.

She paced as she thought, as she tried to talk herself out of something and into something else. Mary Jane didn’t even know what she was arguing with herself, only that feelings were vehement on both sides. And then she noticed Peter.

He still wore black from the funeral. He sat on the windowsill, his legs dangling above the white-picket fence, and Mary Jane wanted to shout a warning to be careful, didn’t he know he could fall and get himself impaled?

As if he wasn’t Spider-Man. As if Spider-Man hadn’t bungee-jumped off the Chrysler Building, or whatever he called it. He was just a normal guy, a kid really. How was anyone supposed to tell that when you wrapped him up in a costume, you got… whatever Spider-Man was.

Oh God, she knew who Spider-Man was. She was the only one who knew who Spider-Man was.

“Are you going to kill me?” she asked him. And then thought that really wasn’t a question you should ask before you’d gotten your hands on the baseball bat under your bed.

His face tangled with confusion and for a moment he was boyish, a child really. He carried his anger in the hard set of his jaw and it was a man’s anger, he wore it well, even attractively, but she missed the old cuteness.

Even when he’d been sullen, smarting over being picked on or left out, he didn’t look dangerous like he did with his eyes and his jaw working to knuckle down an anger that wanted to jump to his fists…

“I’m not going to kill you! Of course I’m not going to kill you! I didn’t even kill the man who—that man. Of course I won’t kill you.” The confusion gave way to anger, or at least bitterness. He faced her like she was one more direction a blow could come from. “If you want to blackmail me, don’t bother. I don’t have anything. So go ahead. Expose me. I can’t do anything about it.”

“I don’t want to expose you!” Mary Jane stressed, before stopping and wondering how that sounded. If she’d said that on school grounds, there’d be a crucifixion in the group chat. “I’m not a snitch either. You get all bent out of shape about me thinking you’re going to kill me, then you accuse me of going to blackmail you, that’s—wait, what do you mean you don’t have anything? You’re famous! On the internet!”

Peter shrugged. Huffed a laugh. At least he seemed amused now. Calmer. His anger receding like it knew it wasn’t needed. “Up in smoke. Sent it all to charity. I never did figure out how to get it to me without leaving a paper trail a mile wide, so I had it in Paypal while I puzzled it out. And what I’m doing now, people are going to be following that paper trail. So it’s gone, it’s all gone. Can’t take it with you.”

Mary Jane wanted to argue with him. She didn’t know why she wanted to argue with him. His family was floating somewhere in the middle class. So was hers, but they’d done their time somewhere else. She imagined how good it would feel to know she had money enough to be taken care of now, next week, next year. Until she had it all figured out.

But from the look on Peter’s face, the lift in his voice, it sounded like a relief to have the money off his hands. It made no sense to her, but she believed it.

She sat on the windowsill, carefully keeping her legs inside the house, hoping he didn’t get the wrong idea from her facing him with her ass in size-zero jeans. He was talking, at least, and hearing him talk and not having it be a roar flowed sweetly into Mary Jane’s thoughts.

It dulled the harsh look she remembered him sending her way. That’d been an aberration. This was the real Peter Parker. Or at least, the face she wanted to put to the secret she had no way to stop from haunting her.

“You said what you’re doing now… what are you doing now?” Mary Jane pressed.

Peter lifted his hands as though to gesture, then laughed at himself. There was no point in trying to communicate it through his fingers. “I’m fighting for truth, justice, and the American Way,” he said with so little irony, Mary Jane wondered if he’d taken a shot to the sarcasm center of the brain.

“No,” she said. “Really.”

“Really. Like I should’ve been doing since I first got this power. Finding criminals, anyone who hurts other people, stopping them.”

It boggled the mind. Mary Jane could only shake her head. He was like a child saying he was going to be an astronaut, only he was grown, he was smart. “You’re going to fight crime.”

“Yeah.”

“Like Captain America.”

“Yes.”

“Or Iron Man.” Mary Jane shook her head. “Why don’t you just… join the police?”

“One, because I’m not going to wait around until I’m old enough to go to the academy. Two, because I want to help people, not write parking tickets.”

“So you’re just going to go out and look for people committing crimes… beat them up… turn them over to the cops?”

“I won’t beat them up if they surrender.”

“Oh, oh, good. For a moment I thought you were being unreasonable.”

“You going to tell someone I’m doing it?”

“No, of course not, I already said—”

“Then it really doesn’t matter what you think, does it?” He pulled his legs in and started closing the window.

“Unless I join a gang and we’re committing a crime, then you’ll run up to us and fight us all, right?”

Peter was having trouble closing the sash. “I do have superpowers, you know,” he said, his brow furrowed in concentration.

“Are you telling me or the window?”

Peter stopped with a grunt and began pulling at his tie to loosen it. “There’s an oil-can in the toolshed, I’ll give the window a going-over as soon as I put on some old clothes. Don’t think I want to keep talking with you. I just wanted to know you weren’t writing a book about me.”

“That would be a long book,” Mary Jane snorted. “’You know who Spider-Man is? I do. It’s Peter Parker.’”

“Yeah, well, you seem more like the ghostwriter type.”

“Don’t bring up that show with me. The damn slime thing gave me nightmares.”

Now down to his undershirt, Peter went through his dresser for something with holes in it. When he saw all his clean clothes were reasonably new, he sorted through the dirty pile in his closet. He came up with a T-shirt from a bowling lane he’d used to go to on Family Fun Night. He pulled it on. It ripped at the neck and biceps and didn’t cover him at the waist, where the lowermost of his abs looked like a paint-roller under his skin and dark treasure trail.

Superpowers, he said. Mary Jane could about see that.

He stopped before going out the door. “You can go,” he told Mary Jane. “I won’t hold it against you.”

“It’s my bedroom!” she argued.

“And she picks now to get introverted,” Peter muttered before stampeding down the steps.