Marvel – I am Spiderman

The pillow smelled wrong.

That was the first thing. It smelled like a fabric softener his mother had never bought, in a house he'd never lived in, and his face was buried in it and he couldn't figure out why his arms were so thin.

He lay there for a while. Could have been longer. His heartbeat was in his wrists. His wrists were bony. They hadn't been bony yesterday.

He sat up.

The bedroom was small. Posters he didn't recognize on the walls, a desk with textbooks stacked on one corner and a half-finished model on the other. Glasses on the nightstand. The glasses were thick. He put them on and the room sharpened and he thought, very clearly: These are not my eyes.

He got up. The floor was cold. His feet were smaller than they should have been and the pajama pants had a drawstring pulled tight and his reflection in the closet mirror was a skinny kid with brown hair that stuck up on one side and a face he'd seen in movies.

He stared at the face.

Then he went downstairs because he could smell bacon.

The kitchen was yellow. A warm, old yellow, the paint job done in the eighties and touched up twice since. There was a woman at the stove with her back to him, humming something. She had grey-streaked hair pinned up and she was flipping bacon without looking at it, doing it by sound and feel. She'd probably been doing it in this exact kitchen for thirty years.

"Morning, sweetheart," she said without turning around. "Eggs are almost done."

He said, "Morning." His voice cracked on the second syllable. Teenager's voice. Puberty wasn't finished with this body yet.

He sat down at the table. There was orange juice in a glass that had a chip on the rim. A placemat with a faded rooster on it. A newspaper folded to the crossword, half-filled in blue ink.

The man sitting across from him looked up from the crossword and smiled.

He was maybe sixty. Thin face, kind eyes, reading glasses pushed up on his forehead. He had a pen in one hand and a coffee mug in the other and the mug said WORLD'S BEST UNCLE in letters that were starting to chip.

"Seven-letter word for 'perseverance,'" the man said. "Starts with a T."

Peter's throat closed.

Because he knew this man's face too. He knew it from a movie where a different actor played him and said something about responsibility before dying on a sidewalk, and here he was sitting at a kitchen table in Queens with a pen and a crossword and a mug with chipping letters and he was alive and he was asking about a seven-letter word.

"Tenacity," Peter said. The word came out rough.

Ben Parker wrote it in. Blue ink, careful handwriting, each letter formed separately like he'd learned penmanship from a teacher who cared about it. "That's the one." He looked up. "You okay? You look a little green."

"Didn't sleep great."

"Growing pains," May said from the stove. She put a plate in front of him. Scrambled eggs, two strips of bacon, toast cut diagonally. "Eat."

He ate. Chewing meant he didn't have to talk. The bacon was good. May Parker made good bacon.

Midtown High School looked exactly like a public school in Queens was supposed to look. Brick, institutional, a flagpole out front that leaned slightly to the left. He walked through the front doors with a backpack that wasn't his, wearing clothes that weren't his, and the hallway smelled like floor wax and cheap deodorant and somebody's burned microwave popcorn from the teachers' lounge.

He made it about thirty feet before a shoulder hit him in the chest and drove him sideways into a locker. The combination lock caught him right between the shoulder blades. His glasses went crooked.

"Watch where you're going, Puny Parker."

The kid who'd hit him was tall, blond, built like he'd started lifting weights at twelve and hadn't stopped. Letter jacket. Jaw that could cut glass. He was grinning down at Peter and enjoying it. He'd clearly been doing this for years and hadn't gotten bored of it yet.

Flash Thompson. Peter knew the name from a movie, vaguely, without detail. The movie version had been different. Less mean, more complicated. This one just looked like he enjoyed the part where Peter's back hit the locker.

"Yeah," Peter said. "My bad."

Flash blinked. He'd been expecting flinching, probably, or stammering. The specific shrinking that made the whole thing work for him. What he got was a kid straightening his glasses and agreeing with him, and he didn't seem to know what to do with that. He stared for a second, then shoved past and was gone.

A hand appeared in his field of vision. Attached to a slim kid with dark curly hair, not quite handsome yet. He was holding a granola bar in his other hand like he'd been eating it when the locker thing happened and hadn't bothered to stop.

"You good?"

"I'm great." Peter took the hand. The kid pulled him up with more strength than he looked like he had.

"Harry Osborn," the kid said, which Peter already knew but couldn't say. Harry bit off a piece of granola bar. "Flash is in a mood. His dad called this morning."

"Whose dad?"

"Flash's. They're- it's a whole thing." Harry shrugged. He stood loose, comfortable. Nothing had gone really wrong for him yet and you could see it. "Hey, my dad wants me to bring you to this gala thing next month. Some Oscorp donor event. He said, quote, 'bring the Parker kid,' which means he thinks you're smart, which means he wants to show you off. The food's good. You in?"

Peter thought: Norman Osborn wants to meet me.

Peter said: "Free food?"

"Really good free food."

"Then yeah."

Harry grinned and walked with him toward first period and Peter thought about the name Osborn and everything he'd ever watched and came back with: green mask, pumpkin bombs, kills people, kills himself, his son goes crazy too. And the kid eating the granola bar next to him had no idea.

He spent the day cataloging. It wasn't intentional. He didn't sit down in homeroom with a checklist. But he kept tagging faces. An adult's eyes in a sophomore's skull, matching everyone against movies he'd watched in another life.

First period, front row: a blonde girl with a headband and a hand that went up before the teacher finished the question. Every time. She'd start raising it at the halfway mark, like she'd already run the math and was just waiting for the rest of the sentence out of politeness. Blue cardigan. Pen cap between her teeth. She wrote faster than anyone he'd ever seen.

Gwen Stacy. He was almost sure. The name didn't come with much. A bridge, a death, a thing he'd rather not think about while she was sitting ten feet away chewing on a pen cap.

In the cafeteria, a girl laughed at something Flash said and her whole face changed. Nose scrunched, eyes closed, everything rearranging around the sound. Then Flash said something else and the laugh cut off and her mouth settled back into the careful arrangement she wore the rest of the time. Like a light switching off.

Liz Allan. He didn't know anything else about her.

Back row, near the door, a dark-haired girl reading a paperback she'd cracked the spine on. Hood up. Bag on the chair next to her like a fence. Once, when Peter glanced back, their eyes met for half a second before she dropped back to the page like it hadn't happened.

He didn't have a name for her yet.

Fourth period, the teacher handed out permission slips. Field trip. General Techtronics Corporation, two weeks from today. "Cutting-edge research in radiation and genetics," the teacher said, in the tone of someone who'd been told to say that by the administration. Peter signed the slip. His hand was steady. The rest of him wasn't.

Two weeks. The spider was two weeks away.

He already knew what General Techtronics was. He knew what happened there. He knew a radioactive spider was going to bite Peter Parker at that exhibition and turn him into something else, and he was sitting in a plastic chair in a Queens high school holding a permission slip and his pen was a Bic with a chewed cap and the kid next to him was picking at a scab on his elbow and none of it was real and all of it was real and the permission slip had a dotted line for a guardian's signature.

Ben would sign it tonight.

Peter folded the slip and put it in his bag and went to lunch.

The rest of the day was noise. Teachers talking about things he'd learned a lifetime ago. Kids moving through hallways in patterns that meant everything to them and nothing to him. A fight almost started near the gym over something involving someone's girlfriend and someone else's phone and he walked past it without caring because he was twenty-three years old inside a body that hadn't finished growing yet and high school politics were exactly as stupid as he remembered them being the first time.

He rode the bus home. The seat was cracked vinyl and the window didn't close all the way and the kid in front of him was listening to music loud enough that Peter could identify the song except he couldn't identify the song because it wasn't from his world, from his version of things. That was the moment it landed. Sitting on a school bus in Queens with cold air coming through a gap in the window and a stranger's music leaking through stranger's headphones.

This was real. He was here. Peter Parker's life was his life now and there was no mechanism for going back and no one was going to explain why.

The bus dropped him at the corner of Ingram Street and he walked the three blocks home.

She was on the porch next door.

Bare feet on the railing. Sundress, white with small blue flowers. Red hair in late-afternoon sun, and the sun was in it, doing things he didn't have vocabulary for. Copper where the light hit and darker underneath and it moved when she turned her head and he was standing in his yard cataloging a girl's hair color like a paint swatch.

She had a lollipop. Cherry, maybe. She pulled it from her mouth slowly, not performatively, or maybe exactly performatively, the line between those things blurring when you looked like that. She pointed it at him.

"Hey, neighbor."

Mary Jane Watson was not what the movies had prepared him for. The movies had given him a version, pretty, nice, rained-on in a famous scene. They hadn't prepared him for the reality of a teenage girl who looked like that sitting on a porch railing with her legs crossed and a lollipop and green eyes that watched him back. Deliberately.

"Hey," he said.

"You look different today." She tilted her head. The eyes were sharp underneath whatever she was performing. "Taller or something."

"I don't think I grew overnight."

"No," she said. "Something else." The lollipop went back in. She looked at him, the easygoing expression shifting. One side of her mouth pulled up. Then the full smile came back, wider than before, and she took her feet off the railing and leaned forward with her elbows on her knees and the sundress shifted and there was a strip of collarbone and freckles he hadn't noticed.

"See something you like, Tiger?"

His face got hot. Which was ridiculous. He was twenty-three. He'd talked to women before. He'd done more than talk. But this body was fifteen and had very strong opinions about a redhead in a sundress calling him Tiger.

"Just the lollipop," he said. "Cherry?"

"Strawberry." She stood up. Stretched, arms over her head, the sundress riding up just enough to show a strip of stomach above the hem, tanned and flat. She caught him looking. She didn't say anything about it. Her mouth did the sideways thing again and she turned toward the door.

"See you tomorrow, Tiger."

She went inside. The screen door banged behind her.

He stood in his yard for a few seconds with his backpack over one shoulder and the late-afternoon sun warm on his face and then from inside her house, muffled but audible, a man's voice said something he couldn't make out. A door closed hard.

He went inside.

That night he lay in Peter Parker's bed and stared at the ceiling.

There was a crack in the plaster. Thin, forking near the light fixture, running toward the window. He traced it with his eyes. Back and forth.

The house was quiet. Ben and May had gone to bed an hour ago. He'd heard them talking through the wall, not the words, just the murmur of it. Two people who'd been having the same bedtime conversation for decades. May had laughed once. Soft.

He ran the inventory.

Ben Parker was alive. Three feet from him at breakfast, alive, drinking coffee, doing a crossword in blue ink. And Peter knew how Ben Parker died.

Norman Osborn was Harry's dad. The kid with the granola bar had no idea his father was going to lose his mind.

Two weeks until the spider. Two weeks and nothing after that would be simple.

And out there somewhere, Avengers. Mutants. Gods. A purple alien with a glove who wanted to kill half the universe. A blind lawyer in Hell's Kitchen. A man in a metal suit. All of them out there right now, and he was lying in a twin bed in Queens with glasses on the nightstand and a body that couldn't do a single pull-up.

Two weeks.

Sleep took hours.