Marvel – I am Spiderman

"Derek Whitman's having a thing tonight. You're coming."

MJ was leaning on the top rail of the fence with her elbows and a Diet Coke. Friday afternoon. She hadn't asked. She'd told.

"Who's Derek Whitman?"

"He's on the lacrosse team. His parents are in Connecticut for the weekend and he has a pool he's not going to let anyone use and a basement full of his dad's beer. It'll be the whole grade." She took a sip of the Diet Coke. "You need to leave the house, Tiger. You've been weird lately."

He'd been patrolling and selling photos to a man who used them to call him a menace. And thinking about a woman in a catsuit who traced symbols on his chest. But MJ didn't know any of that. What MJ knew was that the boy next door had stopped sitting on his back step in the afternoons and started disappearing after dark and coming home with scrapes he explained badly.

"Define weird."

"Weirder than usual." She pointed the Diet Coke at him. "Nine o'clock. Wear something that isn't a science pun."

He wore a flannel over a plain T-shirt. It was the best he could do.

Derek Whitman lived four blocks from Midtown High in a house that looked like every other house on the block except someone had hung Christmas lights on the porch in June and the bass from the basement was loud enough to rattle the mailbox.

Peter walked up the front steps just after nine. A kid he didn't recognize was sitting on the porch railing drinking from a red cup and talking to a girl who was looking at her phone. The front door was open. The hallway smelled like beer and someone's cologne applied with a fire hose.

Inside was a high school party.

He'd been to parties in his other life. Real ones, with adults, with people who'd outgrown the specific desperation of trying to look like they belonged. This was different. This was thirty teenagers in a stranger's parents' house trying on versions of themselves to see which one fit. The kid by the speakers was DJing on his phone and taking it very seriously. A boy near the kitchen was holding a beer he clearly didn't want but couldn't put down because someone might see him put it down.

Peter got a cup of water from the kitchen tap and stood near the refrigerator and watched.

MJ was in the center of it.

She was leaning against the counter next to the sink, red hair loose, wearing a green top that showed her collarbones and jeans she knew how to wear. She had a cup in one hand. She knew every name. Keisha walked by and MJ touched her shoulder and said something that made Keisha laugh. Derek came over and MJ tilted her head at the exact angle that made him feel like the most interesting person in the room and it wasn't the angle she used for Keisha. She had a different tilt for every person.

A girl Peter didn't know said something about someone's ex and MJ's mouth opened and the laugh that came out was bright and timed to land right when the girl needed it to land. The girl glowed.

Peter stood by the refrigerator and drank his water and watched her. The party-girl machine running at full speed. Touched shoulders. Remembered names. Asked follow-up questions about things people had mentioned last week. Laughed at jokes that weren't funny and made the people who told them feel funnier.

And he knew what it cost because he'd heard the voice through the wall. The male voice, grinding, at 2 AM. And he'd seen the fashion sketches in the margins of her calculus notebook, the ones she covered when anyone looked.

A kid spilled beer near the fridge. Peter stepped sideways. His shoes stuck to the floor. He drank his water and the bass from the basement made the cups on the counter rattle.

Harry was somewhere. Peter could hear his laugh from the living room. Flash was louder, which was Flash's default setting. Somebody had opened the back door and the night air was coming in and mixing with the cologne and the beer smell and the particular humidity of too many teenagers in too small a house.

MJ caught his eye across the kitchen. Her mouth was mid-sentence, talking to a boy Peter didn't know, and her eyes found him over the boy's shoulder and for half a second the mouth kept going but the eyes stopped performing. They were just looking at him. Tired and green and honest.

Then the boy said something and her head turned and the laugh came back.

Twenty minutes later she went outside.

She was on the front porch steps.

The kid with the red cup was gone. The Christmas lights were still on, white and uneven, one strand blinking because a bulb was loose. MJ was sitting with her knees up and her cup on the step next to her and she was looking at the street. Just looking at it.

Peter sat down. He left a foot of space between them. The porch step was cold through his jeans.

"Having fun?" she said. Her voice was different out here. Quieter. The party-girl register was off.

"I was going to ask you that."

She picked up her cup. Looked into it. Put it down without drinking. "I'm great. I'm always great. Ask anyone."

"I'm not asking anyone."

She was quiet for a minute. The bass from the basement was muffled out here, a dull pulse through the floorboards. A car went by on the street, headlights sliding across the houses and then gone. Someone's sprinkler was going two doors down, the tick-tick-tick-tick of the rotating head loud in the quiet.

"My mom left when I was eight," MJ said.

She said it flat. Looking at the street.

"She went to the store. Bananas. She said she was buying bananas. I remember because I didn't even like bananas and I didn't know why we needed more because there were still three in the bowl on the counter." She picked at a thread on the knee of her jeans. "She took her purse and her keys and her jacket and she walked out the door and she never came back."

Peter didn't say anything.

"Who does that?" she said. "Who buys bananas and then leaves? Who goes to the store and just keeps going? She didn't even take the car. She walked. She walked away from her house and her kid and she just. She walked."

The sprinkler two doors down ticked. MJ's fingers were still on the thread at her knee. She'd pulled it longer. It was going to unravel if she kept going.

"My dad got worse after." She didn't look at him. "He was bad before. After, he was worse. He's still worse. He'll always be worse." She let go of the thread. "I don't talk about this."

"I know."

"So why am I talking about it?"

She looked at him. Green eyes, tired, no mascara. She'd taken it off at some point during the party or she'd never put it on and the performance had been so good he hadn't noticed. She looked younger without it.

He should have had the right words. Wisdom from his other life about parents and leaving and the things kids carry that aren't theirs to carry. He had all of it. He'd lived twenty-plus years. He knew things about loss and about the people who stay and the people who don't.

What came out was: "Because I'm here and I'm not going anywhere."

MJ looked at him. Her bottom lip was between her teeth and her jaw was tight and her eyes were wet but she wasn't crying.

"You're weird, Tiger."

"Yeah."

She put her head on his shoulder.

The weight of it was light. She was thinner than she looked in her party clothes, the bones of her shoulder pressing into his arm. Her hair smelled like coconut. The shampoo, the one she'd been using since he'd known her, since the first week in this body when she'd leaned on the fence and called him Tiger and her hair had been close enough to smell. Coconut and warmth underneath, hers.

His hand was on the porch step. Six inches from her waist. The strip of skin between the hem of her green top and the waistband of her jeans. The porch light made it warm-colored. His hand was right there.

He didn't move it.

She needed someone to sit with her.

The sprinkler ticked. A moth hit the porch light and bounced off and hit it again.

Her breathing slowed. She was warm against his arm. The coconut shampoo was in his lungs and his hand was six inches from her waist and he didn't move it.

They sat like that for a while.

The window to the living room was behind them and to the left.

Peter didn't see her until the second time she looked.

Liz Allan. She was standing inside by the window, cup in hand, and Flash was next to her saying something with his hands, talking fast, and her jaw was set the way it got when she was listening to whatever she didn't want to hear. They'd come together. They were arguing, or Flash was arguing and Liz was enduring, and then her eyes moved past him and through the glass.

She saw Peter and MJ. MJ's head on Peter's shoulder, Peter's hand on the step six inches from MJ's waist, the strip of porch light between them.

Her lips were parted and her eyes were wide. A raw look, quick, like pressing your hand to a stove before your brain tells you it's hot.

Flash said something. Liz looked away. Back to Flash, back to the argument, back to whatever she'd been enduring before her eyes found the window.

She looked back once more. Shorter this time. Then she turned around and walked toward the kitchen and Peter couldn't see her anymore.

MJ hadn't moved. Her head was still on his shoulder. She hadn't seen any of it.

"Tiger."

"Yeah."

"Don't go anywhere."

"I'm not."

The moth hit the porch light again. The sprinkler ticked. Somewhere in the house someone turned the music up and someone else yelled to turn it down and neither of them moved.