Invisible Girl
The backpack strap tore during second period.
Jessica Jones was ten feet ahead of him in the hallway, between history and English, walking shoulders forward, hood up, the bag on her right shoulder because the left strap had been held together with a safety pin for weeks. The right strap didn't break at the seam. The nylon ripped clean, the fabric separating like someone had taken scissors to it, and the bag hit the floor and her notebooks spilled and a pen rolled under the lockers and Jessica stood there looking at her hands.
She opened them. Closed them. Opened them again.
Peter knew that look. He'd made it at his bathroom sink the morning after the exhibition, standing in his underwear at six AM with a faucet handle in his fingers and the chrome bent like it was aluminum foil and his brain running the physics and the physics not working. That's not how metal works. He'd held the handle for a long time. Turning it over. Squeezing it gently and watching the metal give. Then squeezing harder and watching it crumple.
Jessica was looking at her hands and her hands were shaking and the hallway moved around her. A kid stepped over her spilled notebook without breaking stride. A girl kicked the pen further under the lockers without looking down.
He didn't go to her. She needed to be alone with whatever her hands had just done. The last thing he'd wanted the morning after the bite was someone asking him if he was okay.
He went to English. Sat down. The teacher was talking about chapter five of something Peter had read in his previous life and couldn't remember the ending of, which was a specific kind of useless. The green light at the end of the dock. Gatsby reaching. Peter had seen the Leonardo DiCaprio version at a friend's apartment on a Tuesday night when he was twenty-one and thought the whole thing was depressing and the friend had said "that's the point" and Peter had said "I know, I just don't want it to be." He wasn't sure what he'd say about it now. Probably the same thing.
He thought about Jessica's hands. The nylon had torn clean through the fabric. Not the stitching. That was force. Jessica Jones in her hoodie and her boots, maybe a hundred and twenty pounds, had ripped nylon with a grip that was physically wrong for her body.
The clenched fist under the desk during the mutant report in social studies. The foster father who'd cracked two ribs falling off a roof, and how she'd told him that story like it was about someone else's body. The flinch when someone brushed past her in the cafeteria line, a full-body recoil she'd covered by reaching for her tray. He'd noticed all of it separately. The strap connected it.
Her powers were coming in. He recognized the shape of it because he'd lived it. The accidental strength. The broken things you couldn't explain. The morning you woke up stuck to the ceiling and had to figure out how to unstick yourself without making noise because May was in the next room and the floor was a long way down.
He didn't know what Jessica's powers would look like when they finished arriving. She wasn't in any MCU movie he'd seen. But a girl had ripped nylon with her bare hands and looked at her fingers like they belonged to someone else, and he knew what that felt like.
A guy in the front row dropped his pen. It rolled to Peter's desk. He picked it up and handed it back. "Thanks." "Yeah." The fluorescent light above them buzzed at the frequency that had been bothering him since September and would probably bother him until graduation or until someone replaced the ballast, whichever came first.
His phone vibrated. Text from Cindy: three question marks and a knife emoji. He put it away.
Between English and lunch, Peter passed Jessica near the stairwell. She'd fixed the bag with duct tape, the strap wrapped tight and thick, silver over black nylon. She was carrying it against her chest with both hands instead of wearing it. Her grip was careful. Deliberate. The grip of someone who was thinking about how much pressure her hands were putting on everything they touched.
He didn't have anything to say that wouldn't sound insane. Hey, did your backpack just rip because you have superpowers? Because mine did that to a faucet once.
Peter kept walking.
MJ was in the parking lot.
School had ended twenty minutes ago. The lot was emptying, buses gone, the after-school crowd thinning out. Peter had stayed late to drop off photos at the office for the school paper because Jameson's prints didn't pay until Thursday and the school paper paid in pizza coupons Ben actually liked. He came out the side entrance near the dumpsters and stopped.
She was leaning against the chain-link fence where the lot met the sidewalk. Arms crossed. Hair tied back in a tight ponytail, no loose pieces framing her face. The green jacket. Jeans. She'd been standing there long enough that she'd stopped shifting her weight. The concrete under the fence had cigarette butts and a flattened juice box and MJ's sneakers were planted between them.
"Who is she?"
Peter stopped.
"The scratches." She pushed off the fence and walked toward him. Slow. Deliberate. "The bruises. You came home with a bruise shaped like a wing across your ribs and told me you fell off a bike you don't own." She stopped three feet from him. "You disappear for hours and come back moving differently. You smell like leather and the city and you look at your phone and your face does something and then you put it away and pretend you weren't smiling."
She'd been close enough to smell the leather on him. Watching his face when he checked his phone. Cataloging every scratch and bruise and absence while he was busy being a secret vigilante on rooftops with a girl in a catsuit.
Her eyes were wet. Her jaw was locked, her chin up, and she wasn't blinking.
"I don't care about the rest of it, Peter. The lies. The disappearing. Whatever you're doing at night that puts marks on you." Her voice cracked on a syllable and she closed it. "Just. Who is she?"
The parking lot was loud around them. A car started. Someone honked. Two freshmen were shoving each other near the bus stop, laughing. A teacher was walking to her car with papers under her arm. The wind was pushing a Doritos bag across the asphalt in a slow arc and nobody was looking at two teenagers standing three feet apart next to a chain-link fence.
The scratches were from the Vulture's talons. The wing-shaped bruise was from an I-beam. The marks on his wrists were from Cindy's webbing, which was technically a girl but not the kind MJ meant. None of it would answer what she was actually asking.
"It's complicated."
Her eyes closed. Opened. Her mouth flattened.
"It always is with you."
She turned.
His hand caught her wrist. The motion was faster than the decision, his arm moving before the thought finished forming, and his fingers were around her wrist and her pulse was under his thumb. Hammering. Over a hundred, easy. Her voice and her face hadn't given any of that away.
MJ looked at his hand on her wrist. Looked at him. Her eyes were green and wet and his throat was tight and the Doritos bag had caught on the fence behind her.
"Let go."
Quiet. More weight than a shout would have carried.
He let go.
She turned and walked across the parking lot toward the sidewalk. Her ponytail swung with the pace and she didn't look back and she didn't slow down. No performance. No hips. She was leaving.
The Doritos bag blew off the fence and skidded across the asphalt.
Peter stood there. His hand was open and his chest hurt in a place the Vulture hadn't cracked and MJ was at the sidewalk now, turning left, headed for Queens.
She was wrong about the girl. She was right about the lying.
He stood in the parking lot until the November cold found every gap in his jacket. The Doritos bag was gone. The lot was empty. A janitor came out the main entrance with a trash bag and didn't see him.
He walked home. A crossing guard was still at the corner of Queens Boulevard even though the kids had been gone for an hour. She was reading a paperback against the stop sign and didn't look up when Peter passed. The book was thick. She was near the end. Peter wondered if she'd been reading it all afternoon, standing at the corner of Queens Boulevard, waiting for traffic that wasn't coming and turning pages.
He walked the rest of the way thinking about MJ's ponytail. She'd tied her hair back before she came to the parking lot. Functional, not styled. MJ Watson didn't tie her hair back for nothing.
His thumb was cold.