Spider-Man

  For a moment all May could think about was that he would fall forward, crack his head open, and blood would permanently stain her couch, making her wistful for the plastic coverings that they’d removed years ago to keep Peter happy. Then she decided she really had to reorder her priorities and instead prevent Ben from getting himself killed.

  “Why aren’t you using a ladder? You’ll fall and break your neck,” she admonished him. Indicating the bulb, she continued, “Wait for Peter to do that.”

  Ben ignored her as he was wont to do. Instead, with a final triumphant twist, he got the bulb in and it illuminated. “God said let there be light,” he intoned. “Voila. Seventy-five soft glowing watts of it.”

  He started to step down off the chair, clutching the burned out bulb with one hand, and Aunt May stood just behind him to break his fall should it come to that. Not that she’d do him all that much good; if he landed on her he’d likely kill her. But she felt as if she had to do something. “Good boy,” she said sarcastically. “God’ll be thrilled. Just don’t fall on your ass.”

  The moment his foot was on solid ground, she headed into the kitchen to continue preparing dinner. As she went about doing so, Ben called after her, “I’m already on my ass. When the plant senior electrician is laid off after thirty-five years, what else would you call it? Of course I’m on my ass!”

  She’d heard him rant about it so much that she was able to mouth it along with him. Standing at the stove, she checked on water that was about to boil. Ben walked in behind her, tossing the burned out bulb into the garbage can. Figuring her husband might as well make himself useful, May said, “Hand me the bowl. The green one.”

  Ben picked up the requested kitchen implement and then went to the newspaper that was spread out on the table. He flipped to the classified section and shook his head dispiritedly. “Corporations firin’ people left and right so they can have a few billion more. What do they know about standing on a stool, screwin’ in a light bulb?”

  Standing around in pitch-blackness was beginning to sound preferable to listening to Ben carry on. “Ben, you’ll get another job somewhere.”

  “Well, let’s see,” Ben said with mock joviality, running his finger along the job notices. “Computer analyst, computer designer, computer engineer, computer …” His point made, he let out a melancholy sigh. “I’m sixty-eight years old. I have to provide for my family.”

  She hated to see him this way. So dispirited, so frustrated. Ben was of a generation that set a great deal of store by the ability of a husband to keep a roof over his loved ones’ heads. The loss of his job had been an unmanning experience for him. Granted he wasn’t a young man anymore, but Ben had a natural ebullience that belied his advanced years. That was missing now, consumed by doubt and self-pity.

  Turning the flame down under the pot, she stepped in behind him, embraced him, and kissed him on the cheek. “I love you,” she assured him. “And Peter loves you. You’re the most responsible man I’ve ever known. You’ve been down and out before, but somehow we survive.” Not wishing to dwell too long on maudlin concerns, she stood up and said, “Where is Peter, anyway? He’s late.”

  At that moment the front door opened and then slammed. Ben quickly turned the newspaper to the comic strips and called heartily, “Here he is!”

  “Just in time for dinner,” May said. The roast she was making in the oven was already giving off pleasing cooked smells that were filling the kitchen. She dropped some potatoes to be boiled into the water on the stovetop.

  “How was the field trip?”

  May’s back was to Peter, but when he didn’t respond promptly, she turned and glanced at him. She was taken aback by his wan look. It seemed as if he could barely stand up.

  “Don’t feel well … I wanna go to sleep,” he moaned softly.

  She immediately wanted to start making a fuss over him but knew how that made him feel, and every time she did it he’d complain she was overreacting. So, keeping a lid on her natural impulses, she instead said with just a touch of disappointment, “You won’t have a bite?”

  For some reason he gave her the oddest look when she said that. Then he shrugged and, heading for the stairs, said in what sounded like a bleakly amused tone, “No thanks … had a bite …”

  “Did you get some good pictures, Peter?” asked Ben.

  But Peter was already at the stairs, trudging as if he had lead weights attached to his ankles. “Gotta crash … everything’s fine.” And with that, he vanished. Moments later they heard the slamming of his bedroom door.

  Ben, his own concerns forgotten, turned with a mystified air toward May. “What’s that all about?” he asked.

  May was already moving toward the base of the stairs, but trying to sound nonchalant, she said, “He’s a teenager.”

  “He’s depressed,” said Ben.

  “He’s a teenager,” she told him again, as if that was all the explanation that could possibly be needed. And perhaps it was.

  Ben paused, considering her explanation, but then said firmly, “I better go up.”

  May was even more firm. “Stay put,” she ordered. “He’ll let us know if he needs help.”

  “Help,” Peter whispered.

  He had spoken so softly that his voice didn’t carry beyond the confines of his bedroom. It wasn’t that he was being macho or trying to tough it out. At that point, he really didn’t have the strength to get up any volume.

  Peter had dropped to his knees in his bedroom, clutching his abdomen in pain. “Help,” he gasped again. Writhing in agony, he looked at the spot where the spider had bitten him. It was completely red and swollen.

  He’d been an idiot, a total idiot. Trying to save Aunt May and Uncle Ben a few bucks on a doctor, when he’d obviously been poisoned by that … that stupid, stupid spider. Well, enough was already way too much. He was going to stand up, throw open the door, call down to Aunt May and Uncle Ben that he was sick and they should haul him immediately to the ER while alerting the toxicology and animal venom unit—presuming there were such things—that they were going to have a major case on their hands.

  At least, that was what his mind was telling his body he was about to do. His body, however, wasn’t the least bit interested in cooperating. Instead, just when he thought it couldn’t hurt any more, it got worse. His legs curled up into a fetal position, and sweat was pouring off his body like a sumo wrestler working a Stairmaster. The carpet beneath his head was soaked with perspiration, and he was shaking uncontrollably, extreme heat and lethal chills taking turns pounding through his system. His teeth were chattering, and if he’d been able to make it to a mirror, he would have seen that his eyes were sunken, his face the color of vanilla pudding.

  He made one final effort to stand, but it would have been impossible to tell by looking at him, because he didn’t budge from the floor. Instead he curled up even tighter, his arms clutching around his legs, drawing his knees up to just under his chin. His eyes rolled up into the top of his head, and the final jolt of pain was too overwhelming for him to handle. With a final, low moan, he passed out dead away. Under his lids, his eyes continued to flutter.

  Tortured dreams cascaded through his mind, and he was climbing a strand of DNA, and suddenly the strand was twisting around and back on him, and it broke down into strands of thin, gossamer consistency that were like fluttering threads from a spider’s web. He struggled to break free of them, and then he saw a spider descending toward him, except Flash’s face was reflected in one of its eyes, and Mary Jane’s dad in another, and M. J. was standing to the side with her friends, posing for pictures and laughing, and as Peter screamed, his voice made no sound, no sound at all . . . and there was a screeching in his head, like something was trying to warn him of incredible danger.

  And the spider was coming closer and closer, and it seemed to be talking to him; he thought he could hear its voice in his head . . . but most of what it was saying was incomprehensible. Just two words echoed in his head . . . gre
at power . . . great power . . . all the things he’d wanted to do, everything he’d ever wanted . . . popularity, and Mary Jane, and wiping that smug look off Flash’s face, all of it, his for the taking, except he didn’t want it, he just wanted to wake up, wake up. . . .

  “Wake up! Peter, you’ll be late for school!”

  Peter snapped awake, blinking against the sunlight that was pouring in through the window. For one delirious moment, he thought that the sun had come out at night, and then his mind settled down as he realized that, no, the night had passed. And to his very great surprise, he had not woken up dead.

  Not only that, but the venom had obviously worked its way through his system. He’d probably … sweated it out somehow.

  “Peter,” came Aunt May’s voice a second time, and he heard her tentative footsteps on the stairs.

  Peter’s head snapped around as he saw that he’d more or less trashed his room in the throes of his pain and delirium. Plus he was still wearing the clothes from the night before. If Aunt May saw him like this, she’d probably panic and become convinced that he was desperately ill, just at the point where he was feeling 100 percent better.

  “I’m up! I’m up! I’m getting dressed!”

  The steps paused, and then she said, sounding a bit relieved, “All right. Better move along.”

  “Right, right. Moving.”

  He stretched his legs tentatively. For a moment he felt some tightness around the calves and, even more strange, a tingling around his toes. But those quickly disappeared and movement became unimpaired. He took several deep, experimental breaths, and even took his own pulse. Everything seemed fine.

  And yet, it was a little odd. He felt as if he was a new inhabitant in his own body, learning his way around it like a newborn.

  He glanced over at the clock and saw that Aunt May had been right: Time was wasting. Then he looked down and saw that his glasses had fallen off, and felt mild surprise. With his glasses on, his vision was 20/20, but without them, things were a blur. Yet he’d been able to make out the digital readout on the clock with no problem. He picked up his glasses out of reflex and put them on his face as he stood …

  … and he knocked into a chair.

  He staggered back, utterly confused, as the chair tumbled around. Quickly he removed his glasses and looked down. Sure enough, there was the chair, big as life, perfectly clear to his vision. But when he tentatively replaced his glasses on his face, the chair blurred out as if he was looking through the bottoms of a pair of soda bottles. On, off, on, off, he tested the glasses repeatedly. There was no question about it: Not only could he now see better with the glasses off, he could see perfectly with the glasses off.

  “Weird,” he muttered.

  He had completely soaked through the T-shirt he was wearing. Not even the standard teen tactic of sniffing the armpits was going to salvage this one. He pulled the shirt off over his head and, stripped to the waist, headed over to his dresser, passing the full-length mirror on the wall.

  Then he stepped back in front of the mirror, still barechested, and gaped.

  It wasn’t his body. It was his head, all right, staring back at him from the mirror, but somehow, for some reason, it was sitting perched atop someone else’s torso. It wasn’t the frame of a bodybuilder, not hugely overmuscled. But he was definitely ripped. There was serious muscle definition, as if he’d been working out steadily for weeks on end. His stomach was hard and washboard flat, his gut in the muscle cutout commonly referred to as a six-pack. His pectorals weren’t Schwarzenegger level, but they were impressive nevertheless.

  He raised his arm, watched it move up and down in the mirror, matching the gesture. He turned his head slowly left and right, never removing his gaze from his reflection. For a moment he thought he might still be dreaming. He dug a fingernail into his finger and felt the pinch. Then, just out of curiosity, he tried flexing his pecs as he’d seen muscle men do.

  They jumped like a couple of cheerleaders.

  Peter let out a shriek and jumped back, still never taking his eyes off the reflection of someone who could never, ever, under any circumstance, be addressed as Puny Parker.

  Then there was an insistent knocking at the bedroom door. Peter had been so distracted by the mirror that he hadn’t heard Aunt May coming up the stairs. She’d probably been alerted by such little clues as Peter’s annoying girllike scream. “Peter? Are you all right?”

  “Fine!” he called back, his voice an octave too high, and he forced himself to lower it. “I’m fine! Just fine!”

  “Any better this morning?” she asked tentatively. “Any change?”

  He flipped his glasses into the garbage can, even as he called back unevenly, feeling shell-shocked. “Change? Yes … yes, big change.”

  He grabbed some clothes at random from a drawer and, as he did so, happened to glance out the window and across the way. He couldn’t believe it; his vision was even better than 20/20, maybe 20/10. And what Peter was seeing now was Mary Jane, standing in her bedroom window, doing a last minute check of her hair. He watched, mesmerized. Finally she tucked her hairbrush into her purse and darted out of view.

  Suddenly all the setbacks of the previous day, all the condescension that he’d had to endure, came roaring back to him. Something in him cried out for justice, for the ability to put everyone on notice that things were going to be different from now on. There was a minor buzz of warning in the back of his mind that he should still be panicked. He had, after all, undergone some bizarre metamorphosis. His life had changed overnight.

  Then again, it had only changed for the better, so what could there really be to be nervous about? Maybe the smart thing to do was just accept this, go with it, and milk it for all it was worth.

  Peter pulled on a sock, and then discovered there was a huge hole in the heel … so large that it would be visible over the top of his shoe. “Wonderful,” he muttered, and yanked the sock off again.

  It ripped.

  He stared down at it in confusion. For some bizarre reason, the toe end of the sock had torn clean off and was sticking to the end of his foot. “What is up with that?” he muttered as he pulled the material off his toes and yanked on a new pair of socks. He finished dressing, shoved the edges of his clean T-shirt into the tops of his jeans, and sprinted out the door and down the stairs. He vaulted the banister, landing behind Uncle Ben with the poise and confidence of an Olympic gymnast who just nailed a complicated dismount. He was desperate to run out the door after Mary Jane, but Aunt May was just emerging from the kitchen with a plate of pancakes and strips of newly made bacon. Peter wanted to stay and savor it. In many ways, it was as if he was truly alive for the first time in his life. Still, he didn’t want to let Mary Jane get away. So he compromised, grabbing food off the table and shoveling it down with the efficiency of a black hole. Uncle Ben, sitting at the table, was taken aback, and made a point of keeping his fingers away from Peter lest they be consumed as well.

  “Hi. Gotta go,” said Peter between mouthfuls.

  Ben looked on, hypnotized by the rapid motion of food to mouth. “We thought you were sick.”

  “I was. I got better.” Except this time he wasn’t waiting for his mouth to be clear of food, so it came out more like, “Iduz, Igobedder.”

  “Sit down, dear,” Aunt May suggested as an entire plate of eggs disappeared into Peter’s mouth.

  “Can’t. See you later.” Peter slung his books over his shoulder, leaving behind a table of dishes that he’d had an impact on—not unlike the impact a tornado has on a trailer park.

  “Don’t forget, we’re painting the kitchen today! Home right after school, right?” called Ben.

  His voice disappearing into the distance, Peter called, “Sure thing, Uncle Ben, don’t start without meeeeee… .”

  And then he was gone.

  May and Ben stared at each other. “What was that about?” asked May.

  Ben stared down at his own empty plate. “He ate my bacon.”


  Peter had just emerged from his house when he spotted Mary Jane coming out of hers. She was walking as quickly as she could, and her father was leaning against the door frame. He was speaking with the kind of slur that indicated he’d been drinking. At this time of the morning? Peter wondered, astounded.

  “I don’t care what your mother said! It’s not okay with me!” M. J.’s father called after her. “You’re trash! You’ll always be trash! Just like her!”

  Peter stopped in his tracks, paralyzed, all of his energy forgotten. How could anyone, much less her own father, say something like that to M. J.? M. J., the most perfect, the most wonderful of females? How could someone who should be loving and adoring her and thanking God for blessing him with her—okay, maybe that was a bit over the top, but still … —be speaking to her in that manner?

  “I have to go to school,” M. J. said quickly, turning on her heel.

  “Who’s stopping ya?” her father said with a sneer.

  From over his shoulder, M. J.’s mother stepped up and said angrily, “Leave her alone!”

  M. J. didn’t wait around to see how the confrontation between her parents was going to work out. Instead she bolted down the sidewalk. Her movement snapped Peter’s own paralysis, and he hurried after her.

  Everything he’d been planning to say to her had gone out the window, because in his imagination, she’d been the smiling, bright, chipper M. J. that he knew so well from school. An M. J. who was emotionally overwrought, who had to deal with parents—or at least a father—who didn’t appreciate her for who and what she was, was outside of Peter’s ability to handle. With all the energy bursting in his sinews, he was sure he could overtake her in a heartbeat, but his own uncertainty slowed him. “Talk to her, talk to her,” Peter kept saying to himself as he drew closer to her at a steady but cautious pace. But she was wiping away tears, and Peter’s usually nimble mind wasn’t able to come up with anything to say, given her emotional stress… .