Chapter Text
She’s not obsessed with him.
She’s not.
Really.
(Stop looking at her like that.)
(Stop it.)
She’s not obsessed with him because Michelle Jones doesn’t get obsessed with people. That’s not her. That’s not what she does. ‘Obsessed’ is a painfully simplistic description of what she does.
(Because what she does? It’s different to being obsessed.)
‘Obsessed’ has no nuance. And MJ is all about that nuance. Life isn’t black and white. She deals exclusively in shades of grey, and ‘obsessed’ is a word which, when used to explain her behaviour, incorrectly translates life into two shades with nothing in between.
And she certainly doesn’t get obsessed with mediocre white boys.
So you can see she’s not obsessed with him. Really.
(Not really.)
She is not obsessed with him but she is, of course, interested. Intrigued. And not in a romantic way.
No.
Never.
Interest is, in this case, used purely to refer to academic, scientific, objective interest. Not anything so mundane as romantic or sexual attraction.
(No matter how good his shoulders look.)
(Shut up.)
And look, it’s reasonable to be interested in Peter Parker. He’s an interesting person! Anyone who regularly commits minor legal misdemeanours such as trespassing, loitering, and aggravated assault while wearing a Stark-issued spandex suit is worthy of all the interest they can gather. Her obsession – a word which has been previously established to be a grotesque exaggeration and oversimplification of what she’s doing – only seems weird because they’re in high school, and ‘interest’ in high school is normally of the drooling, creepy, hormonal variety. Others’ misinterpretations of MJ’s thoughts are understandable: no one else knows Peter Parker runs around in a skin-tight onesie to get beaten up so it does appear as though she has a crush when, really, he’s just an interesting guy.
MJ is so sick of the word ‘interesting’.
He’s a flaky guy. An intriguing, flaky, smart, well-meaning loser. That’s who Peter Parker is, summarised to devastating accuracy.
And so when she strides into history class early and spots Peter comatose on his desk, her interest – god, she hates that word – is piqued.
Why wouldn’t it be?
It’s this that prompts her to spin on her heel and exit the room. And induces her to wade upstream through a deluge of lost freshmen to the home economics classroom. And is responsible for her breaking into said classroom with the lockpick stowed in her left boot, pouring three cans of condensed milk and eight sachets of instant coffee (ugh) into her spare KeepCup, topping it up with some milk from the sluggish milk frother, and sneaking back down to the history room to slam it in front of Peter’s wan face with a thoughtful, considerate, and all-round benevolent statement.
“Chug chug, bitch,” she says.
Peter stares.
MJ ignores him.
His stupid mouth falls open.
Okay.
She can’t not say anything else when his face is looking like – well, looking like that. She indulges him with a direct warning about his decathlon performance, and shoves her face back into Orlando and prays that he won’t question her.
And yes, she is sitting next to him.
(Shut up.)
How else will she be able to tell if the coffee works? She has to know. Because this is a –
It’s a –
An experiment.
Yeah.
That's exactly what it is.
And she definitely did not come up with this on the spot.
Any good scientific experiment has a question that requires answering, a hypothesis, and a method of experimentation. Which she has. And did not make up four seconds ago.
Definitely.
The Question: What would Peter Parker be like (academically) if he were not sleep deprived?
The Hypothesis: Copious quantities of caffeine ingested each morning will aid Peter Parker’s social and academic performance.
The Experiment: Provide Peter Parker with caffeinated drinks every morning for at least a week.
Results: to be seen.
Thankfully Peter seems to take in her headphones, the book, and conclude that she doesn’t want to talk. Nor does he seem to suspect that he is the subject of a hastily constructed (no! Well-planned!) experiment. He focuses on the KeepCup, and MJ watches him from the corner of her eye. He chokes on it, takes a cautious second sip, and then downs the entire thing in about four seconds flat.
Fucking hell. She’s almost tempted to pull a headphone away from her ear and snark at him, but Mr Cowell chooses that moment to enter the room and saves MJ from discrediting herself and her results.
This particular section of Midtown’s woeful history curriculum is about the French Revolution, a favourite revolution of MJ’s due to the sudden decrease in number of rich French assholes in the world. ‘Favourite’ as in she’s listened to so many podcasts and read so many books about it that she’s probably forgotten more about it than Mr Cowell ever learned. So she feels no guilt in not listening. It’s not like she’s going to become a historian anyway: she’s a scientist. She’s running an experiment right now and she has to gather data.
So instead she watches Peter attempt to listen to the long, monotonous lecture.
He does a very bad job of it.
He does try – she has to give credit where credit is due, because trying is valiant in itself when Mr Cowell is the most boring motherfucker on the planet. Peter jots down a total of eight notes, a number which matches one of the tallies in the margin of MJ’s history workbook. His eyes glaze over a total of seventeen times, which is the number corresponding to the other tally. He has quite nice eyes, actually. Very expressive. At the moment they’re expressing that he just doesn’t find Mr Cowell interesting at all, but each time the glaze lifts he shifts in his seat, looking uncomfortable and slightly guilty, and makes at least one note before the fog drifts down again.
She makes a mental note to write him a brief, bullet-point summary of the main points Mr Cowell (should have) covered. Then she crosses it out because it’s not her job to stop a classmate failing. Then she grudgingly pulls out a mental highlighter and circles the crossed-out note twice, because he’s kind of her friend, right? And friends are meant to help each other.
The note gets violently scribbled out.
It would contaminate the experiment.
Obviously.
It’s nothing to do with the fact that he still calls her Michelle even when she told him her friends call her MJ.
Class ends, and she tears out the page of neatly written dates and puts it in the trash.
))8((
The coffee kicks in immediately after history. In Algebra Peter completes the assigned exercises a good twenty minutes before anyone else and spends the rest of class daydreaming.
(MJ finishes second.)
(The only reason for that is because she’s distracted by her experiment.)
(Obviously.)
They work the same circuit in physics, and it’s a similar result: Peter is awake and actively using that unreliable brain. He even cracks a few jokes, and laughs when she steals part of Flash’s circuit every time he leaves his desk to go annoy Kimia and Ayesha. He smiles at her a bit more than usual, which she assumes is him trying to thank her for the coffee.
If he really wanted to thank her he'd remember to give back her KeepCup by the end of the day.
At her locker MJ takes an extra minute to glance over her experimental notes, and another minute after that to find her sandwich. Analysis of observations conclude that caffeine is – at least today – a verified solution to his sleep deprivation and subsequently poor academic transcript. A few more days of experimentation should test this further.
It’s a pretty open and shut case.
She sits three seats closer to him at lunch. Fuck it.
She can’t take observations if she isn’t close enough to observe him.
(That’s the only reason.)
(Really.)
(Stop looking at her like that.)
Peter looks like he’s starting to feel the weariness again, but he smiles at her as he slides the KeepCup over the table and thanks her. “I really needed it,” he says.
Well, she'll take a clean cup and a verbal thank you as - a thank you. God. A normal person might smile in response. MJ gives him her best nonchalant shrug. “All good, nerd. You better know what date Louis XVI died by 4pm Thursday or I’m kicking you out of the team.”
“Thanks?”
Ned snickers.
“You’re very welcome,” she says regally, and picks the cup up to shove it into her bag. She stops dead. The cup is warm and full of something that isn’t air.
Is that smell jasmine?
“What the hell’s this?”
Did he just make her tea?
“Tea,” Peter confirms. The corners of his mouth quirk up nervously.
The answer, apparently, is yes.
This is all so unbelievable that she pries the lid off and peers inside to find herself staring at jasmine tea with her own two eyes. Tea. Looks like it steeped for too long and the water’s too hot, but it’s not like Peter would know that. He’s an idiot. And interesting one, but an idiot.
“Huh,” she says, and curses her pathetic recovery. “Why?”
Peter gives his own A-grade shrug and pulls out a squashed sandwich. “You gave me coffee. It seemed fair.”
Fair?
Fair?
What the hell’s fair got to do with anything? Science isn’t fair! It’s objective! The planet doesn’t stare at your stupid ass back through the telescope! Peter is the subject of this experiment. Not her. He is. He is!
“Huh.” It seems a little unfair to yell at him for compromising an experiment he didn’t know he was part of. “Well. Thanks.”
She pulls up her book like a shield and rereads the same page for the remainder of lunch, trying to ignore her lungs brutalising her heart or maybe the other way around, and there’s an especially smug voice in the back of her being a little bitch about this unexpected turn of events.
Well, says the voice, was this actually unexpected?
The level of smugness sits somewhere to the right of the border between intolerable and insufferable. Because yeah, okay, she should have predicted Peter Parker would do something obnoxiously nice in response to her not-obnoxiously nice act. This is, after all, the guy who disappeared five minutes before homeroom and returned late to second period with a detention for tardiness and a birthday card. MJ had seen the smile on Gwen Stacy’s face when she found a card in her locker because one person, at least, had remembered her birthday. Peter’s the guy who keeps a bottle of Windex in his locker in case someone scrawls transphobic slurs on Cosmo Dickson’s locker again. She knows from personal experience that he has an ibuprofen tablet supply in his pencil case, of which she has been given a large number on the days her cramps have been especially bad and she runs out herself.
He’s the worst.
The. Worst.
Peter Parker is the worst.
))8((
When the weather’s good, MJ goes to the park after school and reads beneath a tree. A specific tree, mind you. It has an excellently-placed root ideal for propping her feet up on, there are no knots to dig into her back, and the leafy canopy above filters out just enough sunlight that she isn’t squinting at her page, but not enough so that she gets cold in the shade. Perfect placement near a nice fountain, a two-minute walk from her favourite café.
If the weather’s absolute crap, she visits that favourite café, which happens to be the ground floor of possibly the greatest second-hand bookshop in the whole state. It’s a big, twisty building with three floors, narrow staircases and creaky floorboards. The bookshelves tower up to the ceiling, the windows are perpetually dusty, and in each room of books there are at least four places in the middle of the floor one can stub their toe on.
And it’s named Sappho Books, after the original lesbian herself.
It’s the greatest place in the world.
Which is why it’s a shame that MJ isn’t there today.
Instead of meandering down to this haven, after school MJ makes a beeline for the nearest K-Mart and is in and out in about forty seconds after snatching up an ugly, frilly dress and buying and applying some crap makeup. Then she carefully checks superhero Twitter and sits in a strategically placed McDonalds in Queens for an hour and a half, half-concentrating on her homework.
It’s an illuminating excursion.
Why the makeup and pink shirt?
That doesn’t matter.
(Don’t be nosy.)
Why Queens?
(What did she just goddamn say about being nosy – )
Irrelevant.
She gets a great seat by the window with a clear view of the street. Buys herself a large chips and coke, and steadily works through the Algebra worksheet. After every problem she lifts her head and strains to catch a glimpse of a red and blue suit, and every time she’s disappointed.
For the first hour and a bit, that is. At four forty-five she sits down again with an M&M McFlurry, and promises herself that if no superhero makes an appearance in the next fifteen minutes, she’ll leave.
Fifteen seconds later, the little girl in the booth next to her gasps, and MJ looks out into the street.
Hotdog vendor at twelve o’clock. Bus stop at two.
Spider-Man at ten-thirty. Ten. Nine-thirty.
Spider-Man has a seizure in mid-air.
Crash.
MJ takes a long sip of her McFlurry and watches serenely as Spider-Man peels himself off the window. The little girl fails to recover the chicken nugget that falls from her stunned mouth.
Spider-Man leaps to his feet, body language clearly stating exactly how embarrassed he feels, and MJ throws herself under the table as he looks through the window and gives the little girl a small wave.
“What a loser,” she mutters. She says it like she didn’t go to the closest Goodwill and K-Mart after school for the singular purpose of acquiring the most un-MJ clothing she could find, a cheap hairbrush and some makeup so she could spy on Peter Parker incognito.
Like she didn’t just duck under a table and spill melted ice-cream and M&Ms all over herself to avoid being seen by him.
Like her hands aren’t shaking because of how close that was.
Like she is furious with him and Ned and everyone else because she asked them to call her MJ and no one has. Because if they don't call her MJ then they don't consider her a friend.
Peter Parker doesn't consider her a friend. Even though he made her tea. Even though as he handed her the cup he smiled softly and shyly in a way that was so goddamn adorable she wants to punch herself in the face and knock herself out every time she remembers it so she won't feel this stupid swell in her chest.
Because he made her tea because it seemed fair.
Not because they're friends.
And now she's sitting under a table in a goddamn McDonalds in a dress and makeup spying on a classmate because she's angry at him for doing something nice for someone he doesn't think of as a friend.
She stares into what’s left of her drink and thinks that maybe, maybe something’s wrong with her. It’d be nice to have a friend to confirm or deny. But as previously stated! She doesn’t have any of those! After school she sits in a park by herself, or a bookshop by herself, or works with a bunch of people she can’t stand, or stays at home, or orders people around at AcaDec.
And she’s okay with that. Really.
(Not really.)
She’s got Mom, at the very least.
(She asked them to call her MJ.)
(Why won’t they call her MJ?)
But sometimes she can’t help but think it’d be nice to have someone to send triple-chinned Snapchats to at two in the morning, or bitch about Ms Lopez with, or literally someone to talk to not during school hours who isn’t a co-worker or a forty-five-year-old woman who used to change her diapers.
And yeah, okay. It’d be nice if Peter was that person. Okay. She admits it.
She really, really wants Peter to be that person.
))8((
The lights are off when she gets home, feeling drained and angry and upset. The door is unlocked, and she expects to see Mom sitting at the kitchen table with an ill-advised cup of evening coffee, but the kitchen is dark and silent. The cardboard box of pots and pans they still haven’t got around to unpacking sits open on the countertop, steel glinting with the dull glow of the streetlights outside.
She gropes for the switch, scrabbling about in the darkness for a few moments before her fingers touch the square of plastic to the left of the doorway. She flicks it on.
Nothing happens.
She flicks it off, then on again, then off again, then pummels the stupid switch because this is the kind of shit she doesn’t need when she’s tired, and embarrassed, and sticky from spilled ice-cream. She doesn’t need a goddamn piss cherry on top of an already steaming mound of shit.
“Power’s out,” Mom grunts from somewhere.
“Of course it is.” She gives one of the moving crates a kick to alleviate her feelings. It’s not satisfying, and now she has a sore toe. Scowling, she dumps her schoolbag on another still-packed crate and peers into the living room.
The curtains are open, revealing graffitied wall outside and just enough light to illuminate Mom. She’s sprawled across the couch with one shoe missing. Both her feet are propped up on yet another crate, this one currently acting as their coffee table, and containing their ugliest set of crockery that Nanna won’t let them get rid of. An arm is flung across her face, and her fingers aren’t even beating that normal restless staccato: a sure sign she’s had a shitty day as well. Dr Crumb is curled up on her chest, purring like a chainsaw. She’s by far the loudest thing in the room.
“What did the little crapbags do today? MJ asks, hovering in the doorway. She doesn’t want Mom to see her in her make-up wearing disgrace. Then she’ll ask questions in that patient, measured way of hers that’ll convince MJ to tell her everything and she really just needs ten to twelve hours to think about what the hell she’s gonna do about this friends problem.
Mom groans in response.
“That bad?” Her eyes drift to the fruit bowl Mom must have moved from the coffee-crate to the floor.
Fuck. She really wants an orange.
“Worse,” Mom says. She moves her arm to reveal a toddler’s handprint in white paint across her face.
“Wow.”
“Yeah.”
Her eyes, thankfully, are still closed. There are, as of now, no witnesses to MJ’s disgrace.
“Yikes,” she says, and power-walks as quietly as she can over to the couch, stoops to grab an orange. The bowl looks to be one of Nanna’s other, equally as ugly, gifts. “You could just wash it off, you know.”
Mom’s eyes flick open. MJ flinches, and puts the orange in front of her face. “You try washing off semi-permanent — why are you holding an orange in front of your face?”
There it is.
“I’m not,” she says, and winces.
“Yeah you are. I know I’m not as smart as you, but I know what an orange looks like.”
“Do you?”
“Yeah. Look, the René Magoo — ”
“Magritte. René Magritte.”
“ — René Magritte thing doesn’t suit you and I’m a hundred percent sure you’re just hiding something. Which is probably makeup.”
“Why would you — I’m not wearing makeup.”
“You’re wearing a dress, and I’ve never seen you do that voluntarily. So makeup. Or you got in a fight.”
The latter seems like something way cooler to confess to. She lets out a sigh that’s at least ten seconds long. Mom waits patiently for her to finish.
“So why?”
Now here she could tell the truth, or lie out of her ass.
If the former, she has to live with the excruciating humiliation of confessing to angrily stalking a classmate because they did something nice for her, and then Mom would inevitably conclude she has a crush on whoever it is, and that she’s being a hormonal teenager.
If she lies … well. If she lies, Mom will immediately call her out on it cause she happens to be a genius who should be a psychologist instead of a kindergarten teacher, and decide that the reason she’s lying is because the real reason is embarrassing, that it’s to do with some boy or girl and that she’s being a hormonal teenager.
There is no way to win.
“Reconnaissance mission,” she blurts.
Mom twists her mouth up and nods. “So who was the stalkee?”
There it is.
“Can we not use the word stalking?”
MJ’s feet are rooted to the spot. There’s nothing she wants to do more than sneak away to her room and lie down on her mattress and die.
Except maybe talk to someone about these stupid, annoying, horrible feelings in her chest.
Mom, bless her beautiful psychologist soul, knows this. “Okay. Pursuing, then? We can talk about it later.”
She shrugs, and hopes she doesn’t press it right now.
She doesn’t, of course. She never does.
“The stove still works,” she says. “I’ll cook some rice and heat up the leftover curry. And you can tell me later, if you want.”
Yeah. So no friends. But she’s got Mom, at least.
))8((
The power still isn’t back on in the morning, so MJ takes a nerve-wracking shower in a bathroom with no functioning lights before breakfast.
Mom’s made oatmeal. MJ doesn’t really like it and neither does Mom, but at least it’s something hot and filling that can be made without the microwave. She eats it slowly and quietly, forcing yesterday’s ideas into thoughts, and thoughts into coherent sentences. She’s been working at this since last night. She won’t say more than she has to, so the word have to be right.
When she clears her throat, Mom looks up attentively.
“Did you,” she starts after a few more seconds of silence, “have any trouble making friends at school?” She moves her gaze away from her bowl and to her, inviting her to respond.
Mom swallows her mouthful. “I … did not. I was one of those rare kids who actually did have a good time at high school.”
She sounds apologetic for not having a shit time. Which is ridiculous and stupid. MJ almost wishes that she did, just so she could get some kind of advice or understanding or —
“But,” Mom continues, “Masao didn’t. In fact we didn’t even become friends until junior year.”
“Masao?” It’s a name MJ knows well. Masao is probably Mom’s best friend, and is also probably the funniest guy she’s ever met in her life. He doesn’t even live in the States anymore, but every year since she was born he’s sent her a birthday present. And not normal, useless crap either. Stuff she actually likes. Stuff she still has. “How come?”
Mom shrugs. “He was new to the school, he was — what’s that word you use now? For people with anxiety or depression or — ”
“Neurodivergent?”
She can’t imagine Masao ever being anxious. He’s impossible to embarrass.
“That’s the one. He was neurodivergent. Real bad anxiety and that made it really hard for him to make friends. Or interact with anyone. He just stayed silent. Honestly, I didn’t even know he really existed for the first half of junior year.”
She nods. “What changed?”
“Cut myself real bad in chemistry. I don’t know, test tube had a crack in it or something. And our teacher at the time — my god you would have hated him, he was the most incompetent person I ever met in my life — just fainted. Like the dude just could not handle a bit of blood.”
“Thought you said it was ‘real bad’, Mom,” she says with a smirk.
“Uh, might have exaggerated a tiny bit. But there was a reasonable amount of blood. Well actually, it wasn’t much, but men are hopeless. Anyway, it was enough to send him to the floor. Mr O’Hara. God, he was the worst. Anyway. Someone ran to grab the nurse, and Masao grabbed the first-aid kit and patched me up. Did a pretty good job too.
“I felt like I owed him, right? So the next day I sat next to him at lunch, and asked him how he got so good at first-aid. He told me real quietly he learned it at summer camp a few years back, and then we found out we went to the same summer camp, and then we just talked about that. Well. I talked at him mostly. But when he did talk he said some pretty funny stuff. So the day after that I partnered with him in some class. And it took a while — like weeks of this, but I was kind of intrigued — but he really opened up. Dude was hilarious. But it took work, and after that? We were really good friends. Applied for jobs together, applied for the same college — he was best man at your dad’s and my wedding, and you know the rest.”
“Yeah.”
“And Masao told me way, way after that that when I reached out he gave it his all. He worked so hard to get through all that anxiety just to talk to me and even then, it was still work for both of us. But it got to a point where he wasn’t anxious speaking to me at all, and then cause he could talk to me he got better at talking to other people and then — ” she shrugs. “Well I got my best friend out of it, so yeah. Trying worked.” She picks up her bowl and returns it to the sink. “Are you trying?”
MJ looks back into her bowl. Only a few mouthfuls left. “I guess.”
“What’ve you done?”
MJ taps the spoon on the table. “One of the guys in AcaDec is always tired. Like it’s ridiculous, he’s practically a walking corpse. And he was dead this morning, so I made him a coffee.”
“That was nice of you.”
“It was, I’m an amazing person. And then at lunch he gave me back the cup but with tea in it.”
“That sounds positive to me.”
“Well yeah, but — ugh. It just really pissed me off.”
Mom is finally confused. “Why?”
MJ spins the spoon around between her fingers. “It’s just that he got me the tea because it was fair. Not because we’re friends. And it just. Made me so mad. Cause I really wanna be friends, but no one wants to be friends with me.”
“How do you know it was just to be fair?”
“Because he said so,” MJ replies, and that’s really it, isn’t it? “The words ‘it seems fair’ literally came out of his mouth.”
“Well I mean, normally I’d say that’s pretty damning. But how do you know that that’s the only reason?”
“Because people don’t want to be friends with me,” she snaps.
There’s silence for a few minutes. Her oatmeal bowl is empty now, and she really can’t pretend there’s still food in it for any longer. She grabs the bowl and puts it in the sink, hiding behind her still-full cup of juice.
When she dares to look up, Mom is watching her with a strange look on her face.
“I think you should keep trying,” she says.
“Isn’t that kind of pathetic?” MJ mumbles into the glass.
“You calling me pathetic?”
“A hundred percent.”
Mom shakes her head. “So rude. Wanting friends isn’t pathetic, Michelle.”
“I know it’s not, but it feels like it.”
“I know. But really? He made you tea. I think that’s a good sign. And Peter seems like a really nice kid — ”
MJ’s jaw falls open and juice goes everywhere. “How the hell did you guess it was Peter?” she exclaims, leaping backwards as though that’s gonna get the OJ off her clothes. Ugh. Orange juice over her jeans and her new Jeanne d’Arc shirt, so now she’s gonna have to change and her other jeans are covered in McFlurry even though she wasn’t wearing them when she spilled it and —
And Mom’s right. God, why is she always right?
Mom grins at her like a shark. “Magic.”
“I’m serious.”
“Call it intuition.”
She scowls.
“I know you, and I know what you like.”
“What the fuck is that meant to mean — ”
“It means,” Mom says over the top of her, “that tragically we can’t continue this conversation because your train’s in eight minutes.”
“Jesus fuck — ”
))8((
She makes the train. She also makes Peter a coffee today as well, and wants to die when he asks at lunch if anyone can smell orange juice.
But she wants to die a little less when he hands her a KeepCup of Early Grey and smiles at her. He doesn’t ask why she’s sitting two seats closer. He even asks if she likes jasmine more than Earl Grey.
Maybe this making-friends thing could end in something other than absolute failure.
(She’s not gonna tell Mom that.)
(That’s a lie.)
(It’s the first thing she says when she gets home.)