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Peter-and-Ned, Ned-and-Peter. Peter knew that there was a time when it hadn’t been so, but only in the abstract, unfeeling way he knew that there was a time when he hadn’t yet learned to talk, or a time when his parents were alive.
As children, they spent every recess and lunch period in the library, tearing with starved eagerness through the nonfiction section. Lying on their bellies at the back of the room, where tall shelves obscured them from the librarian’s sight (there was nothing illicit about what they were doing, but even the facsimile of secrecy thrilled them back then), they cracked the plastic-wrapped spines of books about hummingbirds and asteroids, climate change and Newton’s laws. They devoured the biographies of Galileo and Einstein and Curie. They pasted glow-in-the-dark stars to their bedroom ceilings. On weekends, they bird-watched or visited museums or, when their families were too tired to chaperone them to anything of the sort, curled up on the couch to watch Bill Nye the Science Guy.
In retrospect, they could never recall whether Ned developed an interest in science first and Peter followed, or vice versa, or if they’d simply had the immense fortune to both fall separately but simultaneously in love with it. It didn’t matter. Between the two of them, it was never about who did something first, only what they did together.
Puberty descended like a plague of locusts, cracking their voices and speckling their faces and a thousand other horrors made bearable only by the sharing of them. Suddenly high school loomed on the horizon. They both had their sights set on Midtown, but…
“I don’t think I’ll get in,” Peter said one day, tentative, just to taste the syllables against his tongue. He didn’t really fear separation from Ned. He’d have to be able to fathom it to fear it.
They were in Peter’s kitchen, studying for the entrance exam. A maelstrom of textbooks and highlighters and flashcards exploded over the table; loose-leaf debris spilled onto the kitchen counters, mingling with energy drinks and onion rings. When Peter spoke, Ned just rolled his eyes.
“Dude,” he scoffed. “You never think anything good will happen to you.”
Which was true.
Peter tried a few times to write an admissions essay about his parents or Uncle Ben, off of Aunt May’s advice that They eat shit—sorry, stuff—like that up, but his heart wasn’t in it. Or in anything at all. In the end, his essays were a little cold, a little cookie-cutter. Like his best impersonation of what a Midtown student should be.
He and Ned both got in, of course. The alternative was unthinkable. It seemed so obvious that it was hardly even a relief, but Aunt May still took them out for ice cream to celebrate.
✰
At Midtown, everything was consequential. You could have fun, but you shouldn’t do anything purely for fun. Any hobby that couldn’t be listed on a college application was a waste of time; every waking second was devoted to finding the perfect configuration of classes and extracurriculars that would one day make some admissions officer’s balding head nod with sage approval.
People dated, though. A lot.
Peter knew, vaguely, that there was—something about him and Ned. On the rare occasions when their peers’ romantic exploits arose in conversation, Ned spoke dismissively of guys like that. There was no need to clarify what distinguished guys like that from guys like us. When, in tenth grade, Peter finally came out as bisexual to Ned in a stuttering ball of nerves, Ned high-fived him and said, “Hell yeah, dude, me too.”
“Really?” Peter blinked. But it was obvious, wasn’t it? They’d always known, hadn’t they? He had no idea why this seemingly inevitable conversation—held in the school gym of all places, benched for basketball like they always were—was making him dizzy. “Is your family cool with it?” He winced. “Sorry, I don’t know why I asked—I didn’t mean to imply that I, like, assumed they wouldn’t be cool—”
“It’s okay, I get it,” Ned shrugged. “They’re super Catholic. But yeah, they’re cool with it. You should tell Aunt May. She’ll probably think it’s dope.”
She did. Life went on.
MJ was a surprise. It was senior year, and Peter had resigned himself to being someone who dated any gender in theory and dated none of them in practice. He and MJ had been on the Decathlon team together for years, but at some point something shifted, and even their most mundane interactions grew laden with meaning. A lingering hand, a stolen moment of eye contact across the room when Flash said something stupid, an invitation for boba after practice.
Peter worried, at first, that too much of him was wrapped up in Ned; he wouldn’t have any of himself left to spare for MJ. He told Ned as much, albeit in cowardly half-truths and glaring omissions.
“Just go for it, man,” Ned replied, trampling the selfish part of Peter that wanted him to say You’re right. Forget about her; we only need each other. “We’re all young and dumb, and you two are clearly super into each other.”
So Ned-and-Peter became Ned-and-Peter-and-MJ. Gradually, Peter metamorphosed into the sort of person who grew flowers, cooked dinners, picked out matching ties for Homecoming—gestures that MJ teased him for but silently treasured. The three of them all wanted to go to MIT. For the first time, Peter saw an actual future sprawling ahead of him: shared dorm rooms and late-night study sessions, lecture halls and road trips, graduation gowns and wedding rings. For the first time, he began to suspect, with a cautious and wholly uncharacteristic optimism, that between two people his heart could be doubled instead of halved.
✰
The day Aunt May died was perfectly ordinary.
That morning, Peter sat at the kitchen table, shoving a bacon-egg-and-cheese into his face with one hand and scribbling through his physics homework with the other, right up until Aunt May shouted at him from the living room—where she was in the midst of her usual morning pilates routine—that he was going to be late for school.
By nightfall, he was sitting in a hospital waiting room.
He didn’t tell anyone. Texting would have involved creating a permanent record, written evidence that this was actually happening, and calling would have involved talking. Peter hadn’t talked in hours, offering only brief nods to the weary doctors who asked Are you Peter Parker? before giving opaque and meaningless “updates” on Aunt May’s condition.
She was gone before the morning came. Peter wore an old suit of Uncle Ben’s to the funeral.
✰
“Ned. I need to tell you something.”
They were assembling a LEGO Death Star in Ned’s bedroom, which was Peter’s now too. Three months had passed since the moving vans, the quiet agony over what to pack and what to discard (what would she have wanted him to keep?), the wobbly chair Peter balanced on as he scraped his stars from the ceiling.
I need to tell you something. It was nauseatingly reminiscent of the stilted conversation he’d had with MJ in the aftermath, struggling to tell her that he could no longer be the sort of person who grew flowers, cooked dinners, and picked out matching ties for prom. I’m sorry. I can’t… She’d spared him even the trouble of saying it, cutting him off with a firm hug. We’re still friends, okay? Don’t be a stranger, or I will hunt you down. She was too good for him.
“You sound so serious,” Ned chuckled nervously.
“It’s not a big deal, just…” Peter set down the LEGO he was holding with a sigh. “I don’t know why I said that. It is a big deal. MIT rescinded my admissions offer.”
“What?”
Ned blinked rapidly, slack-jawed, nearly as shocked as he’d been when—
“I mean, it’s not like it’s a surprise. I failed half my classes last term.”
“Because you were going through a crisis! They can’t punish you for that, that’s bullshit, you have to—I don’t know, call them, appeal the decision—”
“For what? So I can attend in the fall and fail again?”
Ned went still.
“It’s okay,” he said slowly, careful in a way he’d never been, “if you’re not ready for college right now.”
The words were trite, stale, the same thing their more open-minded teachers had told them at the start of senior year, so that a room full of neurotic teens who wanted to go to college so badly that it was killing them could smile and pretend to agree. From Ned, though, it was so sincere that a knife twisted in Peter’s gut.
“Thanks,” he mumbled. “I’ll probably take a year, I don’t know. Find work, find a place to stay…”
But Ned shook his head, his face creased with distress. “What do you mean, find a place? You can stay here. Of course you can. Did we ever make you feel like you couldn’t?”
✰
It had been fifteen years since Peter was last unenrolled in school. Fifteen years since he went longer than a week without seeing Ned. Life in this fashion was indistinct and strange. From a distance it seemed to form a shape, but up close it fell apart.
He stocked shelves at a bodega in the mornings and tutored high-strung high schoolers in the afternoons. In the evenings, Ned’s Lola cooked for him. Pancit, pork belly, sinigang, halo-halo, fried chicken. His plate was always heaping, and Lola always peered at him, vaguely threatening, until he finished it all.
“Tell me what you like and I will make it for you,” she said one night. Then, clearly casting about for the first white person food she could think of: “Maybe a burger?”
Peter just smiled. “I like whatever you make, Lola,” he said, and earned himself a doting pinch on the cheek.
Phone calls with Ned were awkward at best. Ned hesitated to share details of the MIT life he obviously adored, too afraid of sparking Peter’s envy, or being too happy without him. But Peter liked hearing about his happiness. At least one of them should have that.
“So tell him that, genius,” MJ scolded him, her eye-roll audible over the phone. “Words are all you have now. You can’t communicate through Vulcan mind-meld or whatever like you normally do.”
Couldn’t they? The notion unsettled him. He and Ned used to know the entirety of one another’s thoughts at a single glance. Peter-and-Ned, Ned-and-Peter, squeezing beneath the covers in a twin-sized bed, so close that they couldn’t tell whose heartbeat was whose. Not even a breath lost in translation.
✰
Ned came home for Christmas. His flight landed while Peter was at work, and by the time Peter got back, there was already a suitcase by the door and Ned in the kitchen, surrounded by Lola’s elaborate dishes and stern gaze.
“Let’s do version 2.1 of the handshake,” Peter said without preamble. That was the version that ended in a hug.
Later, in their shared bedroom, they assembled a model airplane that Peter had splurged on the week before in anticipation of Ned’s return. Cross-legged, side-by-side, knees and thighs pressed against each other, fingertips sticky with glue. Peter tried to gather the courage for words.
He started with the easiest ones. “I really missed you, Ned.”
Ned looked up, his whole face soft. “I know, Peter. I missed you too.”
“I…I don’t think I’ll be joining you at MIT next year. Or ever.” Sometimes, on the phone, they’d played pretend, saying things like when I get there and you’ll love it.
Dropping the facade was a relief. Ned nodded. “I know.”
“The people I love keep dying on me.”
Silence.
Peter tilted sideways, allowing himself to collapse into Ned’s lap. Steady arms bracketed his shoulders and held him in place. Maybe they could just stay like that until winter passed.
“I won’t make promises I can’t keep,” Ned said at last. “But I would never leave you on purpose.”
None of them had, after all.
Peter closed his eyes and let that be enough.