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Roughly a month into her first semester at MIT, when she’s trying to keep up with Professor Abassi’s lightning-speed monologue about sinusoidal inputs, her fingers flying over the keyboard of her laptop and her brows pinched together in concentration to the point where she can feel a headache coming, MJ realises that she’s not the smartest person in the room anymore. In fact, she’s probably not even in the top five.
It's a disturbing thought. It sneaks up on her by time she feels an itch at the back of her throat and contemplates grabbing the water bottle she’s brought with her. It would take her approximately 15 seconds to pull the bottle out of her backpack and take a sip but then she remembers that one guy from Numerical Computation who had a sneeze attack last week and ended up visibly panicking for the rest of the lecture because he’d missed about half a page of crucial information that hadn’t been part of Professor Byrne’s PowerPoint presentation. So, as ridiculous as it may sound, she cannot afford 15 seconds. Not with mid-terms fast approaching and the fear of failure constantly thrumming in her veins.
“Fucking hell,” she wheezes quietly, still typing without pause.
Turns out college is more about chronic anxiety and getting used to never-ending high blood pressure than it is about finding yourself. Not that MJ has a particular desire to find herself. She already knows who she is and what she wants. She’s efficient, direct and she wants to get through the fall semester without making an ass of herself, which is why the bottle stays in the backpack and why the itch at the back of her throat stutters out of her in a series of poorly suppressed coughs that mingle with the sound of 50 other people – 50 other geniuses – stabbing at their keyboards in an attempt to keep up with the insane onslaught of information that’s being hurled at them.
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She doesn’t remember much about what went down in Venice or Prague or London or on Liberty Island except that it somehow always ended with either Ned or her or both of them almost dying and Spider-Man of all people stepping in last second to prevent that from happening.
She’s grateful that he’s saved her and her friends on several occasions but whenever she tries to make sense of it – whenever she scours her memory for the hint of a reason why she had been in his vicinity all those times in the first place or why Ned had been there with her – she comes up empty-handed. It’s like she’s missing something and it’s frustrating in a way she can’t put into words without sounding like a lunatic. There isn’t much she can do about it, though, because Ned doesn’t seem like he wants to talk about it and she obviously doesn’t have the time or capability to hunt down Spider-Man and ask him why he had been so hell-bent on dragging them – two complete strangers – into his bullshit for a while only to abandon them without a single word of explanation.
Hell, he’s so busy creating chaos in his attempt to protect the city that he probably doesn’t even remember them – and somehow that’s what bothers her the most.
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She doesn’t feel like herself after Liberty Island. She learns that Ned is basically a wizard and promises not to tell anyone, she begrudgingly teams up with Flash for a History project and accidentally becomes friends with him in the process. She looks up bookstores in Cambridge, goes to prom with Brad but ends up dancing with Zoha, she bites the bullet and sends her mom a picture of her valedictorian sash. She celebrates with her dad and her aunt and smiles when Sasha surprises her with an MIT-themed carrot cake on her last workday at Peter Pan’s.
She moves to a new city and suffers through orientation week. She swallows down a panic attack during her first Introduction to Applied Nuclear Physics lecture, she avoids having lunch in the cafeteria because it’s too crowded there, she finds a lab partner and makes stilted small talk. She joins a study group, mutters under her breath every time Flash’s ego goes into overdrive and watches Ned slowly fall apart as he tries to accommodate college and his duties as an Apprentice of the Mystic Arts.
She lives on instant noodles and coffee and granola bars, she thinks about statistics and calculation paths when she wakes up in the morning and she gets dizzy when she has to take the elevator to get to Professor Chandrasekhar’s office. She spends hours upon hours in the library, types and types and types, pauses and panics and starts typing again and she’s lonelier than ever and it fucking sucks.
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“I didn’t think it was going to be so hard,” she admits to Ned when they’re exiting the library one afternoon, their backpacks stuffed and heavy with half a dozen books about energy conversion, hydrostatics and MATLAB programming. The rain is coming down in sheets, drumming against their umbrellas. MJ huffs. She didn’t think it was going to be so noisy all the time either.
“Same,” Ned sighs, the bags under his eyes painfully prominent, “Maybe we’re dead and this is hell.”
Out of character as it is, she can’t blame him for his cynicism. He’s bursting at the seams, pre-writing papers in-between lectures because he’s usually needed elsewhere at night, saving the galaxy with his sorcerer pals or whatever it is he does once he’s slipped through one of those sparkling magic portals.
“Do you think it’s gonna get better?” she asks carefully and more for his sake than hers because they’ve been friends since they were freshmen at Midtown and she hasn’t heard him crack a lame nerdy joke, let alone seen him smile in ages.
He shrugs. Everything about him screams with exhaustion and it breaks her heart a bit to see him like this.
“It can’t get any worse than right now.”
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In her dreams she’s being chased around Times Square by giant lizards, exploding drones and an army of strangers taking pictures of her with their phones until she wakes up in a cold sweat and sucks in a breath because all of a sudden her chest feels tight and empty at the same time and she’s inconsolable but she has no idea why.
It’s a familiar feeling and it’s terrible. It makes her stomach drop and the corners of her eyes flow over. It makes her head hurt like it’s about to split open and – and fuck Spider-Man. Fuck him because deep down she knows that that each and every encounter she’s ever had with him will haunt her for years to come.
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She’s always been good at getting perfect grades, so when she receives an A- for her essay on Bayesian estimation the foundations of her entire belief system – a system in which hard work actually pays off and leads to something – shift and shake so violently that she fears it’ll knock her off her feet.
She spends the following weekend in bed to lick her wounds. She stares holes into the ceiling, ignores Ned’s texts and Flash’s calls and grits her teeth while her roommate blathers on about how she breezed through her Polymer Science exam like it was nothing. It’s ridiculous. She’s self-aware enough that her anger is completely irrational because an A- is still pretty fucking good but that doesn’t change how tense she feels when it’s Monday again and she has to sit through another lecture she can barely comprehend.
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“I hate it here,” she tells her dad on the phone in the evening, like it’s a secret, and he lets out a sad chuckle because he knows what she’s talking about. He went to Yale on multiple scholarships and while he did eventually find his footing there, the time it took him to get comfortable had been downright unbearable. She scoffed dismissively when he told her this but now that her perfect movie-like vision of college life has proven to be a pipe dream she feels stupid for not taking him seriously back then.
“You’re not stupid,” he coos, and she imagines him sitting down next to her on the steps that lead up to the dorm, ruffling her hair and tugging her against his shoulder, “And you don’t have to stay there if you don’t want to.”
She sniffles. She’s spent the past 30 minutes sobbing her heart out while he kept insisting that he is proud of her, that she doesn’t have to prove anything to anyone. That he loves her so, so much.
“No, that’s not – this is everything I’ve ever wanted,” she says, her voice weak and quivering, “I’m just really tired.”
“I know, sweetheart.”
“And I haven’t read a single book that’s not about numbers since I got here. I don’t,” she stops, her face crumbling, “I don’t have time for anything.”
The line stays silent for a moment and she wants to shake herself. Did she really think this was going to be easy just because she used to be the top of the class at Midtown all the time?
“Can I give you a pro tip that’ll make you roll your eyes at me?” her dad asks then.
She lets out a wet laugh.
“Sure.”
He takes a deep breath and somehow that’s when she notices that it’s actually quiet for once. No rain, no typing noises echoing all around her. No monologues, no gallows humour, no panic-induced chatter about an upcoming exam. Just her trying to get her breathing under control and her dad telling her that time management can be tricky sometimes and that if she can’t figure it alone there’s no shame in asking for help.
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She’s not sure if she’s ever been in love so far. Like, she’s had a few awkward crushes that sometimes resulted in awkward kisses and one awkward hook-up shortly after prom but she assumes she has yet to meet someone who will make her heart beat out of her chest just by looking at them.
Because that’s what she imagines in love feels like and even though she’s only 18, even though she still has plenty of time to fall in and out of love with several people, she thinks it would be nice to know what it’s like. To care about someone so deeply, to have someone who’s not only a friend but also a partner. To tell them that she loves them for the very first time and have them say it back and revel in the silliness of it all.
She groans and buries her head in her pillow, torn between conjuring up the face of someone she could fall in love with – their eyes, their smile – and memorising the equations she just spent hammering into her brain for the past hour.
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Her dad hooks her up with Dr Kwan. She’s a licensed therapist based in Watertown, which is about a 30-minute train ride away from campus.
MJ is apprehensive about the logistics at first. After all, 30 minutes plus the actual session plus the ride back home is a lot of time she could use for cramming in the library instead but she also knows that her dad is right. It’s okay to ask for help when you need it.
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One of the guys in MJ’s study group is a fully-fledged theatre kid. His name is Jasper and he comes barging into the library in early November, his brown eyes sparkling when he announces that Dramashop is going to perform a special rendition of The Importance of Being Earnest the evening before Christmas break and that he somehow managed to bag a supporting role and how fucking cool is that.
“It’s so cool,” Aisling, a girl who’s on a completely different level than MJ when it comes to sarcastic remarks, says flatly and with a blatant roll of her eyes that causes the rest of the group to giggle.
MJ bites the inside of her cheek, the impulse to give Aisling a piece of her mind passing by before she has the chance to act on it. It’s probably all right, though. Jasper doesn’t look too hurt by Aisling’s ribbing. He slips into the empty seat next to MJ with a sigh, his shoulders slumped, and takes out his laptop while Caleb, the self-proclaimed leader of their group, clears his throat and starts laying out today’s agenda.
But still.
“I think it’s cool,” she whispers after a moment, keeping her eyes on her Fluid Mechanics coursebook because Jasper is a looker – he has dimples – and she kinda doesn’t want to find him smiling at her in gratitude right now.
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Much to her own surprise she never brings any coursebooks with her when she’s taking the train to Watertown. She usually brings a novel or one of Ned’s comic books or she doesn’t bring anything to read with her at all and just listens to music instead or watches the other people on the train.
“Sounds like you’ve managed to add some free time to your schedule,” Dr Kwan comments, “But just out of curiosity, what’s the last book you read?”
“The Best Book in the World,” MJ says, grimacing when Dr Kwan raises a brow, “Like, that’s the actual title. It’s about two authors who want to write a bestseller. They make a competition out of it.”
“Ah.”
She watches Dr Kwan scribble down on her notepad and wonders if she gave the wrong answer. But then again there probably isn’t a wrong answer. It’s literally the last book she read and while it didn’t exactly live up to its title, it wasn’t bad either.
“What’s your favourite book?”
MJ blinks.
“That’s kind of a personal question,” she blurts out automatically before she remembers that everything about their sessions is personal. She bows her head, “Fefu and Her Friends. It’s a play, actually. It’s about – ”
“No spoiilers, please,” Dr Kwan cuts in, mock-chidingly.
“Okay,” she bites her lip, “What’s yours?”
A beat passes between them and MJ tries to guess the answer beforehand by recalling all the information she has about Dr Kwan. She knows that she’s a very calm person, that she doesn’t beat about the bush but that she also puts a lot of thought in what she says. She seems to have a soft spot for black clothes but the frames of her glasses are bright red and look a little quirky. All in all she doesn’t peg Dr Kwan as someone who likes to deal with tragedies in her private life, fictional or otherwise. She could be more into autobiographies or absurdist comedies.
“The Island of Missing Trees,” she says eventually and while it’s not the answer MJ expected, she finds that she isn’t really surprised either.
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Was there a time when Spider-Man considered her and Ned his friends? Was he ever planning on telling them who he was? Did he abandon them out of guilt? Because he was sick of getting them in danger?
She doesn’t know. She’ll probably never know and she has to accept that.
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It’s easier said than done, re-evaluating her weekly schedule and admitting that her current time management is kinda idiotic. She makes it work, though, and miraculously so does Ned. He has a long talk with Wong or Wong has a long talk with him, she doesn’t know, and they agree that they better tone it down a bit before Ned gets himself killed due to sheer overextension.
“It’s like Star Wars, you know,” he tells her when they’re on their way to Brattle Theatre to catch a movie – any movies, they didn’t look up the programme – and she’s happy to see that there’s a small grin tugging at his lips, “It’s all about balance.”
It’s a cloudy Sunday afternoon, less than 24 hours before finals week, and after having walked in circles for 20 minutes they’re now headed in the right direction thanks to Google Maps. MJ figures that’s what they get for never really bothering to set foot outside campus until today and Ned not being allowed to use his magic skills for his personal benefit.
“I’m just glad he didn’t make you choose.”
“He said it’s all good as long as I make it to practice on time,” Ned says as they walk past a tiny home décor shop, the display window crammed with Santa Claus figurines and tacky Christmas tree ornaments, “He actually thinks it’s cool that I want to have a career in engineering.”
She smiles and thinks about what Jasper told her when they walked to the library together the other day. She wanted to know where his passion for stage acting came from and he explained to her that it’s kind of an outlet for him, something he enjoys almost as much as he enjoys discussing photometry but doesn’t necessarily want to make money with after college.
“Anyways,” Ned says, “We should do this every Sunday next semester.”
She tilts her head.
“What?”
“Staying away from the library,” he clarifies, “We could invite Flash, too, start an anti-study group and peer pressure each other into taking breaks,” he nudges her with his elbow, “I mean, we obviously suck at taking breaks when we’re on our own.”
She laughs. It’s more or less exactly what Dr Kwan told her yesterday.
“Sounds good to me.”
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She nails her finals or she doesn’t. It’s out of her hands as soon as she leaves the lecture hall but she knows she did her best and that’s all that matters.
Later that day she watches Jasper on stage and fights a blush when he smiles at her during the curtain call, his dimples on full display, and there’s an impulse to imagine herself on stage for a second. Somehow the result doesn’t strike her as off-putting as she thought it would.
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By the end of her first semester at MIT, when she’s on her way home for Christmas Break, her fingers curled around a copy of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and her brows jumping with amusement when Ned lets out a loud snore from where he’s slumped in the seat opposite hers, MJ realizes that she’s fine with not being the smartest person in the room anymore. Chances are that being healthy and making time to regenerate is way more important anyway.
It's a comforting thought. It washes over her like a friendly wave when she’s on the edge of letting the stress get to her again and it helps block out the noise, too. It’s a tool to keep herself sane, she assumes, and it seems to be working so far.
“Fucking hell,” Flash murmurs next to her, frowning at his phone. He’s been trying to crack the high score of some online game since their train weaves its way out of Back Bay Station two hours ago and he’s failing gloriously.
She bites back a smirk.
Turns out college isn’t hell, at least not entirely. She doesn’t hate it there anymore and she’s okay with taking breaks now. She talks to Dr Kwan. She has lunch with Jasper in a small diner off-campus, sketches Flash when he has a meltdown over some nonsense on Instagram and tells Ned off when it looks like he’s about to wear himself out again. She thinks that she should call her mom soon, just to let her know how she’s doing. She makes time to read and draw and to explore the city with her friends, and she signs up to join Dramashop next semester – not because it means she’ll get to spend more time with Jasper but because she thinks that acting could be something she’ll enjoy.
Leaning back in her seat, she puts on her headphones and scrolls through her playlist of the day until she finds what she’s looking for. She feels a lot more settled now. She’s still efficient, direct and prone to obsess over her grades. She’s still terribly lonely sometimes, still has nightmares and she still kinda holds a grudge against Spider-Man but in the grand scheme of things she’s doing all right.
She’s finding her footing, one day at a time.