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Michelle Jones likes to pride herself on her memory. If everything else in her life falls apart, she knows that her mind will be her sanctuary. She knows that her brain won’t fail her. She knows that she can rely on one thing, even if each corner she goes around has a new lie. Her mind is her own form of a polygraph, the lines staying flat in a minefield of spikes.
At thirteen, Michelle knows quite a few things. She knows that her parents are getting a divorce, and her older sister is collapsing under the weight of trying to pretend that everything is normal. She knows that her grandma is dying, and the summer that they just had might have been the very last they will ever spend together. She knows that the world is spinning out of her control. She knows that she wants to go to Harvard, that she wants to be a writer and a poet. She knows that she wants to be someone that the world remembers.
So Michelle does what she does very best, what she does every time the universe starts collapsing in on her. She retreats into herself, into the protection and salvation of her mind. She hides within her brain, building up her walls higher and higher until not even the gates of Troy could rival them.
At thirteen years old, Michelle Jones watches, and she waits. She hides, and she doesn’t dare to hope. She spirals so far down into herself that the boy staring at her with wide brown eyes is barely even a tiny peak in her flatline.
—
Michelle Jones likes to pride herself on her memory and her pen. Her notebook becomes her protection, her gated garden becoming physical. She draws and she writes, faces and words pouring out of her in blue ballpoint ink. The sight of her mother’s face when they close her grandmother’s casket lingers behind her eyes for days until she plucks it from her memories and pins it down to the page. Her words scream into existence. Her pen rips through the pages.
At fourteen, Michelle knows that Peter Parker is weird. She knows that he is nerdy and jumpy and has seen the fresh turned dirt on the grave of a loved one too young. She also knows that he no longer needs his glasses. She knows that his arms fill out his sweatshirt a little more than they used. She knows that his perfect attendance record is now riddled with holes.
Michelle Jones decides that Peter Parker is someone to be watched. She decides that something is not right with him. Her journal, her sketchbook, her wall of glass built to break, becomes a play by play of his failure and his success. Something is not right with him, and she is determined to figure it out. And if he starts to worm his way into her heart with his nerdy smile and dumb science jokes, if her glass wall starts to crack, then her notebook keeps all her secrets.
At fourteen years old, Michelle Jones is just a girl. She is not yet wrapped up in the web of darkness, not yet sorting through the shadows of her mind. Michelle Jones is just a girl who writes and writes and writes.
—
MJ likes to pride herself on her memory, her pen, and her heart. The last is a new addition, one that tentatively snuck its way into the soil and bloomed bright and shiny. The seeds were planted when two boys with their own too big hearts stared too long at the world.
At sixteen, MJ knows that Peter Parker and Ned Leeds are up to something. She knows from whispered conversations, from hasty disappearances, from blushing faces, from the way their eyes flicker when anyone mentions Spider-Man or Tony Stark. She knows and she knows and she knows. She knows.
MJ knows when they go to DC, and things start to click into place. Her memories form the red and blue puzzle pieces, snapping together in a way that makes perfect sense. The shape of a hero emerges, gently carving a place into her brain. And suddenly, she has more memories of laughter and rolling her eyes than she does of tears and silence.
When MJ is sixteen years old, her blue pen runs dry. She stares at it, the carcass of her grandmother’s last gift, rolls it between her fingers. When MJ is 16, she switches to black ink, and it feels like a betrayal. It feels like someone scooped out her center and left her hollow. It takes her time, more than she would like to admit, before she lets herself open up her notebook again. The sign of Peter Parker in distress makes her crack open the rippling pages, makes her shake out her fingers, and makes her put the nib to the paper. Black replaces where blue used to stain.
When MJ is sixteen, Peter Parker shatters her glass castle and cements himself in her heart. His sidelong glances and pathetic coverup stories, the way he thinks she doesn’t know and would do anything to keep her from breaking his secret wide open. Peter Parker’s heart, too large for his body, bleeds into hers. His blood, the blood that he would give if it meant the world kept spinning even if he wasn’t there, shocks her system into overdrive. She feels, really feels, an emotion other than blankness and grief and hollow. It scares her, but MJ has never been frightened by fear.
At sixteen years old, MJ is no longer just Michelle Jones. She is something more, a girl who knows what it is like to have something you want to hold onto and keep. At sixteen, MJ watches and she waits, but she also reaches out. And when she turns to dust, when the world collapses around her, she just hopes that her heart keeps beating somewhere else in the universe.
—
MJ prides herself on her memory, her pen, and her heart. She is still sixteen, but the world around her is five years older. She is still sixteen, but her sister has a daughter that MJ has never met. She is still sixteen, but in her absence, her parents have stuffed bitter words down the drain and rekindled their marriage. She is still sixteen, but her sixteen years of memory no longer slot perfectly into place.
Her pen, at least, she can still rely on. Her pen, passed from Peter in the middle of class, when their fingers barely brushed, that she keeps as a prized possession, writes smoothly. Her pen smudges black ink across Peter Parker’s face when he tries to steal her away from writing her feelings down into history.
And her heart, the heart that she swears betrays her at the worst moments. The heart that reluctantly softens and cracks open wide. The heart that Peter and Ned have stuck their sticky fingers into. She can still, always, trust her heart. Her heart still fits in this world, five years later. Her heart fits, like her lips against Peter’s, like their hands laced together.
Her heart fits until she’s falling. Her heart fits until wind tears at her skin. Her heart fits until she watches death happen before her eyes. Her heart fits until rejection and loss and pain sink their claws into her unprotected soul. Her heart fits until it doesn’t.
At sixteen years old, MJ turns hollow. Her memories scooped out, her Stygian stains washing away into the rain, her heart turning into a cracked amalgamation of a Jack O’ lantern. MJ closes her eyes and opens them as Michelle Jones when she is sixteen.
—
Michelle Jones prides herself on her memory, her pen, and something that she can’t quite put her finger on. She wakes up with a name on her lips, one that disappears like spun sugar when she tries to swallow it down. MJ looks at the MIT pennant hanging from her wall and wonders when her dreams changed. She wonders what changed them. She wonders why, and she just doesn’t know.
When Michelle is seventeen years old, she knows, no, she thinks, that her house is haunted. She tossed out her certainties the year before, when her body turned to dust along with her truthful conviction. She stopped trusting herself when she got back from the Europe trip and found herself standing in her bedroom, staring at the ceiling with tears brimming in her eyes and she doesn’t know why. She doesn’t know why.
Michelle Jones prides herself on her pen and something that she can’t nail down. Her pride in her mind has been torn down, stomped down by every aching moment of confusion and drawing of an unfamiliar boy that she finds in her sketchbook. A boy that she knows she has seen before and can’t remember where. A boy that looks like he should be on T-shirts and billboards and instead only exists in her dreams and nightmares.
Michelle Jones prides herself on something that floats right out her reach. When a boy, not quite a man, with sad eyes and an even sadder smile, comes into the coffee shop, that thing swims before her eyes. It sparks on her tongue, his name and the way that she knows that she has seen him before. The more she stares, the more she racks her mind, the more she tries to push the words clinging to her lips out of her mouth, the more that thing slips away. She turns around as the bell signals the boy’s exit. She forgets, and a pyrrhic feeling settles in her chest.
At seventeen years old, Michelle Jones hasn’t been MJ for anyone except Ned Leeds, and it hurts.
—
Michelle Jones doesn’t know what she prides herself on most. She knows who she is, who she loves, who she stands for. But she doesn’t know what she’s proud of about herself anymore, and that’s what hurts the most. That’s what carves the tear tracks down her cheeks. Michelle Jones doesn’t trust her mind. Michelle Jones doesn’t trust her pen. Michelle Jones doesn’t trust, or even know, what keeps spinning around in her head without ever forming into an actual thought.
At 18, Michelle’s black pen runs out of ink. It rolls off her desk in a MIT classroom, and she blinks at it. Once, twice, with the urge to feel something other than rain plinking down on the crater of her heart at the sight. She can’t remember who gave it to her, why that black ballpoint pen had such a grip on her. She can’t remember, and she wants to stop trying. Michelle Jones writes only in red now, her thoughts spilling over the pages like blood flows from a fatal wound. She writes only in red, and wonders why it feels like a betrayal.
Michelle Jones is sitting in class, on a random Wednesday when the sky is spitting down on the Earth, when she remembers what she used to value most. She remembers what she used to hold close to her chest, what she would whisper in the dark to the walls of her childhood bedroom.
She remembers her heart.
She remembers the name that she screamed as she plummeted.
She remembers the fall.
She remembers the catch, but she doesn’t know if he did.
She remembers Peter Parker.
At eighteen years old, MJ knows and she knows and she knows. She remembers and she remembers and she remembers. The name Peter Parker, foreign but familiar on her lips.
And MJ knows, without a doubt, with a certainty she hasn’t felt since she was seven years old running through her grandmother’s yard, that Peter Parker is dead. She can feel it in her bones, her marrow, her very DNA. Peter Parker is dead, and she is left with the haunted house of her memories, his ghost running through the halls.
She knows that she wouldn’t know unless he was dead, the terms and conditions of the spell flooding her mind. She knows, and she mourns. She cries, like she hasn’t cried since her grandmother was returned to the Earth. She cries, for what was and what could have been. She cries, for what will now never be.
MJ likes to pride herself on her memory, her pen, and her heart. Her memory, altered but finally, finally, intact. Her pen, words in Massachusetts writing down New York moments and dreams. Her heart, her very soul, lying dead in a city that no longer screams his name.
—
Peter Parker dies on a Tuesday.
MJ remembers on a Wednesday. And she is too late.