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After MJ forgets the love of her life, she packs her bags and goes to college. Her first day in Cambridge, she stands outside her dorm, gripping the handle of her suitcase. The fall air is brisk against her skin, blowing strands of hair out of her loose bun and over her face. Ned doesn’t arrive until the next morning, so she has the rest of today to be alone in her new home.
Boston, Massachusetts. It feels sometimes like half the world experienced some grand coming-of-age here, every bad movie and pop song backdropped by these streets, these bridges, that river. As a rule, she tries not to get her hopes up. Expect disappointment, and you will never be disappointed.
Still, it sort of feels like everything in her life has been leading up to this moment.
Here’s what she remembers from high school: sitting alone at lunch, plastic tray hitting the fake wood table over and over again. Being too smart to get caught up in the typical high school drama, reading feminist manifestos in the back of the gym, not caring what anyone else thought of her because she was going places so far beyond high school. Ignoring the loneliness gnawing at her chest, because she hadn’t had the words to describe it.
Befriending Ned. She doesn’t even remember how it happened, exactly, only that she’d begun her sophomore year sitting alone every day, and by May, she was captain of Academic Decathlon and had a text chain with Ned so long, she couldn’t scroll up to the top if she tried. Lying on the roof of their school—why had they chosen that spot? MJ couldn’t tell you—and listening to Ned dream about MIT and college and their big, beautiful futures, while MJ shot down the more ludicrous suggestions (Ned: what if we drop out to become crime-fighting superheroes? like Iron Man? MJ: So Tony Stark did graduate from college. That was a thing he did.) and let her mind drift to the more mundane fantasies. Going to college, getting out of this place, starting the rest of her life. A lot of her life, she’d spent feeling like she was waiting. Maybe this future Ned was describing was the answer.
At the start of college, one of her roommates gets monstrously drunk and paints herself blue. MJ watches from her top bunk in the corner, semi-amused, as Sydney staggers back into their dorm, leaving paint stains on the carpet as she collapses on her bed.
“God,” Sydney groans. “Don’t tell Andrew, but I think I kissed our RA.”
Andrew is Sydney’s on-again, off-again hallway boyfriend. “Situationship,” as everyone else describes those things, though MJ doesn’t really get that word. It sounds kind of fake, like a cop-out for noncommittal people. You’re either in a relationship or you’re not.
Not that MJ would know. MJ isn’t really interested in relationships. She never has been.
Her first semester, all the classes are pass-fail, just to ease the freshmen in, so she has ample free time to explore campus. She walks to Harvard, pretending to be one of them, milling around in the bookstore and the coffee shops. She takes the Red Line downtown, walks along the river, does homework in the public libraries. She hangs out in the park, standing on the bridge, watching the families with their children, the couples kissing in swan boats.
Ned becomes a hardcore partier. He’s always calling her drunk outside of some frat house, trying to drag her out of her room, telling her you gotta be here, this is where the world is! He gets new glasses, an updated haircut, starts wearing leather jackets and high quality shirts. He starts fitting in in a way he never did in high school, in a way MJ didn’t then and still doesn’t now. She’s not interested in popularity, in any sense of the word, but she knows it bothered him more than it did her, back then, so she’s happy for him. He makes some questionable choices, but he’s good to his core, so he comes around, in the end, and finds a balance.
He also develops a Spider-Man obsession.
“What is it, with you and that spider guy?” MJ asks, the umpteenth time she finds Ned slumped over at his desk, having fallen asleep midway through watching YouTube videos of Spider-Man swinging through the city.
“Dude, he saved our lives! I just wanna be able to say thank you in person, you know? Like, face to face.”
“No one’s ever seen Spider-Man’s face.”
Spider-Man, actually, is notorious for keeping his identity secret. MJ is impressed, in this day and age, wonders sometimes how he’s managing it. He has to be hacking into the city’s camera system somehow, wiping footage of himself. Or maybe the camera operators know who he is, and they’re just not telling the rest of the world. Like some kind of city-wide conspiracy. She wonders if the mayor has met the man under the mask.
“That’s why I’m gonna be the first,” Ned says.
“That’s ambitious.”
“What else are we at MIT for?”
MJ shrugs and moseys away, leaving him to it.
“Tell me this isn’t the happiest you’ve ever been.”
MJ rolls her eyes. She doesn’t know where Ned got the idea from, but he’s decided to start making video diaries to chronicle their college experience. He made a brand new Instagram account for it and everything. MJ doesn’t know how he’d managed to rope her into this, but here she is, featuring in all his reels.
Is this the happiest she’s ever been? Probably. All signs point towards yes. Though to be fair, the bar’s pretty low; there’s not that much to compare it to, no real highs from high school or before. Privately, she still doesn’t think she’s entirely found her footing here. She didn’t realize it, but a part of her expected to fit in more at MIT. A nerd amongst nerds. She sort of hoped it would all just… immediately click.
But the truth is she still feels out of place, only now she no longer knows why. Most of the things that made her stick out in high school no longer apply—she’s definitely not the smartest anymore, for instance—so. What gives? What is she still missing?
Not that any of this is the internet’s business. She looks back up, meeting Ned’s please-indulge-my-wannabe-influencer-era puppy dog eyes, and lets a smile slide over her face. She looks into the camera sideways and tells the world that this is the happiest she’s ever been.
Second year, MJ’s dorm gets a spider infestation. The arachnids drop down from the ceiling, spooking people in the showers; her whole floor sounds like a horror movie for a while, screams echoing at random in the night. MJ has to clear the webs out of the corners of her ceiling with a broom, shoving the bristles into the plaster, whispering apologies as she transports them out her window.
She texts Ned about it afterward. Ironic. Wonder if your Spider-Man could come and fix my dorm for me.
If we still lived in NYC he totally would, Ned texts back. Spider-Man is cool like that!
In the privacy of her second-year single, MJ snorts out loud, imagining it. Last year Spider-Man took out a gang of ninjas in all red; she saw it on TV while getting hotpot with her dormmates and later looked up more details on her own, watching security footage of the guy shooting webs and kicking ass. MJ remembers the way he ran up to her in Washington DC, listened to her panicked plea about her friends being in the elevator, and climbed up to the top of the Washington monument, using the enemy (government helicopters) to slingshot his way into the building. She remembers Venice, Prague, London: the way he was there every time, saving them. She remembers suspecting for a while that Spider-Man was secretly someone from her school, or in her class, but nothing came of those suspicions, and then she was so busy with college applications that she stopped thinking about Spider-Man altogether.
Her classes are getting harder, this year. She’s working in a biochem lab, kind of hating her life, but on track to apply for grad school in two years, if that’s still what she wants to do. She isn’t really sure anymore. She sort of thought she’d have it all figured out by now, but then again, it makes sense that she doesn’t. Most people her age don’t, and those who think they do, who aren’t introspecting about it now because they assume they know what they want, will probably have a quarter life crisis later on when their self-delusions come to a head. Better now than then, right?
The line of thought doesn’t really help. MJ is starting to think she might be too absolute about some things, that she might not be right all the time, actually; but the uncertainty on the other side of this quasi-revelation is terrifying enough that she chooses to turn away from it every time.
By this point, Ned has progressed to trying to keep a log tracking all of Spider-Man’s appearances. He’s trying to see if there are any patterns in Spider-Man’s patrolling.
“He’s definitely from Queens,” Ned says, “but, I mean, that’s not that hard to figure out. You just have to draw a radius of all his sightings, see, and…” He clicks a few keys, and a semi-transparent red circle appears on his screen over a section of Google Maps.
“Should you be stalking this guy?” MJ asks. “I mean, he seems pretty serious about his privacy.”
“I’m not gonna do anything crazy, like leak his identity to the paparazzi." Ned sounds offended, which makes MJ feel bad. Of course he wouldn’t do something scummy like that.
“Right,” she says. “Well, let me know if you find anything cool.”
MJ sort of wants to say thank you, too.
Third year, and she’s officially an upperclassman and a new Aerospace Engineering major. She wasn’t a hundred percent sure when switching over, but after this, it’ll be too late to start over again, so she better like it.
She really hopes she likes it. She wants something that feels right, that strikes this perfectly resonant chord within her, something that feels like her greater purpose. She’s always been inspired by people who have a purpose like that, who know exactly why they’re getting out of bed in the morning, what their MO is. MJ has always secretly craved that, but she hasn’t felt it yet.
A few months in, and she is liking the actual content of her classes more than before, but there’s this new issue of all of her classmates salivating to work for defense contractors, which adds an additional layer of challenge to casual socializing. MJ tells some guy in her Space Systems Engineering class that he’s a soulless genocide-enabling worm who’ll never amount to anything worthwhile, and feels a little bit of her high school self come back to her. She gets reprimanded for that, which is complete BS. She was right.
She complains to Ned about it later, but gets the feeling that he isn’t really listening. Her bad, honestly, for trying to talk to him when he’s working on his Spider-Man stalking app. She’s told him he should just name it that, Spider-Man Stalker, just to be upfront about what he’s doing.
“Plus, alliteration’s good for branding.”
“I’m not stalking him,” Ned says, exasperated. “I’d stop if he asked!”
“Would you, really?”
Ned avoids eye contact and has a hard time answering her directly.
Spring semester, MJ runs into her first-year roommate, who invites her to a party she’s throwing that weekend. She just finished her last midterm, so she has a little bit of free time on her hands, and it turns out Ned is already going, so she’s fine with tagging along. MJ is milling around in the kitchen, minding her own business, when she runs into someone from high school.
“Damn.” Flash stares at her. He’s sporting a crazy new haircut and is clearly drunk off his ass. “When did you get hot?”
MJ puts up double middle fingers and turns away, scanning the room. Ned is up behind the decks next to the DJ, because of course he is.
When she turns back around, Flash is still gawking at her. She remembers what he was like in high school, peacock-strutting down the hallways, acting like the greatest guy alive. MJ saw through him, of course, knew that he was only bigging himself up to make up for his insecurities—cliche high school bully stuff. The two of them never really interacted, so she doesn’t know why he’s talking to her now.
“Seriously,” he’s saying. “Like, you were so ugly in high school—no offense—but now, I mean. I’d hit.”
“That’s disgusting,” she says. Then, when he’s still staring at her, she rolls her eyes and spells it out. “Leave me alone, Flash.”
“Um, actually, I go by Eugene, now. Flash was, just, very high school. I’ve entered a different chapter of my personal growth journey, and—”
“Leave me alone, Eugene.”
MJ turns around and walks directly into someone’s chest.
She looks up and sees… an objectively good-looking man. He’s taller than her, with a dark swoosh of hair and warm brown eyes. He’s wearing a green button-up with the cuffs rolled up to his elbows.
She mutters an apology, moving to swerve around him, but he ducks his head and murmurs, “Is this guy bothering you?”
Is this guy—oh, Flash? An idea forms in MJ’s head.
“Yeah, actually,” she says, looking up. “Could you, like, pretend you know me?”
His eyebrows raise, and he starts smiling. “Yeah? Yeah, sure.”
“Just for tonight,” MJ hedges. She doesn’t want him to start getting ideas.
The guy sweeps an arm around her, pressing MJ into his side. Says, to Flash, “Is there a problem?”
MJ catches the shock of Flash’s face and can’t help feeling a smug sense of satisfaction.
“See you around,” she tosses over her shoulder, and then she walks off into the party.
“So how’d you meet?” Ned asks, leaning in. “I want all the juicy details.”
MJ leans back against the couch, arms crossed over her chest, and lets Paul take the lead. Let the record show that she fully intended it to be a one-time thing: she needed someone, he dropped out of the sky (or the kitchen), and she took the opportunity for what it was. But afterwards, he didn’t let her go, kept talking to her all night. They ended up outside together, standing between the potheads and some frat guy fast asleep in the grass. MJ was surprised to find that he actually had a lot of interesting things to say. He’s also Course 16, Aerospace Engineering, is working on building a satellite, wants to found his own start-up after college and send smallsats up to space to build a more robust earth-to-space communication system. He asked MJ what her dreams were, and MJ shrugged and told him she was still figuring them out. Then he said it seemed like someone who could achieve whatever she set her mind to, and she, just past tipsy at this point, asked: okay, what if I want to dismantle the patriarchy? Or, like, solve world hunger? And he said if you want to, I bet you could figure it out. And then he asked for her number, and the next morning she woke up with a headache and a text from him, asking her if she wanted to get dinner together.
Paul is recounting it to Ned in a more romcom-y love-at-first-sight fake-dating kind of way, which isn’t exactly how it went, but MJ sits back and lets him spin the tale. Ned is eating it up, and she’s enjoying watching his overdramaticized reactions, the way his eyes widen and hands fly over his mouth.
“Can’t believe Flash indirectly landed you a boyfriend,” he says to MJ, afterwards, and MJ raises one hand, palm facing the ceiling.
“It’s how it goes sometimes.”
“Do you ever feel like there’s another life we should be living?”
Ned rolls over, half-asleep. He asks, groggily, “What do you mean?”
MJ is lying on her back, staring up at the ceiling. She can’t fall asleep, and by now her eyes have adjusted to the dark, like some kind of bat.
The two of them are abroad for a hackathon in Thailand, with a club at MIT that they’re both a part of. Paul’s here, too, but he’s in a different room tonight.
Paul and Ned have hit it off like a house on fire, which makes MJ feel kind of weird about the uncertainty she feels sometimes, around him. He’s great, hasn’t done anything wrong, keeps up with the news and has more or less the same political views as her. He’s basically the textbook boyfriend, and MJ really is very lucky that they randomly ran into each other at that party. MJ likes how she looks around him, how they look together, how he looks at her.
But—it’s—sometimes she takes stock of her life and realizes that the woman she is now would be unrecognizable to anyone she went to high school with—including, maybe, her own past self. She’s not sure how she feels about that last part. There’s a lot of good: she’s grown, changed, matured; she’s doing so many things that her younger self never would’ve imagined herself capable of; her worldview has expanded; her horizons have broadened.
Still. Sometimes she worries that the older she’s getting, the more she’s losing her fight. She had such firm opinions in high school, was so sure of what she believed in and stood for, and now everything feels murky and uncertain. She’s learned nuance, sure, knows that lots of situations are more complicated than she would’ve realized back then. But she worries it’s not that. Is she backing down because she’s scared, because she knows the stakes now, because she wants to save her own ass?
Would high school MJ hate this version of her?
She doesn’t tell Ned any of that. What she does say is, “I feel like I’m still waiting for something.”
Ned takes that in for a second. “If you want to end things with Paul, I would support you. Like, I was friends with you first.”
MJ smiles. “That’s not what I was talking about. But thanks. I appreciate that.”
“Anytime.”
“I just wish I was sure that I was doing the right thing.” It’s a couple weeks later, but MJ is still thinking about it. What feels off, what feels wrong, what feels incomplete. It’s probably just a product of being in her early twenties. Maybe it’s a product of who she, fundamentally is: that she will always, now, doubt.
“I dunno,” Ned says. “I think we just have to take it day by day.”
“But if you do the wrong thing now, then you set off on the wrong path, right? So, like, what if we already did the wrong thing in the past, and now we’re in an offshoot timeline? What if this isn’t where we’re meant to be?”
“Even if that’s true, we could always get back to the original good timeline in the future. Just take a more circuitous path to get there.”
“You think, what, God”—MJ waves a hand—“or the universe, or whatever, is really working in our favor like that?”
“I think if we’re really meant to be somewhere, we’ll end up there, one way or another,” Ned says, completely earnestly. “And if not, then that wasn’t where we were meant to be.”
MJ collapses back against the couch, trying to pinpoint the source of her unease. “How are you so sure?”
“Hey. Fake it till you make it.”
Ned decides to turn his Spider-Man Stalker program into an actual app that he’s planning on releasing. He’s trying to come up with a name for it—for some reason, he doesn’t want to keep calling it the Spider-Man Stalker.
“How about Spidey Tracker?” MJ offers. It’s a toned down version of her original idea. There’s a kind of charm to it, too. Rolls off the tongue.
“You, MJ, are a creative genius,” Ned declares, and then that’s that, it’s the Spidey Tracker.
The day after Ned releases a beta version of the app, MJ downloads it to her phone and clicks into it. It’s a cartoon-ish map that he got a friend studying Art and Design to hand-draw. There’s a red dot with a spider symbol inside. That’s where Spider-Man is, in theory. A bank in Queens, probably saving it from being robbed at the moment. MJ switches out of the app and looks up spider man now. She scrolls through some videos of him doing his thing, mask firmly on in each one of them.
Her room is dark, all the lights out since it’s the middle of the night. She lies down on her side, letting the blue light of her phone screen wash over her face. Her phone chimes, an incoming FaceTime from her boyfriend, and she hesitates for a few seconds before swiping it away. She’s tired; she’ll call him back tomorrow.
She ends up falling asleep to a video of Spider-Man swinging through the streets of New York. When she wakes up the next morning, the videos have kept autoplaying, so she’s greeted immediately by the sight of that familiar red and blue suit. She catches herself smiling down at her phone and rolls her eyes at herself.
Some guy in MJ’s high school physics class used to watch YouTube videos of Spider-Man in secret in the back of the classroom; he kept the screen tilted down, but she caught him at it at few times, even snuck a few peeks at the videos herself. Back then the videos were so much grainer, low quality, shaky iPhone footage that she was half-sure was edited somehow. When she tries to remember who it was—his name, where he ended up for college—the memory slips from her mind, his features all a blur.
Oh well, she thinks. It’ll come back to her.
While applying her make-up for the day, the thought faintly crosses her mind to wonder what Spider-Man’s real name is. What his face looks like, underneath that mask. For a second, she gets Ned’s big obsession. Who is the guy, really?
Winter break of her senior year, MJ sits in front of a list of job postings, scrolling and scrolling and scrolling. She wants to go back to NYC; it’s just a feeling she has, that her future is waiting for her there. Plus, there is a part of her that’s ready to go back home. Four years is a long time to be away, and while she loved her time in Boston, she has never seen herself staying in this city forever.
She’s never really seen herself staying anywhere long term, actually, other than NYC. She thinks it’s something about growing up there: the city has a certain magnetism, it sinks its teeth into you and never really lets you go. This is something her boyfriend has been trying to discuss with her, because he’s planning to go to the West Coast, LA area, after graduation, since that’s where a bunch of satellite manufacturing companies are. He’s trying to convince her to come out with him, but on this MJ is digging her heels in, a stubborn streak that reminds her of her high school self flaring up. They had a blowout fight about it right before finals, and Ned found her sitting on the balcony afterwards, knees curled up to her chest, leaning against the railing and taking deep breaths.
She clicks on the location filter. Right now, only New York City box is checked, but she lets her cursor hover over the checkbox beside Los Angeles. MJ stares at it, deliberating for a little too long, and a pop-up appears on her screen. Are you still there? Logging out in 30, 29, 28…
MJ closes her laptop, resting her temple in her hands, and groans.
She doesn’t end up applying to any of the jobs anyway. She decides she’ll just focus on her thesis for now, at least until she finishes it and gets her diploma, and after that whatever will happen will happen. She has some savings, could reach out to her dad if it really comes to that. Come summer, she’ll start applying to jobs full-time. She has a great GPA, a solid resume, a really interesting and current undergraduate thesis. She’ll land on her feet, one way or another.
MJ unclips her cap and tosses it in the air along with the entire MIT Class of 2028. The sea of black mortarboards sails up into a perfect blue sky, then descends, a flock of sparrows, diving back into their graduates’ waiting, outstretched hands.
It’s not that she isn’t proud—she is, of herself and all her friends. She’s happy to have her diploma, relieved that she’s done it, already nostalgic for Cambridge. There’s a lump in her chest, and at one point during the ceremony she even gets a bit teary. She knows she’ll only have this exact moment once, and she is grateful for it.
Still, there’s something about this ending that rings somewhat hollow. Were those the best four years of her life? She doesn't know. She kind of hopes not.
Beside her, Ned whoops in excitement. They leave their seats and start milling across the green, the new alumni catching up with each other for the last time before they all scatter around the world to do whatever they’ll end up doing, to become whoever they all end up becoming. Old classmates MJ runs into keep asking her about her post-grad plans, and even though she thought she’d reasoned it all out in her head, knows that where she stands is where she planned to be, there’s an inkling of insecurity growing inside of her at the constant questioning.
What is she going to do after graduating? God. She doesn’t fucking know, is the truth. She thought she would know. Ask high school MJ and she would’ve judged anyone who spent that much money and time and effort on a college degree only to come out with no plan for what to do with it. Was four years not enough time to cobble something together? Apparently, not.
What she does next is this: she signs a lease for an apartment with Ned, something she can’t really afford on her nonexistent income, but little steps. Ned got a job as a software engineer. They pop champagne when he gets his offer letter and drink it on the roof.
The two of them hold a housewarming party. Ned blasts the Partiful on social media, and they get a surprisingly high turnout. Paul flies in from California, where he’s doing flight software at an aerospace start-up, and helps set up. MJ sees some people she thought she’d said good-bye to last week, during graduation, which is fun. Turns out half of the MIT graduating class has moved to NYC. She really should’ve seen that one coming.
A neighbor from across the hall shows up with flowers, which is sweet. MJ and Ned invite him in, and Ned shows him his Spidey Tracker, and he seems genuinely interested, which isn’t always the case. Ned can get a little overexcited about the things he loves.
The party lasts into the wee hours of the night. At some point the neighbor disappears, probably to go back across the hallway to bed, but MJ is still up, moving through this space that is now hers, laughing with old and new friends alike, giving her boyfriend a kiss, cleaning up afterwards, sweeping plastic cups into a giant garbage bag, leaving it by the doorway for tomorrow, and then, finally, leaning back against the countertop in the dim kitchen light, just her and Ned, just the right side of tipsy, a warmth in her chest and a lightness in her heart. This could be it, she thinks. She’s back home again, and it feels right.
It feels like the start of her new life.
And then she blacks out in her brand new apartment, sitting at her desk scrolling through job postings, and wakes up midair, free-falling off the edge of a building, Spider-Man’s red-and-blue suit reaching for her from above. She screams, because what else do you do in a situation like that?
He catches her, just before she can smash into the concrete. He holds her, talks to her like he knows her. She asks him to take her home, please, and he says he can’t. He says she’s in danger, she has to come with him, and then he brings her to some warehouse where a guy named Frank lives, and they bicker for a bit before all going to Frank’s half-underground apartment. MJ doesn’t really know what’s going on, would honestly really like to get back to her apartment with Ned and wash her hands of this superhero/vigilante/crime-fighting(??) business altogether.
Like, she’s an unemployed engineer. These are strangers. This isn’t her world. Even Ned would be handling this better than her.
Ned, MJ thinks, would be so geeked to be kidnapped by Spider-Man.
Spider-Man leaves, all on his own, and even though MJ has just met the guy, she starts getting worried, watching him go off like that. She can’t fight criminals—she quit martial arts in middle school, spent gym class reading instead of participating—but she tells Frank to go after Spider-Man, as back-up.
Watching Frank grab his huge gun and leave, MJ does feel a little bit better about the whole situation. Spider-Man is tough. She’s seen a video of a truck slamming him into the side of a bridge; when the dust cleared, he jumped out of the rubble and swung away into the distance. So he should be fine. Right? He should be fine. He’s always been fine, before, and he’s faced down New York’s biggest and baddest in the years since he appeared on the crime-fighting scene.
MJ uses the logic to calm herself down. She paces circles around Frank’s apartment, rifling through the tech Spider-Man was working on, trying to piece together the specifics of the engineering. It’s high-level stuff, beyond even what she was doing at MIT. Did he go to college somewhere? Is this all self-taught?
She reaches for a folded piece of paper, thinking she’ll find some sort of schematic, maybe a roughly-sketched blueprint of the inhibitor’s design. And that’s how she finds the letter that shatters her world.
Afterwards, MJ wracks her brain, hitting her temple with the heel of her palm, trying desperately to remember. Her mind has never failed her like this before. It’s every late night working on a problem set in the library, every final exam she couldn’t finish in time, every bout of crippling imposter syndrome that she’d never confess to in the light of day. It’s hating her classes halfway through undergrad, pouring through the course catalog, reading the descriptions of every major, even the impractical humanities ones she’d never actually go for, no matter how curious or interested she was. It’s switching from biochem to aerospace, starting all over again, and still, somehow, feeling like there’s something wrong. It’s telling herself MJ, you’re running out of time. It’s asking herself MJ, who the fuck have you become?
She’s never wanted something so bad, so deep in her bones. She claws through her high school memories for a hint of brown hair, an echo of the name Peter, the faintest memory of soft hands, a shared kiss, a bright laugh.
You have to believe her. She tries so, so, so hard, to remember.
But she can’t.
Because it’s magic, apparently, some fucking spell or something that wormed its way into her head four whole years ago, screwed with her memories and completely changed her life as she’d known it. Which of her current memories of her past, of her high school experience, are completely false? How much of it was real, and how much of it never even happened? Lying on the roof with Ned: was that real? Sitting alone at lunch: what about that? Having no friends, feeling alone, building up walls between her and the world. Going home every day to an empty apartment, having to cook her own dinners, all those books she read and the shitty TV she put on. She runs her metaphorical fingers back over the chronology of her life and she can’t find the cracks, the places where the pieces don’t line up. The replacement was too seamless, the lie too well integrated into reality; and on top of that, it’s been four whole years. Four years for her to accept any feelings of wrongness as normal, four years for her mind to smooth over the imperfect edges and rough insertions, four years for her brain to gaslight itself into believing something that was never, apparently, real.
Because the truth, according to this letter, is that she was loved. She was loved, and she can’t remember it. She was loved, and then she wasn’t, and she hasn’t been, in that way, since.
Spider-Man reaches for the edge of his mask, and for a second MJ thinks this is it, I’ll see his face and all the memories will come back and it’ll feel right, he’ll feel familiar, I’ll be saved by the very magic I never believed in. And then he takes off his mask, and MJ is looking in the face of a complete stranger.
She’s never met him in her life; or if she did, she has absolutely no recollection of it. He’s confessing his love to her, saying she means everything to him, and she doesn’t know him.
“I don’t love you,” she finds herself saying, because she wants to be honest with him. She wants to be gentle. A few hours watching him work, and she already feels that it is of utmost importance to be very careful with his heart. “Because—I don’t even know you.”
He takes her back to her apartment. On a whim, she invites him up. She can see how much it means to him, and she finds in herself a well of tenderness she didn’t even really know she possessed.
Peter and Ned hit it off instantly. It’s like MJ can see the weight of years falling off of Ned like the layers unfolding off of an onion. His nerdiest, goofiest, most child-like high school self rises right to the forefront, all pretense and machismo gone by the wayside. The Ned who worries what people think of him, the Ned who wants to look cool, the Ned who’s secretly afraid of being outcast again, of being teased or bullied or excluded—that Ned is gone. The Ned Leeds sitting across the table from MJ, joking around and quoting old movies and playing LEGO with Peter Parker, is a boy MJ didn’t even know she was missing until now.
She smiles, privately, tucking this golden hour somewhere safe inside of her heart, and puts her pencil back to her sketchbook. She shades in the spider on Peter’s chest. She leaves the mask off, draws the contours of his face from memory.
After this, MJ is going to be kept up all night by Ned’s excited rambling. He’s going to recount this entire encounter a million times over, as if MJ wasn’t there for all of it, as if she wasn’t the one who arranged their meeting in the first place.
And MJ will let him. She’ll pretend she’s indulging him, maybe roll her eyes every now and then; but the truth is that she’ll be really grateful to him for doing it. For letting her exist in this happiness for a bit longer, for letting her pretend that this is her reality, that this has been her reality, all along. Ned and Peter are the type of people who are good at capturing joy, at existing in it, at preserving it for as long as it’ll stretch. MJ is the opposite: she’s a pessimist, she doesn’t let things in for fear of being let down. Watching the way they laughed, even knowing that this could be the last time they get to do this, it makes MJ want to open her heart, to hold onto the joy she was a part of, for that moment in time, to be able to access it forever.
MJ stands at the door and watches Peter go. He leaves her to be the hero, to save the day, to save someone’s life; and in the end, she can’t begrudge him that.
From out the window, she watches him swing away, his red and blue form moving across the city until it disappears from sight. She knows there’s a good chance the two of them will never meet again. Their lives diverged four years ago. She's a different person now, and he’s a stranger she doesn’t remember.
Still, MJ can’t help but hope. Maybe this is just the Peter Parker effect. But some part of her, some certainty she hasn’t been able to reach for years, expects to see him again.