Chapter Text
“Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.”
“You’ll like Boston…it feels like a small town next to New York, and it’s old,” Mrs. Moore said. “The traffic is worse, though, so there’s that.”
“I’ve been reading up on the Molasses Flood,” MJ replied. “Did you know twenty-one people died?”
She was wandering through a fog of lavender and mint in the courtyard of the Met Cloisters with her former English Teacher. Romanesque architecture, bathed in late afternoon light, rose around them in close approximation of Assisi Cathedral. If a hint of autumn hadn’t been so persistently in the air, she could have imagined they were in Italy.
“You should go to the Gardner Museum while you’re there,” Mrs. Moore continued. “The garden courtyard has a glass roof, so it’s perfect for a winter visit…and it was the location of one of the biggest art heists in history. You’ll like that.”
“Tell you what,” MJ replied, “I’ll go if you come visit me in Boston.”
Mrs. Moore laughed and glanced at her. “You’ve really changed MJ. You never used to be this outgoing and considerate. It suits you.”
MJ gave a half-shrug, trying not to smile. “Whatever. Ned Leeds always brings the worst out of people. Blame him.”
Mrs. Moore’s comment returned to MJ hours later when she was lying on her bed watching a square of orange light move across her ceiling as the sun set. Had she changed? What had she been like before? She tried to think back and realized with a rising sense of disquiet that half her memories of her friendship with Ned seemed to be blotted out. How did they ever become friends? She understood why she would want to be friends with Ned; he was probably the most forgiving and upbeat person she had ever met…but why would Ned want to be friends with her? She didn’t like Legos, or Star Wars, or pretty much anything he was interested in. They had to be the most oddball pair in the history of Midtown Tech.
She knew they had become a lot closer after they had accidentally spent a night stranded on Liberty Island with no memory of how they got there. The Park Rangers who arrived on the scene in the morning had taken them to a hospital, but beyond a few minor bumps and bruises the doctors could offer no explanation for their amnesia.
It was like trying to put together a puzzle without a reference picture and half the pieces missing.
The puzzle piece that bothered her the most was a voicemail from an unknown number that she had discovered after her phone rudely informed her that she needed to delete messages because her mailbox was full. She had practically memorized it.
Hey MJ, it’s me. I forgot my phone and I’m running late. I just wanted to let you know that I’m all right in case you tried to call. Don’t worry too much. I’ll see you soon.
It was a voice that she had no recollection of ever hearing before and she played it over and over again. It was a nice voice, but it made her skin crawl every time she heard it.
The flurry of getting ready for college helped take her mind off her shattered memories. As she packed, she looked around her room with more awareness, taking notice of things that for the past few years had just merged into wallpaper. She had a charcoal study of Coach Wilson pinned over the head of her bed; next to it was a sketch of an unhappy looking boy under a raincloud. For some strange reason she didn’t recognize him and she came to the conclusion that it had just been a bad drawing that hadn’t looked anything like the subject. Had she pinned it up as a warning to herself not to make bad drawings? Strange.
On her dresser, tucked behind a Kleenex box, she found a photograph of Venice. Seagulls spiraled around the solitary figure of a young man leaning on one of the pilings, gazing out at the Grand Canal and the gondolas that lined the embankment like black swans. It struck her oddly because she remembered taking the photo, but she didn’t remember anyone being in it. She never photographed people; it was always flowers and landscapes and buildings at crazy angles, but she knew she had included him deliberately because she had worked him in with the rule of thirds.
She managed for almost an entire week to put the uncanny photograph out of her mind. Ned was on cloud nine because he was getting a new phone and he invited MJ over so she could be there for the inaugural power on. She wasn’t anywhere near as excited about electronics as he was, but she came happily. He had the new phone charging when she arrived, and they sat down at the dining room table to go through the setup together.
She humored him, summoning excitement that she didn’t know she had in her. She smiled when Ned set a picture of Spider-Man as his new lockscreen, and pulled out his old phone so he could migrate all his settings to the new one. They fell into a companionable silence as MJ texted her mother, then she glanced over to see Ned scrolling back through his photo app with a growing expression of alarm. He looked physically ill.
“What is it?” she asked.
He didn’t say anything, just slid the phone across the table to her.
It was a whole string of selfies of Ned, and a guy MJ had never seen before. Curly hair, twinkling brown eyes, comfortably ordinary. He exuded a warmth like sunshine even through the cracked screen of Ned’s old phone. Despite how ridiculously young he looked there was a sense of sadness about him as if he carried a weight that was almost too heavy to bear. He was an old soul.
“Cousin?” MJ asked cooly, sliding the phone back. She had felt a sudden stab of jealousy that Ned was clearly close friends with someone she had never met.
“You don’t understand,” Ned said in hushed tones. “I have no idea who this is! There are tons of photos of him! Look!”
He scrolled frantically on, looking increasingly shocked and horrified.
“He came to Venice with us?” MJ said, peering closer. She felt her heart stutter. There was a photo of all three of them, Ned, MJ and this stranger, with their backs to the Grand Canal. She recognized that plaid shirt and those chinos. It was the same guy in the photo on her dresser.
“My memory has not been the same since that whole Statue of Liberty thing,” Ned burst out suddenly. MJ glanced at him, strangely relieved that it hadn’t just been her.
“We couldn’t have forgotten an entire human being, could we?” she asked faintly.
“I don’t know who this is,” Ned repeated.
MJ’s mouth was dry. It was becoming hard to swallow and her heart was racing. The last five minutes had somehow been even more unsettling than being an amnesiac at the Statue of Liberty. She felt a faint sensation of familiarity, like a whiff of perfume she couldn’t place or a bar of music she couldn’t name.
“Coffee shop,” MJ said, sitting back in triumph. “I recognize his left eyebrow.”
“What?” Ned asked incredulously.
“Do you remember that really weird guy who came into my coffee shop last Christmas?”
“Like creepy stalker weird?” Ned asked.
“No, it wasn’t like that,” MJ said softly. No matter how strange the interaction had been, she couldn’t laugh at it. It had become increasingly less funny the longer it dragged on. There had been a whole mix of emotions in his face that had been impossible to describe, but none of it had been creepy, just heartbreaking, and she had sincerely hoped she would see him around just so she could know he was OK. If anyone had ever been in crisis it had been what’s-his-face that day in the coffee shop.
“He said his name was Peter,” MJ said after a moment. “I don’t think he talked to you. Maybe you wouldn’t remember.”
“Do you remember knowing someone named Peter?” Ned asked.
“There was Peter Quincy in ninth grade,” MJ mused. “But he was six feet tall and had blond hair.”
“I feel sick,” Ned said after a moment.
“Yeah, me too.”
When she got home, she pulled out her eleventh grade yearbook and flipped through it, checking every name until she came across a kid named Peter somewhere near the back. At last, with a sense of both dread and relief, she saw him. Smartly dressed. Hair combed. Chipper smile. All around nice guy. Peter Parker.
~o*o~
Boston was way colder than New York City. The bronze mother duck and ducklings in Boston Gardens had been dressed in tiny beanies and scarves, and the great neoclassical buildings of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were surrounded with blazing sugar maples. Even the grasshopper on Faneuil Hall looked cold. MJ and Ned had thrown themselves into their studies, and during the odd weekend when they found time, they toured the city. Paul Revere’s house. Small, cramped. The replica of the brig Beaver, epicenter of the Boston Tea Party. They had gone to Salem for Halloween. The House of Seven Gables had been nowhere near as haunting as a single voicemail on MJ’s phone.
They clambered up to the top of the Bunker Hill Monument but somehow being that high gave them both a breathless vertigo they knew had something to do with the Statue of Liberty. Neither said anything, but when they had descended all two hundred and ninety-four steps, they looked at each other wide-eyed. Maybe it was the number of steps. Maybe it wasn’t.
The Harvard Museum of Natural History had been something else again. There had been a big room full of glass flowers so intricately and perfectly made that they honest to goodness looked real. Like realer than real. Of course, it immediately reminded them both of the glasswork in Venice. Neither of them wanted to think about Venice and by mutual consent, they left that amazing room, haunted by glass flowers.
MJ felt her hand going to the broken flower that hung from her neck, the one she mechanically put on every morning without thinking about it. Some grumpy guy named Happy had given it to her, but it wasn’t from him, he had just passed it on.
“You know that glass dahlia you always wear…” Ned trailed off.
“Just say it,” MJ replied abruptly. “It came from Venice, didn’t it?”
They had, by unspoken agreement, never mentioned Peter Parker, or the Statue of Liberty, or Venice again. What Ned did with the hundreds of photographs, MJ didn’t know, but she had immediately checked to see if she had any contacts named Peter Parker and had been strangely relieved when she did not find his name anywhere on her phone.
Despite her willful denial, she thought about Peter Parker nearly every day. She tried to trick herself into believing that he never existed, that she had never seen those photos on Ned’s phone, that it had somehow all been a horrifying nightmare. Then, against her will, she would listen to the voicemail again and drive herself crazy. In the end, MJ was the one who broke her unspoken agreement with Ned.
Mrs. Moore, their former English teacher, had driven up to Boston to visit her ‘two favorite students’. MJ seriously doubted she had ever been anyone’s favorite student, but she rolled with it anyway. They were in the Gardner Museum, in the room that had been the target of the 1990 heist, gazing at the empty frame of Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, when all the uncertainty and guilt came pouring over MJ like the seawater in the painting. Somehow the empty frame made her think of the lost friend she had been trying so hard to forget.
“Mrs. Moore,” MJ said abruptly, “Do you remember having a student named Peter Parker?”
Mrs. Moore’s eyebrows knit in puzzlement. Silently Ned slipped his phone out of his pocket and pulled up an image of the three of them together with such ease that MJ knew that he had spent a lot of time looking at it.
Mrs. Moore’s face cleared when she saw it and she nodded.
“It's funny you should mention him,” she said, “Peter came to the school a few months ago to ask for his transcripts...but strangely enough, none of the teachers or administration remembered ever seeing him before. I certainly don't remember him in any of my classes, yet the records show he attended for the whole four years.”
The familiar eerie sensation came over MJ. It was like the worst and most uncanny ghost story she had ever heard. The boy who never was. Doomed to travel through life forever, unknown to everyone. It made her want to weep in frustration. Now at least she knew that it wasn’t just her and Ned who had forgotten, which was vaguely comforting.
“The Dean was so upset about it that he called a meeting to lecture us about letting students slip through the cracks,” Mrs. Moore continued, then shook her head. “I don't understand what happened. He was a nice young man, very clean cut and polite. He didn’t act like a recluse. His attendance record seemed to be a bit spotty, but he apparently got good grades.
“Well,” Mrs. Moore continued more cheerfully, “I’m glad you remember him anyway. The Dean will be glad to hear it.”
“Except, we don’t,” MJ replied dourly. “I saw him once when I was working at the coffee shop, but that was it. Everything else is a blank.”
“We don’t remember ever seeing him before in our lives,” Ned added, “And yet, according to the pictures, we were best friends. We did everything together. He was even with us in Europe when Spider-Man kept crashing our school trip.”
Mrs. Moore’s face had drained of color as she looked at them, “That is very strange.”
You have no idea, MJ thought, then added aloud: “Do you happen to know where he lives?”
“According to the school records, He lived in Queens with his Aunt, but when the Dean tried to track her down, he discovered that she had died. Peter apparently vacated the apartment shortly after that.”
Ghost story, MJ’s brain repeated against her will.
“I think it might be time to get the police involved,” Mrs. Moore said after a moment.
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” MJ asked skeptically. “Maybe he doesn’t want to be found. He’s not a criminal.”
“There’s something very, very strange at work here,” Mrs. Moore replied. “He might be in trouble, and we need to help him if we can. I don’t want to fail one of my students, even if I don’t remember him.”
“Is it possible to forget someone who has been part of your life for years?” Ned asked, then his eyes lit eagerly. “Maybe my phone was hacked, and all the pictures are AI!”
“Stranger things have happened,” MJ shrugged. “Maybe we’re all hallucinating. Maybe it’s a side effect from the snap. Is all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream?”
“Edgar Allen Poe,” Mrs. Moore replied mechanically.
“Don’t contact the police,” MJ said. “Please. I don’t think he would want that.”
Mrs. Moore was reluctant, but she finally agreed, and when MJ looked back on it later, she was grateful beyond belief that they hadn’t involved the Police.
~o*o~
The entire mystery would have remained unsolved if MJ had not remembered an obscure knitting book that her cousin Mildred had once said she could borrow. She hadn’t texted Mildred in almost a year and MJ scrolled through Uber Eats orders and texts from the power company about estimated restoration, and appointment reminders for her yearly physical. She deleted them all one by one, congratulating herself for being momentarily tidy. Her mother would be proud.
She almost deleted ‘Iktomi’.
Her thumb hovered over it, but she caught herself in time and tapped on the name instead.
When Ned found her later, she was curled up in her chair with a bleak expression on her face. She turned a pair of tortured eyes on him.
“MJ, are you OK?” he exclaimed. “What happened?”
“Do you have a contact in your phone named ‘Iktomi’?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied, sitting next to her. “What is it?”
Panic had overwhelmed MJ as she scrolled through the messages. They were from someone who knew her very well, someone who had even loved her, and if her replies were any indication, she had loved him back. All her life she had wondered if she could ever be vulnerable enough to let another person into her life like that. It had apparently happened, and she had forgotten all of it.
It was a horrible cruel joke.
Maybe her phone had been hacked. She had started to panic, striking out blindly like someone who had walked face-first into a spider’s web. She had stopped herself one moment before she attempted to delete the text thread a second time.
“He’s a shape-shifting spider from Lakota mythology,” MJ replied.
“Dude!” Ned exclaimed. “You’re friends with a shape-shifting spider? That is so cool!”
After a few minutes of scrolling through his contacts, Ned found the same number under a different name, although the messages had not moved over when he upgraded his phone. He shrugged. Spring break was coming and he would just have to look at his old phone to see if they were still there.
“’Underoos’?” MJ asked, pointing at the pseudonym, “What does that mean?”
“I have no idea,” Ned said apologetically, then looked over her shoulder. “What do your messages say?”
“Nothing much,” MJ said, abruptly turning off her phone. “Just someone who claims to know me.”
MJ never spoke of ‘Iktomi’ again. She tried to bury the name, and thought again and again of deleting all the messages. She thought seriously about moving to Australia. Far worse, she thought about just calling the number. Periodically, she would stare at it, and it would stare back. It was like an unlocked door. All she had to do was turn the knob.
A sense of foreboding held her back. Through the entire text thread, there was always something left unspoken between them, and MJ was increasingly convinced that ‘Iktomi’ had regularly broken the law and was involved with a large and dangerous international gang.
The revelation broke her heart. It was just her fate that the only guy who had ever loved her was apparently a criminal. Why she had even encouraged it was a mystery to her. It was then that she decided to let the whole thing go. She would no longer think of Peter Parker, or the photographs, or the text messages. It would all be in the past.