The Night Gwen Stacy Died (5 page)

“Sheila,” Andrea said, and her name sounded far away. Sheila smiled up at her sister
and for no reason at all remembered this time when they were kids Sheila had become
lost in a Hy-Vee supermarket, and Andrea had called her name down each of the aisles.
Sheila had heard her sister’s voice leading her and had followed it from the chaos
of the cereal aisle all the way back to produce, where her family was waiting. And
for a moment, she wanted to reach out and seize her sister’s hand and say,
let’s get out of here, Andy, you and me, we could just go
.

“So are you?” Andrea said.

Sheila’s smile faded. She swirled around the ice in her glass that signified the end
of the drink. “Am I what?” she asked.

“Sleeping with anyone!” Andrea said. “Hello? Are you in this conversation or not?”

“No and not,” Sheila said. But she smiled.

“But you’ll tell me when you are, right?” Andrea said.

“I wouldn’t hold your breath or anything.”

“You should do it in high school,” Andrea said wistfully. “That’s when it’s the best,
sneaking around behind lockers, and those dark storage rooms near the gym.”

“I’ll probably do it when I’m in France,” Sheila said. “By the river or something.”

“Ugh, gross,” Andrea said. “That sounds like a great way to get a disease. The river
is probably where women go to get molested.”

“The Seine? The fucking Seine, Andrea, really?”

Her sister rolled her eyes. She opened her mouth as if in rebuttal, but then shut
it just as quickly.

“What?” said Sheila.

“Nothing,” said Andrea. “Forget it.”

“Say it,” said Sheila.

Andrea shrugged. “Just that the whole thing’s weird.”

“Maybe to you.”

“Not just to me. I think Mom and Dad sort of thought you would go to college next
year.”

“You didn’t go to college,” said Sheila.

“It’s different,” said Andrea. “I have Donny. And we have a business plan.”

“So if I was having sex with someone who I was starting a business with, I wouldn’t
have to go to college either.”

“Touché,” said Andrea rolling her eyes.

“French!” Sheila shouted. “Ha-ha!” She waved her finger in her sister’s face, as if
she’d caught Andrea in the act of something, as if this usage were evidence Sheila
was winning the argument they were always perpetually having on some level. “Vive
la France!” she growled in the direction the pool table. She laughed until she hiccupped,
until her body shook, and when she looked up again, she saw that Andrea was regarding
her with a look of slight concern from the other side of the table.

Sheila felt uneasy. The fire that had felt warm under her tongue had moved into her
stomach. She wanted to feel as she had before, as the drink was still going down.
Patsy Cline had given way to Peggy Lee, who was angry in a different way, demanding
to know whether or not
that
was all there
is
. Sheila looked at her sister, five years her senior, who obviously had figured out
some way to live in the world, and wanted to ask of her something similar. But she
held her tongue. “I’m going up for another one,” Sheila said. She was looking through
the money in her purse to go up and ask for the drink herself. But just as she was
getting ready to leave the booth, she froze.

Peter Parker walked in and sat at the bar. She watched him take a roll of bills out
of his pocket and lay a few of them down on the counter. He counted the money flippantly,
as if it were irrelevant how many dollars were there, and how many needed to be laid
down to pay for his drink. When he looked up and met Sheila’s gaze, she looked away.

“Who is that guy?” Andrea asked.

“Oh, just this guy.”

“Well he’s looking at you like some kind of pervert.”

“Let him,” said Sheila.

She needed to stand up now, to signal to him somehow. But she felt scared of walking
straight up to the bar. It didn’t seem right to run into him this way, with Andrea
and Donny. Peter belonged to another part of her life that had nothing to do with
this one. Sheila got up to go to the bathroom.

The bathrooms were at the far end of the bar, with a sink just to the right of the
back door that led to the alley. Sheila felt sure that Peter Parker would be on the
other side of the door when she finished. She fantasized about slipping out the back
door with him without even washing her hands. She imagined how his taxi would be waiting
just in the side lot and how he would gesture toward it, silently opening the passenger-side
door for her, how she would get in, how he would close the door, run around to the
driver’s seat, and then: they would drive. Where didn’t matter. Anywhere really. She
pressed her hands to the bathroom door in anticipation of him being there, the way
that she’d been taught in grammar school to touch her bedroom door to detect if there
was a fire in the house at night.

Sheila’s family had always slept with their doors open. If a door was closed, her
father said, something fishy was likely going on behind it.

“I demand an open door policy in this family,” he said, as if their bedrooms were
foreign countries resistant to trade.

Sheila checked her face in the bathroom’s dirty mirror and it was pretty much what
she expected: limp brown-blond ponytail, smudged eyeliner, thin smile. She opened
the door slowly. Peter Parker was not there. She washed her hands and turned the corner,
but he wasn’t even in the bar.

“Looks like your buddy took off,” Andrea said.

“Who?” said Sheila.

Andrea shook her head. “Just be careful. He’s way older and he was looking at you
like a piece of meat. I wouldn’t get into that if I were you.”

“I met a boy,” Sheila told the coyote in Macbride Hall.

The mountain coyote gazed at Sheila, eager for her to go on.

A piece of meat!
Had he really looked at her that way? Sheila knew she was supposed to feel objectified,
but she felt fantastic. She could feel every muscle in her leg, every tendon expand
and contract, as she pedaled her bike to the museum.

“It’s stupid,” she said to the coyote. “He’s not even really my age.”

But the coyote did not seem bothered by this detail. It stared straight ahead as if
to suggest that relative age was the most insignificant factor in the world to a coyote
that had lived in a glass case for over a century.

“There’s a chance he thinks he’s a superhero,” Sheila admitted.

This too barely fazed the coyote. For all Sheila knew the mountain coyote was also
susceptible to delusions of grandeur, what with the plaques and glass around it.

“I might say something.”

Silence.

“I must be an idiot,” Sheila told the coyote, “I must be crazy,” but the coyote didn’t
give any indication that there was any reason for her to hesitate in approaching the
boy.

She couldn’t sleep that night after her conversation with the coyote. She couldn’t
explain the endless flicker of her thoughts or how they continued to route toward
Peter: the outline of his shoulder under the sleeve of his T-shirt, the flat surface
of his fingernails moving quickly as they counted though dollar bills, the way he
had looked at her in the bar, the way he had looked away from her. She slipped on
a sweatshirt over her pajamas, tiptoed downstairs, and turned on the computer that
sat idle on her father’s desk in the corner of the room. She typed “Spider-Man” and
“Peter Parker” into the empty search engine box that was waiting for her there. She
had never bothered to see any of the blockbuster Spider-Man movies, because—well,
why would she? She generally didn’t waste her time with films marketed to prepubescent
boys.

“Sheila?” her father called down the stairs. “Is that you?”

“Yeah, I’m on the computer,” she paused, “looking up some stuff for school.” Was there
something devious about researching Spider-Man in the same way that there was something
devious about learning French? She wasn’t sure what would create worry in the minds
of her parents anymore, what would signal that she was in some way not living a normal
life or healthy life. Her own father could probably tell her as much about Spider-Man
as the Internet, but she wasn’t about to ask him.

A pause, and then nothing. The creak of the stairs that signified her father had retreated
back into his bedroom.

First there was the expected stuff, the stuff everyone knew: spider bite, spider sense,
great power, great responsibility, blah blah blah. Sheila scrolled down the page.
Most of the stuff she read had to do with villains and superpowers, not the kind of
thing that interested Sheila. But the more she researched, the more the varied facets
of Peter Parker’s character seemed to gesture in directions that were completely contradictory.
By some accounts, Parker was a hopeless recluse, a school nerd who was ridiculed by
everyone; by others, outside of his school work, he was a part-time photojournalist
who drove a motorcycle through the school parking lot and revved the engine around
pretty girls, asked them out for sodas.

He was a chameleon, and not just because of the whole secret identity thing. The other
people in Peter’s life sometimes seemed baffled by his actions. Sheila clicked on
a reproduction of a short spread from one of the early comic books. Peter Parker peeling
around the school parking lot on his motorcycle. A blond girl named Gwendolyn Stacy
gasps, clearly impressed,
Actually I never thought of you as the motorcycle type before, Pete!

Peter Parker smiles in a satisfied way and looks the girl straight in the eye.

Lady, there’s a LOT you don’t know about me! But stick around—I’m planning to educate
you!

Sheila sat back. She blinked at the screen. This is not the way science nerds spoke
to pretty girls. Some things were not adding up here; some things were going to require
further investigation.

The next time she was near the college, Sheila walked into a store that sold comic
books.

“Can you please direct me to your Spider-Man section?” she asked the boy behind the
counter.

“Huh?” said the boy.

“Spider-Man,” said Sheila.

“Depends on the title. And the year. Back issues in the boxes, more recent on the
walls. Alphabetical order,” he said.

Sheila found a few relevant comic books in plastic sleeves along the walls. She brought
them back up to the counter.

“Could I look through these?” she asked the boy.

“Sure,” he said, “if you buy them.”

Sheila turned the comic books over and looked at the prices written on little white
stickers on the cellophane.

“Oh, I don’t really even want to read them,” said Sheila, “I just want to find out
about Spider-Man’s life.”

A few boys flipping through issues looked up from their shopping. Shuffling quieted
near the front of the store.

“What for?”

“Oh, personal reasons,” said Sheila. “Anyway, they’re awfully expensive.”

“They get much more expensive as you move up the wall there,” said the boy, finally
making eye contact, or perhaps just catching her eye on his way to glancing down at
her selections. “These in your hand are barely controversial issues.”

“Just give me the bottom line,” said Sheila. “What sort of person is he really?”

The clerk sneered. “He’s shy. He wears glasses. He gets bit by a spider.”

“Glasses?” asked Sheila. “No, that doesn’t sound right at all. I thought he rides
a motorcycle to school.”

She started to put her selections back on the shelf, but in the back of the store
she cornered a customer who looked about twelve and who set everything straight. Peter
Parker didn’t really
need
eyeglasses; he wore them despite 20/20 vision. The motorcycle he bought with money
from working as a photographer for the local newspaper, which was just a part-time
gig he worked on the side of high school. The reason why he worked side jobs was to
fund his life as Spider-Man; he had to pay for his web-shooter and some of the other
tools hidden away in his costume. When he wasn’t fighting villains, his life as a
regular kid was pretty rough. His uncle Ben was killed by a criminal who broke into
the house one night; he lived alone with just his aunt May. His parents, don’t even
ask—he doesn’t have any. His first real girlfriend, Gwen Stacy, was killed by the
Green Goblin, and Peter Parker, first crazy with regret at not being able to save
her in time, then fell in love with Mary Jane Watson. Spider-Man had never wanted
to be Spider-Man. It was just something that came up; he didn’t want so much responsibility,
but he did what he could with it since there was no getting out of the role once it
came. It wasn’t always easy for him to know what was the right thing to do.

The next day at lunch, Sheila decided to see if Anthony had any further information.
He was a guy. He might know something.

“Did you ever see any of the Spider-Man movies?”

“First one,” Anthony said. “Kind of sucked.”

“I never saw it,” Sheila said. “Would you want to maybe watch it this weekend or something?”

“Did you hear what I just said about it kind of sucking?”

Sheila stared. “Forget it,” she said. “I’d rather watch it alone.”

Anthony laughed. “Since when are you into Spider-Man movies?”

“I don’t know,” Sheila said. “I’m not.”

Anthony nodded. “Okay.”

“What?” asked Sheila.

“Nothing,” Anthony said.

Sheila looked from the crumbs on the table and up to Anthony. She felt a prickling
at the back of her ears. “Since when are you so interested in pep rallies and the
court of Spring Fling?”

Anthony shook his head. “It’s a dance at our school. We go to school here. It’s not
like some random thing I just decided to become obsessed with for no reason, like,
I don’t know, French or Spider-Man.”

Sheila bristled. “Yeah, except you’ve never been to one of these dances in your life.
I mean are you even going? I haven’t heard you talk about asking anyone.”