Birds of a Feather
MJ actually doesn't mind the customers that come into the bar on weekday nights. With a few exceptions, they're all pretty tame. Often it's couples on first dates or in the early stages of their courtship, still trying to impress each other with how late they can stay up, or so engrossed in getting to know each other that they don't notice the time going by at all. And then they usually leave larger tips, either because they're happy and tipsy or because they don't want their date to think they're stingy.
There are the usual loners who come into the bar, too. Night owls. At least one angst-ridden poet. Every now and then a grad student from the university who has a rather unconventional choice of place to study. But for the most part they keep to themselves, and rarely get so drunk that MJ has to call them a taxi or, as she does on some unfortunate nights, the police.
It's Fridays and Saturdays that make MJ want to rip her hair out. Young people.
Okay, okay. It's not like MJ doesn't know how to party. For an eighteen-year-old she has had her fair share of beverages she is not technically allowed to consume. But first of all, she has a real fake, not the sloppy, barely passable IDs that half the kids are trying to shove under her nose. And more importantly, she doesn't get drunk. Yes, she gets happy. Maybe even tipsy on occasion. But never vomit-inducing, where-did-I-leave-my-shoes, what-the-hell-happened-last-night drunk.
"Kill me," Louise, one of her co-workers, mutters as she passes.
MJ blows a strand of hair out of her face, but it sticks to her sweaty forehead. Vodka cranberry, Blue Moon, two Long Island Iced Teas on the left side of the bar, three tequila shots and a Bud on the right – and, of course, another waitress coming with a drink order in her hand.
"Kinda busy here," says MJ, jimmying the broken tap.
"Someone puked in the bathroom."
"Uck," MJ exclaims, leaning down to grab the cranberry juice out of the minifridge. "Need-to-know basis, Lou."
"It's blue – "
"LOU."
"I am not sorry, I'm the opposite of sorry, except maybe for myself," Louise grumbles, barely audible over the music, a very large bachelor party, and what appears to be half the Empire State cross country team.
Sometime around two-thirty in the morning when they finally close up shop and kick the last drunk idiot out, MJ and Louise are in the alley next to the dumpster, Louise to take a smoke and MJ to count her tips.
"You were a cheerleader, right?" asks Louise. In the unflattering yellow light the wrinkles around her lips and the bags under her eyes are more pronounced than ever.
MJ shuffles the bills in the envelope, trying to organize them, smallest value to largest. "First two years of high school, yeah."
"But you can do like, flips and shit?"
MJ glances at Louise, just in time to get a puff of smoke to the face. "I haven't in years. But yeah, probably."
Louise raises an eyebrow.
"Not here."
Louise smirks, and then rifles through her shoulder bag with her free hand, pulling out a piece of paper. "A friend of mine is opening a club. Kind of unconventional, kind of burlesquey, I don't know, I just heard her yammering about it. But they're looking for dancers."
MJ takes the piece of paper from her, but doesn't bother to look at it yet. She's heard about plenty of dancing gigs before and a lot of them have been less than legit. "What does it pay?" she asks, prepared to dismiss it if it's too little, prepared to assume the worst if it pays too much.
"Six hundred, for three nights a week. Plus tips." She shrugs. "No harm in trying out."
"Hmm," says MJ. She folds the piece of paper into her tip envelope. It's too late at night for her to be mulling this over. She's so tired that she could fall asleep standing up.
Still, even as she showers off her sweat and breathes in the steam, she is thinking of it. She is staring down at her pale bare legs and remembering leaps and kicks and the rush of everyone's eyes on her, the beautiful terror that fluttered in her stomach when she was thrown through the air. But more importantly, she is thinking of a fat paycheck, and the opportunity to pay her own way through school without the scholarship money that is still making her ill at ease.
She dries herself off in a hurry, rubbing her skin raw, as if she can shed her own discomfort. The hallway is empty when she emerges in her towel. She unlocks the door to her room and glances over at the room next to hers, the room where Peter will supposedly live in a few weeks.
How strange. She has been his next-door neighbor almost as early as her memories go back, so really it will be nothing new. But there is something much more intimate about this, something subtle and edged and uncertain. She grazes the wall with her fingers and imagines him on the other side of it, and for the first time in a while, she smiles.
She misses him. She misses herself – the way she was, back when they were friends, back when they could rely on each other for anything, back when they couldn't imagine a future without the other one in it.
Maybe they can have it back again. Maybe those little people are salvageable. Of all the pieces of herself that MJ has lost over the years, maybe there is one thing left that isn't gone for good.
(((())))
"I can't go."
MJ rifles through the dollar bills in the front pocket of her backpack and pulls out three for the hot dog vendor. "Go where?"
"To Harry's today," says Peter glumly.
MJ takes her hot dog from the vendor and starts hunting for mustard packets, standing on her tiptoes to see over the counter. "Why not?"
Peter pushes his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. "Uncle Ben wants to teach me how to fix up the car."
MJ looks at him, deliberately pouting as they start their half-mile walk home. It's about as far as the leash Peter's aunt and uncle have on him extends – MJ's father doesn't particularly care where she goes, as long as she's home before seven and doesn't get in any trouble.
"But it's summer," she says.
Peter shrugs.
"And Harry says he has something really cool to show us."
"Yeah, yeah. Last time he said that it was the maid's dirty magazines – "
"No, he said it was scary!"
Peter shrugs again, and grabs her hot dog out of her hands, biting the other end and then handing it back to her. "Uck. Mustard."
"Sorry, princess," she says, wiping some off the side of her mouth.
"Maybe next Tuesday we can – "
(((())))
MJ's ringtone pierces through the quiet of the dorm room and she wakes up violently and all at once, ripped out of the dream so quickly that she can't blink it out of her eyelids. Even as the dorm comes into bleary focus she is still convinced that thirteen-year-old Peter is walking beside her, the sun glinting on his old glasses, the untied laces of his sneakers dragging behind him.
It almost felt like she was living it. Like she had put herself in a time machine and gone back to –
Gone back to what? That never happened. She went to that hot dog place with Peter plenty of times but she can't ever remember talking about anything that specific, can't remember him talking about fixing up the car or wearing those doofy large headphones around his neck.
The phone is still ringing. MJ scrambles to pick it up, almost knocking it over in the process.
"Hello?" she croaks, her voice still hoarse from sleep.
"Mary Jane Watson?"
She clears her throat and tries to squint somewhere to check the time, but the only clock she has is on her phone. "Yeah."
"This is the Financial Aid office. I'm calling to let you know that the FAFSA you submitted was cleared, and you've been approved for full student loans."
MJ pulls the phone away from her ear for a moment and stares at it, feeling the space between her brows pucker in confusion. It's a New York number, one that she recognizes, only because she called them over and over and over again when she was trying to secure this loan in the first place.
But if it's really the Financial Aid office, shouldn't they know she has a scholarship?
The decision is easier to make when she realizes that they don't. Whatever OsCorp is doing for her, it's not school-sanctioned – in fact it's gone right over the school's heads. She can't take OsCorp's money. This is the way out.
"Miss Watson?"
"Yeah, yeah, I'm here. Yeah. That's great. Can I come down today to start the paperwork?" she asks, kicking her legs over the bed and scouring the floor for her shoes.
"Of course. We're open until five."
Only as she says this does the implication of the FAFSA really sink in. "Wait," says MJ, but the woman has already hung up.
She sits on the bed and stares at her bare feet, scowling into nothing, absorbing what this means. The FAFSA wouldn't have gone through unless her father finally got his taxes in order. That was the only pivotal factor stopping her from getting any aid, that he claimed her as a dependent, and god only knows what he had done since then to mess up his tax status.
Does that mean he's home?
But if he is he would have gotten in touch with her. He has her number. She knows that they haven't exactly had the best relationship, but he wouldn't just come home and ignore her, and he certainly wouldn't go out of his way to do her any favors without trying to cash in some brownie points for it.
She considers calling May to ask if he's been around, but thinks the better of it. If there were any sign of him back in Queens she is sure May would call her right away.
So where is he? And what does he want from her? The question plagues her all the way to the financial aid office, where she half-expects him to be outside the door, waiting for her, asking for whatever it is he needs.
But in doing this he has essentially granted her freedom – freedom from him, freedom from OsCorp's money, freedom to rely on nobody but herself. He has taken away any advantage he might have, any hold over her he might have used against her. It doesn't make any sense.
She finishes the paperwork and signs her name on the dotted lines anyway. He's alive. That's all she needs to know to keep her conscience clear. She decides not to look for him – if he wants to be a part of her life then he knows where to find her.
Felicia's words are the ones that come to mind: you do what you have to do to survive. Well, she will. But this time, it will be on her own terms.
(((())))
The next few weeks pass quickly. MJ ends up landing the job at Louise's friend's club – it is an unusual brand of dancing, a strange hybrid of jazz and burlesque and acrobatics, but MJ has been working her body through the paces since she could walk and manages to pull it off in the audition despite months without having been in a studio.
She wouldn't take the job if she weren't certain of its legitimacy. But the club is actually a ritzy joint, and although the woman running it has a flair for the dramatic and insists on calling MJ "babyface" about as loudly as she can, it's clear that she really cares about the people who work there and that safety is her top priority, both on the dance floor and off of it.
By the time the fall semester starts MJ falls into an easy routine. She works Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays at the club, and since all she has to pay for is room and board, she even scrapes up enough spare cash to start taking dance lessons in midtown again. She chooses classes for the fall and buys a bright green desk lamp and notebooks and mechanical pencils and spreads them all out on her bed to admire them, actually excited for school for the first time she can ever remember.
When she looks at herself in the mirror she pats down the frizz from the humidity in her hair, and stands up a little straighter. She feels older. More capable. Optimistic, even. She imagines shedding her high school self like a second skin, and becoming someone else entirely – someone committed, someone focused, someone who throws herself into her life wholeheartedly instead of standing on the fringes, waiting for her turn.
The dancing helps. She gives way to the practiced, familiar rhythms, the sway of her hips, the thrust of her chest, the sweaty whip of her ponytail slapping against her neck, and it is as close to coming home as MJ can ever get.
On the day before classes there's a knock on her door. She assumes it will be her new roommate – she knows nothing about the girl except that her name is Blake and that she is also a New York native – but when she opens it she finds herself staring at one of Peter Parker's hipster band t-shirts.
"Oh. Hey," she says, looking up at him. He's got an arm propped up against her doorframe, and looks marginally better than he did the last time she saw him, not that that is saying much. To be honest she almost forgot he was going to be living here. She's had a lot on her mind.
"Hey," he says. He licks his upper lip and she can tell that he's going to ask her something. "Hi. Uh – "
"Do you need help unpacking? Did you get everything up here already?" she asks, poking her head under the crook of his arm to glance down the hallway.
"No, no, I got it, thanks."
"Oh, okay," she says. She shifts her weight onto her other hip and waits for him to say something, already uncomfortable by the slightest lull in the conversation. She clears her throat to fill the silence, and then asks, "How are you?"
It's a stupid question. She already knows the answer.
"I'm – " To her surprise he doesn't bother lying. He stares at his shoes for a moment and when he looks back up at her his expression is sheepish. "I forgot to sign up for classes," he finally blurts.
"Oh – do you need a computer? I mean, mine's kind of a clunker – "
"Ah, no," he says, with another one of his vague gestures. "No, I mean, I forgot, and then I signed up last night, and the thing is, I have to take a physical elective for the requirement, and I got stuck in World Dance."
MJ feels a smirk creeping up the corners of her lips. "World Dance?"
Peter's expression is both miserable and earnest. "Yeah, I know, so I was thinking – I mean, you like to dance, right, so – "
"You want me to help you pass your dance finals?" MJ asks.
Peter winces. "I was wondering if maybe you wanted to take it too?"
MJ feels her eyes widen in surprise. "World Dance?"
He stares at her without elaborating and then shakes his head. "I know, I know, you've probably already got something lined up – "
"Yeah, I – I signed up for self defense. And my schedule's kind of air tight," she says, without mentioning that she has to carefully plan around a night job where she may or may not be strutting around in a bejeweled bikini for Manhattan's elite.
"Self defense," says Peter, his eyebrows lifting. "Yeah, yeah, that's – that's a great class, you should take that, yeah." He blows out a breath between his top teeth. "Oh well," he says. "Worth a shot."
She feels her stomach throb with guilt. He hasn't needed her for anything for years. And here he is, at her doorstep, his life in shambles, asking for something simple and easy and stupid. She struggles for a moment, looking up at him and wondering if there is anything else she can offer, but he's already taken a step back in that affable, almost clumsy way of his.
"Maybe next semester? We'll suffer through a gen ed together," she says. She doesn't want him to think that she's pushing him away. "You pick."
He smiles, but he's already looking distracted, gone off to some unreachable place again. She watches as he looks at her and tries to bring himself back to the moment at hand. "Neuroscience," he says, with the barest of his usual humor.
MJ laughs, maybe a little too loudly. She hopes it doesn't sound forced. She was just surprised. "You got it."
He nods, more internally than to her, and heads back toward his room. She shuts the door behind her and at once she knows what he must be thinking, in every heavy breath, in every glance at the floor: Gwen was supposed to be here, too. Gwen was supposed to buy textbooks and drink at parties and pick out first-day-of-school outfits, Gwen was supposed to complain about the meal plans and highlight old lectures and remind Peter to schedule his classes.
MJ takes in her messy room and is stricken by the notion of it, of how fast everything could be taken away from her. Just one moment, and Gwen was gone. Gwen, the most promising of all of them, would never grow up to be anything more than what she already was.
MJ won't just be successful, she decides. She will be grateful. She will savor every moment of this, knowing how fleeting it all is, knowing that every choice she makes and every day she stays alive has to count for something.
And then for a moment she is terrified. As if she is on the precipice of everything she might be, everything she could be, and the pressure of it is so overwhelming that she can't even fathom it. And maybe she should be afraid. She has no idea what she's doing. She is still so stunned that she even made it this far that she doesn't even know what to do with herself now that she's here.
The only comfort is knowing that this time, she isn't alone. All through high school, even when she was surrounded by the cheer team or the dance club or hanging out at one of Flash's stupid parties, she was still somehow separate from them, somehow hiding in plain sight. But now – now she has Peter one room away, and now she has this letter from Harry saying that he still believes in her. And even though they are still as far from her as they have been these past few years, she feels some hopeful shift in the distance, some compelling force that is bringing them all together again.
It makes her feel redeemable, in some way. High school wasn't a life sentence. She feels it in the thrum of the city, in the promise of autumn, in the smell of used textbooks and ink. She doesn't need anyone's approval – not her father's, or the cliquey, privileged girls at Midtown. She is going to make something of herself. She just doesn't know what it is quite yet.
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Blargh, sorry the updates are coming slow. I've been bonkers busy. Fun fact: I've been walking several miles to and from a cafe to write this and my original fiction and this week I passed a cop who one hundred percent tried to bust me for skipping out of the high school down the street (friends, for those of you who don't know that I'm a sad barely employed post-graduate dragging her psych degree around like the rotting carcass of an unfortunate animal, NOW YOU KNOW). So anyway in the end I didn't get arrested for skipping a school I haven't attended in five years which is always indicative of a good week.
I'm going to try and get the next one up faster - I've also been auditioning like crazy (I have a callback tomorrow! IT INVOLVES DANCING god help me god help every one of us) but the good news is I'm always sitting in the holding rooms typing fanfiction like the secret little freak I am. THANKS FOR READING, I hope you are all surviving your finals! I BELIEVE IN YOU!