Perpendicular
MJ wakes up to a bare apartment the next morning. She checks the clock, knowing Harry's flight from his business trip will arrive in about a half an hour. She offered to just meet him at the airport with all their bags, but he said he wanted to come back to the city for an early lunch, and to say good-bye to the apartment. MJ thinks he is being overly sentimental, but she doesn't say so, even though she would rather just leave now without any big fuss.
She doesn't bother making the bed, even though Harry hates it when she leaves it a mess. She walks through the empty space of their living room and glances at the window, at their spectacular skyline view. She doesn't linger and stare at it. Unlike Harry, this never truly belonged to her, and it is easy to give it back.
She grabs her purse, deciding to go for a walk around the block, and maybe buy some gum for the flight. It's embarrassing, but MJ hasn't been on a plane in more than twenty years, and she isn't really sure what to expect. She meant to ask Gwen about it, because she doesn't want to ask Harry, who will look at her with those condescending, pitying eyes that he sometimes gets whenever she confesses to some essential gap in her existence.
A fleet of police cars and an ambulance whiz past as MJ hits the curb. She hesitates for a moment, watching them go, but rationalizes that if the cops are out, Spiderman must have taken care of it by now.
She reaches for her phone and considers texting Peter. She thumbs at the screen, wiping off some imaginary dirt, but decides not to. She stares out into the distance, watching the cars all take a sharp turn to the left, listening as the wail of the sirens grows lower and further away until it disappears.
About halfway to the convenience store she suddenly feels this strange, dissociative feeling overcome her, as if she is walking in somebody else's boots, doing somebody else's errands. There is nobody around her who expects her to say or do anything, but she suddenly has this sinking, horrible sensation, like she used to get when she thought she had forgotten her lines.
What is she thinking? Packing up and moving to Los Angeles—because of a boy? The wrong one, at that. Because if she's being honest with herself, she is doing this for Peter, not for Harry. She is doing this to get away, not to head toward something better.
This isn't right, suddenly none of it is. She feels her heart start to pound against her chest with an abrupt, acute panic. She has no idea what she is doing. It's like she has been sprinting at top speed to find a happy ending, and didn't see the cliff until she had soared right over the edge.
She will never marry Harry. She can't. She doesn't want to be with him like that, she shouldn't be with him now and she certainly shouldn't be getting on a plane and leaving everything behind with him. What would her life be like, with Harry at the center of her universe, the only part of her past to hold on to? She considers it for the first time, waking up every single morning to his face, falling asleep every night to the sound of his snores, for the rest of her life.
She stops short on the sidewalk. She has passed the convenience store without realizing it. She turns around, the noise of the city like a funnel around her.
She'll tell him when he gets here. It will be hard. Maybe one of the hardest things she has ever had to do. But she owes him that, at the very least—a conversation, an explanation, an apology. When she was younger she left her childhood home in a blaze of indignation of resentment, blaming everyone around her for her misery, because it was the easy thing to do. But Harry has done nothing wrong except love her, flaws and all.
Full of resolve and an eerie calm, she pulls her phone back out and dials Harry's number. She'll meet him some place public. She is just working out where when he picks up the phone.
"Oh, my god." Harry's voice is thick and so unrecognizable that she almost pulls the phone away from her ear to check the number. "Mary Jane. Mary Jane."
It sounds like he has been crying, that he still is. The way he is saying her name sounds like a drowning man clinging to the oar of a lifeboat. She walks to the side of a shop window, plugging her finger into her other ear against the sound of the traffic and the clamor of pedestrians.
"Harry?" she says.
The panic hasn't fully set in yet. Instead it is a boding, stealthy kind of dread. The feeling of falling before she hits the ground, the feeling of watching something terrible from a distance happen and knowing she can't stop it. She remembers an instance of watching her father slug his hand through the wall—he had misaimed and plunged it through the window, but for those few paralyzing milliseconds his arm was in motion, there was nothing she could say, nothing she could do to warn him. He had turned to her after it happened, his arm a mass of blood, his expression at once vulnerable and surprised.
She is holding her breath, waiting for him to speak. She holds on to one desperate hope that there is a bad connection, and she imagined the despair in his voice. A moment later those hopes are dashed.
"You haven't heard," he says. She hears him gasp into the phone. No. He is crying. "Oh, god."
Now there is only fear, and impatience. She cannot stand his weakness. She needs to know whatever it is, she needs to know now.
"Heard what?" she demands, her voice shrill.
Her throat is so tight she is afraid she'll never breathe again, but she is breathing, heaving in a lungful of air as she waits for him to upend her world. She already knows what he is going to say before he says it: he is going to tell her that Peter is dead. It is the only reason he could be crying like this, the only thing that would reduce him to such hysterics so quickly. Harry is going to tell her the terrible thing that she has feared for the past few weeks, confirm the awful truth: that Peter has been living a double life, and now both of them are over.
She shuts her eyes, waiting for the news, but it doesn't come. Instead Harry is muttering to himself, words that MJ can't understand. She feels a rush of blood in her veins, accompanying her rage at him. He can't do this to her. She feels her fingernails digging into her palms, feels her knees lock and her jaw tighten.
"Harry," she snaps. "Heard what?"
It still takes him a moment to compose himself, and even when he speaks it's a struggle to understand him.
"It's—it's Gwen," says Harry.
She can't have heard him correctly. Her stomach wrenches and she tips forward in shock, the image of Gwen's face last night bursting into her mind, fresh with a new horror.
"Gwen … she …"
MJ is shaking her head before he even finishes. She says the word no, and then says it again, trying to interrupt him, because he has to be wrong, but there is no noise coming out of her mouth.
"She's dead, Mary Jane. The Goblin—I just heard."
For a long time MJ stands there with the phone pressed so hard against her ear that she can feel the heat of it radiating against her cheek. She longs for two minutes ago, when everything felt like a dream, because now everything seems too real: the colors sharper, the noises closer, as if everything is trying to suffocate her with its aliveness.
"When?" she hears herself ask.
"I don't know," Harry says. "I just landed. Maybe an hour ago. Mary Jane—"
The phone slips out of her hand and hits the sidewalk, with enough force to pop out the battery. She leaves it there. She has this sudden sensation that she needs to throw up, but instead she walks, and then she runs.
Harry has been wrong before. She needs to find a television, or a computer, something to confirm that this has happened, but even then she doesn't think she'll believe it, short of seeing Gwen's lifeless body. No. No. She shudders, so revolted by the thought that she again has to fight the urge to wretch. She doesn't want to hear another word of it, but at the same time she needs it to be real and absolute for it to sink in. She needs to know how this happened, needs to know where and how and why, but even if she has all the answers it will never fix this horrible chasm spreading in her chest.
They were so stupid, all four of them. So astronomically and unforgivably stupid. They all thought they were invincible. They stayed here long after everyone they knew had left the city for some place safer. This wasn't a horrible and impossible coincidence—it was an inevitability.
How could she have planned to leave without taking Gwen with her? How could she have not even tried? When Peter and Gwen were willing to do anything for her, even let her move back in when they thought she was in danger—how could she not have done them the same favor, how could she not have even asked if Gwen would come too? They may not have left yet, but at the very least Gwen would be some place else, somewhere distant from wherever she had been killed, somewhere with MJ—
"Oh," MJ says to herself, her stride slowing. She clutches at her chest, remembering last night in full force.
Let's get lunch tomorrow, Gwen had said. Remember how we used to go there all the time?
MJ doesn't even know how to contain the overwhelming wave of shame and grief. She is so overcome by it that it is all she can do to put one foot in front of the other, while it feels like every muscle is tight and restricted and working against her. She could have prevented this. There are so many ways she could have stopped this from happening, but she had been selfish, she had been callous and thoughtless and cruel. She had practically asked for this to happen, dared the universe to punish her for her wrongs.
She starts to run again, consciously sprinting toward the old apartment, as if her speed and the pain of the air shredding her lungs and the effort she is putting in far too late could do anything to change the way things are. She is slammed with the thought of that child she imagined, the miniature Peter, the one with Gwen's eyes and smart sense of humor, the one that she will never meet.
It is her fault. She willed this into nonexistence.
She turns so sharply on corner and flings herself into the street so fast that several cars slam their brakes and lay on their horns, barely avoiding an accident. She doesn't look back. Her feet fly under the pavement with impossible speed, because she doesn't care what happens to her—it is the run of the damned, the run of somebody with nothing left to lose.
She only stops to wait for the elevator in the lobby. She has just enough presence of mind left to know that it will take much longer to climb twenty-eight stories than it will to wait. Still, she is agitated, overdrawn, incapable of this stillness. Her body reacts to the sudden stop with protest, her vision swarming, her pulse racing. She is slick and clammy with sweat even in the January chill.
When the elevator doors spit her out she tears down the hallway and tries to jerk the doorknob open. It's locked. She suddenly has a nonsensical urge to try and shove it down, and for a split second she is so far gone that she almost does. Then she reaches into her purse, locating the keys in an instant.
Her hands are shaking so badly she can't get them into the lock. She has this sudden unhelpful, unappreciated memory of Gwen mentioning that her father taught her to kick a door open. MJ squeezes her eyes shut, determined to focus when she opens them.
The key slides in and the door bursts open. She walks in without announcing herself, the door slamming shut behind her, and for a paralyzing moment she truly believes she is alone.
Then she looks into the bedroom, and sees Peter's eyes snap up to meet hers.
He is almost unrecognizable. There is a wildness in his eyes that terrifies her, takes her breath away. He appears unharmed, wearing ordinary street clothes, his hair askew in its usual way, but despite all this he doesn't look like a person to her. He looks consumed, his expression twisted into something ugly, his posture like a cornered and angry animal.
She is so stricken by him that she can only stare. And then it hits her: she sees his grief, and it is the final blow. It is the confirmation. Gwen is really, truly gone.
Her shoulders spasm first and she hears a low and mournful noise escape her throat, a sound resonates from some dark place she has never tapped into before. She reaches out and finds a kitchen chair, half-sinking into it, her arms barely propping her up. She can't look away from him. He is breathing hard, and she has the sense that he was doing something before she arrived, something that he doesn't want her to see, because he is frozen, too.
Then she can't see him anymore, her eyes streaming, her body pitching forward with uncontrollable sobs. She tries not to breathe, tries for Peter's sake to hold it in, but it only makes it worse. She cannot be strong for him. She cannot be strong for anyone.
She hears the distinct click of the doorknob. She swipes at her eyes, trying desperately to halt her sobs for even a moment to regain some composure, and sees Peter's back turned to her, walking out the front door.
"Where are you going?" she asks.
She is bawling and incoherent. She doubts he caught a word of what she has said, but he pauses, just for a second. His head turns so slightly that she can't even see his face. Then he takes a step forward, one cold and unremorseful step, and shuts the door behind him.
She feels herself hovering in the seconds that follow, in a crippling and catastrophic disbelief. She is so devastated that she cannot even process his departure. She keeps hearing the door slam, over and over again, and it feels like no matter how much time passes she will always be in this terrible moment, knowing that the two people who have truly mattered to more than anyone her are both gone.
A dry sob escapes her. The tears stop flowing but she cannot calm the rest of her body, which seems to be absorbing the blows in mismatched stages, her grief unable to sync up into one singular and terrible feeling—there is too much hurt, too much guilt, too much regret, that she doesn't know how to feel them all at once.
She sinks to the floor, her knees hitting the hard surface, and lets her body sag all the way to the ground. She presses her cheek against the cool tile of the kitchen floor, her eyes wide open, staring into nothing. She wants to close her eyes and shrink into a ball but she can't. She is paralyzed here, the same way she was when she was little and had night terrors that always revolved around the same theme: she'd be running, running from something big and bad and scary, and then suddenly her legs would only pump air and the rest of her body wouldn't move as she felt the ominous thing grow closer and closer until she woke up screaming.
She is not deluded enough to think she can wake up from this, but she would trade anything if she could. There is no question in her mind that she would trade her own life for Gwen's, maybe even trade a perfect stranger's without hesitating.
It should be MJ. Of the four of them, MJ is the stupidest, the most inessential. Harry and Gwen and Peter—they had always been grown up and sensible, useful to society in a way that she never would be. They were all full of ambition and ideas that would change the world and help people, and MJ has only ever wanted frivolous, inconsequential things like fame and attention. If it had to be someone, it should have been her.
She has never felt so miserable for being alive. Her heart is thundering in her ears, reminding her of it with every beat, that she is here and Gwen is not. There is a dark and ugly part of her that lets her mind wander to the fire escape, to the twenty-eight story drop she has only ever contemplated when the noise of the traffic reached their tiny apartment. She could get up right now, quietly and quickly. Nobody would know until it was too late, and then she wouldn't have to tolerate even one more excruciating second of this burden she will bear for the rest of her life.
It is only a thought. She squeezes her eyes shut. She may be weak and pathetic and selfish enough to think about the simplicity of ending her life, but she could never go through with it.
She suddenly worries about Peter, and his abrupt exit. Where is he? Why does she have the awful sense that whatever he is doing, wherever he has gone, he is putting himself into serious danger? She thought at first that he only left to be alone, but when she thinks about it, there was purpose in his stride. Not just purpose, but tight, poorly-hidden rage. She is suddenly afraid that Peter is out seeking his own brand of suicide, by trying to confront the Goblin and avenge Gwen's death.
This realization is followed abruptly by another one: there is nothing she can do. She can't change his mind or tell him to stay; she has never had that kind of power over him, and never will. A single tear drips off the bridge of her nose and thuds onto the tiles.
It is impossible in this moment to see how anything could be worth living for after this. She has spent years tagging along behind Gwen and Peter, a sad little planet in their orbit, and without them she has no way to define herself. MJ knows that pain is supposed to fade with time, because she has experienced all sorts of heartaches in her life, and has overcome them in her own misguided ways. But this—this isn't the kind of grief that will make her a stronger person. This is the kind of grief that will eliminate her, cancel her out until there is nothing left.
She closes her eyes, exhaustion creeping into her bones. She isn't trying to fall asleep, thinking that she doesn't deserve even the small comfort of a temporary escape, but after a few minutes her breathing evens out and she finds herself slipping into an unintentional, forgiving darkness.
When she wakes up, the light is dim in the apartment. The sun is just starting to set. Every limb in her body aches and her throat is so dry that she can't even swallow. She hoists herself up to her feet, her thirst so demanding that it takes all of her focus and attention to open a cabinet, wrap her shaking hands around a glass and fill it with water from the tap.
The first gulp of cold water is overpowering in its relief. She feels her senses stirring back into action, and she drinks and drinks until there is nothing left in the glass and she is gasping for air.
It is just enough to restore her back into her grief. The day's events slam into her consciousness with full force, and she sets the glass down, feeling tears well up in her eyes again. She doesn't want to be here, she doesn't want to be in her own skin. Everything feels foreign and scary and impossibly out of her control. The shadows cast across the apartment have a menacing edge to them, the noises of the city seem aggressive and cruel.
She grabs her purse. She can't be here anymore. She heads for the door, and finds that the deadbolt is locked; somebody has been here. She hazards a glance into the bedroom but it is empty.
It isn't worth dwelling on. She unbolts it and heads out of the apartment. One of their neighbors walks out at the same time, texting someone on his phone, waiting for the elevator with MJ as he scowls into the screen.
How bizarre that this day is unimportant to him. That there are people in the world living their lives the same way they always have, when from this day forward MJ's life will never be the same. She wants to reach out to him somehow, to say something and connect to a person outside of her own horror, but all she can think of to say is, "What's the cheapest way to get to JFK from here?"
The man is startled that she is addressing him, looking around to see if she meant to talk to somebody else.
"Uh," he says, and then he pauses, taking her in for a moment. She is wearing the same jeans and coat from this morning, but judging from the uncertainty in his expression she figures the rest of her must look pretty grim. "There's a bus that leaves from Penn Station, I think."
She nods and thanks him.
It's starting to get even colder outside. MJ opens her purse, and finds her wallet. She doesn't have any cash on her, or a phone for that matter, but she knows how to get to the station from here. She ducks her head down and moves forward, not making eye contact with anyone, walking as quickly as she can.
She finds an ATM and withdraws enough cash for the bus fare. The woman who sits next to her has a screaming baby and tries to make conversation with her, but MJ just stares out the window, watching Manhattan crawl by with the traffic. She wants to ask what time it is, but then it strikes her how little it matters now, because she has nowhere to be and nobody that she wants to be accountable to. It almost feels in this moment like the laws of space and time don't apply to her. That she can ignore the friendly, pudgy woman next to her, and she can ignore hour of the day, because she doesn't exist in this same plane with everybody else anymore.
When they arrive at the terminal MJ picks an airline indiscriminately, and walks up to the counter.
"What's the next flight leaving here?" she asks.
The woman behind the counter looks at her suspiciously. It doesn't occur to MJ that she might be a red flag for airport security until this moment, because she hasn't been on an airplane for so long. She glances up and sees a flight for Chicago first on the list.
"I meant to ask, when's the next flight that leaves for Chicago," she amends.
If the woman has noticed MJ's poor cover-up, she is too tired to do anything about it. "Seven o'clock," says the woman. "But you're going to have a hard time making it through security in time."
She gives MJ a price and MJ hands over her credit card, knowing and not caring that she doesn't have the money to pay it off this month. MJ walks calmly through the security gate, slipping off her boots, letting them root through her bags. The airport is huge but she somehow manages to follow the signs to her gate, listening the sound of a person on the speakers say that it's the final boarding call.
A few gates away, she picks up the pace, when she sees the monitors on the televisions above her flicker to an all too familiar sight: it's a picture of Gwen. Not just any picture, but her high school graduation picture, the one that her mother has framed and set in the foyer of the family apartment. MJ's heart constricts and she stops short at the sight of it, remembering for the first time with sudden clarity the last day of high school, when she offered her yearbook to Gwen for them to swap signatures.
They weren't really friends in high school, but MJ had wanted to get as many signatures as she could, and Gwen was polite as ever. MJ remembers making small talk about how they were both going to Empire State for college, and how they should totally hang out when they got there, but back then she hadn't really meant anything by it. MJ figured she would be in the theater department, and that Gwen would be someplace else with all the other nerds, and that they might pass each other on the street and wave from time to time.
And maybe it would have turned out that way, if they hadn't both gotten lost on the first day of classes, holding outdated maps that had been handed to them at orientation by mistake.
"If you guys are looking for English building, it's been moved," one of the upperclassmen explained, pointing on the map to a building at least a mile away.
MJ had gawked in disbelief, and Gwen had let out a disappointed sigh and said, "Well, we're never going to make it in time for a two o'clock class." She checked her watch, as if to confirm it, and added, "I can't believe we already blew it on the first day."
"Great first impression," said MJ, who hadn't really cared so much about British Lit anyway.
Gwen folded up the map and slid it neatly into her purse. "Well. Do you want to grab coffee or something? If you've got nothing better to do."
MJ had stayed up the night before practicing a monologue and was so desperate for a nap that she almost said no. But she ended up following Gwen to some little corner shop and splitting a croissant with her, and then gradually they made it a weekly thing, and then started hanging out outside of that, too. MJ remembers how they had virtually nothing in common in the beginning, but that seemed to work for them, maybe because they provided each other a much-needed escape from their own lives: it was comforting for MJ to be around Gwen, so solid and sure in her decisions and career path when her own was so unpredictable, and she likes to think that maybe Gwen got a kick out of her theater stories too.
They probably weren't all that close until sophomore or junior year. It's all so long ago that MJ couldn't pinpoint the time when they became so inseparable, she just knows that it happened sometime after Gwen started dating Peter. She had seemed a lot more happy and accessible after that. Knowing the story behind it, it makes more sense to MJ now.
"Final boarding call for Flight 367, service to Chicago."
She tears her eyes away from the screen, but Gwen's image has long since been replaced by old footage of the Goblin terrorizing the city. Still, it is burned in the back of her brain, all she can see as she walks the ramp into the plane doors: Gwen, at seventeen years old, her smile shy and earnest, her blonde hair tucked neatly into a navy blue headband and her cheeks glowing with promise.
"Ma'am? You don't have any bags to fit into the overhead bin?"
MJ shakes her head no, and finds the last unassigned seat on the plane, in between two heavyset men who seem annoyed by her presence. Within a minute of sitting down she hears the plane whirr angrily under their feet. She has almost no memory of this unholy noise, and wonders if all planes sound like this as they're getting ready for take off, but when she looks around nobody seems fazed in the least.
She shuts her eyes for a brief moment as the plane starts to move forward on the runway. She imagines herself as a little girl on that plane ride she took, sitting between her parents, clicking and unclicking the latch for the tray table in front of her and relishing the treat of the magic markers her mother had stowed away for her in her carry on.
It seems impossible, that she could ever have been that simple, that innocent. MJ searches for some piece of that little girl inside of her, any shred that might remain, but there is nothing. She cannot be salvaged. She cannot be saved.
She opens her eyes just as the plane lurches forward and leaves the runway. The engine roars in her ears, the pressure jerks her back into the seat, and the plane climbs quickly up to death-defying heights, but all MJ feels as she clutches the seat handles is a crushing and pitiful relief.