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There was always something different about Peter Parker. Not that he wasn't cute, and charming, and a total and utter goofball under that nerdy exterior he carried around with him. He was definitely all of that but he was also something more. From the moment I laid eyes on him, out in the front porch of his Aunt's house, hours before his junior year prom night, I knew that this boy in his oversized tuxedo and brushed back hair with the slightest twinkle in his eye had a few skeletons up his closet and some big ones at that. It may sound like a claim I couldn't possibly back and I won't dispute that I've had a few of them wrong over the years but the one thing I've never lacked is the confidence to trust my instincts. And even back then, standing under that open doorframe with Peter's awestruck expression directed at me, I remember having the dead certain feeling in my stomach that this boy in front of me may have all the telltale signs of adolescent immaturity on the surface, but when no one was watching, when the curtains were pulled back, he was nothing like you or me or anyone I knew.
That being said, the memory of the night I met him ranks high in my mind for another reason. Because it also happened to be the night I'd arrived at his doorstep drunk and annoyed, mostly because my aunt had forced me to come despite my initially not wanting to and then having to go because of her pestering. I didn't know who or what I was going to meet down at the Parker residency, except that it was some kind of setup for a blind date, and I remember hoping as I'd knocked on their door that it wasn't going to be some ugly, horribly deformed, cocky asshole on the other side about to answer my call, only to then be pleasantly surprised by the stunned expression of Peter Parker staring back at me in my drunken haze. At that moment, I was so relieved by his jaw hitting the floor that I couldn't help but let it all out - "Face it, Tiger. You just hit the jackpot!" I said as a playful zinger, a release, a rebuke of sorts but now it serves as a bittersweet reminder of my girlish immaturity as well, and as much as I'd like to blame it all on teenage hormones and just being a general airhead back in those days, there aren't many nights where I'm lying sleepless in my bed and not cringing at the memory of that comment. Sometimes, I wish I hadn't said it at all. But then other times I'm glad I did. I'm glad I got it out of the way so soon after we met, glad that I'd let him know the kind of person I was right off the bat and he could only be amused and thrilled by it or wholly disappointed.
I've never been one to try and hide myself in front of others and maybe that's just how I felt around Peter that I could be that person without feeling a whole lot of judgment from him even though he was the one hiding things all the time. Maybe he brought that out in me - the good, the bad, and the ugly, and he could handle it in a way like nobody else. His ability to weave in and out of things was almost scary, spiderlike even. Which makes the question I often get asked in those cocktail parties for the rich and famous by prim and arrogant producer types and actors and gossipy housewives even funnier – Tell us MJ, how does a high energy party-girl like you with big aspirations in Hollywood fall for a nobody from boring old Queens like Peter Parker? "Well, I'll tell you ladies and gentlemen and members of affluence…" - I'll say before preparing my well-rehearsed answer, notwithstanding the ones in my head like "Why not?" and "What's the big deal about it?" and "Frankly, it's none of your fucking business" which I'll have to bite my tongue on before saying – "You don't know him like I do" to which I'll get a good number of groans and a few disbelieving laughs but it always manages to satisfy the stooges of society to the point that they'll stop bothering me.
For some reason, people always characterize us as a mismatch. The lovely Mary Jane Watson, they'll say, and her tag-along boyfriend Peter, what's-his-name? Sometimes it's done on purpose, sometimes not, and sometimes it's something in their voice or in their looks that really gives off this overall sense of derision, of how one might treat garden weed if garden weed was in a relationship with a human being. I never quite understood it, naively so maybe, but it never seemed to affect Peter at all and neither has it done me. In fact, I've genuinely never cared about it, about how both our lives have come together and ended up where they have and how people might look at us for it and how they would treat us if they only knew what we knew about each other and how they couldn't so frankly there's no point trying. But then somewhere along that line of not being bothered with it to continuing our lives like normal, something changed. Something finally made me sit down and start taking things more seriously and start writing things down. Important things, like the one I'm writing now. After years of telling stories for Hollywood and being a part of countless movies in that time, I wanted to tell one of my own; a vanity project of sorts that would go well with my reputation up here.
So, in case you're still wondering what this is, allow me to make it clear - it's the story of how a girl and boy met on prom night in 2010, when the world was simple and both of us were young and dumb and stupid, or at least, I was if I can't speak for Peter himself, and how she fell madly, head over heels, in love with this boy. Obviously, I didn't know then how things would work out because right after our brief encounter with each other that night, where I went as his prom date, I spent the whole of next summer back in Pennsylvania, back in Montoursville roaming the sunny but empty streets of home before finally making that move to Queens the following year, where I started living with my aunt and became the Parker's new neighbors. This was the chance to start my life all over again and do it in the bustling recess halls of Midtown High as a new student where Peter Parker, the model schoolboy, would walk me down the corridors on that first day as my acting tour guide while showing me the science labs, the school grounds, the mess area, and the same gymnasium floors where we'd danced a year ago, this time with a lot less confetti and celebratory banners hanging about.
No, not even then did I know how incredibly intertwined our lives were about to get, and there was no way of knowing even if I tried. But it's hard to imagine what things might have been like otherwise, or once upon a time, or many years in the future, because eventually there would come a time where I would never remember a life that happened before Peter Parker came into mine and I'm sure it's likewise for him. Because if things had happened even a little different to this story I'm about to tell, a little different than how they actually did, would I be the same person who's sitting here writing these words, the ones that you're reading right now, and be telling you all these things? Maybe you think I would. Personally, I doubt it though. I doubt I'd be that same person, that girl-next-door Mary Jane Watson of years ago or the superstar Mary Jane Watson of years to come, if I hadn't met him that fateful night in that dimly lit front porch of his aunt's house in Queens and said that god-awful line that has stuck with me through all that time for good or bad.
Because when it comes to how things worked out for the both of us - let's face it, Tiger. We just hit the Jackpot.