5
One person, who slipped by the wayside soon after the news about Gwen's death broke everywhere, was Peter Parker.
It was subtle in the beginning because we were all preoccupied or too distracted – by the plunging of our psyche into a dark week of mourning - to notice the changes. But there was an overall scent of despair and loss and tragedy hanging about the school halls. It could be felt in the scant mutterings between pairs of students, or in the faraway look in our teacher's eyes as they took their classes two days of unscheduled break later. We were all in that perpetual state of limbo that follows a truly traumatic event that rocks one to their core. And that dark curtain of depressed mumbling remained in thick veils over our proceedings until exam week arrived. There had been an immediate backlash, on the part of many parents, who found it unfathomable that the school was sticking to their original timeline for the final exams, so soon after something so monumental had just occurred. And there had been no adjustment or flexibility or attempt at making room for a mandatory period of emotional respite for the students. It was a battle that yielded no favorable result because such was the machinery of the American education system that the show had to keep going on – even if a promising young student had just lost her life in the most terrifying of circumstances.
And I suppose it was naivety on our part or simply immaturity that partly overrode the gravity of the situation that we, as kids, were suddenly immersed in. For one, I'd never truly witnessed the impact or the consequence of having someone I knew, even if it might have been on an acquaintanceship basis, die. The idea of it simply didn't register or sink in, because we were all so young and ignorant back then, so full of youth and exuberance that the idea of facing our own mortality or death was like being dropped into a world where everyone spoke an alien language. But all of a sudden, the ugly face of that horrifying world was staring right into our innocent eyes, unblinkingly. The worst part of it was the realization, which crept on us little by little like a spooky hand from the dark, that if it could have happened to someone like Gwen Stacy, then it could have happened to any one of us. The thought of her fragile, flightless body hurtling down the length of the bridge towards the choppy waters underneath, was seared into our minds like a burning cattle brand being seared into a cow's flesh.
How easily that could have been me, or someone else like me, I kept thinking, time and again, turning that thought over and over in the confines of my bedroom like I was some inquisitive kid trying to solve a Rubik's cube under my fingernails.
That same deadened look of general detachment must have been ever-present, even while I was going through my tests. The quiz paper, starch white, with freshly printed questions, sat, just inches in front of me on the classroom desk, and yet my mind couldn't have been farther away. And that was the case with all of us; with every single individual seated in that classroom alongside me. I knew for a fact, that those same thoughts and that same out-of-body experience that I was going through, was what everyone else was going through as well. Because I could see it in their faces, in the same glazed-over quality of their eyes as I roved through the entire class. They had the same look on their faces that I'd seen in mine in the bathroom mirror a hundred times. Everyone did, from Harry, to Liz, to a bunch of stragglers who barely gave a shit in most classes, and it was even ruefully visible in the aggressive and roughly-hewn features of Flash Thompson. We were all limp and stunned and recovering like a trauma patient might be recovering from his injuries. Well, everyone except for those two empty desks right at the back of the class. Spots dully reserved for the deceased, and for the missing. One for Gwen Stacy. The other for Peter Parker.
If Peter had been a non-entity before, then the period following Gwen's death can be described, quite aptly, as the time he turned into a ghost. People hardly talked about him, it was all Gwen, every conversation was so heavily dominated by Gwen Stacy that eventually there came a point where I felt badly burnt out. And I couldn't understand what was making me so irritable all of a sudden, except that I felt guilty for feeling this way, even as my internal fuse for tolerating this downer of a topic was reaching its inevitable end. If I'm perfectly honest, I wasn't sad for Gwen. I hardly knew her that well to resonate emotionally as a family member or a close friend might. So, it wasn't pity I was feeling, even though it felt like it at first. I was just deeply upset. Upset at how undignified, and unfair, her passing had been. It felt like the universe had rolled some kind of cosmic dice and picked her as its unwitting victim. More than that, though, I wanted everyone to shut up about it and leave the memory of Gwen Stacy untouched and untarnished, just as we'd seen her in the school halls – happy and content and radiating with brilliance. Because that's how I would have liked to be remembered had it been me in her place.
But then, very quickly, I realized how self-serving that point of view actually was. Or I was made to come to terms with it on a rainy evening, where, whilst walking back home from an average Geography exam performance under my gray tousled umbrella – I'd preferred to take a walk than a limo ride with Harry that day - I ran into the neutral, frigid, and zoned out figure of Peter Parker, seated on the landing of his front porch. The same place we'd met for the first time.
I felt like a deer being caught in his headlights because there he was, unmistakably staring right at me - and as I'd realize a second later - right through me. His eyes were lost in the fog of the crashing downpour around us, in the pitter-patter hiss of the rain hitting the concrete lanes and the pavement where I stood, foolishly transfixed to my little spot and getting wetter by the second. I might as well have been a wispy hallucination in his world and I could almost hear the gears in his mind turning whilst he traveled down some distant memory lane with Gwen, or so I imagined. I didn't quite know how to break him out of this spell because it was the first time I'd laid my eyes on him in a while. So I was a little timid myself, and a little unsure about how to proceed. And in that moist atmosphere, with the painful look on his face, and with my inability to push past the awkwardness of the situation I suddenly found myself in, I conjured a few memories of my own. Perhaps it was linked in tandem with his thoughts as well. I didn't really know, I didn't ask him.
But there were these stories I'd heard from my time at school and from my aunt that I was just remembering. Stories about how this boy had lost his parents when he was four years old – some distasteful edict about a plane trip from a Hawaii vacation gone wrong – and more notably, the death of his Uncle a year prior to when I'd showed up. I'd heard tales, of varying degrees, from different mouths, of the people Peter had lost through the years. To an outsider like me, it sounded like an extraordinary set of circumstances for one so young to have gone through already. And yet, it was only starting to dawn on me, just as I stared into his soft and timorous expression through the curtain of rain separating us, those extraordinary set of circumstances had grown fairly larger in the last fortnight. If Gwen's death had been an unfair way to cut a life short, then life had dealt equally cruel blows to Peter Parker. To lose that many people in such a short time and to carry that burden, that weight on your unsure shoulders, at so tender an age, for the rest of your life, was something I didn't envy of him. There was no window-dressing the ugly truth, except, if nothing else, he would come out of it being no stranger to hardship and adversity – there were things in his life that many of us wouldn't face until way down the line, and unlike him, we'd be prepared for it while he had been defenseless for most of his. Right now, however, there was no blunting the scalding iron stake being driven through his entire being, tearing him into a million smithereens of unbridled grief. There was no going back. It was all there, on his face, no matter how well he tried to hide it. I knew it even then. The death of Gwen Stacy would haunt him, like no other event before or after, for years to come, and in a sense, it would go on to define him.
Before I took the tentative steps in his direction, perhaps in order to close the distance, or perhaps because I wanted to offer my sincere condolences, no matter how hollow it may have sounded, he was already standing up. I thought of rushing in, to say those words – "Listen, Peter, I just wanted to say… I'm sorry for your loss" – words he may have heard a countless number of times by now, empty words without much meaning, acting as a necessary distraction. But ultimately, I thought better of it when I saw the hard edge of his outline under the accompanying streetlamp, hands balled into fists as he walked into the warm yellow light of his Aunt's living room without a word, the front door closing on my face, leaving me to get drenched under the wind-bent stalk of my umbrella. On the way back home I'd be constantly thinking if he should have waited, even if as a courtesy, to listen to what I had to say. It may have turned out to be useful advice. Maybe I could have offered a gentle hand of help, of support, in a time of heart-wrenching pain. Maybe I could have eased him out of his isolation, his alienation, his loss even. Or maybe he already knew what I had to say. He just didn't care.