Chapter Four

"Now what am I supposed to do?" I chucked a pillow across my room. It smacked into my clock radio and knocked it off my desk, gloomily flashing 1:24 AM in the darkness. The rest of the house was utterly silent.

I groaned and flopped back into bed as thunder muttered in the distance. When it came to gnawing feelings of guilt, nothing beat keeping massive secrets from your mother.

I scrubbed a hand over my eyes and caught a glimpse of the inside of my wrist. Where I used to see a web of blue veins was now a smooth, irregular star-shaped white patch. Spinnerets. Web-shooters.

My hand clung to the bedsheet and I wrenched it off angrily. Of course I was angry. Angry at myself, at Mom for not telling me sooner, even at Dad for disappearing when we all needed him most.

Oh yes, and angry at the fact that I was part arachnid!

What was I supposed to do now? I wasn't exactly your average tenth-grader anymore! How could I spend the rest of my life as some kind of genetic mutant? What did this all mean, for everything?

Not to mention Benny. Did Benny have the spider-abilities too? Had he inherited them at all? Or would they wait to show up when he was a teenager?

"Now what am I supposed to do?" I repeated. "What can I do?"

Well, I could just wear gloves for the rest of my life and pretend to be as boring and ordinary as everyone else. But how could I live like that? Why would I want to?

On the other hand...

I slapped my forehead. "I have got to be out of my mind."

I had just had this strange, silly image of me in a patriotic costume, trapezing around Manhattan like the old news clips of Spider-Man, no, Dad.

But me? The embarrassingly diminuitive of stature, wild-haired Mayday Parker?

I stood up, crossed the room and peeked out the door into the hallway. Pitch black and noiseless.

The door creaked deafeningly as it shut and I tiptoed down the hall towards the attic stairs. No movement from either Mom or Benny's rooms.

The attic was exactly as I had left it, with the toppled chest of drawers and the stack of spandex. I clicked on the hanging light bulb, and knelt down next to the open drawer. The mask was still lying crumpled on top of the stack of costumes, face down. I reached over and picked it up. The huge, blank, swept-back eyepatches were frozen in an unblinking wide-eyed stare.

Dad's mask. He had been my age when the spider had bitten him. I remembered a talk from a few years ago, when I was a little kid just starting the track team at the YMCA. There was a scheduled meet that I didn't want to go to, frankly because of a much younger Jennifer Banda. I had cried and wailed that I didn't want to go, that I just didn't want to run. Mom and Dad had known why. And, that morning, Dad had sat me down for a talk on responsibility.

Sounds like an old episode of Father Knows Best from the way I'm telling it, doesn't it? Either way, he had been very serious. I couldn't let my team down just because of something personal. I had started track, and I had to pull through and not try and get out of my duty.

Another crash of thunder brought me back to the present. I glanced around uncomfortably, but all was still. Dad had been my age when the spider had bitten him. And he had decided then to devote his life to using his powers to fight crime and save lives.

I swallowed, staring down at the mask in my hands. I was alone on this. Mom couldn't come and make everything okay. No one could make this decision for me. I was on my own.

Could I? Could I do it?

I leaned over the drawer, pulling out the entire costume. Standing up, I let it unfold to the floor. Much too long, and too wide. A little long in the arms, but probably fixable.

"Lots of people go into their family businesses," I said finally.

Well, it wasn't quite an average case, but still...

"Okay, Dad. I'm finally getting responsible," I said to the air, then began rummaging through the piles of cardboard boxes for Mom's old sewing kit.