Peter doesn't like hospitals.
So when he gets beat up by a group of D-list supervillains and ends up with one stab wound too many, he doesn't make a beeline toward the hospital, even though it's only a five-minute swing away and May is on the night shift.
He does what he always does: stumbles home, clumsily stitches it up himself, and falls asleep on the couch in the living room, one hand clutched against his aching side, the television where The Office is playing stretching shadows across the room.
Anything is better than the hospital.
The next day he comes to school with three cracked ribs and a black eye hidden under a baseball cap and sunglasses. It makes him look like a total douche, which he knows because only douches wear sunglasses on a cloudy day, and also because when he slumps down at the lunch table, MJ says, "You look like a douche," and then turns the page of her book without looking up.
"Are you, like, high or something?" Ned asks, cautiously waving a hand in front of Peter's shaded eyes.
"Got hurt," Peter mutters, dropping his forehead onto the table as he pulls out a pack of gummy worms. "Patched myself up. Life sucks. No more questions, your honor." He shifts so his cheek is pressed against the tabletop, one hand clutching his ribs to lessen the pressure of breathing in and out.
Still not looking up from her book, MJ reaches across the table and plucks the now-lopsided sunglasses from his face, twirling them between her brown fingers like a fidget spinner as she turns another page.
"Jerk," Peter accuses, turning his head so his black eye is looking up at her indignantly.
Instead of looking sympathetic toward his plight, MJ gives him a superior look that says she doesn't really care what he thinks, especially because he's sitting there with three cracked ribs and a pack of discounted gummy worms, and she's sitting there with no cracked ribs and a whole lunch that includes an organic banana, which obviously makes it clear who the superior one in this situation is.
Ned just looks worried.
"Why didn't you call someone?" he asks. "Or go to the emergency room? You could have just, like, said you fell down the stairs or something. Or were being super heroic and totally awesome and saved a cat stuck in a tree for this really old lady. And then all you had to do was find some really old lady and pay her to back up your story—"
"Yeah, except Parker can't lie for shit," MJ points out. "Even if he does have a partially-prostituted ninety-year-old lady backing him up."
Which of course leads to two arguments, one on the exact definition of a prostitute and if it's even possible to prostitute one's acting skills, because "creative liberties aside, MJ, webster dictionary says—" and the other on whether keeping a secret identity secret for almost two years means someone is officially a good liar, even if that someone does look "like a guilty puppy that stole a piece of ham from the cutting board when no one was looking" every time he lies.
Peter listens to the argument without really listening. One cheek still pressed against the table, a finger tracing patterns in the wood table that isn't really wood because it's laminated plastic or some shit. Like the laminated sign hanging five blocks from his old apartment, cracked and plastered with stickers passerbys had tagged it with, bearing the name of the cheap twenty-four hour supermarket beneath it.
(The supermarket. Bottles of vitamin water for ninety-eight cents including tax. Old fluorescent lights flickering, buzzing like beehives overhead. Like a warning. A loud bang, a man stumbling back into a display of fruit, honeycrisp apples bouncing across the floor like runaway ping pong balls. Bloody handprints on the tile floor, swirls like mud. Bloody hands trying to find where all of it was coming from. Trying to understand why the blood wasn't stopping.)
Ned and MJ's voices are still arguing above him, but with the side of his head still pressed against the table, they sound distant, distorted, like light through bubble windows. Like two people holding a conversation in different parts of a theater, and neither can find the other because there are too many hard surfaces for their voices to ricochet off, too much empty space to fill.
Just as they're in the middle of debating whether or not puppies even feel guilt, or whether faking guilt is just an evolutionary tactic used to avoid further displeasing their owners, Peter interrupts.
"I don't like hospitals."
Ned pauses with a forkful of pasta halfway to his mouth. MJ glances over her book, which she's been reading in between rapidly firing points and counterpoints at Ned about canine emotions. And then they're both staring at him, and Peter knows what they're thinking because it's what he's thinking, and then all he can think about is that even though he was the one to bring it up, even though people keep telling him to talk about it, he just feels even more vulnerable and exposed and small, like a lab rat under a table lamp.
So before any of them can make any final conclusions, and before the worry lines on Ned's face turn him prematurely into an eighty-year-old man, he says quickly, "You know, because of May. Working there and all. She'd freak. And besides, their gumball machines are terrible. I'm pretty sure they're just filled with marbles."
Weak.
It's a very weak joke.
MJ has finally put her book down. (This is a sign of how interested in the conversation she is, since usually she doesn't give a fuck about anything going on around her if she's absorbed in a book. Peter once witnessed her sitting at a cafeteria table when a fight broke out between two students. When they'd accidentally rolled under her table, still shouting and swinging fists, all MJ did was tuck up her legs and turn the page.) She levels him with a measuring glance.
"You're a dumbass," she finally decides, then pulls out her phone and gives him the name of her therapist in the same breath.
Which, yeah, that was MJ for you.
As she texts Peter the number for one "helps with the Big Sad"—at least, that's what they're listed as in her contact information—she tells him that if he dies because he's a dumbass who didn't go to the hospital after he got shot, then she'll be morally obligated to create a movement for dumbasses who don't go to the hospitals after they get shot, which means that instead of studying for the PSAT, she'll have to spend her time making posters to signal support for said dumbasses, and then she'll fail her PSAT completely, and dammit, Parker, you'll have ruin my chances of achieving world domination because you have an inability to ask for help.
Ned tells her that's victim-blaming and pretty unrealistic, and that she can probably spare to skip a step (#37: pretend to conform to capitalistic ideals by attending reputable college to lure society into a sense of security) in her three-hundred and twenty-seven step plan to achieve world domination.
She tells him to fuck off and returns to her book.
After Peter adds the therapist to his contact information (thinking that maybe he'll give the number a call, but will probably just end up deleting it later because he's fine, really, he is. Fine.), he tries to thank her with a weak smile. But MJ has either maxed out her graciousness or his smile looks more like a grimace, because her only response is to raise an eyebrow and bury her nose back in her book on the French Revolution like nothing happened.
"Next decathlon meeting is on Friday," she tells him, her voice muffled by the decapitated ghosts of rich people sentenced to the guillotine two and a half centuries ago. "Don't be late.
That was pretty much how it went in the emotions department for MJ. Last month, she told Peter that on average she experiences maybe three emotions per week, so making her feel worried and benevolent all in one afternoon must really be taxing her.
(Even though he totally knows she's lying about that. She can play that bored, neutral, I-don't-care- about-anything air all she wants, but there's no way someone who wears three scarves on cold days and says, "Excuse me, sir bastard" to any pigeon she encounters isn't a total gummy bear on the inside.)
Ned deserts them five minutes later, claiming he has to go to the library and study for their upcoming Spanish quiz. Which is interesting because their Spanish quiz was yesterday and, coincidentally, it's the same time that Betty from three tables over packs up her lunch as well.
Waiting until both of them are out of sight, Peter turns to MJ with a grin, hoping to share a laugh with her about it. But she's hidden herself behind her giant book again, and since he values his life enough not to interrupt her, he files it away to tease Ned about later.
"What's the real reason you didn't go to the hospital last night?" she asks without looking at him.
Ahahaha.
Shit.
"I dunno," he says casually, reaching for his sandwich before remembering he finished it five minutes after the bell rang. "They smell weird. Are you gonna finish those fries?"
MJ peers at him over the top of a completely different book than she had five seconds ago (seriously, does she keep a stack of them in a pocket dimension and pull one out whenever she needs one?) and gives him a disinterested look before returning to her reading on Cannibalism in Medieval European Societies. She's probably trying to go for her trademark you-could-be-choking-on-your-own-tongue-and-I-would-still-wait-to-finish-my-page-before-calling-you-an-ambulance kind of look, and it might have actually worked, but the book is upside-down and her neutral expression is sloppier than usual. Curling away at the edges.
If Peter didn't value his life, he might have called it worry.
Concern. For him.
Even though she's still pretending to be deeply invested in the cannibalistic hypocrisy of European people, the book remains up-side down. And Peter remains on edge, afraid she might suddenly snap the book shut and demand to know what was going on with him, and that in the face of a future world-dominator casually reading a book on cannibalism, all of his resolve with crumble and everything will come bursting out like powder from a stress ball squeezed too tight.
But when MJ does close her book, it's with nothing but a roll of her eyes and a huff of exasperated breath. She shoves it in her book-bag, takes a bite of her lunch. Mutters something about how she's not even going to bother looking up the average life-span statistics for spandex-wearing dumbasses with a hero-complex, because she already knows the answer and seeing it will just send her into a depressive spiral, and she doesn't have time for a depressive spiral because they've got exams coming up, and dammit, Parker, stop trying to ruin my plans for world domination.
Which, you know.
Fair.
Peter apologizes for getting in the way of her three-hundred and twenty-seven step plan to overthrow thousands of incompetant government officials and declare herself as ruler supreme of the earth. She gives him a squinted-eye once-over before slowly, without breaking eye contact, sliding her plate of half-eaten fries to the center of the table.
Since she's allergic to the full spectrum of human emotions, or at least to communicating them through words, Peter's learned that MJ sharing food with you is her way of saying things are okay. At least for the moment.
He takes a fry.
She steals one of his discounted gummy worms and goes back to reading her book.
"Seriously, though, you should make an appointment," she tells him a few days later at practice, long after he thinks the conversation is over.
(But that's pretty much how it works with MJ being one of your best friends—you mention something in passing, and then two weeks later, bam, you're in the middle of a conversation about the impacts of global warming on city rodents, and how your opinion on the matter is wrong on thirty-seven different accounts, even though you aren't aware you have an opinion on the matter because global warming and city rodents? And since she doesn't bother clueing you in, you have to stand there and flip through the past six weeks trying to figure out what she's talking about, and it's only after she walks away that you realize this whole thing stems from a joke you made about a possum, like, three weeks ago. She's scary like that sometimes.)
"What appointment?" Peter asks, playing dumb as he tries to remember if it's possible to recover a deleted contact.
MJ gives up a squinted-eye look.
He tries not to sweat.
Luckily, Abe chooses that exact moment to skid into the room in a pair of honest-to-god roller shoes. He crashes head-first into one of the study tables, which of course makes Flash start choking on the whole sandwich he's stuffed in his mouth for no fucking logical reason, which of course makes Cindy start screaming as Mr. Harrison, apparently losing what little of his mind remains after teaching public school for twenty years, starts trying to perform CPR on Flash instead of the Heimlich maneuver. So in the chaos of Peter's life being a fucking sitcom and MJ going to perform the actual Heimlich maneuver, he's able to dodge any more follow-up questions.
Which is nice.
For now.