Lying Heart
"Peter."
"Hm?"
Aunt May looks down at his breakfast pointedly. He follows her gaze all the way down to the fork in his hand, which he has absent-mindedly been using to shovel cereal in his mouth for the last five minutes.
"Oh," he says, holding it up and looking at it.
Aunt May finishes pouring hot water out of the kettle and says, "Something's been on your mind, Peter. You seem distracted."
Peter sets the fork back down. It's been three days since the fire, three days since the last time he saw his father and three days since he last talked to Gwen. When he woke up she was gone, but had left a note explaining it was getting late and her mother needed her to watch her brothers while her conference ran late. He missed school on Friday and then the next few days he spent scouring the streets of New York, not just for petty crimes but for answers.
Unsurprisingly, he found none. He isn't sure what he expected to find, but he returned to the apartment building where he had seen the arm, but when he carefully trekked through the guarded off ruins of the apartment, he found nothing. While this served to confirm that whoever this was knew how to cover their tracks, it did little else to help Peter.
He even returned to the basement twice. He considered leaving notes, although he eventually thought against it, just in case. But even knowing that he tried, he feels uneasy. Regardless of his issues with his father, the fact of the matter is that they are both in danger, and he feels responsible knowing that the man essentially sold himself out to save Peter.
But if Peter can't find him to warn him, there's nothing else he can do but hope that his father is intelligent enough to realize it on his own.
"Peter," says Aunt May, tugging him out of his long chain of thoughts.
"Yeah?"
She raises her eyebrows at him. He tries to backtrack to where their conversation left off, and it takes him a few moments to remember and say, "I guess I have a lot of schoolwork."
"The semester only just started."
"And the internship," Peter says defensively.
"The internship you haven't been to once since your first day?" Aunt May asks innocently.
Peter stares back down at his cereal so she won't see him rolling his eyes. He's tired, but not bone-tired, just tired enough to feel unreasonably irritated by someone nagging him at six thirty in the morning. Trying to keep Aunt May from knowing too much about his alter-ego's life sometimes feels like a full-time job by itself. He cringes, thinking of the day she admitted that she'd known all along.
He hasn't thought of that day in awhile now, with everything that has happened, but now something gives him pause.
"If something's bothering you …" says Aunt May. "Well, you know you can always talk to me."
Peter looks up at her, careful to watch her expression as he asks this. "That note that I was holding the other day when I came back," he says. "You looked at it for a really long time."
Her eyes dart over to him, just for a fleeting moment, but then she carefully focuses on finding her crossword and says, "What note?"
"The note that I—" He stops short. She knows exactly what note.
She seems to realize this was the wrong maneuver to have used on Peter, he can tell by the way she keeps rapidly clicking her pen against the table and trying too hard to look busy. He stares at her incredulously, thinking of the way she held that note, the way she seemed to scour every word of it.
Of course she would recognize his father's handwriting. It occurs to Peter now that she most likely recognized it right away.
As the realization dawns on him, he isn't quite sure how to feel. On one hand Aunt May has never been a fan of secrets, and the idea that she would be hypocritical enough to keep such a monumental piece of information away from him is maddening. On the other hand, she probably didn't believe it herself—he can understand why she wouldn't want to confuse or upset Peter by mentioning it.
Only then does a hurtful question emerge, one that is impossible to ignore—is it possible that his aunt knew that his father was alive the whole time? Her astonishment at the note might not have been for the fact that someone's handwriting resembled his father's, or at the idea that his father was still alive, but instead astonishment for the idea that Peter's father would bother to resurface after all these years. Peter hates that he is thinking this way, that he would feel any suspicion for the woman he considers his mother, but he can't help the lingering doubt in his mind that there is something not quite right about the way s refuses to look at him now.
"I have to go to school," says Peter, grabbing his bowl and walking to the sink with his head ducked down.
As he's slinging his backpack onto his shoulders, Aunt May touches his arm. Peter looks up in surprise. Her eyes have never been so unreadable.
"I worry about you, Peter."
He shrugs his arm away from her, looking away so he doesn't have to see her reaction. "I'm careful," he mumbles, not for the first time. He walks to the door. The words seem to slither unconsciously off his tongue when he turns just slightly and says, with just a hint of uncertainty, "And so are you."
Peter is so far removed from the rest of the world that he barely notices when Fisher sits down next to him and loudly drops his skateboard down on the tile floors. The teacher shoots them a dirty look, her gaze shifting between the two of them, trying to decide who was the culprit. Fisher raises a hand in apology.
"Hey, man," says Fisher, "I'm sorry I bailed on boarding last week."
Peter frowns, trying not to betray his confusion, but the truth is he has no idea what Fisher is talking about. He tries to think back to the one other lab they've had so far this semester, and the choppy details come back to him a little too slowly: something about boarding, a place in Brooklyn they were supposed to meet, sometime in the afternoon—he's embarrassed to say he completely let it slip his mind, and he can't remember why.
Peter hasn't remembered fast enough, though, because Fisher says, "There was this apartment complex fire, I don't know if you heard about it, but my dad's apartment totally got destroyed."
"The fire—" That would explain why Peter forgot. "The fire downtown?" he asks.
"Yeah," says Fisher, "so you heard about it."
Peter nods. "You said you lived in Brooklyn, I thought."
"Yeah, that's where my mom lives, my parents are separated."
"The apartment was totally destroyed?" Peter asks.
"Yeah," says Fisher, looking glum. "Sucks. I had some stuff in there, my old laptop, a bunch of winter clothes, movies and stuff like that. I didn't really think anything of it when I heard there was a fire, but apparently there were some sort of explosive substances involved, which is why the apartment got fried."
"That sucks," says Peter, digesting the situation. He wants to pry and see if Fisher knows anything more than he does, but he can't think of the right question to ask without seeming too interested.
"Lucky my dad wasn't there."
"Yeah," says Peter, his thoughts darting to his own father before he can stop himself. He tries to focus. "What floor was your—"
The teacher starts talking, loudly and definitively, letting the class know that the time for chitchat is over. Peter retreats back into his thoughts, mulling over everything that has happened in the past week from his father's reappearance, to his ill-defined friendship with Gwen, to Aunt May's suspicious behavior. By the time the bell rings and the class disperses, Peter forgets to ask Fisher anything about the fire.
On the walk to Gwen's place she pesters him relentlessly. "I haven't seen you all weekend," she starts as soon as they hit the street and the rest of the school can't hear them. "What have you been doing? Did you find anything out? Have you heard from your—"
"No." Peter shakes his head just once.
"You haven't tried to—"
"If he doesn't want to talk to me, that's his problem," says Peter, reluctant to admit that he has, in fact, tried several times to get in touch with the father who apparently wants nothing to do with him.
They walk another few steps and Gwen stops and says, "Look, Peter, I know you're upset, but the longer your father goes without knowing—"
"I tried, don't you think I tried?" Peter says, trying not to lose his patience. He doesn't want to talk about this, it feels like someone is burning a hole into his chest whenever he thinks about it. It's humiliating to think about, how worthless he must be in the eyes of this man who has left him again and again, who will even leave at the cost of figuring out whatever is happening with these robots.
He takes a breath, tries not to sound so on edge. "I won't pretend to know what he's up to, but I've tried to find him and he's just—he's gone. Just like the last time."
She doesn't bring it up again. They make it to the front of her apartment building, and Peter smirks a little bit at the doorman as he follows Gwen inside. They're alone once they reach the apartment. Gwen doesn't seem to be expecting this, and so instead of heading to her bedroom she pulls out her laptop and they sit in the living room, as if this makes the aloneness somehow less intimate, knowing that they are out in the open if her brothers burst through the front door.
She hooks Peter's camera up to her laptop so they can peruse the shots.
"These are awful," she says, snickering.
Peter can't help but agree. It isn't really her fault. She can't help that she doesn't have mutated abilities to crawl up a wall to get a good angle on a shot.
He sees a better shot and stops her. "I can probably crop this one and mess with it in photoshop."
She copies and pastes it into another file and continues going through the photos. The camera is still fairly new, so what Peter doesn't realize is that once Gwen scrolls through all the photos they took the other day, it will lead straight into the first photos that he ever took on the camera, the ones he hasn't deleted yet.
She has probably scrolled through five or six of the earlier photos on the camera before he grabs it from her, but it's too late: she has found one of the shots he took of her, this one with her face partially obscured by her locker door. It's the kind of picture he is objectively proud of. She looks like a quiet, overlooked character in a story seeking a moment of solitude in a sea of people, as if there is a little corner of the world in her locker where she has found some peace. For a moment he forgets to be embarrassed, admiring the curves of her half-visible cheek, of her lowered eyelid, of the back of her neck, all subtly speaking to the grief she has endured in the last few months.
Then he looks up guiltily, his whole face burning.
"I—it's just, that I, I mean, I was going to tell you I took the shot, but—the bell rang, and I didn't."
She's sitting with her knees together, her hands wrung together and very still in her lap. He can tell she's going to ask him something. He thinks she will ask why he took the shot, or if he does this often, or any number of things a girl who just found secret pictures of herself on a boy's camera would ask, but instead she looks at him and says, "You really liked me back then, didn't you?"
I have eaten approximately seventy homegrown grape tomatoes today. My coworker grows em at home and brought me a HUGE Ziploc bag full of them today. You are officially reading a story written by a tomato. Also, I'm going to go up to a giant mountain now and eat peaches. Look at me, pretending to be healthy.
Heads up: Entertainment Tonight has this ADORABLE interview with Andrew Garfield from the Lions for Lambs premiere back in 2007 online right now. I recommend everyone watch it. Then plug your ears and say LALALALALA when they cut to modern Andrew singing Emma Stone's praises with googly eyes and saying "she can do anything" (well OBVIOUSLY, or she wouldn't be dating the hottest guy alive).