“Since you been in the shower?” Ganke joked. “I did some breakdancing. Showtime!” He rolled the top half of his body.
“Come on, man. I can’t go back to class tomorrow ice-cold.”
“Aight, aight.” Ganke turned his chair around. “Here’s your briefing. I feel like your trusty sidekick, by the way. Or your hype-man.” Ganke shook his head. “Anyway, so the two days you were gone…” Ganke thought for a second. “One thing is, Mr. Chamberlain is crazy.”
“Uh…yeah.” They had just started their unit on the Civil War in fifth-period history. Everyone figured this was Mr. Chamberlain’s favorite subject to teach, because he had been talking about it the entire month that school had been in session.
“I mean, I know you know. But he’s like…nuts. So he keeps talking about how the Civil War was like this beautiful, romantic thing. He talks about it like it’s a video game he loves to play. But the weirdest part was on Friday, when he finally started talking about like, y’know, the nitty-gritty stuff—slavery, and how the Confederacy didn’t want to end it, and all that—he was going on about how, depending on how you look at it, slavery was kind of good for the country.”
“Wait, he said that?” Miles asked, grabbing one of his web-shooters from under his bed.
“I mean, basically. You know, Chamberlain. He does the whole talking statue thing, acting like it’s gonna make him seem smarter or whatever, but that’s what I took from it.” Miles fired the shooter at the TV, a wad of web turning it on. Ganke shook his head. “So lazy.”
“What? I’m exhausted from saving your ass,” Miles joked, shooting a splat at Ganke as if it were Silly String. “Anyway, okay, Chamberlain’s trippin’ as usual. Blah-blah-blah. Anything else?”
“Well, yeah. This right here.” Ganke struggled to peel the web off his arm. He eventually just quit and held up his notebook.
“And what’s that?”
Ganke cleared his throat, and then pretended to clear it. “Ahem. Ahem,” he said dramatically, before leaning over and turning the TV off.
“I am a vault, a safe locked by loyalty earned by few;
tell me your secrets, whisper them to me behind enemy backs;
I was born this way, a vault, and your secrets will die when I do.”
Ganke looked at Miles, nodding his head. Miles returned the look, one eye slightly closed as if he was concentrating on what Ganke just said.
“What the hell are you talkin’ about, Ganke?”
“Did you like that?”
“Um…what the hell are you talkin’ about, Ganke?” Miles repeated.
“It’s what we’ve been learning in Ms. Blaufuss’s class since you’ve been on lockdown. You liked it, right?” Ganke nodded confidently at Miles’s blank face. “It’s a sijo. Some kind of Korean poetry.” Ganke slapped his notebook on his lap, excited. “This is the poetry of my people! This is my birthright! That’s why I’m so good at it!” Miles waited for Ganke to give in to his usual jokey grin, but he didn’t. Miles shot more web at the TV to turn it back on. Ganke leaned over and turned it back off. “And I named this one ‘MILES MORALES IS SPIDER-MAN.’” Then the grin came.
“Not anymore,” Miles said, lying back on his bed. As soon as he said it, he immediately felt a heaviness leave his body. A weight lifted.
“What?”
“I’m done,” Miles said. “I mean, the powers are acting all weird anyway, and honestly, I can’t afford to be Spider-Man.”
“You wanna get paid to be Spider-Man? I mean, you do know that we—well, you—just did.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about hero-for-hire or nothing like that. Look, you know how over the last few years I’ve gotten better at being…I don’t even know how to say it.”
“I’ll say it. You got better at not being a punk? Better at not being a sucker-ass mini Mario. Now you big Mario. Mario with the mushroom and the invincibility star.”
Miles sat back up. “Look, I’m not scared of nobody like I’m scared of my parents. And I don’t mean that, like, I’m scared they gon’ do something to me. I mean, I come…we come from…” Miles couldn’t find the words to finish. “Think about my dad. He don’t have a degree. He didn’t even graduate from high school. My mother did, but she couldn’t afford college. Think about my block. Cyrus Shine, wherever he is these days. Fat Tony, who spends most of his time waiting on a hand-to-hand, sitting on his stoop talking trash to whoever walks by. Frenchie at the end of the block who works around the corner at the dollar store. She’s cool, but her son, Martell, better make it to the league. And then Neek, from across the street. Went to the army. Went to war. Fought for the country. Got out. And now he’s just…there. Sometimes you see him pull the curtains back and peek out, but that’s about it.” Miles got up from his bed, grabbed his backpack. “You know what they call me every time I go in the barbershop? Baby Einstein. Smarty Arty. Stuff like that. And they smile and give me a hookup on cuts. They ask me about girls, of course, but they also ask me about my grades. My uncle used to do the same thing.” He reached in and pulled out his suit, black and shiny with red webbing. “It might sound silly to you. I don’t know.”
Ganke leaned forward in his chair. “Okay, Miles, um, aren’t you being just a little dramatic? You’re doing bad in one class. One class.”
“Let me ask you something, Ganke.” Miles balled up the uniform. “Did you get in here through a lottery?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you on scholarship?”
“No,” Ganke said, leaning back, folding his arms across his chest.
“If for some reason this doesn’t work out, do you have another plan? Are there other options for you?”
“Miles.”
“I’m just asking.” Ganke hesitated, then nodded. “Exactly. You and me, we the same in a lot of ways. But this ain’t one of them.” He opened the closet behind his bed, tossed the suit into the corner, before shutting it again. “To have the time to be a Super Hero, you gotta have the rest of your life laid out. You can’t be out there saving the world when your neighborhood ain’t even straight. I just gotta be real about it.”
Miles flopped back on the bed. His mind was made up. He was done. He was going to do what he knew he needed to do, starting tomorrow. Refocus.
But for the rest of the night, he was going to watch as many episodes of American Ninja Warrior as possible. He shot another wad of web at the TV, cutting it on for the third time, while Ganke turned back toward his desk and started scribbling in his notebook. When he was finished, he propped it up on the desk, the words written so small on the page that a normal person wouldn’t have been able to make them out from across the room. But Miles could.
MILES MORALES IS A DUMBASS
What good is it to quit doing the thing that you do best?
Unless quitting is freedom, but what if it’s not freedom?
What if it’s just a smiling family and a prison cell?
And though Miles could see the words clearly on the page, he also could see that Ganke couldn’t understand how he felt. So Miles just shook his head and turned back to the TV, watching another man jump through an obstacle course to prove—for no reason at all—that he too was a little bit more than normal.
Miles had been to this place before. Knew it the way he knew his own house. But this was far from home. Pillars the size of trees in fantasy forests. White stone. Marble. Big wooden door with a brass ring in the middle. A castle entrance. Fountain in front of the steps. Off-white linen curtains at the windows, pulled back and tied off. Inside, leather couches like giant thrones, oak tables, tile floors far nicer than the crummy ones in Brooklyn bathrooms. Portraits on the wall of old white men. Dark paintings that made the whole house look sepia. A crystal chandelier. A grandfather clock. A cattle iron and a cat-o’-nine-tails as decoration. The smell, familiar. The fight, even more so.
Left, left, duck. Left hook, duck. Clean right uppercut to Miles’s chin. He bit down on his t
ongue. Penny-flavored blood filled his mouth, and before he could recover there was a foot in his chest knocking him back, his body banging against the massive front door. Then came the rush. A flurry of fists. Miles did his best to block as many as he could before grabbing a lamp off the side table next to him—the lampshade made of red, green, and purple stained glass—and cracking it over the head of…who? It was as if the person he was fighting was blurred. As if there were some sort of invisible heavy plastic between them, distorting the figure. The glass from the lamp shattered, an explosion of shards as brightly colored as sundae sprinkles. The person Miles was fighting hit the floor and Miles shot some web to trap him there, but the blur dodged it, rolling backward up onto his feet, white silken cord flying from his wrist as well. What? How? Miles bobbed, then charged the—web-slinging?—blur, spearing him back into an old cabinet full of crystal trinkets. Blood dripped down his distorted face and onto the mosaic tile floor. Miles punched him. The blur punched back, and the two traded blows until finally Miles released more webbing, anticipating his combatant’s next move. As expected, the blurred fighter dodged it, the web attaching itself to the old wooden cabinet—all part of the plan. Miles wound the web around his wrist and grabbed it, yanking the bureau down, a cacophony of clinking as the crystal trinkets tipped. The blurry battler quickly turned around to stop it from falling on him, and that’s when Miles used the shooter on his other hand to web up the fighter’s beclouded legs. Distract and defeat.
“It’s over,” Miles said, watching the man struggle to get free. Miles unloaded what seemed like a never-ending stream of webbing until his adversary was trapped in what looked like a white sleeping bag. The blur didn’t respond, just rolled his head around as Miles bent over him, pushing his hands into the foggy face. And instantly, as if Miles’s hands were pushing clouds from the sun, the man’s face came into focus.
“Uncle Aaron?”
“Miles,” Aaron whimpered.
Before Miles could say anything else, Aaron’s cheeks sank, and his nose narrowed into a blade of skin and cartilage. The patch of hair on his chin grew long and white. There were burn marks on his face that began to wrinkle and crack like dry clay.
Miles jumped back, not sure of what his uncle was doing there. Who he was turning into. What he was turning into.
“Miles,” Aaron whispered. Then a little louder. “Miles.”
Miles shook his head, looked away, squeezed his eyes shut. Then he opened them and turned back toward Uncle Aaron, whose mouth, slightly opened, now housed rotten teeth.
“Miles,” he called again, his voice thickening, Miles’s name like slime in his throat. Miles leaned in. Uncle Aaron flashed a sly smile, yanked his now-knobby white hands from the web and wrapped his fingers around Miles’s throat, squeezing as hard as he could. “MILES!”
The loss of breath.
The kind that comes from falling.
Miles crashed hard onto his twin bed.
“MILES!” Ganke yelled. He was standing in front of Miles’s bed in sweatpants and a T-shirt with I LIKE TO MOVE IT, MOVE IT! printed across the front in neon green.
“Huh? Wha—? What’s…?” Miles put his hands over his face. “What time is it?”
“Almost seven.”
“Ugh.” He spread his fingers and peeked through them like fence pickets. “Did I do it again?”
“Yeah, man,” Ganke said. “I got up to go to the bathroom and you were literally crawling on the ceiling. And I just gotta tell you, as your friend, it’s not cool to wake up to a human-size spider above your head.”
“Sorry, man. Just…crazy dream.”
“Your uncle again?” Ganke asked, sitting back on his bed.
“Yeah,” Miles huffed. It wasn’t a hard guess for Ganke. Miles had been dreaming about his uncle for a long time. Since he’d watched him die.
That day at the Baruch Houses, Uncle Aaron knew that the spider that bit Miles wasn’t just a normal spider. And Miles knew it, too, after watching his uncle step on it and noticing the blood smear radiated on the hardwood. Miles was certain that, even though his uncle didn’t intentionally plant the spider, it was obviously special, which meant the bite was special, which meant there was a good chance Miles would also now be special. No longer a regular boy.
“This will be a simple conversation—a short one,” Uncle Aaron said the next time they met up as they sat on the couch. No pizza this time. Aaron looked Miles square in the face. “I’ll tell people.”
“Tell people what?” Miles asked, perplexed.
“About you. About…what you can do. What you are.” Aaron pointed to the small circular scar on the top of Miles’s hand, no bigger than a pimple, then sat back and smiled. He wasn’t stupid, he explained to Miles, and he was willing to leak Miles’s secret. “Unless…”
“Unless what?”
Unless Miles agreed to help him take down a mob boss and former friend of Aaron’s everyone called the Scorpion. Miles didn’t have a choice. He did what he had to do, and used the fact that the Scorpion was a terrible criminal to justify it. But the threat of ratting Miles out didn’t go away. Instead Uncle Aaron demanded that Miles continue to work with him. For him. But Miles knew that wasn’t an option. When he confronted Aaron, a brutal battle ensued. Aaron got the best of Miles, who was still just a novice at using his powers, leaving nothing but the final blow of one of Aaron’s electric gloves, called gauntlets. But the gauntlet malfunctioned and blew up in Aaron’s face, leaving him crushed by an explosion he’d planned to use, in a desperate fit, to kill Miles.
“You’re just…like me,” Aaron said, burned and bloody, before losing consciousness. It was the last thing he said to Miles.
When you fight your uncle to the death, it’s hard to shake it. Hard to not see his face, his eyes glossing over, his breath slowing, gurgling, stopping. It’s hard to keep it a secret. A secret that seems to seep into everything—your immediate family, your school, your sleep. Ganke knew, because Ganke knew everything, but that didn’t stop the constant loop playing over and over again in Miles’s head.
He could never go back to bed after the nightmares. He tried time and time again, but it was impossible. Plus his alarm was going to go off in a few minutes anyway. So with a disgruntled sigh, Miles got up.
Ganke was in the shower already, and as Miles ventured down the hall of feet funk, sliding lazily in his flip-flops into the bathroom, he could hear Ganke speaking softly to himself in one of the shower stalls. As opposed to the stench of toxic toes in the hallway, the bathroom smelled more like wet dog and corn chips. Steam wafted through the air.
“Who you talking to, Ganke?” Miles groused, turning the knob on the sink faucet. Then catching himself, he added, “You know what? Don’t tell me. I don’t wanna know.”
“Whatever, man. I’m working on my poetry. All three lines have to be between fourteen and sixteen syllables,” Ganke explained through the vinyl shower curtain. “So you gotta count ’em out.”
Miles cupped his hands under the spigot and splashed water on his face. “Why?” he asked.
“What you mean, why?” Ganke snatched one side of the curtain back, just enough to push his face through. “Because my people said so.” Then he snatched the curtain closed again, and yelled, “SIJO!”
Miles and Ganke flip-flopped back to their room, got dressed—hair-brushing, sneaker-brushing—split a pack of cold Pop-Tarts, and headed out to class. But before they left their dorm, Miles doubled back. Just for a moment. He walked over to the closet and opened the door, Ganke still in the hallway waiting for him. He peered into the pile of clothes and shoes. There in the dark corner was the red-and-black skin he usually carried with him every day, now balled up underneath a mess of BVA sweatshirts, unmatched socks, and spotless sneakers. He stared at it for a few seconds before reaching through the junk and yanking out the mask. He held it up, limp like a melted face, then, shaking his head, stuffed it back down into the pile of leather and laces. Not today.
; At Brooklyn Visions Academy students only had four classes a semester, but those classes were ninety minutes long. So if you had bad classes, they were extra bad. But at least Miles got to start the day with math.
Calculus, one of Miles’s favorite classes, was taught by Mr. Borem, a skeletal man with olive skin and a nose like an ice pick. “Calculus,” Mr. Borem had said on the first day of class, jacking his pants up to his navel while pacing across the room, “is the mathematical study of change.” But after that speech came the real glory of math, at least to Miles—numbers and symbols and letters. The sweet sight of one plus one equals alphabet. A challenge that Miles was always excited about facing.
After that—chemistry with Mrs. Khalil.
Then, while half the students had first lunch, Miles and Ganke headed to Ms. Blaufuss’s class.
The thing about Ms. Blaufuss was that she didn’t really look like she was supposed to be teaching at BVA. Where was the blazer? The over-starched button-up? The khakis? The “sensible” shoes? She did have the glasses, though, but they weren’t the Brooklyn Visions Academy glasses—the wire circles or the plastic rectangles. No, Ms. Blaufuss wore cat-eye frames, bright yellow as if they were made of lemon rinds. Her hair, a choppy short cut, was always tousled. Sometimes she wore dresses, but usually she wore jeans rolled at the ankles, loose blouses, long sweaters scrunched to her elbows, high heels Monday through Thursday, and sneakers on Friday. She had a tattoo on her wrist of a semicolon, and one on her forearm of a slice of pepperoni pizza.
“Mr. Morales, welcome back,” she said, as Miles and Ganke entered the classroom. Her room was covered in posters of writers, most of whom Miles had never heard of before. He took his seat. Ganke sat behind him. Winnie Stockton, a sko-low—which was what the kids on scholarship called themselves—from Washington Heights, sat in front of him.
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