Free The Night Gwen Stacy Died by Sarah Bruni

dominos
     and he and his mother would divvy them up face-down on the table. Every once in a
     while, they convinced Jake to play with them. But usually he was too busy to play
     with dominos.
    Peter was counting dots. He was very close to winning.
    “You and me, honey,” his mom had said very quietly.
    Peter was counting the dots on his tiles. He was trying to concentrate. Sometimes
     if his mom drank a little wine with dinner she talked quietly, under her breath. It
     was not such a strange thing. He was adding the dots on the tiles in multiples of
     five. Those were the rules.
    “How about it?” his mom said again. “How about you and me.” Her voice was so soft
     it sounded like it was coming from the other room.
    Peter looked up at his mom.
    “How about what?” he said.
    His mom was running the palm of her hand slowly up and down the side of her face.
     She wasn’t looking at him. And she wasn’t looking at her tiles either.
    “Honey?” his mom said after a minute.
    He didn’t know why he’d said something that night. His brother sometimes didn’t come
     home for a few days at a time. Even after his first try with the pills, it was not
     such a strange thing for Peter to be left alone with his mother in the evening.
    “Where’s Jake?”
    She hadn’t told him then. It was another four days of waiting before his mother would
     tell him Jake was gone. Still, Peter had understood then that it would be him and
     his mother alone for some time.
    Around then Peter began spending his afternoons in his brother’s old bedroom. His
     mom was often working late into the evening at the hospital, and after school Peter
     was alone in the house. His mother had kept the room exactly as he had left it, so
     it wasn’t hard to find the milk crates filled with comic books and drag them out of
     his closet one at a time. At first, the sliding doors of the closet had been a place
     that Peter avoided. He looked at them and saw his brother slumped in the corner as
     they’d found him before his mother dragged him out. But eventually, he could look
     at the closet doors and think only of the comic books behind them.
    Peter had never seen his brother read the comic books. But once Peter had watched
     him from the hallway sorting through issues, organizing them into the crates where
     they were kept.
    “You’re not a very good spy,” Jake had called into the hallway. “I can hear you breathing.”
    Peter knelt on the floor next to the crate Jake was pulling from. There were hundreds
     of them, and Peter had the impulse to run his fingers along their stapled edges.
    “Take one if you want,” Jake said. “It’s just a pile of trash.” But he never threw
     them out, and when Peter found them after Jake left, each issue was still preserved
     in a cellophane sleeve.
    “Where did you get them?” Peter had said, but then he was sorry that he asked.
    “My old man,” Jake replied.
    Jake’s father was not Peter’s father, but when Jake talked about him, sometimes Peter
     liked to pretend he was. Jake remembered all kinds of things about his dad—his taste
     in music, the type of beer he liked to drink, where he used to take Jake sledding
     when it snowed—but Peter remembered nothing of his own father, and his mother never
     spoke of him.
    “Can I have this one?” Peter asked.
    “Any one you want,” Jake said, without looking.
    Peter chose a later issue, once Spider-Man had already settled down with Mary Jane,
     because he was attracted to the red swath of her hair, filling the empty space; but
     it was later—it was after Jake was gone—that he read from the beginning of the story.
     How Spider-Man was just a regular kid whose family kept getting killed by villains,
     and what it was like to be lonely for a long time before he discovered these powers
     that showed up out of nowhere, and then even after that, to be lonely sometimes still.
    After school, during the afternoons, Peter read the comic books Jake had