Free The Night Gwen Stacy Died by Sarah Bruni Page A

left behind,
     and he started to realize there were certain undeniable similarities. There was a
     long history of superheroes being lied to, men and women with superhuman strengths
     who only ever had been told half their own stories and had to find out the other half
     on their own. It also wasn’t uncommon for their families to be largely absent or dead
     by the time they reached adulthood. These were the facts. Peter was not embellishing.
     He also was not suggesting that his was the life of such a hero—obviously there were
     certain abilities missing. For example, he couldn’t move buildings. He couldn’t propel
     off them either. He couldn’t see through them. Basically, he couldn’t do anything
     extraordinary having to do with buildings. So he wasn’t superhuman. It had really
     been devastating to come to this realization. But when his so-called nightmares had
     started shortly after, Peter understood that while he wasn’t
necessarily
superhuman, there was definitely something abnormal going on with him. When, at eight
     years old, he told his mother that he wanted her to call him a different name, a name
     that just happened to be the same as Spider-Man’s alter ego, his mother complied.
     She was working under the assumption that this request was a reasonable response to
     childhood trauma, and at the suggestion of some child psychologist at the hospital,
     she went with it. But the more time that went on, the easier it was for the name to
     become permanent, and for neither of them to use his old name at all.
    Was that all? It was habit and nothing more? Not exactly. Yes, it was habit, but even
     now, there was some part of Peter that felt grateful to have this story to defer to.
     If he actually had a friend call him out and say, “Who do you think you are, Parker?
     You think you’re pretty goddamn special, huh?” of course Peter would punch the friend
     in the arm and insult him for even coming to this conclusion in jest. “Yeah, I’m a
     fucking superhero,” he’d say. “Let’s go out back and I’ll teach you how to fly.” He’d
     give the guy a real hard time, rile him up a little for the mere suggestion that he
     was trying to be someone he was not, trying to be something better than what he was.
     There would be a good laugh over that. But Peter mostly spent the evenings with his
     mother. There were a few guys he talked to over the CB radio or in the dispatch office,
     but that was it.
    The thing about keeping to yourself for so long is that there’s no need to defend
     your actions, so a lot of gray area has room to grow. It is possible for two things
     to be true at once in one’s own mind, for one statement and its opposite to coexist,
     so that Peter could understand on the one hand the he is no one, that he is nothing
     special, and at the same time to create a private space in which he knows certain
     things about himself to be irrefutable. That there is something special about him,
     that there is something wrong with him, that the thing that is special/wrong has to
     do with reading too many comic books as a kid and with the dreams that started when
     his brother died, that under the right conditions, in the right place and time, he
     could actually be the kind of person who could use his gift or curse to do something
     extraordinary.
     
    The business of saving the world is tricky. The incredible difficulty of the endeavor
     weighed on superheroes’ brains constantly. Spider-Man, for example, was overwhelmed
     by how to balance superheroic feats with girls and biology class. But it was tricky
     even to save a single living thing. The problem was that, in real life, events are
     always already happening all the time, and there’s often little to be done in terms
     of interception.
    This is how it happened when Peter’s dog ran away.
    Patch was Jake’s dog first. Jake had brought him home from the shelter one afternoon
     with a red collar and a twenty-pound bag of