Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

by Brittney Morris

  GANKE: Watch the legs.

  I look down at the ankles peeking out from the mass of black cloak-like material and realize the legs are thin. Like, unnaturally thin. Pencil-thin.

  Literally the size of twigs.

  ME: Is this person on stilts?

  GANKE: In a bird costume?

  I close the text window and look at the video again, realizing that the black cloak—well, what I thought was a cloak—is actually segmented out into strips. Long, feathery-looking strips held in place by the weight of the rain falling around this person. Then, they stop. If it weren’t for the rain falling, I’d assume the video was lagging. There’s not even any sound, like I’m watching security footage.

  And they turn.

  The sight startles me. This… bird… person… thing… has a beak that’s longer than their head is wide, and now that they’ve turned their head to the left, I can see how long, and sharp, and menacing it looks. And just when I think it might be a mask, or some other logical solution to this, they part said beak and I see a tongue lift up slightly inside.

  Then, they turn back, step forward down the alley and up to the dumpster. They kneel slowly, by degrees, crumpling to the ground before slumping against the dumpster and collapsing in a feathery heap, twig legs still poking out from under their feathery bulk.

  I clear my throat and furrow my forehead.

  That definitely didn’t look like a person. They didn’t move like a person, they didn’t look like a person, and they had a beak! And feathers!

  ME: That was… creepy. Was that thing human?

  GANKE: I don’t know! It looked like an ostrich with a crow beak the size of a chainsaw. Whatever it is, I’m glad you didn’t run into it while you were climbing through the window tonight.

  A bit of terror runs through me at that. If this video is real—and who knows, given the state of the internet and how bored people can get—I could’ve run into this bird thing in an alleyway somewhere. There’s no way to tell which alley this video was taken in. If it’s somewhere in Brooklyn, I could’ve been very close to it tonight. It might’ve been hostile or tried to kill me.

  ME: Looks like a science experiment gone wrong.

  GANKE: True. Speaking of science class, if you’ll excuse me, we have school in the morning.

  ME: Hey man, you brought this up!

  I smile and slide my phone back into my pocket. He’s right, but I’m not going home anytime soon, let alone going to bed. I still have chilling out to do up here.

  “Hey, man,” comes a voice from behind me. I flinch so hard that I almost launch myself off the side of the building, catching the top with my right arm and my left leg. Heart racing, every hair on end, I look up to see Peter sauntering toward me out of the shadows with his hands up defensively.

  “Woah, woah,” he chuckles, “didn’t think I smelled that bad.”

  I breathe a huge sigh, roll my eyes, and accept his hand back up, sitting myself back down where I was perched before. He plops down next to me, rests his hands on his knees, and clears his throat.

  “So,” he says, “I uh… was thinking about what happened earlier, in the alley in front of that store, and… I just wanted to know if you… you know… might wanna talk about it? And make sure you’re okay?”

  I sigh and pull my knees up closer to my chest, resting my chin between them. I thought I wanted nothing more than to be alone, but hearing Peter sound so concerned… I feel like I owe him at least an “I’m okay.”

  But am I?

  I sigh.

  “What makes you think I’m not okay?” I ask instead. I like it. Cryptic. Honest. Throws the ball back into his court.

  Peter turns to me and chuckles.

  “‘Okay people,’” he says using his fingers for quotes, “don’t usually sit alone on rooftops at night, sighing forlornly over a view of the city in the rain.”

  The man has a point, and it gets half a smile outta me.

  “I’ve just been doing a lot of thinking,” I say. “I mean, I got the suit back before anyone saw, but that was a close one. Too close. I just… I want to be Spider-Man like you. But I feel like I just… slipped up tonight.”

  “Miles, even Spider-Man slips up. We’re human under these suits. We make mistakes.”

  “I feel like I can’t afford slip-ups,” I say. “I’m already way behind you. Take that shop owner from tonight. How can I be one of the good guys when some people look at me and see a villain by default?”

  “They…” Peter begins. “What do you mean? Why would they see you as a villain as Spider-Man?”

  “Not as Spider-Man,” I say, looking at him pointedly. “As Miles.”

  There’s a long pause in which Peter goes quiet, his eyes go wide, and I look away. And then I hear him.

  “Oh.”

  Yeah.

  “That’s rough,” he says. “And I can’t say I get all of that.” I see him turn back to me out of the corner of my eye. “But I know how it feels when people judge you before they even know you.”

  “You’re talking about J. Jonah Jameson, aren’t you?”

  We’ve all heard the slander about Spider-Man on JJ’s show, about how he’s a “menace” and a “liability to the city” and how he shouldn’t be “doing the work of cops.” But my dad was a cop, and if there’s one thing I know about the limitations of his job, it’s that cops can’t be everywhere at once. Even they are bound by the laws of physics. And roads. They can’t travel through New York in a straight line, swinging all over the city lightning fast like I can. And they’re not trained in de-escalation tactics like the ones that come naturally to Peter and me.

  That’s just how we are.

  Maybe it’s because we’re not armed, so our words are our first line of defense?

  I don’t know.

  I can’t figure out what JJ’s problem is with us. We help when we can, for free, without expecting to be recognized for our efforts, or even thanked.

  Sometimes I think if JJ runs out of controversial things to scream about, his radio show will fade into obscurity, then he would fade into obscurity, so he talks about Spider-Man nonstop and tries to turn it into a controversial topic. If there’s one thing a loud man would hate to be more than anything, it’s irrelevant. Picking an evergreen topic like Spider-Man, who doesn’t seem to be fading into history anytime soon, and turning our role in New York into a hotly debated moral conundrum?

  That’s just smart business.

  “Yes,” says Peter, “but he’s not the only one. I’d need eight hands to count the number of articles about me in the Bugle talking about how much I’ve cost the city in property damage.”

  “Right,” I say, remembering. I know all the stories. “Like the time you toppled that air traffic control tower at the docks while going after Doctor Octavius?”

  “Yeah, there was that.”

  “Or the time the whole judicial building came down when you fought Swarm and his rogue bacteria ate it from the inside out.”

  “That too,” says Peter, scratching the back of his neck.

  “Or when you jacked up the subway system fighting Mr. Negative—”

  “Hey, hey,” he chuckles, both hands up, “plenty of examples out there, I was there for all of them.”

  “Sorry.” Embarrassment turns my face hot. I thought becoming Spider-Man would change how I felt about Spider-Man, but once a fan, always a fan, I guess. “I… I’ve read all the stories making it sound like Spider-Man is a walking money suck. But I never got the impression that anyone believed them.”

  “Oh,” he sighs, “you’d be surprised. MJ was asked to do a writeup, an ‘exposé’ if you will, about why Spider-Man was too big of a risk to be allowed to continue fighting crime in Brooklyn, and why ‘his activities should be heavily regulated, like any other city-ordained service.’”

  “City-ordained service?” I ask, cringing inside. Peter sighs again.

  “Some people,” he starts, “care more about the city hemorrhaging
money than they do about the safety of all its citizens. Those people—that’s all they’ll ever see us as. Expensive. They forget that we’re human under these masks, and that we’re just humans helping other humans.”

  Tell me about it.

  If JJ knew about Peter’s Uncle Ben, or Aunt May, or how much he cares about MJ, he might not be so quick to classify Spider-Man as a “city-ordained service” to be regulated, but a guy who’s just trying to do the right thing.

  A guy who doesn’t give up.

  I remember the sight of my dad walking up those steps to the mic. I’ll never forget watching him go, even though I was knocked unconscious in the explosion. I’ll never forget.

  And maybe if they knew the other Spider-Man was the kid who lost his cop dad in a terrorist attack at City Hall, or that he’s just moved across town to a whole new world with his mom and abuela, they’d see me differently.

  Maybe they’d have a little more compassion.

  The minute I ended up in that alley without my mask, they assumed I was somebody else.

  “Hey,” says Peter with a slap of his thigh. He stands and stretches his arms high above his head. “Whatdya say we swing around for a bit? It’ll help clear your head, get above some of this smog… and there’s a certain radio show that says swing therapy is all the rage in Manhattan.”

  I must give him the blankest expression, because he starts diagramming with his hands.

  “You know, swing therapy? Where people climb into loops of fabric like this,” he says, flinging his arm up and latching his web onto a utility pole above us twice, so that it forms a sturdy loop in the air, “and then they hang upside down, like this.” He hops into it like a swing, rotates back, and lets his torso and head hang heavy toward the ground.

  “Ooh, actually…” He rotates his torso back and forth until several tiny cracks ring out through the air. I cringe at the sound. That can’t be comfortable. “Ahhhhh, really takes the pressure off. Try it!”

  I hesitate. Spines aren’t supposed to sound like that.

  “Come ahhhhhn,” he urges, pointing up toward the sky behind me. “Enough utility poles for two.”

  I follow his finger and spot the second one. Turns out making a hammock loop is super easy, and soon I have my very own “therapy swing” to turn upside down in. Immediately, tension in my back that I didn’t even know was there melts into nothing.

  “Ooh, that is nice,” I have to admit.

  “Right?”

  “But you know what would feel even nicer?” I make a second hammock loop, this one connecting Peter’s utility pole and mine, and hop into it like a lounger, with my hands behind my head like I’m chillin’ on a beach in Cancun. “Now all I need is a coconut drink with a paper umbrella.”

  Peter chuckles.

  “That works too! Long as you’re relaxed, man.”

  I look up at the night sky, which is mostly clouds. The rain falls on my masked face and chest, and I close my eyes and breathe deeply of the fresh air—or at least the freshest air we could possibly find in NYC.

  “Yo, Miles,” says Peter, in a gentler voice this time. I look down at him.

  “Yeah, Peter?”

  “Being Spider-Man is a hard job.”

  I nod.

  “In all the time you spend on others, remember to take time for yourself, too. Take time to breathe, okay?”

  Suddenly, I’m back at the explosion site, blinking my eyes open amid the smoke and the glowing bits of burnt debris floating through the air. My mom’s face is hovering over me, urging me to wake up, but her voice is muffled. Distant. Like I’m somewhere else. I’m confused. The last thing I remember is my dad walking up those steps. There’s a piece of glass lodged in my cheek just under my eye. My chest feels heavy. I look over at what used to be the stage, reduced to smoking rubble, and I see my dad laying there face down.

  All I remember thinking was, how fast could I possibly get to him? How fast can I possibly make this right?

  And I couldn’t.

  I couldn’t make it right.

  I look at Peter and know he must feel the same when he remembers his Uncle Ben.

  “What you said about… being seen as a villain first. I’ll never know what that’s like in plainclothes, just based on the color of my skin. I don’t have any advice for you there. But I can advise you to get to know yourself. Take some time and learn how being Spider-Man will be the same and different for you.”

  He’s right. Peter can only teach me how to be Spider-Man.

  He can’t teach me how to be Black Spider-Man.

  Remember to breathe, he said.

  Even when things get rough. Even when times are hard. Breathe, Miles, I think to myself. I rest my hand on the shiny red spider on my uniform that feels too big for my chest, and think about how being Spider-Man will be different for me. My spider was totally different anyway, genetically modified, not radioactive like Peter’s.

  Who knows if I even have the same powers as he does, or if I can do… more?

  I sigh at the daunting task before me.

  Peter’s right. Being Spider-Man is a hard job. I don’t expect it to get easier. But after talking to him up here, with the rain and the clouds, and the low rumble of thunder across the sky, I feel a flicker of hope that I’ll figure out my place in the suit, and get the hang of it eventually.

  Ha, the hang of it.

  * * *

  LATER that night, back at my Abuelita’s house—my house now, technically—I pull myself up the stairs in my soaking wet hoodie and jeans, all stuck to me, and I can’t wait to get into clean shorts and a T-shirt and crawl into my nice warm bed for the night. But when I take the brass key from my pocket, slide it into the lock, and turn the knob gently so I don’t wake anyone up, I find my mom sitting alone in the living room under the light of the floor lamp in the corner. A book lies butterflied upside down in her lap, open at the halfway point. The title reads Zen Político: How to Work in Politics Without Becoming a Politician. I raise an eyebrow, but decide to ask her about it later.

  “Mom?” I whisper, deciding it’ll be better to wake her now and let her know I’m home, and safe, and that she can sleep peacefully tonight. But then I feel bad. Her head is back against the chair, mouth slightly ajar as her chest gently expands and falls. She’s blissfully off to dreamland in a world where she doesn’t have to worry about me. I shouldn’t disturb that. I think of something else. A text would wake her up. Maybe good old-fashioned pen and paper would be best.

  I find a notepad by the landline phone in the kitchen—no idea why Abuelita still even has this thing. Everyone has a cell phone, even her. Why would you sign up for a second phone that’s more prone to telemarketers, that you can’t text from, and that you can only answer when you’re at home?

  Different generation, I guess.

  I find a pen next to the pad and start to write out:

  I’m home now, Mom. Sorry for staying out too late. Please don’t worry.

  On the one hand, I’m grateful she cares. So many kids my age don’t have anyone looking out for them. No one wondering when they’ll come home. No one asking if they’re okay. On the other hand, I wish for her sake she could bring herself to always assume I’m okay. As Spider-Man, I won’t always be able to tell her where I am or when I’ll be home. My F.E.A.S.T. shift only spans the daytime hours, so I can’t use that as an excuse to be out at night. One more thing to figure out, I guess.

  I leave the note in her lap and smile as a snort explodes from her and she flips her head to face the other way.

  “Night, Mom,” I whisper, turning to head down the hall to my room. Just as I reach my hand out to grab the knob, I hear a whisper from the living room behind me.

  “Miles?” comes my mom’s voice.

  I turn to see her looking at me, peering over the top of the chair to make out my shape in the dark hallway.

  “Hey, Mom,” I whisper back so I don’t wake Abuelita. Her room is right next to mine. I return to where my mo
m sits and slide my hands into my pockets. “I’m sorry I came home so late. I, uh… I got a little lost.”

  That’s a lie. My phone has a GPS, and I could’ve always called her.

  Before she can point any of that out, I’m right there with a diversion.

  “Then I met up with Peter and thought it’d be easy to swing on over to Ganke’s dorm to get my backpack back.” A pang of panic hits me at the fact that I used the word “swing” in front of her, but I’m pretty sure she thinks I meant it figuratively. “I, uh… I figured you’d know I was safe if I was with him.”

  She stretches her arms high above her head, forgetting entirely that the book is in her lap. It goes tumbling to the floor, and I pick it up for her, turning it over in my hand.

  “What’s this book for?” I ask. “You interested in politics all of a sudden?”

  “A little,” she says with a weak smile. “You know I love to do what I can for the community. While we were in Brooklyn, I had places I could volunteer. The library, at schools, and at F.E.A.S.T. But now that we’re in a new neighborhood, I’m… feeling a little lost.”

  I blink in surprise. Mom? Lost? No way.

  Mom could find a way to make a difference if we were on a runaway train careening toward oblivion in an icy post-apocalyptic hellscape.

  “Really?” I ask. “But… Abuelita’s lived here for years. Doesn’t she know anywhere you can volunteer?”

  She nods.

  “Yes, she does. She’s connected me with the organizer of F.E.A.S.T.’s sister location out here. But even with that… I just can’t help but wonder if I can do more.”

  It’s exactly what I was thinking earlier with my powers. I hate how it feels, eating away at me—that feeling that I’m not doing enough to help. That I’m the one who needs to be helped. It’s how I felt standing by my dad’s casket when everyone was clapping me on my shoulders and assuring me that it would be okay, that this too shall pass, and that the pain would fade over time. That was the day I met Peter.