Green blades of grass sprung softly yet defiantly up from cracks in the sidewalk, doing their best to thrive in a world plagued by concrete and the thrum of constant footsteps. The scent of pollen almost overpowered the stench of rotting garbage, and the air seemed to buzz with energy. Children ran around joyously, counting down the days until school let out for the summer.
All these things Peter Parker noticed every day as he walked home from school. He passed run down yet still charming houses with tiny lawns and wood painted every fading color of the rainbow. The smog hung light in the air this afternoon and the Sun almost reached his face. By all accounts, this was a good day.
He hummed lightly as he passed plain lawn after plain lawn, some tune that had played from May’s speakers the night before.
Peter hitched his worn backpack further up his shoulders as he turned a corner, finding the first stop on his trip home. Among the drab, plain houses that lined the street was one in particular; its wood was not outstanding and its grandeur was no feat, but one thing made it stand out from the rest. Its garden.
Peter could already smell the light floral scent, growing ever stronger as he approached. Azalea bushes lined the porch in bright bursts of pink and red. Long strands of wisteria dropped softly over the house’s shingles, dipping into orange dragon snaps and yellow buttercups and so many other types of flowers that Peter couldn’t name. Blueberry and strawberry bushes dotted the small green plain. Weeds were carefully trimmed away, keeping the plants from being choked and starved. This was no yard. This was a miniature castle grounds. Peter almost felt bad stealing from a garden someone poured so much love into.
But what was a few flowers out of hundreds?
He set his backpack down on the sidewalk and waded through the sea of petals. He no longer kept an eye out for people peering through the windows. He knew no one was home.
Peter continued his soft humming as he snapped a few easter lillies off of their thick stems. From there he mixed in soft blue hydrangeas, a lavender wisteria that had dropped to the ground, and a few bundles of marigold for a yellow pop. He made sure not to take them all from the same section of the bush. Rather, he plucked from the inner leaves, simply thinning out the clusters of flowers.
He reached into the long grass, searching for the perfect strand to tie the bouquet together with a neat knot. He sifted through the long green ribbons, gently plucking off beetles as he looked.
Then, just as he was about to tear off a long piece of grass, he heard a voice call, “What the hell are you doing?”
Peter shot straight up, whipping his hair off of his face and staring wide-eyed at the girl who had spoken. She stood tall on the rotting porch, thin arms crossed over her chest. Her brown hair was pulled back into a puff of ringlets behind her head, and gray cotton pajamas and bare feet reminded Peter of a drifting cloud. An angry, accusing, ready-to-kill-him cloud.
And Peter, being the idiot that he was, shoved his colorful bouquet behind his back and said, “I thought no one was home!”
She cocked her head, her dark eyes sharp and calculating. Pretty. Destructive. “And that gives you the right to steal my flowers?”
”No! Uh, no, I mean...” But Peter had no idea what he meant. He had no defense to give her, nothing he could say, because she was already stomping down the stairs and walking towards him.
Peter stood, frozen and slack jawed and terrified, as the girl who couldn’t have been much older than him took hold of his wrist and yanked it out from behind his back, revealing the bushel of gorgeous, dying flowers. She quirked an eyebrow at him. “No?” She repeated back to him, sarcasm dripping in her voice.
Peter snapped out of his stupor, inappropriately noticing how soft her hand was on his skin, and said quickly, “I mean, yes, I took your flowers, but it was just this one time and I promise I’ll leave you alone—“
”’Just this one time’? Dude, someone’s been cutting my stems for months, I just never got home early enough to find out that it was you.”
She stared into his eyes as if she could read his soul, and he saw high cheekbones, a smattering of freckles, felt the soft hand gripping his wrist in a vice-like hold, and he definitely felt some sort of stirring in his chest, like something heavy was beginning to dislodge and float around the empty cavity.
Then, she released him, looked away, and it was gone. Peter hissed at his red skin, and was so preoccupied with his own pain that he didn’t notice as the girl slipped on sandals from beside the front door and started down the sidewalk without a word.
“You coming?” He looked up from his hand, full of already wilting flowers, and saw that she was staring at him, nearly a yard down the street.
”Coming where?” Peter asked, already jogging to catch up to her. Once he was by her side, she began walking again, and Peter awkwardly tried to match her pace.
“Well, I figured I might as well come see the girl you think is pretty enough to warrant flower-stealing.”
Peter’s step faltered. His face paled.
”W-What?” He asked, cringing at his stutter.
”Yeah,” she replied nonchalantly, keeping her eyes on the cracked asphalt ahead of her. “You’re fucking with my garden and I want to know why. Besides, I was super bored.”
”Oh,” was all Peter said, and they walked together in silence.
Because how was he supposed to explain to this girl that he wasn’t on the way to his girlfriend’s house? These flowers had nowhere living to go. Every Friday afternoon, Peter had stolen flowers from this terrifyingly gorgeous girl and walked seven blocks to the cemetery. He always broke the bouquet up into three sections, one for each grave, for Mom, for Dad, for Ben, and this girl that he didn’t even know but certainly wanted to was about to see the most private part of his life before she even knew his name.
His palms started to sweat around the bushel of petals. He wiped his left hand on his pants, then his right. Within seconds, the sweat gathered yet again.
In an attempt to distract himself from his surely impending doom, he said shakily, “So, uh...why were you at home today?”
”I was sick.”
“...Oh. Okay.”
Silence. The sound of humming bugs and two sets of feet pounding rhythmically into the sidewalk. Somewhere far away, a child shrieked in joy.
His nerves increased with every foot closer they came to the cemetery. He could see its signature willow tree up ahead, peeking out from behind rows of houses.
A single bead of sweat slipped down his forehead. He wiped it off with the back of his hand.
God, it was hot.
”So,” the girl said again, and Peter turned his head to look at her. “I’m Michelle.”
”Oh, uh, hi! Hi, Michelle. I’m...I’m Peter.”
Peter openly cringed this time, practically folding in on himself. Michelle didn’t react, thankfully ignoring his awkwardness. Unless his mind was playing tricks on him, he thought he saw a quirk of a smile on her lips.
”So, what’s the girl’s name?” She continued, impervious to Peter’s idiocy.
For a moment, Peter was confused. Who was she possibly talking about? Then, he remembered.
Oh, shit.
Peter blanked. “Mary,” he said immediately, then regretted it. Playing his dead mother off as his girlfriend? Pathetic.
”Mary,” She repeated, dragging out the syllables as if trying to decipher a meaning between the letters.
Peter nodded hastily. His back was getting soaked with its own sweat.
The rest of the walk continued in silence. Peter felt his hands start to shake, making the flowers tremble even in the still air. His sweating increased tenfold. God, should he knock on the door of a friend? Turn a corner and find a classmate’s house and pretend they were dating? But he didn’t know of anyone who lived in this area, and unless he planned on dragging Michelle four more miles, it wasn’t like he could go to his neighborhood and con a friend there.
The gates approached, all iron bars and ornate wind chimes. Peter swallowed. Hard.
He stopped in front of the rusty gates, sparing Michelle a glance. She looked nonchalant, as if this were perfectly normal, but her eyebrows were a bit too high, her lips a little too pinched.
Peter moved his eyes forwards again and pushed the gate open with a loud creak.
Peter weaved carefully through the tight rows of gravestones, feeling the dew from the grass start to penetrate his canvas shoes. He heard Michelle’s shuffling footsteps from behind him, but said nothing.
He whispered quiet ‘hello’s to his grandparents as he passed by their graves but didn’t stop. He never even knew them, anyways.
Then, Finally, he stopped beneath the looming willow. In the shade were three graves and an empty spot. Mary, Richard, Ben, and one day, May. The Parker plot.
Peter felt Michelle’s presence from his right acutely but chose to ignore her, going about his weekly rituals as if he were alone. He divided the bouquet into thirds and placed each cluster in the vases, removing the dead flowers from last week. Then, setting his backpack in the grass beside him, he pulled out a washcloth and a small bottle of water from its front pocket. He kneeled in the grass and turned the water bottle over, dousing the rag until it started to drip. The remaining water he poured into the vases.
Looking up to Michelle’s awkward form, he explained, “The groundskeepers, uh, they aren’t really good at cleaning the headstones. You know, there’s hundreds in here, so I just do it myself. Usually.” Peter laughed humourlessly, then swallowed. An odd sort of peace had come over him as it often did here, sitting with his family in the shade of the willow. Of course, Michelle was an interruption, but not necessarily an unpleasant one. Just...weird.
He started wiping off the headstones, cleaning off the grime in broad strokes, minding the odd dents and scratches that he knew so well.
As he worked away at a stubborn spot on Ben’s grave, he saw Michelle sit down next to him out of the corner of his eye. His gaze flitted to her, where she sat criss-crossed and comfortable. He quickly looked back to his task.
She watched silently as he cleaned each headstone until it gleamed, carefully scrubbing between the engraved letters without even really looking. Finally, nearly ten minutes later, he packed his supplies back into his bag. His cheeks burned as Michelle followed his movements carefully, standing up when he did. Now that the sense of peace he had gained began to fade away, he was embarrassed. Why did he take her here? Why didn’t he just lie, or refuse?
He spared the graves one last glance, whispered a melancholy, “goodbye,” to the ghosts that he knew couldn’t hear him. Then, he turned on his heel, hands on the straps of his backpack, and started towards the gate.
He hurried out of the cemetery, ignoring the burning in his throat. He held the gate open for Michelle but didn’t look her in the eye, hardly heard her murmured, “thank you.”
The two began walking back the way they came. Peter could have just left, booked it in the opposite direction until he made it home and was free to cry into a pillow at how much of an idiot he was. He didn’t, though. He walked her home, like Ben always told him to.
They walked three blocks before Michelle took a deep breath and said, “I get it, you know.”
Peter kept his eyes on the ground. He didn’t want another pity friend. He refused to form a connection with someone who just felt bad for him. Not again.
She continued, “I don’t have parents either.”
Peter raised his head, his brows furrowed. What did she mean?
”They’re not dead or anything, but when they beat the shit out of you and lock you in an attic the court tends to rule against them. That house is just a long term foster home.“
Michelle sniffed, and her gait seemed heavier than before. Peter’s eyes were wide.
”The garden was kind of destroyed when I got there a few years back. It was all dead and gross. But it was summer, I didn’t have anything to do, so I dug a spade out of the trash and just...went at it. Those wisteria were actually the first things I planted. They take forever to grow.”
She paused. Took a breath, gathered her thoughts.
”I didn’t even really plan on keeping it up, but it actually felt really nice to make something grow for once, you know, see my work actually produce something. So I kept at it. Those marigolds are actually newest,” she said, nodding at a yellow petal that Peter must have dropped an hour ago. She cracked her knuckles, quickened her pace. A tiny smile found its way onto her lips, and Peter felt something flutter low in his throat.
”So, you know. It goes. I’ve got a sort-of brother now, and a garden. It’s going good for me. Plus, I go to a really nice school. You ever heard of Midtown Tech?”
Peter stopped in his tracks, right in front of her garden and when he grabbed her wrist, so did she. She stared at his hand on hers with wide brown eyes, but Peter hardly noticed. “Wait, you go to Midtown?”
”Um, yeah? Why?”
”I go to Midtown! How have I not seen you before?”
Her smile widened, soft and shy. She said quietly, “I tend to keep to myself. Don’t usually look up from my book, you know?”
Peter fumbled in his backpack’s side pocket as she spoke, and pulled out a folded piece of paper. He pressed it into Michelle’s long fingers. “This is my schedule. I don’t know if we have any classes together, but we might. Give me a wave on Monday.”
Michelle’s face lit up for a swift second, so quick that Peter could have imagined it, then melted back into cool indifference. She plucked a blueberry off of the bush next to her, popped it in her mouth. “Cool. See you Monday,” was all she said, then turned back to her house and started up the steps.
Peter stayed for just a moment more, watching her bound towards her door, then moved past the rainbow of petals and began his long walk back to his drab little neighborhood.
He didn’t make it more than ten steps, though, when he heard Michelle call out, “Peter!”
He whipped back to face her, and saw her smiling, a strawberry in one hand and his unfolded schedule in the other.
”We have English together, dork!” She yelled. She threw the berry at his head, and he dodged quickly out of the way. Thanks, spider-senses, he thought as the berry splattered the sidewalk red instead of his favorite shirt.
”Awesome!” He yelled back, then, with a thumbs up, turned back in the direction of home.
He started walking again once he heard Michelle’s front door shut. His footing was more sure, now, and something light and airy was beginning to bubble up in his chest, forcing mouth to turn into a small smile. He bit his lip lightly and quickened his pace, feeling the beaming Sun warm his skin and drinking in the heat.
For the first time in a while, he couldn’t wait until Monday.