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 tongue. 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.