After dinner, Miles grabbed the trash bag, ran down the stoop, and tossed it into the can. When he turned around his dad was sitting on the top step, the same step where he’d sat on Friday. It was like a game of Simon Says, except with Jeff. Jeff says sit down, Miles. Jeff says don’t talk until I ask you a question, Miles.
Neither of them said a word for a minute, the silence sizzling in Miles’s stomach, as if the chicken he had just eaten were refrying itself.
“You know me and your mother love you,” his father said, finally.
“Yeah.” Miles could feel the setup coming.
“And you gettin’ ready to go back to school, so listen, I need you to understand.…I just need you to, like…” Miles’s father was the one doing the stammering now, searching for the right words. Finally, he just shot it straight. “You know your uncle was suspended. A lot.” Miles’s father pressed his hands together. “He didn’t think he ever had to follow rules. And it got him killed. And the last thing your mother and I want is for you to be…like him.”
You’re just like me.
The words pierced Miles, lodged in his neck. Suspended. Rules. Killed. Miles swallowed hard, washed his guilt down with confusion. He was used to his uncle being brought up in times like these, but it stung every time. In fact, the only time Uncle Aaron was brought up was when his father was trying to explain to him all the ways not to be. His father and uncle were street kids—Brooklyn jack-boys—who were always robbing and hustling, going in and out of court and juvie until they were old enough to go in and out of jail. Miles’s father met his mother and ended up choosing a different path, but his uncle Aaron kept chasing fast money in dark alleys. Now Uncle Aaron was the standard for stupid, the example for all things wrong in their family, as far as Miles’s dad was concerned.
“You understand?” Miles’s father asked.
Miles sat there gnawing on the inside of his cheek, thinking about Uncle Aaron. What he knew about him. Not just what he had been told by his father over and over and over again. But what he knew firsthand—that he was there when his uncle was killed. That three years ago, Uncle Aaron had accidentally killed himself while trying to kill Miles.
“I understand.”
Miles rolled the mask down over his forehead, over his eyes. For a split second, darkness. Then he lined up the holes so his vision cleared and continued stretching it over his nose, mouth, and chin. He looked at himself in the mirror. Spider-Man. Then he rolled the mask back up, again, that quick moment of darkness. He’d been doing this—the back-and-forth with it—for a few minutes. Miles’s father had told him time and time again that when he and Uncle Aaron were young, they used to take their mother’s dark stockings and pull them over their heads, cut the rest of the leg part off and tie it in a knot before pulling robberies. He said it was uncomfortable, and took a second to get used to, like being trapped in some kind of cocoon. “Aaron didn’t become no butterfly, though,” he would say. “He became something else.”
You’re just like me.
Uncle Aaron lived in the Baruch Houses, a few blocks from a Ray’s Pizza. Baruch was a huge housing development running along Franklin D. Roosevelt Drive. Right on the East River. If it weren’t for the fact that there were over five thousand people living in fifteen blocks of brick high-rises, it might’ve been considered prime real estate. Waterfront property. Miles would always meet Uncle Aaron on the corner of East Houston and Baruch Place at a bodega, where Aaron would buy grape soda. Then they’d go and get a whole pizza, before walking through the forest of skyscrapers to get back to Uncle Aaron’s apartment. Because you never walk through projects by yourself unless you live there.
If Miles’s parents had known that he used to spend time with Uncle Aaron, he’d be on punishment for the rest of his life. As in, forty years old with kids of his own, still not allowed to go outside. So Miles would tell them he was going to hang out with some friends at Ray’s Pizza. Which was technically true…even though there were like a hundred Ray’s Pizzas in New York. And this “friend” was, in fact, his uncle. And Miles always made sure he wasn’t in Aaron’s apartment when he had to call his parents to check in, that way he wouldn’t have to lie. He couldn’t. It just wasn’t his thing.
Uncle Aaron’s apartment—4D—had nothing in it but a mattress, a few fold-up chairs, a rickety TV stand with a TV on top, and a small coffee table with a few packs of panty hose on it. There was also always random shoe boxes, size nine, which Miles knew was too small for his uncle, and he hated the fact that they were also too small for him. Probably just merch to be boosted on the block. Fell off the trucks.
Everything else, like all of Aaron’s clothes and things, were in trash bags lined up along the wall. He was all the way moved in—as a matter of fact, this was the only place Miles had ever known Aaron to live—but always seemed like he was ready to move out.
While Miles and Uncle Aaron ate, sitting on the foldout chairs with the pizza box on the empty corner of the coffee table, they talked about family, school, and girls. Well, really Uncle Aaron would talk about girls, but he’d do it in a way that made Miles feel like they were talking about girls, even though Miles really didn’t have nothing to say about them besides I don’t really have nothin’ to say about them. The one thing Uncle Aaron never—NEVER—talked to Miles about was “business.” He never told him about the banks, or the stores he had hit. He never talked about how he’d stalk around Wall Street? the only late-night ghost town in New York, waiting to catch unassuming, stiff-suited stockbrokers working overtime. And he definitely didn’t tell Miles about the biggest hit of all, the one he made just before Miles came for a visit one afternoon. The one that would change Miles’s life, and ruin their relationship. OSBORN Industries. The home of the most cutting-edge innovation when it came to defense, biomedical, and chemical technologies. And spiders. Genetically mutated, chemically enhanced spiders.
It was forty-five minutes before Miles would have to leave to make the phone call home. TV playing midday talk shows. Are you ready to see her new makeover?! Gina, come on out! A duffel bag on the floor next to Miles’s chair, full of money and pieces of technology Aaron thought he could sell on the black market. And from the bag emerged a spider, one that crawled up the leg of the chair and bit Miles right on the top of his hand, sending a sizzle down to his fingertips.