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Susie grits her teeth and grinds her jaw and spends the entire spring of their fourth grade year plotting how to get back at Calvin for stealing Mr. Bun and dropping him in a mud puddle.
(it involves putting Hobbes into a dress and taking polaroids; she still has the photos, even thirty years later)
She does her homework. Does his homework too, sometimes, because Mrs. Wormwood gives them each different math problems to discourage cheating, and Susie likes math. His mom finds out when they’re in sixth grade, and offers her four times the going rate to tutor Calvin in math. She agrees, because even at twelve she knows college isn’t cheap (not the ones she’s eyeing, anyway).
She has to learn quickly about superheroes and dinosaurs and aliens, because Calvin won’t listen to anything that isn’t one of the three (preferably all at once, but even she has her limits). Her opinions of aliens don’t align with his - her aliens are gorgeously strange monsters, elegant, like a Degas painting reflected in rainy puddles, glittering in distorted neon, and his are just…scary. With a lot of tentacles, and either too many eyes or not enough. Dinosaurs are cool, but they’re a boring sort of cool, not black holes and galaxies sort of cool. So she’s left with superheroes, and lets him talk about them as much as he wants, as long as he eventually gets around to long division.
This turns out to be a mistake. Though he draws aliens and ray guns and flying saucers in the margins of his homework, he has a whole thing built up around Stupendous Man. She’s seen the costume, but didn’t know there was lore. She doesn’t want to know the lore.
It’s stupid. No one can just fly. That’s not how the world works. That’s not how physics works. And capes are dumb, especially in proximity to airplanes, like that story he tells more than once about saving the school from evil robot dinosaurs. But he finally grasps long division, and Susie doesn’t say a word (raises an eyebrow, but doesn’t say a word) when his mom makes him another Stupendous Man costume when he hits his growth spurt. He passes eighth grade algebra well enough that he doesn’t need summer school, and she checks the mail one day in July to find a scribbled picture of Spaceman Spiff fighting a one-eyed tentacled monster, thank you written in the bottom corner. She tacks it up on her corkboard beside her desk, alongside a picture of Hobbes in a polka dot dress.
She still tutors him Thursday afternoons, but they drift apart in high school. Calvin and Moe somehow become friends, become even bigger assholes together, and Susie discovers calculus and girls. She gets into Harvard and Yale and Stanford and others, chooses to go to California. He waves at her from his driveway while she drives away in the moving truck.
“You were never stupid,” she tells him on the phone when they’ve drifted back into each other’s lives her senior year. “You just didn’t care.”
“Yeah,” he laughs, and she pretends she can’t hear the desperation in it; his girlfriend kicked him out, he lost his job, and he’s now in the unfortunate position of acknowledging that his father was right and higher education was important. She has two finals to study for, the NASA interview next week, and a grad school application to finish, but he’s had a rough week. She can take an hour to listen.
“The community college isn’t bad,” she suggests, though she knows it sounds patronizing coming from someone set to graduate Stanford with honors.
“You mean I can’t just put on my Stupendous Man costume and live off the media attention?”
Susie snorts. “Not Spaceman Spiff? There’s a TV show there, I’m sure.” She’s been watching a lot of Star Trek in what little spare time she has.
“Nah,” he says, “Spiff’s always been your territory.”
She goes to Houston and he goes to art school, and they drift apart and back together and apart again. She loses track of him entirely right around Curiosity’s landing. Her invitation for their twenty-year reunion gets lost in the mail while she’s packing up her life to move down to Chile for a three-year stint at Atacama. She doubts she would’ve gone anyway.
A package arrives the middle of her second year in the desert.
It’s a comic book. Spaceman Spiff, volume one. Hardcover, full color, shiny smooth pages. A giant alien takes up most of the cover, while a small astronaut with a ray gun hides behind a rock. The alien is a far cry from the one she's hung up by her desk, now slid into a plastic protector against light and age and too many moving boxes, and Spiff's suit has gotten a few upgrades, but it's still clearly Calvin's tentacled alien with too many eyes, and it's still Spiff.
Except - she squints at the astronaut.
She flips open the book, thumbs through a few pages. Spiff isn’t the Calvin-insert she remembers from their youth.
It’s her.
Mousy brown hair, button nose, Mr. Bun tucked away in the back of her rocket ship.
She flips back to the first page.
thanks for not giving up on me. - c