Chapter Text
Michelle is pretty sure she spent the first few hours of Saturday hanging out on Liberty Island with her best friend and a wizard.
Yes, she knows how that sounds. No, she doesn’t know why they were there. It gets particularly confusing when she remembers there was some kind of showdown between Spider-Man and a lizard and a sand storm, and maybe a guy on a hoverboard? Anyway, the point is, she and Ned spent their night hanging out at what she’s pretty sure is now a crime scene, and she has no idea how they ended up there.
Ned is equally confused. Dr. Strange was kind enough to portal them back to Queens, although apparently door-to-door service was asking too much of a man who could perform magic.
“Maybe we were interviewing him?” Ned asks as they trudge their way home.
“Why would we be interviewing an Avenger, Ned?”
“Uhhhhhhh . . .”
“Exactly.”
“No, okay, listen, maybe we were trying to find some new material for our regular decision essays.”
“Yes, because hanging out with an Avenger to brainstorm college essays sounds exactly like the sort of thing I would do.”
“Well, maybe it was just me.”
“And I was there for what? Emotional support?”
“Maybe? I don’t know, MJ,” Ned whines. “Superheroes are intimidating!”
Michelle rolls her eyes and tilts her head back, letting the early morning sun warm her face. “I don’t think we were interviewing a wizard—"
“I think his official title is Master of the Mystical Arts.”
“Whatever he’s called, I highly doubt he would bother with two random high schoolers. And we both know you’re just going to reuse your early action essays.”
“Yeah, but maybe I wanted to make it more interesting. I mean, think how cool an essay about an Avenger would be.”
Michelle resists the urge to roll her eyes again. “Ned, Avengers Tower used to be in this city, and aliens have invaded multiple times. I’m sure plenty of applicants have an Avengers-adjacent story to tell.”
Ned holds strong to the essay theory, a tinge of desperation in his voice. She doesn’t blame him—she’s starting to get a headache trying (and failing) to piece everything together.
Michelle is spent by the time she gets home. She treads lightly through the kitchen and to her bedroom, grateful it’s early enough that her father is still asleep, then changes into an oversized shirt and collapses into her bed.
Except she can’t sleep. She can’t get her brain to shut down, to stop analyzing every second of the last day, to stop searching desperately for the memories of the seconds she can’t remember. After two hours pass and all she’s accomplished is tangling herself in her comforter, she gives in. Sitting up, she glances over at her phone. For once she regrets turning off and blocking all location services—this is the one time big tech may have been able to shed some light on the last 24 hours. Instead, she relies on her memory, hazy as it is.
She remembers an imposing building, remembers Ned looking around an atrium in awe as Dr. Strange berated the two from above. She remembers Ned’s lola’s, and she remembers one of the labs in Midtown. She searches her brain for a pattern, for whatever unites these three places, but she comes up blank. Their high school (to pick up something one of us left in class?) is the last place she remembers before they ended up at a national landmark.
Maybe Ned’s right. Maybe they had visited Dr. Strange and asked to tag along as he did whatever it is wizards do, and then he had picked them up. Popped by with one of his portals and brought them along to Liberty Island to . . . what? Observe as he helped out Spider-Man? Put two teens in harm’s way so they could make up some bullshit essay about what they learned about themselves through the experience, while casually bragging that they were connected to a superhero?
Michelle doesn’t have much respect for the man—everything she’s read says he was an asshole back when he was a surgeon, and she highly doubts magic did much to change that. Still, she’s pretty sure he wouldn’t do something that stupid. Which is unfortunate, because it means she’s no closer to an answer. Sighing, she tosses her phone aside. She is in desperate need of a shower, and maybe the hot water will help clear her mind.
The hot water does absolutely nothing. If anything, she feels worse. For twenty minutes her mind wanders from the mystery of last night, but it’s replaced by a deep ache in her chest. It also doesn’t help that she finally got a look of herself in the bathroom mirror and saw she had a freaking gash on her forehead that she had to clean up. By the time she’s finished toweling off, the questions are only piling up, and the ache remains.
She spends the rest of her Saturday locked in her room. When her dad knocks on her door, asking about lunch, she tells him she’s busy with an essay for AP Lit. She scours the internet for news stories, tweets, Facebook updates—anything that might be the tiniest bit relevant—until the headache from staring at a screen becomes unbearable. Eventually, she falls asleep, phone still in her hand.
When she wakes up early Sunday morning, Michelle doesn't want to move. Her entire body throbs, like that time Coach Wilson forced her to participate in gym for rope climbing. Which is fine, whatever, they have Advil in the medicine cabinet. But there’s that persistent pressure in her chest, the clench in her stomach, the feel of tears prickling behind her eyes. She grabs one of her pillows and pulls it tightly to her as she squeezes her eyes shut, pushing away the desire to cry.
She knows what this is—remembers from when her mother left all those years ago. The grief returns every once in a while—out of nowhere, triggered by nothing more than a stray thought. But this time it’s different. It’s not the echo of an old loss. This grief is fresh—new.
So what did she lose?
By the afternoon, her father is clearly worried. When his knocks continue to go unanswered, she hears her door open. “Michelle?”
“M’here,” she says, voice half muffled by her pillow.
A few moments later, a weight settles next to her, and she feels a hand push back her hair. “Everything okay? You’ve been in here a while.”
Michelle shrugs, then turns over to face him, although not before making sure her hair covers the bandage on her forehead. “Yeah. Just one of those days I guess.” His brow wrinkles, and she knows he doesn’t believe her. She pushes herself up, forces her face to reflect a normal teenage angst instead of the unexplained devastation she feels. The last thing she needs is her father questioning her, especially when she has no answers. “I’m fine, promise. I’ll get up.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah, I just didn’t sleep well.” She gives her father a tight smile. He hesitates, so she pushes back her covers to convince him everything is okay.
He leans over and plants a kiss on her head before getting up. “I’ll be in the kitchen.”
Once he’s left, Michelle drags herself to her dresser, rummaging through and settling on a pair of sweats and a long-sleeved tee. When she pulls off her sleepshirt, her hair catches on the chain around her neck. After a few pulls that fail to release the chain, she reaches behind her, unclasps the necklace, and gently pulls it from her hair. Her shirt is halfway off when she stops, frowning. Half-naked with her arms still stuck in the sleeves, Michelle stares at the necklace dangling from her hand. She’s worn it every day for months. She knows this. If she goes through her phone, she’ll find awkward photos with Ned proving she hasn’t been without the necklace since the summer.
But she doesn’t know why. Or how she got it. Or even what it is. Looking at the jagged edges, she thinks that it must be broken. That, or a helicopter seed, which seems like a strange choice.
Michelle is starting to wonder if she hit her head last night and is suffering from a concussion. Granted, the only sign of damage is that cut on her forehead, but she can’t think of any other reason why she can’t recognize a necklace she’s worn every day for almost half a year.
Biting her lip, she fires off a quick text to Ned. You know that necklace I always wear? The black one? While she waits for his response, she finishes changing, all the while keeping her eye on her phone.
His response comes a minute later: yeah, why?
Weird question, but where’s it from?
She watches as the three dots appear and disappear, again and again, until finally coming to a stop.
Ned?
A moment later, her phone rings, her best friend’s picture appearing on the screen.
“Didn’t realize this needed a call,” she answers, putting the phone on speaker.
“I think I’m going crazy” is his response. Michelle gives the phone a bemused glance.
“Uh, care to explain?”
“Okay, so, first off, I’m pretty sure you got the necklace on our summer trip.” Michelle nods. That tracks. Probably when they were in Venice—it could definitely be Murano glass. “But that got me thinking about why. And, MJ, I knew about the necklace before Europe. Like, there was a plan to buy it.”
Michelle frowns. “Why would I plan to buy a necklace?” She had barely saved enough money to cover meals that weren’t part of the trip fee and a souvenir or two—there’s no way she would’ve planned on buying jewelry.
“Right? Exactly! But I swear that’s what happened.”
Michelle studies the piece again, turning it over. “Do you even know what it is? Or was?”
“No,” Ned sighs. “Which is another reason I think I’m losing it. Because if it was important enough to plan—”
“—we would remember what it is,” Michelle finishes. She puts the necklace down on her dresser. “So that’s two things that we don’t really remember: Liberty Island and the necklace.”
Ned clears his throat. “Three.”
“What?”
“There are three things. Uh, MJ? I can’t remember why we’re friends.”
Michelle snorts. “Wow, way to let me down easy, Leeds.”
“No, not like that!" Ned says, the urgency in his voice startling Michelle. "I know why we’re friend. I just don’t know why we’re friends. Like, how it happened.”
“Really? C'mon, Ned, we—” She cuts herself off, at a sudden loss for words. A wave of dizziness washes over her, and she grips the dresser to maintain her balance.
“MJ?”
Michelle remembers the first time she saw Ned. The second day of freshman year—physics. He sat two rows in front of her. Then a few weeks later they met for real at the first decathlon practice. She remembers brief conversations, mostly snarky remarks on her part. And then it’s like someone presses “skip forward” on her brain, and now it’s movie nights at his house, hanging out at her work, laughing together at lunch.
She can’t find the missing scenes.
“I don’t remember,” she whispers. “How could we both not remember?” It wasn’t like she expected herself to know that specific moment that led to allowing Ned Leeds into her life. But she should know why they started to hang out—what happened that convinced her she could trust him enough to let him know her.
“Three things,” Ned repeats.
Michelle’s stomach churns. This officially went beyond one fucked up night with a wizard.
Something was seriously, terribly wrong.
The arrival of school on Monday is a relief. It’s something to focus on other than the growing list of questions, which now includes the location of Michelle's Maya Angelou shirt. Michelle makes it through AP Lit and Latin, her mind sufficiently distracted by Dostoevsky and Virgil, but when she reaches AP Gov & Politics, her temporary freedom ends.
There’s an empty desk next to hers.
It shouldn’t matter. It doesn’t. It’s just an empty seat. There are plenty of those at Midtown. (Okay, not plenty. It is a public school, even if it has way more funding than most and requires an application and test scores to get in.) But Ms. Denton teaches the class, and Michelle had her for APUSH last year. That woman is seriously dedicated to seating charts, and if a seat’s going to be empty, it’s going to be in the back.
Despite her best efforts, Michelle is not sitting in the back.
At first, she lets it go. The student must be out with the flu or a stomach bug. Yeah, it’s weird she can’t remember who sits next to her—add it to the list.
But when she asks the student who sits on her other side if they know what’s going on, she gives her a strange look. Michelle is prepared to blame the response on the fact that this is the first time Michelle has ever spoken to her, but then Brooke asks what she’s talking about, and that pretense flies right out the window.
Michelle can barely pay attention to the lesson, only managing to briefly glance up at the smart board as Ms. Denton reviews the rubric for their upcoming essay. She's too busy going through a mental list of everyone who might have sat next to her. She comes up empty.
When the bell rings, Michelle waits for the other students to file out and then she makes her way to the front of the room. “Uh, Ms. Denton?”
The teacher looks up in surprise. “Michelle! How can I help you?”
Michelle pushes a piece of hair behind her ear, trying to sound calm and collected and not like she’s posing a conspiracy theory about an underground Midtown kidnapping ring. “This is a weird question, but, uh, do you know what happened to the student who’s supposed to sit next to me?”
Ms. Denton furrows her brow. “The student next to you?”
“Yeah, there’s an empty seat”—Michelle waves in the general direction of the desk—“and I thought maybe a student switched to a different section in the middle of the semester or transferred?”
“Let me look at the original seating plan.” Ms. Denton turns her attention to her laptop, clicking a few times before frowning. “Huh. It seems I left the seat next to you empty.” Ms. Denton tilts her head, staring at the screen. “Now why would I do that?” Her teacher seems lost in her thoughts as she clicks through multiple folders, bringing up seating charts from other classes. Michelle mutters a hurried thanks, which goes unacknowledged, and then rushes out.
Soon the number of things that don’t make sense is too unwieldy to keep in her head. Michelle finally starts keeping track in her notes app, making one column for herself and another for Ned. She does her best to keep everything in chronological order, and it isn’t long before she realizes that there’s nothing on their lists from before freshman year or post-Liberty Island. Whatever is responsible for their memory loss and confusion, it happened in those nearly three-and-a-half years (blip excluded).
Michelle and Ned spend their lunches at the far end of the table, heads hunched together as they brainstorm possible explanations.
“It started when we got to Midtown, right?” Michelle reasons one Wednesday. “Maybe the school was drugging the water fountains—dosing us with something to improve test scores. Then they were found out, they had to pull the plug, and now we’re all suffering from some weird withdrawal that screws with our memories.”
“Uh, MJ, I’m pretty sure we would have heard if the school was caught illegally medicating everyone.”
Michelle raises an eyebrow. “Do I need to forward you that article of government coverups again?”
“Point taken,” Ned acknowledges. “But wouldn’t there be side effects other than memory loss?”
“Then what do you think it is?”
“You’ve been looking at it from where it started, right?” Michelle nods. “Well, maybe it’s really about how it ended.”
“Please don’t say—”
“Magic.” Ned beams at her. “I bet Dr. Strange had something to do with it.”
Michelle lets out a disgruntled “Hmph.” Her dislike of the man has only grown since they first met, and it's something even her natural aversion to white men with superiority complexes can’t quite explain. “Why would he mess with us? Doesn’t he have bigger shit to worry about?”
“I mean, usually, sure. But maybe something happened that night and he had to—”
“Half-ass a brain wipe of our high school careers?” Michelle asks dryly.
“Well, it makes more sense than our school secretly drugging us,” Ned grumbles.
Michelle takes out her phone, scrolling through her bookmarks until she finds what she’s looking for. A minute later, Ned’s phone chimes. Frowning, he picks it up, then lets out a groan as he looks at the link in her text: 50 Times the U.S. Government Lied to You. “MJ.”
She shrugs. “Thought you could use a refresher.”
Silver tubes arrive in the mail for Ned and Michelle. They facetime each other as they open them, MIT acceptance letters and red and silver confetti falling out. After reconsidering your application, we are pleased to welcome you to the MIT class of 2029. . .
Michelle tries to focus on the excitement. She pushes aside that neither of them asked MIT to reconsider their applications. She dismisses the astronomical probability that this would happen to both of them. She joins in as Ned talks a mile a minute about getting an apartment off campus after first year. It’s a good day. They were accepted into their dream school. The universe can let them have this one thing.
But Michelle can’t ignore the hollow feeling in her chest, or the nagging voice that whispers, This isn’t how it was supposed to happen.
A boy walks into the donut shop the next day.
The interaction lasts all of three minutes. And when the door closes behind Peter Parker—when Michelle feels the return of that sharp ache and constant confusion she’s lived with since November—it’s only then that she realizes.
She mentions the encounter to Ned, because she's always sharing customer service stories and this is certainly one of the stranger ones. But she keeps her realization to herself—she's not sure how to tell him, not when she barely understands it herself.
Because a stranger walked into the donut shop, and for three minutes, her life had made sense.
Days pass, but whenever Michelle feels the frigid mid-Atlantic air and hears the soft chime of a bell, she looks up, expecting to see Peter.
He isn’t there. He never is.
She tries not to let the disappointment show—tries to bury it deep with everything else she keeps tucked away from everyone but her father and Ned.
She’s not sure why she even cares. He wouldn’t be the first customer to taste the donut shop’s coffee and realize, when you’re in New York and have an infinite choice in coffee shops, there’s really no point in sticking with what one could only generously describe as a mediocre cup. And it’s not like she’s the type to get attached to random strangers. She has a total of one (1) close friend, and it took a good two years before she was willing to do more than sit three seats away from him at lunch.
Except for this: If any other customer had asked her about MIT, she would have given a non-answer and a bored glance, maybe make a snide remark about listening in on private conversations. But after recovering from the shock of his question, she didn’t think twice before telling Peter the truth, before trusting him with something of herself. Didn’t even think to question why he was paying attention to their conversation or why he would care. Talking to Peter was easy. Familiar. That didn’t happen. Not to Michelle. Not to a girl who observed everyone from afar, only reaching out her hand once she knew they would never hurt her.
She remembers every moment—thinks about it more often that she would ever admit. The brown curls. Nervous swallows. How he fumbled for his wallet. The way his face softened as they spoke. His falling smile when his eyes fell on her brow—the care and distress over the scar on a stranger’s skin. That moment when his lips parted, as if there was more that he wanted to say than “thank you.”
How she held her breath, hoping he would.
And after he had left with a quiet “see you around,” after she had spent her night reliving that strange meeting over and over until she finally fell asleep, she thought maybe his quiet “see you around” was a promise. That maybe this strange boy who had wormed his way into her thoughts with the briefest of encounters would come back.
He never does.
The door opens. The bell chimes. Michelle keeps looking up.