“Hey. Um. You don’t know me. Nobody does — that’s sort of the whole thing.”

Peter Parker of Queens, New York — nobody in particular — would like a word before you go in.

A Complete Stranger’s Guide to Being Spider-Man

Okay so. Hi. Sorry — I’m not great at this bit. There’s no good way to introduce yourself when technically, legally, and in every single person’s memory, you don’t exist. But you’re here, and you’re about to walk into one of these, so someone should probably tell you what you’re getting into. Might as well be me. I’ve done nine of them.

Here’s the thing nobody puts in the trailer: it’s not really about the powers. The powers are — fine, they’re great, I can stick to stuff, it’s very cool. But what it actually is, mostly, is lying. To your aunt. To your best friend. To the girl. It’s being forty minutes late to everything forever and never being allowed to say why. It’s a chemistry test in the morning and a guy with metal arms at four in the afternoon and nobody ever, ever saying thank you, and you keep doing it anyway, because you can, and if you can and you don’t — then whatever happens next is yours. Somebody told me that once. I think about it a lot.

And there’s two other guys. Look, I know how that sounds. I met them. They’re me, in the way that matters and in absolutely no other way, and one of them is older and calmer and has a bad back, and one of them is — he’s not okay, honestly. Some of what’s down there I only know because they told me, sitting in a school lab at two in the morning, and I’m going to try to pass it on right. It’s not really mine to tell. But you should know it’s there.

· · ✱ · · ✱ · ·

Eight ways in. Pick where you come down.

The Golden Years — This is his. The older one. He said it like it was a nice place and then his face did something else. Picture a New York that’s warm all the time, that actually likes him, where the webs come out of his own wrists like that’s a normal thing to have happen to a person. There’s a girl next door he’s been in love with since he was six and won’t go near because he thinks it’ll get her killed — he’s not wrong, that’s the awful part. There’s a best friend whose dad is a monster and who spends years thinking the monster’s him. And there’s a carriage full of total strangers who carried him over their heads once and refused to give him up, and when he told me about that he had to stop for a second. Come here for the version where the city loves you back. Just — his aunt used to say something about power. Ask him. It’s better from him.

The Rain Years — This one’s the other guy’s and I’m going to be careful with it. Colder city, always wet, everything blue. He built his web-shooters himself, at a desk, at seventeen, which is genuinely the coolest thing I’ve ever heard and I told him so and he did not take it well. He’s got missing parents and a briefcase full of questions and a girl who’s smarter than him and knows it and refuses — refuses — to be protected, and honestly she’s right. There’s a promise he makes to her dad that he can’t keep, and then a clock tower, and then five months where he doesn’t put the suit on at all. He calls himself lame. He’s not. He just says it a lot so you can’t say it first. Go easy on him.

Queens, Fifteen — Mine. The good bit, back when I still had the good bit. I’m fifteen, I’m on the decathlon team, Ned’s in the chair, there’s a girl in the corner who reads books about murderers and notices everything, and I am so desperate to be an Avenger that I’m basically unbearable about it. And a very rich man in a metal suit turned up in my aunt’s living room and told her it was an internship. There’s a guy with wings out there selling alien scrap, and he is not a maniac, he’s a dad who got put out of business, and I found that out — okay, look, I found that out in his car. On the way to a dance. With his daughter in the back seat. It was the worst nine minutes of my life. Start here if you want me before I knew anything.

The Bad Five Years — I don’t love this one. There’s a ring in the sky over Manhattan and I get on the ship because of course I do, and then there’s a dead planet and a plan that almost works, and then — I could feel it coming. That’s the thing nobody knows about me. I always feel it coming, a half-second early, and that half-second was really long. And then nothing, for five years, except it wasn’t five years for me, it was no time at all, and I came back into the middle of the same sentence. My aunt buried me. We’ve never talked about that. Everyone else got older and I didn’t and there’s a kid in my year who used to be a tiny nerd and is now taller than me, and if you want to know what the Blip actually did to people, it’s that. Also I lost him about an hour after I got back. Sorry. Moving on.

The Trip — Europe. I had one plan: Eiffel Tower, tell MJ how I feel, don’t die. That was it, that was the whole plan. And then Fury hijacks the trip and a guy shows up from — he said another universe — fighting monsters made of fire and water, and he’s kind, and he’s calm, and he tells me I’m a good kid, and I am so tired and so sad that I hand him the last thing Tony ever gave me. It was glasses. It was also a satellite with guns on it. Yeah. I know. Everyone in Prague found out at once. Come here if you want the version of me that just wants someone older to take it, please, for one week. He was very good at pretending to be that. And she worked out who I was on her own, months before, because she pays attention and nobody else does — that part’s still my favourite thing that’s ever happened.

The Worst Year — Everybody knows my name. There’s a crowd outside the building. Ned and MJ got turned down from MIT because of me, and I couldn’t fix it, so I went and asked a wizard to make the world forget, and then I kept talking while he was doing it. That’s — yeah. That’s on me, all of it, every single thing that comes through the crack afterwards. Five men who all know my name, out of the second before each of them died, and I wouldn’t send them back to die, because that’s not what my aunt would have — because it wasn’t right. She was standing right there. She told me I did the right thing. Come here if you want to be in the room for the biggest thing I ever chose and the worst thing it ever cost. Bring somebody with you. I didn’t have anyone left by the end.

The Four Years — This is now. There’s no one. That’s not me being dramatic, that’s just the arrangement — I asked for it and it worked. I watched them graduate from a roof. I put flowers on a grave for a woman nobody remembers I’m related to. I’m very, very good at the job now, which is what happens when it’s the only thing you do, and I hand what I catch to some very polite people in a very clean building and I have never once asked them what happens next. And lately something’s wrong with me. My body’s doing something it hasn’t done since I was fifteen and I can’t stop it and there’s no one to tell. There’s a cop who talks to me and a man with a skull on his chest who sort of does, and that’s the list. Something’s hitting the city and it can get inside anyone’s head except mine, and it wants something, and I don’t know what it is yet. Come here if you want the quiet version. Fair warning, it’s the loneliest one.

The Crack — Or don’t pick a world at all — fall between them. It’s real, it’s survivable, and it is not free. Anyone who knows my name can get pulled, and you come through out of whatever second you left, wearing the wrong clothes for the weather, and every hour you’re here the sky gets a little more wrong. Cracks first. Then things at the edge of your eye. Then everyone, all at once. But I’ll tell you what I got out of it, since I’m the one who broke it: two people who’d already survived exactly what was happening to me, and one of them caught someone falling and stood there shaking afterwards because the last time, he didn’t. So. Worth it, maybe. Depends what you take home. You do get to take it home — that’s the one good rule.

· · ✱ · · ✱ · ·

Nine films. Three New Yorks. One kid from Queens who keeps getting up.

You can change it, by the way. Any of it. The thief I let go, the promise he made, the glasses I handed over, the spell I kept talking through — none of that has to happen the way it happened. That’s the entire reason I’m telling you.

“Okay. Yeah. Go on — I’ve got you.”

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