“And what’s that?”
Ganke cleared his throat, and then pretended to clear it. “Ahem. Ahem,” he said dramatically, before leaning over and turning the TV off.
“I am a vault, a safe locked by loyalty earned by few;
tell me your secrets, whisper them to me behind enemy backs;
I was born this way, a vault, and your secrets will die when I do.”
Ganke looked at Miles, nodding his head. Miles returned the look, one eye slightly closed as if he was concentrating on what Ganke just said.
“What the hell are you talkin’ about, Ganke?”
“Did you like that?”
“Um…what the hell are you talkin’ about, Ganke?” Miles repeated.
“It’s what we’ve been learning in Ms. Blaufuss’s class since you’ve been on lockdown. You liked it, right?” Ganke nodded confidently at Miles’s blank face. “It’s a sijo. Some kind of Korean poetry.” Ganke slapped his notebook on his lap, excited. “This is the poetry of my people! This is my birthright! That’s why I’m so good at it!” Miles waited for Ganke to give in to his usual jokey grin, but he didn’t. Miles shot more web at the TV to turn it back on. Ganke leaned over and turned it back off. “And I named this one ‘MILES MORALES IS SPIDER-MAN.’” Then the grin came.
“Not anymore,” Miles said, lying back on his bed. As soon as he said it, he immediately felt a heaviness leave his body. A weight lifted.
“What?”
“I’m done,” Miles said. “I mean, the powers are acting all weird anyway, and honestly, I can’t afford to be Spider-Man.”
“You wanna get paid to be Spider-Man? I mean, you do know that we—well, you—just did.”
“That’s not what I mean. I’m not talking about hero-for-hire or nothing like that. Look, you know how over the last few years I’ve gotten better at being…I don’t even know how to say it.”
“I’ll say it. You got better at not being a punk? Better at not being a sucker-ass mini Mario. Now you big Mario. Mario with the mushroom and the invincibility star.”
Miles sat back up. “Look, I’m not scared of nobody like I’m scared of my parents. And I don’t mean that, like, I’m scared they gon’ do something to me. I mean, I come…we come from…” Miles couldn’t find the words to finish. “Think about my dad. He don’t have a degree. He didn’t even graduate from high school. My mother did, but she couldn’t afford college. Think about my block. Cyrus Shine, wherever he is these days. Fat Tony, who spends most of his time waiting on a hand-to-hand, sitting on his stoop talking trash to whoever walks by. Frenchie at the end of the block who works around the corner at the dollar store. She’s cool, but her son, Martell, better make it to the league. And then Neek, from across the street. Went to the army. Went to war. Fought for the country. Got out. And now he’s just…there. Sometimes you see him pull the curtains back and peek out, but that’s about it.” Miles got up from his bed, grabbed his backpack. “You know what they call me every time I go in the barbershop? Baby Einstein. Smarty Arty. Stuff like that. And they smile and give me a hookup on cuts. They ask me about girls, of course, but they also ask me about my grades. My uncle used to do the same thing.” He reached in and pulled out his suit, black and shiny with red webbing. “It might sound silly to you. I don’t know.”
Ganke leaned forward in his chair. “Okay, Miles, um, aren’t you being just a little dramatic? You’re doing bad in one class. One class.”
“Let me ask you something, Ganke.” Miles balled up the uniform. “Did you get in here through a lottery?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Are you on scholarship?”
“No,” Ganke said, leaning back, folding his arms across his chest.
“If for some reason this doesn’t work out, do you have another plan? Are there other options for you?”
“Miles.”
“I’m just asking.” Ganke hesitated, then nodded. “Exactly. You and me, we the same in a lot of ways. But this ain’t one of them.” He opened the closet behind his bed, tossed the suit into the corner, before shutting it again. “To have the time to be a Super Hero, you gotta have the rest of your life laid out. You can’t be out there saving the world when your neighborhood ain’t even straight. I just gotta be real about it.”
Miles flopped back on the bed. His mind was made up. He was done. He was going to do what he knew he needed to do, starting tomorrow. Refocus.
But for the rest of the night, he was going to watch as many episodes of American Ninja Warrior as possible. He shot another wad of web at the TV, cutting it on for the third time, while Ganke turned back toward his desk and started scribbling in his notebook. When he was finished, he propped it up on the desk, the words written so small on the page that a normal person wouldn’t have been able to make them out from across the room. But Miles could.
MILES MORALES IS A DUMBASS
What good is it to quit doing the thing that you do best?
Unless quitting is freedom, but what if it’s not freedom?
What if it’s just a smiling family and a prison cell?
And though Miles could see the words clearly on the page, he also could see that Ganke couldn’t understand how he felt. So Miles just shook his head and turned back to the TV, watching another man jump through an obstacle course to prove—for no reason at all—that he too was a little bit more than normal.