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 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 unless there’s at least one. she has her own opinions of aliens (real, but not the tentacled fanged monsters calvin draws in the margins; her aliens are gorgeously strange monsters, elegant, like a degas painting reflected in rainy puddles, glittering in distorted neon), and dinosaurs are cool, but they’re a boring sort of cool, not black hole kind of cool, so it’s only superheroes she lets him go on about.
this turns out to be a mistake. though he draws aliens and ray guns and flying saucers on the back sides 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. capes are dumb. she can’t believe his mom made him another costume after he hit a growth spurt.
she still tutors him, 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 education was important. she has two finals to study for, the nasa interview next week, and a grant 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.”
they drift apart again, she goes to houston and he goes to art school. she loses track of him entirely right around curiosity’s landing. she skips their twenty-year reunion; she’s in the middle of a move down to chile for a three-year stint at atacama.
a package arrives the middle of her second year in the desert.
it’s a comic book. spaceman spiff, volume one. hardcover, full color. one of his signature tentacled fanged aliens takes up most of the entire cover, while a small astronaut with a ray gun hides behind a rock. he’s gotten much better, but it’s still unmistakably calvin’s art.
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