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 theyâre 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 isnât cheap (not the ones sheâs eyeing, anyway).
she has to learn quickly about superheroes and dinosaurs and aliens, because calvin wonât listen unless thereâs 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 theyâre a boring sort of cool, not black hole kind of cool, so itâs 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. sheâs seen the costume, but didnât know there was lore. she doesnât want to know the lore.
itâs stupid. no one can just fly. thatâs not how the world works. capes are dumb. she canât 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.
âyou were never stupid,â she tells him on the phone when theyâve drifted back into each otherâs lives her senior year. âyou just didnât care.â
âyeah,â he laughs, and she pretends she canât hear the desperation in it; his girlfriend kicked him out, he lost his job, and heâs 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 heâs had a rough week. she can take an hour to listen.
âthe community college isnât bad,â she suggests, though she knows it sounds patronizing coming from someone set to graduate stanford with honors.
âyou mean i canât just put on my stupendous man costume and live off the media attention?â
susie snorts. ânot spaceman spiff? thereâs a tv show there, iâm sure.â sheâs been watching a lot of star trek in what little spare time she has.
ânah,â he says, âspiffâs always been your territory.â
they drift apart again, she goes to houston and he goes to art school. she loses track of him entirely right around curiosityâs landing. she skips their twenty-year reunion; sheâs 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.
itâs 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. heâs gotten much better, but itâs still unmistakably calvinâs art.
except - she squints at the astronaut. she flips open the book, thumbs through a few pages.
spiff isnât the calvin-insert she remembers from their youth.
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
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