None of us were more than 16 years old, but among us there was already a living legend.  His name was Spider, and he never spoke, never smiled, and never, ever got caught.  

"I heard his name's Fitzwilliam or something and he's really just a brat from the hill."

"Bull-shit.  He's older than all of us and ain't never had a territory or a job or a group or even a friend, not nothin'."  

"Spider doesn't exist.  Some crackhead made the whole thing up."  

And then we'd argue, and such a tone would enter our voices as to make it sound as if we were arguing the existence of God.  The flames from our pile of trash and paper licked at the dark dirty city air and cast a pumpkin-orange glow on a few feet of the alley and blackness around us, and for a moment we thought we saw a little black shadow sitting on a railing a few stories up.  But we blinked, and it was gone.  



We were a family – no, we were closer than a family, closer to one entity.  At first it might have been only necessity that brought us together but it soon became clear that without each other survival would be impossible.  And so we wove around ourselves a feeling, silky like love, but it was love tinged with the hysterical ache for survival.  So a bunch of ragged lost boys slept in an alley in a nameless city and loved each other and had to steal things just to keep themselves alive.  



Some nights, some of us couldn't sleep so we'd lay on our backs and watch the white moon sail over the crack between our buildings until we were asleep and beaded with gritty dew.  It was one of those nights, and we were talking and laughing quietly waiting for the moon.  

"Let's go somewhere," one of us said.  So we started to walk or run or climb anywhere to keep from thinking.  We climbed up fire escapes like squirrels in an iron forest and stood and danced on the roofs and spat down to the sidewalk and saw who could yell the loudest, imagining the man on the moon could hear us and send us smoke signals or rearrange the stars to say hello.    

We hopped like fleas over the canyons between buildings and one of us said he was so scared he was going to shit his pants and we all laughed so hard we almost died.  We swung from railing to railing above our alley like monkeys and whooped and shrieked like the animals we were and paid so little attention we didn't see the little black shadow until one of us was on top of it.  It let out a cry of pain and shock and the last food we'd eaten jumped and danced in our stomachs.  It stood up, a little hunched over, and glared us right in the eyes.  

It was a girl.  She was a bit older than us and thin like us with a sharp little face and a big saggy jacket.  She glowered at us with her biting black eyes and grimaced in pain with her pursed little lips.  

"Are you – okay?" we asked, frightened.  She shifted her weight from foot to foot, frowned a bit, and nodded as she straightened up a little.  "Who are you?"  She looked at us and gave a swallow.  "Where are you from?"  She turned and left us, not touching the ground but seeming to move as a part of the immobile wall, nimble and graceful as a spider.  We tried to follow her with just our eyes but even then we could hardly keep up.

We gaped after her and looked at each other.  "Do you think that was–?"

"No."

"Who else could it be?"

"I don't know."  

We climbed back down home and lay down and thought confused and reverent thoughts but we didn't sleep.  Although none of us wanted to admit it, we knew that had been Spider, the Spider, and were too ashamed to go to sleep when we found out that our hero had been all this time nothing but a spindly white-faced girl.  



A few nights later some of us brought home secondhand newspapers and on the front page there was a little article about a string of petty shopliftings in our area – chain pharmacies, supermarkets.  Most of us felt warm and gloated at those who didn't believe in Spider, because we all knew that there was no one else who could rub the cops the wrong way so much as to get into the news.  Those of us who knew the truth ducked our heads and frowned a little, and one grabbed the paper and threw it on the fire and sat back down.  

"What the hell, man!"  

"We needed that!"

"I'm sick of Spider."  

Confusion and resentment stewed in the air and we glared at each other through the angry flames.  Some of us walked away down the street and some others climbed up fire escapes and sat on little metal balconies to contemplate what those words could even mean.  



The days got shorter and the nights got colder and when the wind sneezed all the leaves fell from the gray city trees.  One day like this a few of us just got fed up with Dumpster-diving and sitting around on the sidewalk suffering the cold and still getting nothing so we decided we wouldn't mind being hungry for a day and just went home to light a fire.  We stopped when we reached the alley's mouth and sitting there in our alley was that girl, the one whose face we'd only actually seen once but hundreds more times in our dreams and she was just sitting there, not really doing anything, and we looked at each other for a moment and her sharp beady eyes filled with a humiliation we couldn't have understood, not really, and most of us started yelling at her, for her to get the hell off of our territory and to go back to wherever the hell she came from and we saw a dirty strip of cloth wrapped around one of her cut-up legs and some knew it must have been from that night because there was no way she would have gotten hurt otherwise and instead of running away she started to cry and to see us making her cry like this seemed so terribly cruel that for the first time,

I spoke.  

I took a step forward and felt the concrete underneath my bare brown feet and turned around to face the group, four other filthy, tattered boys with dirty faces and yellow teeth, and I pointed straight at her and said, "Do you even know who this is?"   I heard the little threads of feeling in my voice and Spider crying behind me.  The boys looked surprised and I realized that I didn't know their names or if they even had names.  "This is Spider, understand?"

"Bullshit," said one of them, his mean eyes narrowed at me.  "Spider can't be a girl."  

"What the hell do you know about Spider?  Before now you'd never even seen her."  My mouth curled around the words, shaping them like a hot metal braid, and blasphemy opened my mouth and forced itself out like a balloon.  "What difference would it make if she weren't a girl?!  So what if she was a boy?!  She's still the only one of us who's… who's ever…"  I looked down at the cement ground and thought for a silent moment of the damage I might have done to myself – I looked at the angry dirty boys and then back at Spider, whose face was impossible to read but I thought there was something like anger.  My face got hot and I walked back to the boys ashamed as Spider disappeared.  



That night I sat on a roof and tried to put a name to what I was feeling – like a beast that had followed some distraction and lost the herd completely, finding itself vulnerable and alone for the first time.  I picked up a cigarette butt and threw it as hard as I could thinking things like who is Spider? and why do we even care so much? Then a pebble, and that girl never even told us who she was, and who said Spider even exists? I heard it skip against the ground far below with a shy, muted hiccup.  I was cold and frustrated so I stood up and started to pace around crying and talking and fighting against my own thoughts and body and I sat down and shivered a bit and cried a bit more until I saw a weakly lit window in a building I thought was empty and full of termites.  I wiped out my eyes, climbed down the side of the building I was sitting on, and walked across the first empty street I'd seen since I-couldn't-remember-when and my feet gave nice cold kisses to the road.

The door of the place sighed a little as I pushed it open, and I glanced up once to remember the spot of the window.  The complex was dusty and dark and smelled a little bit like life but it was musty life, like it had been kept locked in a box too long.  There was a stack of wilted worn newspaper high as my waist next to the stairway.  Each step breathed softly as I stepped on it.  On the second floor there was more newspaper, in stacks high as my shoulders, and some were spread open on the ground carefully like blankets.  The window glass crackled in their panes as night air pressed up against them.  I followed my memory to the room with the yellow light.  

The piles of newspaper grew in size like in a garden of strange white-gold stalks.  I couldn't believe that there was this much newspaper even in the entire city.  I turned around and around and around to look at the amount of it – there was even some spread open and stuck on the walls! – and when I stopped and my eyes stopped swirling there stood that girl in front of me, there she was, just standing and looking at me in that way only she could, cold wild angry scared childlike, and she let out a cry, guttural and coarse and throaty, and when she heard herself she pinched her lips closed and made little desperate rasping sounds from her chest and looked ashamed, mortified enough to cry and I could see her voice hanging in her throat like a shriveled vine and she ran back into the room she came from, and the animal sound she'd made echoed in my ear as I followed.

It was a little room but it smelled like her and was lighter than the rest of the house.  She had most of the things we had in the alley – a blue tarp, canisters of rain water against a wall, a stolen blanket and box of Aspirin.  Spider leaned against the windowpane, face turned away from me, lit by one of those lanterns you crank up which sat humming in the middle of the room.  I saw a picture drawn on the wall of a circle of boys around a big fire – which I thought was us – with a skinny girl with dark hair and a wide smile – which I knew was her.  The newspaper was everywhere, in stacks and rolls and lying on the floor and to avoid looking at her, my eyes scanned the pages I could hardly read.  I recognized one.  

"Hey, that one newspaper's about you."  

She whipped around and her face looked like a sharp hopeful mask as her black eyes widened and she darted over to where I was pointing.  She fell to her knees before it and pulled me down too and from the way she looked at me I guessed she wanted to ask me which one I meant so I pointed.  "They're talking about how you've robbed a lot of places recently…"  Her thin white finger shook as it traced over the little lines of ink and her eyebrows knotted in concentration and her lip looked like it would bleed she was biting it so hard and for some reason when I looked at her I wanted to cry.   



"So Spider's a girl?" asked the largest boy in the circle the next night after someone let it slip about seeing her in our alley.  The trash-and-paper-fire painted black creases in his face I'd never seen before.  

"Still just bull-shit, it's nothin' but bull-shit, I'm tellin' you."

"I don't see why it can't be her," said one earnest-looking kid who looked an age I thought didn't exist in the group.  "We ain't none of us ever seen her."

"I seen her once," said one of the boys who saw her that first night.  "Sharpest little face I ever seen.  Didn't talk to us."  

"I don't see why it's bad for her to be a girl," I mumbled, and when I closed my eyes I imagined her longingly, lovingly drawing that picture of all of us together on her wall.  "It's still Spider."   

"Why are you still saying that crap?  That ain't true at all, it makes everything different."  

"Fuck you guys."  I stood up and started to leave.  

"Wait, where are you going?  Come back," they sighed, but they didn't try to stop me because they were all moving as one sluggish group and not thinking anything.  I climbed the railings with a leaden stomach and helium chest and my nervous heart beating at my ribs like a moth and twenty-two eyes boring into my back.  

Spider was sitting on the roof which was actually bizarre and it was as if she had been listening, or waiting for me, or reading through my thoughts because I'd been thinking "Let me find Spider, let me find Spider, please God let me find Spider" over and over until it became like worn ruts in a road.  I sat with her, tried to stop the drumming sound in my ears and stop panting from the anxiety, and started asking her things I couldn't go on not knowing.  

"How long have you sat here?"  

She shrugged a little and looked down to her lap.  

"Do you know?"  

She nodded sadly and looked down at the fire, smaller from here than a candle's flame.  

"Will you tell me?"  

She stopped for a moment, staring at the boys below, and shook her head.  

"Okay, whatever."  We leaned back together, our feet dangling over the side, and looked for stars lost in the city lights.