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Peter belonged to another part of her life that had nothing to do with
     this one. Sheila got up to go to the bathroom.
    The bathrooms were at the far end of the bar, with a sink just to the right of the
     back door that led to the alley. Sheila felt sure that Peter Parker would be on the
     other side of the door when she finished. She fantasized about slipping out the back
     door with him without even washing her hands. She imagined how his taxi would be waiting
     just in the side lot and how he would gesture toward it, silently opening the passenger-side
     door for her, how she would get in, how he would close the door, run around to the
     driver’s seat, and then: they would drive. Where didn’t matter. Anywhere really. She
     pressed her hands to the bathroom door in anticipation of him being there, the way
     that she’d been taught in grammar school to touch her bedroom door to detect if there
     was a fire in the house at night.
    Sheila’s family had always slept with their doors open. If a door was closed, her
     father said, something fishy was likely going on behind it.
    “I demand an open door policy in this family,” he said, as if their bedrooms were
     foreign countries resistant to trade.
    Sheila checked her face in the bathroom’s dirty mirror and it was pretty much what
     she expected: limp brown-blond ponytail, smudged eyeliner, thin smile. She opened
     the door slowly. Peter Parker was not there. She washed her hands and turned the corner,
     but he wasn’t even in the bar.
    “Looks like your buddy took off,” Andrea said.
    “Who?” said Sheila.
    Andrea shook her head. “Just be careful. He’s way older and he was looking at you
     like a piece of meat. I wouldn’t get into that if I were you.”
     
    “I met a boy,” Sheila told the coyote in Macbride Hall.
    The mountain coyote gazed at Sheila, eager for her to go on.
    A piece of meat!
Had he really looked at her that way? Sheila knew she was supposed to feel objectified,
     but she felt fantastic. She could feel every muscle in her leg, every tendon expand
     and contract, as she pedaled her bike to the museum.
    “It’s stupid,” she said to the coyote. “He’s not even really my age.”
    But the coyote did not seem bothered by this detail. It stared straight ahead as if
     to suggest that relative age was the most insignificant factor in the world to a coyote
     that had lived in a glass case for over a century.
    “There’s a chance he thinks he’s a superhero,” Sheila admitted.
    This too barely fazed the coyote. For all Sheila knew the mountain coyote was also
     susceptible to delusions of grandeur, what with the plaques and glass around it.
    “I might say something.”
    Silence.
    “I must be an idiot,” Sheila told the coyote, “I must be crazy,” but the coyote didn’t
     give any indication that there was any reason for her to hesitate in approaching the
     boy.
     
    She couldn’t sleep that night after her conversation with the coyote. She couldn’t
     explain the endless flicker of her thoughts or how they continued to route toward
     Peter: the outline of his shoulder under the sleeve of his T-shirt, the flat surface
     of his fingernails moving quickly as they counted though dollar bills, the way he
     had looked at her in the bar, the way he had looked away from her. She slipped on
     a sweatshirt over her pajamas, tiptoed downstairs, and turned on the computer that
     sat idle on her father’s desk in the corner of the room. She typed “Spider-Man” and
     “Peter Parker” into the empty search engine box that was waiting for her there. She
     had never bothered to see any of the blockbuster Spider-Man movies, because—well,
     why would she? She generally didn’t waste her time with films marketed to prepubescent
     boys.
    “Sheila?” her father called down the stairs. “Is that you?”
    “Yeah, I’m on the computer,” she paused, “looking up some stuff for school.” Was there
     something devious about researching