by Sam Maggs
“So good; thanks for asking!” Nadia responded, grabbing an N slice. “Dr. Sinclair has been so helpful. It’s been really nice having someone to talk to. Not that you’re all not wonderful to talk to,” Nadia corrected in a rush. “I wouldn’t be here without—”
“No, we get it,” Tai interjected dryly. “You’re all right, but I don’t want any of you adjusting my meds, either.”
“Exactly.” Nadia smiled. Every girl in this room had played a huge role in helping to get her to a place where she was able to receive a diagnosis, and she would never stop being grateful for that. Even if she wasn’t always the best at expressing it with her words. “Now…” Nadia waggled her eyebrows. “Can we start the real party?”
“Thought you’d never ask.” Priya laughed, tucking her long, dark hair behind one of her ears. Priya was so gorgeous all the time, but doubly so when she laughed. Nadia knew that Priya was one of those girls who even looked amazing when she cried. She was so gifted in so many different ways. Priya had even been teaching Nadia how to do cat-eye liner and Nadia almost had it mastered.
On one side.
The other side…Nadia preferred not to speak of it.
The streamers and balloons abandoned, the G.I.R.L. squad moved to the far side of their lab, cake plates in hand, chatting idly about their respective days. Priya worked in her parents’ store (boring, uneventful, save for a brief sighting of a very average human Captain America imposter who was on the receiving end of a full-on Captain America–size punch from someone who, apparently, does not like Captain America very much because his cosplay was that convincing); Ying had spent the afternoon sparring with a heavy bag (Nadia felt for the bag); Shay had been responsible for the cake and décor (she excelled in nearly all things, and the funfetti choice was proof that this was no exception).
And Tai had been in the lab, getting ready for this moment.
“Okay.” Tai took a deep breath. “Over here.”
The girls all gathered around a table in one corner of the lab, under a makeshift banner that read LIKE MINDS. Well, it was less of a “banner” and more of a “single sheet of 8x10 printer paper with letters cut from magazines taped to the front.” Ying had made it. Priya expressed that she felt pretty strongly that it looked like something a serial killer had made, which just made Ying like it even more. Nadia thought it had a certain creative flair. Shay had added some glitter, which kind of just made it look like something a deranged serial killer had made, but, you know. Group projects are like that sometimes.
Like Minds was a Stark Industries think tank comprised of students from all over the world. The program had different divisions and initiatives, and their latest objective was to find ways to make neighborhoods more sustainable on a local level. Tony and his team at Like Minds had hand-selected groups of teen scientists from cities across the globe to participate in a big experimental sustainability showcase, and in New York City (well…okay, New Jersey, but as a newly minted Jersey girl, Nadia figured it was close enough), Like Minds had chosen G.I.R.L.
For weeks, Nadia and her four lab partners had been working toward strategies and solutions to present at the Like Minds showcase, which was over Thanksgiving weekend this year. As a new American, Nadia was kind of obsessed with Thanksgiving. It made absolutely no sense: It was entirely ahistorical; you ate a bizarre combination of foods to excess; enormous, vaguely threatening floating cartoon characters were a crucial part of the experience; and most people celebrated it even though doing so caused them great emotional distress. It was like the perfect distillation of the American experience.
The G.I.R.L.s still had eight whole weeks ahead of them to prepare for the showcase, but that kind of time passed quickly when most of your team was focused on passing their classes and the rest of it was busy trying to save the world from A.I.M. and maybe aliens, depending on the day.
So far, they’d all been developing projects independently. Shay had been combining biopolymer electrolytes (like from vegetable oil) with solar cells to maximize clean neighborhood energy. Priya was figuring out how to develop genetically enhanced bioluminescent plants in the hopes that they might be able to replace streetlights. Ying had been busy putting together a chemical marker that could be deployed into sewers to warn people about…Okay, Nadia had stopped paying attention at that point. Sewage treatment was not her specialty, though she respected it deeply.
Nadia hadn’t been able to settle on an idea for her own contribution just yet. She had so many ideas, but they were big ideas. After escaping the Red Room, she dreamed about changing the entire world. By comparison, making Cresskill, New Jersey, a bit more energy-efficient just seemed a little…small-time. “Starting small; thinking big.” It was even on the Like Minds pamphlet. Apparently, it was a quote from Tony Stark himself.
Nadia wasn’t sure she believed that. Mr. Stark probably had better things to do than come up with pithy campaign slogans for teen think tanks. Especially a slogan this…dull.
Despite her own indecision about the project, Nadia was excited, as always, to see her friends’ hard work.
And this was Taina’s moment to shine.
On the table in front of the girls sat a Raspberry Pi motherboard connected to what looked like a very mechanical lazy Susan on wheels. The circular tray had three robotic arms attached to it, each with a small grip at the end. Tai rolled her chair over to the table and picked up a remote.
“So,” she started, confidently, “what we have here is a self-transporting, easily rotating plant pollination device. Or…” She paused. “The Bee-Boi.”
“Does this—” Priya started, but Tai was already way ahead of her.
“It travels through city parks and gardens and pollinates high-energy, low-yield plants, freeing up actual bees to do much more useful, helpful work for their hives,” Tai explained quickly. “It has three pollinators that can activate simultaneously, and each arm has a camera that can recognize flowers and other plant matter that requires pollination.”
NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!
Tai is completely right, as per usual! We are in a bee crisis. Thanks to a brutal combination of viruses, fungi, habitat destruction, pesticides, pollution, malnutrition, and various many other elements, honey bee populations have been dwindling across the globe for years. Apiarists and entomologists say some of these factors could be driving “colony collapse disorder,” or CCD, a phenomenon where the majority of worker bees disappear and leave the queen bee behind in her hive. Some bees are dying as a result of CCD, and others are at risk of extinction because of human-driven factors.
And if we don’t have any bees, we’ll lose some of earth’s most crucial pollinators, and three-quarters of all crops depend on pollinators to reproduce! (Basically: The sex bits from one plant have to make their way to the sex bits of another plant to make a new plant, so the bees carry the sex bits from one plant to the other, honestly kind of by accident! They’re helping plants sex and they don’t even know it. Bees rule!) While Tai’s design is ingenious and could absolutely assist bee populations, we should remember that it’s up to us to explore other sustainability options, like being smarter about pesticides and focusing on ecological farming, to really save our bees long-term!
Because I would like for us to always have garlic. No bees, no garlic.
Can. You. Imagine.
Priya whistled. “Tai…that’s extremely cool.”
“Is it as cool as the poop thing, though?” Shay teased, nudging Ying playfully.
“The ‘poop thing’ is a great idea, and you’ll all feel bad for joking about it one day,” Ying deadpanned. “Also, stop calling it the ‘poop thing.’”
Nadia couldn’t wait any longer. “Let’s see it, Tai!” she urged with a clap of her hands. Admiring the squad’s work in action was her favorite thing to do in the lab, after eating funfetti. But that happened far less frequently.
“All right.” Tai grinned. “Hold on to your butts.” She hit a button on the remote in her h
and. The mechanical arms raised in unison. The wheels moved forward and backward. And the tray-like platform started to rotate on a timer. One; two; three. One; two; three.
“Tai!” Nadia cheered. “Nice work!”
“Well, you know, I—” It was Tai who was interrupted this time. The lazy Susan was becoming significantly less lazy. “Hang on—” Tai slammed what Nadia could only assume was the Stop button over and over again to no avail. The platform’s rotation started to speed up: onetwothree onetwothree onetwothreeonetwothreeonetwothreeonetwothree, until…
The Raspberry Pi caught fire. It was a small piece of equipment, but it produced some impressively large flames.
Ying sprang into action first, ripping an extinguisher from the nearest wall and leveling the nozzle at the motherboard. Carbon dioxide blasted from it, smothering the robot in a white cloud and extinguishing the fire almost instantly.
The robot’s arms drooped. Tai, in her chair, covered in a fair amount of white CO2 herself, drooped just the same.
Nadia rushed over to examine the robot. “It’s still completely salvageable, Taina. I wouldn’t worry—”
“It’s fine,” said Tai, waving her off. She gripped the wheels on her chair and shoved herself forward, right into the other girls. “Comin’ through.”
“Don’t stress, Tai, you’re gonna get it—” Shay started, before Ying cut her off with a glance.
Ying’s glances could do that. They were very scary. Ying was good with glances the way some Widows were good with tomahawks. Better, even.
“Seriously, guys, it’s fine.” Tai moved between the girls and toward the lobby. Nadia could tell by the break in her voice and the speed at which she was trying to exit the lab that it was definitely not fine. “It was a stupid idea anyway.”
“No idea is stupid,” Nadia protested. “That’s G.I.R.L. rule number one. Can we help—?”
“It’s fine!” insisted Tai. “I just want to wash this off. I’ll see you all tomorrow. Happy name day, Nadia.”
Nadia watched Tai roll out of the room’s automated double doors, one hand waving back. The big DON’T TELL ME TO SMILE sticker—the one with the girl holding the spiked bat and making a rude gesture—stared Nadia down from the back of Tai’s chair until the doors slid closed behind her.
The girls all looked at each other in silence for a minute. A bunch of Nadia’s name day balloons were now coated with a thick white layer of carbon dioxide.
Priya broke the silence. “Well. It’s not exactly confetti, but it’s a little festive?”
Nadia sighed. Tai would be in a better space tomorrow. Or maybe she wouldn’t. It was hard to tell with Tai.
An alarm went off on her phone and Nadia started. She whipped it out of her back pocket—the best thing about high-waisted jeans (among many best things, thought Nadia) was that they provided gigantic back pockets for gigantic cell phones and also sometimes snacks. Ladies’ clothes never had sufficently workable pockets.
Pocket…dimensions? An alternate-dimension pocket for women’s clothes only…Nadia tucked that idea away for later. She turned off her phone alarm and explained to her friends apologetically, “Sorry to cut the party short,” she said, “but I have to skedaddle.” She’d learned that word from Hawkeye. The superior Hawkeye, of course: Kate Bishop. “Family dinner tonight at the house.”
“Another surprise?” guessed Ying.
“Oh, absolutely,” Nadia confirmed. “I should be getting the call any second.”
The girls stared at Nadia, waiting. She looked down at the phone in her hand.
“Just…any second,” she said again.
Still nothing.
“Any…” She swallowed. Was she wrong about this surprise…? She was certain she’d overheard—
Her phone buzzed in her hand, the screen lighting up. “Ha!” Nadia lifted the device in triumph. Shay and Priya burst out in laughter. Ying shook her head, but Nadia could see the smile in the corners of her lips.
“I’ll be at the shop tonight and tomorrow if any of you need anything,” Priya said, picking up her oversize tote bag. It was a beautiful faux-leather, and Nadia was always impressed by how many things Priya could fit in it. It was like her own super-power. Other than the talking-to-plants thing. Like a second, tote bag–related super-power. “Picking up some shifts while my uncle finishes his semester.”
“We’re out, too,” Shay said, grabbing Ying’s hand. “Date night.”
“We’re going to the cemetery!” Ying said, a huge grin taking over her face.
Shay blinked a few times before managing her own, slightly less enthusiastic smile. “They’re showing a movie on a big projector,” Shay explained, as Ying dragged her out of the room. “It’s Spaced Invaders tonight.”
“‘Prepare to die, Earth scum!’” Ying called back over her shoulder, then disappeared down the hallway.
Nadia assumed—nay, hoped—that was a quote from the film. Ying had been much better about catching up on her pop culture knowledge since exiting the Red Room, and she had a special affinity for weird movies from the ’90s. Nadia supposed both she and Ying were trying to reclaim their lost childhoods in different ways. Ying was determined to consume as many missed movies as possible; Nadia was consuming more baked goods than an unsupervised eleven-year-old at a particularly decadent birthday party. And she was trying to find and hold on to joy in this new life, outside of the Red Room. The kind of joy that kids didn’t usually have to search for.
Her phone buzzed in her hand again. She was keeping her ride waiting.
Nadia was the last one out of the lab, and she turned off the lights behind her.
Something’s not right, Nadia thought, her Wasp-sense* tingling.
“Ah!” she cried, flipping the lights back on in an instant. Nadia rushed back and grabbed the remainder of her cake. “Close one.”
* Russian for “grandmother.” A purely theoretical concept for Nadia, but one she liked all the same.
* One of the “adults” in the Red Room. She came up with a diabolical plan to force Nadia and Ying to return to the Red Room, but they escaped. Again.
* Too much like spidey-sense. Will have to workshop.
“You’re late!” chastised Nadia, leaning into the driver’s-side window. “Can I drive?”
The older, very English-looking man who sat behind the wheel of the bright red Chevy Corvette bristled. “Late? You didn’t even know I was coming!”
“Yes, of course, of course.” Nadia brushed him off. “So, can I drive?” The man stared at her, straight-faced. Nadia put on her best puppy-dog eyes. “Pleeeease, Dedushka?* It’s my name day…!”
The man sighed. Edwin Jarvis had been around Super Heroes most of his adult life—first as a pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, then as the butler for the Starks. He had seen the Avengers assembled, Quinjets in action, full-on alien invasions.
He was good at his job because he was unflappable. Jarvis could handle anything. But Nadia knew that Jarvis was no match for his latest charge, the newest and smallest of all the Avengers: the Unstoppable Wasp.
When it came to Nadia, Jarvis was decidedly flapped. Especially when she called him Dedushka.
Nadia tried to wield her great-granddaughterly powers with great-granddaughterly responsibility. But she really wanted to drive Lola, which called for full-on weaponized adorability.
A successful Super Hero has many tools in their arsenal and knows how and when to use them all.
Nadia saw Jarvis break. It was subtle, but it was there. His jaw unclenched for the briefest of moments before clenching up again. Nadia wondered if Jarvis was ever truly unclenched. It couldn’t be good for one person to be so tightly wound all the time, could it?
“Oh, all right,” Jarvis conceded. “But only because—”
Nadia threw open the driver’s-side door, hugging him before Jarvis could even get his seat belt off. “Thank you thank you thank you! I’ll drive so safely. You won’t even know I’m driving!”
&n
bsp; “That really doesn’t sound as comforting as you think it does,” Nadia heard Jarvis say under his breath as he walked around the cherry-red Corvette to the passenger side. “You do recall that this car is only temporarily on loan, right?”
Nadia slid into the driver’s seat, adjusting the chair and the rearview mirror like she’d been taught. Driving was the one thing Nadia was able to learn on a normal Cool American Teen schedule. She had never learned how to ride a bicycle on a leafy suburban street; that skill had come from Red Room trainers around the same time she had learned to operate a KA-22 Russian military helicopter.
She’d never celebrated a win with her junior softball team; Nadia didn’t like to remember the team activities she’d been put through in Siberia. She didn’t know what it was like to sneak into a movie to see a film you weren’t allowed to see; Nadia was party to violence much worse than anything you’d see in a theater before she was even old enough to wrap her fingers around a knife’s handle.
But she was sixteen, and she was learning how to a drive a car. That’s what completely normal Cool American Teens did. And now Nadia was doing it, too. Nadia was looking forward to the rest of the shared experiences she would have with the rest of Cresskill, New Jersey, now that she was putting her past behind her. For good.
Jarvis cleared his throat subtly from the passenger’s seat. That usually meant Nadia had forgotten something.
Ah. The parking brake.
Nadia smiled at her favorite adoptive Super Hero dedushka and pulled down the lever. It took effort, but she avoided so much as glancing at the best button on the dashboard—the big red button that matched the car’s exterior paint job to a tee. The one that would send the car flying—off the pavement and straight into the skies.
That was only for occasions much more special than this one.
“We are going—”
Nadia shook her head. “Jarvis. I know where we’re going.”
“Ah,” he sighed. “Of course you do. And don’t forget to check your mirrors.”
