The Unstoppable Wasp

by Sam Maggs

  Apparently, that was not enough. All of that wasn’t enough. Now Nadia had to add “betrayed by older sister” to the pile, too.

  It was too much. It was the one thing Nadia thought she didn’t have to worry about, in a life of worrying about everything, all the time. Bobbi was there for her. Bobbi wouldn’t let her down.

  I vse yeshche. And yet.

  Bobbi was starting to look nervous. Nadia didn’t blame Bobbi for her nerves; Nadia didn’t get upset often, and when she did, it meant things were serious. And they were serious now. Dedushka knew it. Out of the corner of her eye, Nadia could see Jarvis wringing his hands.

  “Nadia, it’s all right.” Janet stepped in. “I’m really happy that you found a connection to Maria. I think it’s healthy and exciting and, if you’d like, I’d be thrilled to be a part of—”

  “I’m working on Like Minds right now, not Maria’s list,” Nadia snapped. She could feel herself unraveling. She tried to keep a lid on her emotions, but in that moment she was too upset to think about Dr. Sinclair or her exercises or any of the healthy coping habits she’d been learning. She had trusted Bobbi with this—this one thing, and Bobbi had betrayed her.

  Nadia felt more alone than she’d felt in years. No one understood her relationship with Margaret, or why it was so important to Nadia to have someone like her involved with G.I.R.L.—someone who wasn’t afraid to take risks and break rules, like Nadia. No one wanted to understand Nadia’s Like Minds project, or why it could make such a huge difference—to the world, not just to some science fair. No one was even in the G.I.R.L. labs lately to talk about these things, even if they had wanted to. The only people who were consistently there for her right now were Dr. Sinclair and Margaret. And she was paying one of them.

  “I’m sorry.” Bobbi held up her hands in apology. “I know you have a lot on your plate and I was just trying to help—”

  “By doing what I asked you not to do?” Nadia could hardly believe what she was hearing. Excuses? These weren’t even good excuses. “Why didn’t you help me by supporting me? Because you don’t like Margaret? Because you’re jealous that I’m spending time with her?”

  “Nadia…” Janet warned.

  Bobbi stood in silence. It was enough of an answer for Nadia.

  “Don’t be upset with Bobbi, please, Nadia.” Janet took a few steps forward, her heels loud against the hardwood. Nadia took an equal number of steps back. She didn’t want to be close to anyone right now. She didn’t feel close to anyone right now. “She told me about Maria and about Margaret because she was concerned for you. You’re taking on a lot—”

  “And I can handle a lot,” Nadia shot back. She was strong and she was capable; she didn’t have to be treated with kid gloves. It was infuriating. “Everyone is concerned for me and for my bipolar, but when I try to tell you what I want or what I need, no one seems to be listening!”

  “Nadia…” Bobbi ran her fingers through her hair. “I talked to Taina and I just don’t think the VERA project is a good idea.” Nadia opened her mouth to argue, but Bobbi kept talking. “The VERA project falls outside of the Like Minds scope—and it’s also dangerous.” She took a step forward. Nadia kept still. “I know you think you can solve all the inherent issues with privacy and infosec, and one day you might! But I don’t think you can do that in the next week. And I don’t think it fits the parameters of the assignment.”

  “And I don’t think you should be associating so closely with Margaret Hoff,” added Janet.

  This. This was exactly what Nadia had been afraid of.

  Nadia rounded on her. “Right. You, too?”

  “I found her old HR files,” Janet said gently. “Hank was worried about her. She was very driven. To a degree that scared him. Which is really saying something. If Hank was scared, it must’ve been extreme.”

  Nadia snorted. “Oh, and now it’s bad to be driven? Keep the teen girls where they belong, in the mall, is that right?”

  “‘In the mall’?” Bobbi repeated incredulously. “Nadia, I know I screwed up talking about the list, but I just thought we could get you back on the right track—”

  “I have bipolar, I’m not a lost stray,” Nadia shot back. “I’m not having an episode. I’m just upset.”

  “Totally fair,” said Janet. “Listen, the hockey game is—”

  “I can’t worry about the list until after Like Minds. I have to go back to the lab.” Nadia couldn’t even look at Bobbi right now. “Quantum oscillator.”

  “I will drive you,” offered Jarvis, from a room away.

  “I’ll find my own way back,” said Nadia, scooping up VERA and her phone. Janet and Bobbi looked at each other, concerned—but Bobbi had to know she had messed up. Nadia made it three steps out of the house before reaching for her Wasp charm. There were some things that could only be made better by a long fly and a long cry.

  This was one of them.

  “VERA,” Nadia said, her voice rough, “play ‘When I Needed You’ again.”

  “Are you sure there is not another Carly Rae Jepsen song you would like to—”

  “No,” Nadia cut the holo off. “Again.”

  “All right,” VERA said. If it were possible for machine intelligence to sound reluctant, VERA did.

  NADIA’S NEAT SCIENCE FACTS!!!

  Time for some more brain science. People say all the time that music has the power to make a person feel better, almost like magic. But obviously, it is not magic. Scarlet Witch is not crouched inside your baby-blue Victrola. Though that would admittedly be kind of adorable. But she’s busy. No, instead it has everything to do with your brain chemistry.

  When a human hears music, it triggers the release of a chemical called dopamine in the brain, more specifically in the dorsal and ventral striatum. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter: something that acts like an information taxi between your brain cells. It helps with many different things—movement, attention, emotions—but it’s also responsible for making humans feel happiness, satisfaction, or pleasure. Dopamine from the ventral tegmental area is released when a person does something that makes them feel awesome—like exercising or listening to music. It tells the body, “Do this again. That was good. More of that, please.”

  In fact, dopamine levels increase by up to 9 percent when we listen to music we like. Listening to music we love, just like eating food we love, releases dopamine and makes us all happier, instantly. Music is universal. It connects us all.

  Is the pure joy of Carly Rae Jepsen universal, too? I think so. I have to think so.

  Nadia was back at the lab, lying on her bed, VERA projecting a keyboard into the air over her. She’d found the quantum oscillator buried at the bottom of a kitchen drawer (why Jarvis had put it there she would never know). Nadia had been working on hooking VERA into the quantum realm since she got back to the lab an hour ago. She knew she should go to bed soon, but she was still too upset to relax. And getting VERA to liaise with the quantum realm had been more difficult than Nadia had originally anticipated.

  “Is it possible for a song to be both happy and sad at the same time?” Nadia asked VERA, half-distracted by her work.

  “Robyn, ‘Dancing on My Own,’” a voice from Nadia’s doorway answered. “Lorde’s ‘Supercut.’ Kacey Musgraves, ‘Happy and Sad.’ Eighty percent of ABBA Gold.”

  “Margaret!” Nadia went to move off her bed, but Margaret waved at her to stay put.

  “I heard you might need a friend,” Margaret said kindly, sitting on the edge of the bed. She had on her usual uniform—maroon hoodie, jeans, white tennis shoes. She smelled like cedar and cardamom.

  “You heard…?” Nadia frowned.

  “We linked our VERAs, remember?” Margaret smiled. “It’s like your project is already working as designed.”

  Nadia flumped back down onto her pillows. “No. Nothing is working as designed.”

  “That’s life for you.” Margaret patted Nadia’s leg sympathetically. “Want a refund?”

  “Som
etimes,” Nadia admitted.

  “Same. Mind if I…?” Margaret gestured to the pillows. Nadia wiggled over to make room on her bed and Margaret lay down, resting her hands behind her head. “Cute place.”

  “A work in progress,” Nadia said to the ceiling. She sighed. She was frustrated with Bobbi, frustrated with Janet, she missed her friends, and she just wanted to get back to work, but her stupid emotions were getting in the way. Not even her room was making her happy, not in its current disheveled mid-move-in state. “It’s actually…the only place I’ve ever had that was just mine,” Nadia continued. “I mean, I share the lab with my friends, which I love, because I love having people around. But I grew up in a…” She paused. “Boarding school” is what she landed on. “And then I came back to Hank’s old house. Here, though…I can make this what I want. Just like G.I.R.L. But…”

  “It’s taking a lot of time and energy and some compromise?” Margaret raised an eyebrow and looked sidelong at Nadia next to her on the pillows.

  “Yes. Almost like you have some experience with this.” Nadia nudged her.

  “You’re a big dreamer, Nadia,” Margaret said, rolling onto her side and propping her head up on one hand. “And what that means is sometimes people aren’t going to understand you. They’re going to doubt you. Look at me; Hank Pym didn’t even want to hire me. As if it were possible to be too passionate about making the world a better place.”

  “Exactly!” Nadia pushed herself up on the bed, propping herself against her headboard. “Exactly. And I’m so close with VERA. If I can get this working, it could change so many lives. Not that Taina’s local bee pollinator isn’t also a great idea, or Ying’s sewage treatment, or…” Nadia leaned her head back against the board and closed her eyes. “I just have to see this through. I need to.”

  “Well, then.” Margaret rolled off the bed and stood up, reaching out her hand to Nadia. “What’s stopping you?”

  Nadia opened her eyes and looked at Margaret, standing over her bed here at Pym Labs, her arm outstretched. It was the last thing she would have expected back on her name day: her friends and her family refusing to believe in her work, a beautiful and brilliant new role model by her side instead.

  In a way, Nadia figured she had Maria to thank for her new mentor; had it not been for her journal and her list, Nadia would never have been pushed to open the VERA. She would never have thought of a project for Like Minds, and she would never have met Margaret. It was like Maria was looking out for her daughter even from…wherever she was now. Nadia never knew quite what to think about that. But wherever she was, she’d dropped this in Nadia’s lap. It had to mean something.

  Nadia grasped Margaret’s hand.

  “Am I interrupting some sort of white-girl sleepover ritual here?” came a voice from the door. Taina walked in on her crutches, looking disdainfully at Margaret. Nadia dropped her hand quickly and slid off the bed.

  Nadia decided she would try to play peacemaker, and fast. “Taina, this is—”

  “I know who this is.” Taina leaned on one of her crutches and waved the other toward Margaret. “What’s she doing here?”

  “Just leaving,” Margaret said coolly. “Nadia, you know how to find me.” Margaret stepped around Taina and out the door, leaving only the smell of cedarwood in her wake.

  “That was rude,” Nadia said, once she’d heard the lab doors slide shut. “You didn’t have to be so mean to her face.”

  “At least I’m honest.” Taina leaned against the doorframe. “I thought you told Bobbi you were letting all this go.”

  “What is with all of you?” demanded Nadia, snatching up VERA off her desk and storming out of her room. Hadn’t she dealt with enough of this today? She had just been starting to feel better and ready to work again, and now this. It was too much to handle. She needed a nap. Several naps. Maybe just an entire sleep, at this point.

  “What is with you?” Taina threw back, following Nadia into the lab. “You’re acting like you’ve completely forgotten what friends or morals are. Like a tech CEO, actually.”

  “Always with the jabs.” Nadia marched into the kitchen and turned on the electric kettle with more force than was probably necessary. “I get it; you don’t like Margaret and you don’t like my project. Are we done?”

  “Listen to yourself!” Taina said incredulously. “You don’t sound like Nadia. You don’t even sound like manic Nadia.” Taina dropped into a plastic chair and punctuated her statement by setting her crutches down against the table. “No one here is being unreasonable! You’re a secret Super Hero who works for a public Super Hero fighting off attacks from Super Villains while you develop a quantum-realm spy network! It is not weird for your friends to say ‘Maybe pump the brakes on this total stranger’ or ‘Why are you making something completely illegal and probably evil?’ I’ve been trying to get Ying and Shay and Priya back in here for weeks. Have you even noticed?”

  Nadia whipped around, an empty mug in her hand. It had the words BECAUSE SCIENCE on it in big, bold letters, and it was Nadia’s favorite. “I’ve been a little busy, Taina! And I don’t appreciate that you don’t seem to have any faith in my abilities and I’m tired of you talking to me like I don’t know what I’m doing and everyone is trying to get me to hate Margaret and I don’t know why—” Nadia stopped herself. She didn’t want to say something she would regret. She just wanted to get back to work.

  “Nadia,” Taina said, interrupting the silence. She didn’t sound angry anymore. She sounded…scared. “Nadia, what’s going on with your eyes?”

  Nadia squinted. “Nothing? I can see you fine. It’s just bright in here.”

  “It’s really not.” Taina swallowed. She cocked her head toward the cupboard door with a mirror on it. “I’m serious. Are you okay?”

  Am I okay? Am I okay? Nadia slammed her mug down on the counter and stomped over to the mirror. She wasn’t made of porcelain. She was a flier and a fighter. She was a scientist. She had bipolar. It wasn’t who she was; it was a thing she had. And she was managing it. Responsibly. “I’m fine,” Nadia said, “and I wish people would stop asking me that question—”

  Nadia looked into the mirror, and she froze. Nadia recognized herself; she looked like she’d been crying a bit today, red-eyed and puffy-faced, but otherwise she looked…normal. Healthy. Rested. Sad, but normal.

  Except for one thing. Nadia leaned closer to the mirror. With her index fingers, she tugged down the skin under her eyes. There was no denying it.

  The brown of Nadia’s eyes had disappeared. The irises were gone. And in their place, she saw giant, blown-out pupils.

  Nadia could hear them, out in the lab. Taina had been on her phone for the last half hour, getting in touch with everyone she could: Priya, Shay, Ying, Bobbi, Janet, Jarvis, even Alexis. They’d all been caught up in their own lives, but this time, when Taina called, they all came. For the first time in weeks, the whole squad was assembling in the lab—no arguments, no misunderstandings. They were here to work.

  Nadia knew that was a good thing. Logically. And she would leave her room in a minute. In just a minute.

  But first, Nadia needed a moment to herself.

  She couldn’t stop seeing that image of herself, her eyes an unnerving wall of black. Just like Crédit France. Just like Times Square.

  Nadia filtered through the different possibilities in her mind. She was relatively certain she wasn’t on any sort of illegal substance; typically there were more symptoms than “big eyes” that came along with being drugged against your will. She wasn’t scared (well, until a couple of minutes ago, anyways) and she wasn’t excited (definitely not after a couple of minutes ago).

  “VERA?” Nadia asked. “Unusual causes of mydriasis.”

  “Unusual as in least common?” VERA queried.

  “Yes.” Nadia squeezed her eyes shut. She hated that something was happening to her body she couldn’t control. She spent so much time attempting to stay in command of herself—training her body wi
th ballet, shifting her size with Pym Particles, organizing her brain with medication and therapy and meditation and self-reflection…That there was something happening to her body now that she didn’t understand and couldn’t bring under her own control was infuriating and terrifying in equal measure. She couldn’t even punch it to make it stop. It was her own face. That was a terrible idea. What was she even thinking?!

  “Acetylcholine blockers,” VERA began to list. “Hallucinogens. Anesthetic. Stroke. Epilepsy. Traumatic head or eye injury. Impending brain herniation.”

  “Oh, good,” Nadia said to herself. “So probably best-case scenario, it is just an impending brain hernia. This is why people say not to search your symptoms online, isn’t it?”

  “Would you like me to phone an ambulance, Nadia?” VERA asked, not unkindly.

  “No.” Nadia shook her head. “No. I can figure this out on my own. I just need to think. I just need to—”

  Nadia reached for the chain around her neck—but there was nothing there. Her crystal—

  “Looking for this?” Taina leaned against Nadia’s doorframe, same as she had earlier. The Crystal Lab necklace dangled from her fingers. Behind her, Nadia could see Shay, Ying, and Priya, all looking different varieties of concerned. “Absolutely not.”

  “I just need time to think,” Nadia explained desperately. “If it’s not drugs, and I haven’t hit my head, then it can only be…”

  “VERA?” Taina asked loudly. “Turn yourself off.”