The Unstoppable Wasp

“Okay, yes, true,” Nadia conceded. “But I was working, and I found—Wait.” She paused, confused for a moment. “I thought you went home earlier?”

Taina shrugged. “I was going to.” She sat on the edge of her bed, carefully tucking her crutches in the corner by the lab stool that was currently passing for a nightstand.

Nadia sat next to her friend. Tai’s bedspread was a cool blue, and on top of that was a white crocheted blanket that Tai’s abuelita had made her. It reminded Nadia of the snow under the sky outside the Krasnaya Komnata. Not like the winters in New Jersey, where snowfall almost instantly turned brown and slushy and covered everything in muck so that you immediately ruined the suede boots your machekha* had gotten you. In Siberia, it stayed white and crisp and pristine for what felt like forever—there was no one to disturb it.

When the sky was clear and the sun was shining, those were the days you knew to stay inside. Without cloud cover, everything was that much colder.

“Is it the Bee-Boi?” Nadia asked with concern, touching Tai’s shoulder. Taina might not have bipolar, but all-nighters weren’t healthy for anyone.

Tai shrugged and Nadia’s hand slipped away. “It’s—” Tai looked at Nadia properly, for the first time since she’d come in. “…Whyyyy are you all Wasp’d up?”

“It doesn’t matter.” Nadia waved her off. “We are talking about you.”

“Nothing to talk about,” Taina said with an air of finality. “Thing doesn’t work; thing should work; gotta figure out how to make thing work. There, easy.” Taina bumped Nadia’s red-and-black boot with her white Vans. “Now, Wasp’d?”

Nadia sucked in her bottom lip, a habit whenever she got excited. It might have been her subconscious way of stopping herself from talking too quickly. It didn’t work super well. “I found something.”

“So you said.”

Ignoring her friend’s snark, Nadia brandished the journal in front of her. “I was packing up the house and I found Hank’s secret tiny laboratory and inside the secret tiny laboratory I found something else—my own mother’s journal. And—”

“Your what?”

“Look!” Nadia flipped to page twenty-seven. “Here!”

“‘Things to share with your future potential child.’” Taina read slowly from the top of the page.

“Yes!” Nadia sprang up, spinning in a messy pirouette with the journal held above her like a very small and very light pas de deux partner. “I’m going to do them. All of them, right away. Isn’t it amazing?!”

“Is it?” Tai asked.

“Isn’t it?” Nadia repeated, stopping to face Taina. Wasn’t it?

“I’m asking you.” Tai flopped back onto her pillows, stretching her legs out in front of her and crossing her arms. She looked at Nadia with an expression mostly of curiosity…but there was something else in there, too. Wariness? Hesitation? Doubt? Nadia knew that Taina approached everything with a level of skepticism (or, as Taina would describe it, “realism”), so she tried not to take the look too personally. Nadia was an over-communicator to a fault and it was easy to forget that not everyone was the same way.

“Well,” Nadia said quickly, “I never knew my mother! And now she’s left me what is basically a how-to list for connecting with her and it’s such a beautiful opportunity, and—”

“That’s great,” Taina interjected. “That sounds really great, seriously, I’m happy for you. But—”

“But what?” Nadia asked. It came out a little snappier than she meant it to.

“Nothing.” Taina seemed to change her mind about what she wanted to say. “I’m happy for you,” she repeated. It wasn’t as convincing as Taina seemed to think it was.

“Taina.” Nadia frowned. “Be honest.”

Taina let out an exaggerated sigh and ran her hands over her face. “All I was going to say is that you’ve got a lot going on right now and nobody wants you to end up in a manic episode and frankly I didn’t even know you cared that much about, you know…” She paused, searching for the right way to say what she was trying to say. “Living in your past. I thought you were all about the other thing.”

Ah. Nadia thought she understood now. She perched on Tai’s stool. “It’s not that I want to live in the past—it’s the opposite,” Nadia explained with a smile. “This gives me a list of all the things I was supposed to have done but never got the chance to do. It’s like…a correction. A do-over.”

“And what about Like Minds?” asked Taina. “Have you even settled on a project yet?”

“Well, I just—”

“Or taking G.I.R.L. statewide?” Taina continued, a little louder. “Or your therapy workbooks? Or driver’s ed? Or selling your house? Or—”

“I know,” Nadia interrupted, her tone uncharacteristically sharp. Why was Taina being like this? Nadia was well aware of everything she had going on right now. “I know! But this…” Nadia stopped for a second to think. “What if you found something from your mother? What if she could speak to you again, even a little? Wouldn’t you want to be a part of that?”

Tai’s face closed off entirely. She didn’t like to talk about her mom’s passing. “I have Alexis and I have my abuelita,” she said bluntly. “What good does it do to wish my parents were still around? Should I be sad all the time? Should I be hanging on to something that isn’t real?” Tai pulled the crocheted blanket up over her legs. “I’d rather focus on the people who are here for me now.”