The Unstoppable Wasp

“Isn’t it amazing?” Margaret said, lying next to Nadia.

“It really is,” Nadia agreed, her hands behind her head.

The two looked up at the night sky above them in the middle of the day. Margaret ha

d rushed them up a flight of stairs, and then another, and then another (she was in surprisingly good shape for someone who probably spent a lot of time behind a computer screen), until they’d arrived on the building’s roof.

Or what would have been the roof, had it not been replaced with a massive domed planetarium.

“We don’t do a lot of the standard tech-bro garbage,” Margaret explained as the heavens rotated above the two scientists. “No foosball tables and no Ultimate Frisbee League, or whatever. But my favorite place in the world is this cabin my grandpa had way up in the Rockies, and all you can see is sky forever and ever. I used to go there as a kid, and it was the most sacred place I knew. There’s something so reaffirming about seeing the night sky.…” She paused. “I think it’s supposed to make you feel small and insignificant, but it just makes me feel like…whatever made the stars made us, and we should do something meaningful with that.”

Margaret rolled onto her side and smiled conspiratorially at Nadia. “And there’s so much light pollution in New York it’s impossible to see anything good at night. So, my one tech-bro indulgence. Can you blame me?”

Still staring straight up, Nadia shook her head. She had never visited a planetarium, ever. She knew there was one at the American Museum of Natural History in Central Park, but who really had time to go and do things like that? She was busy. She had lists to check off.

It was only as Nadia lay there on her back in the darkened dome that she realized this moment—moments like this—might actually help her to feel prepared enough to check off more of those list items in the future. There was something about doing this with Margaret that made it feel different; special, even. Sure, she’d been watching Star Wars with Ying, but the other items, the bigger ones, Nadia had been completing them alone. She hadn’t wanted to talk to many people about what was going on. Something about it felt too personal to share. And she hadn’t wanted Janet to hear about it secondhand, in case it hurt her feelings. She hadn’t even been able to share her mother’s goals with her own stepmother.

But now, lying here next to Margaret and checking off the box next to the stars, she felt different. Excited. She felt more refreshed than she had in ages. Days—weeks, even.

And it was all thanks to VERA.

VERA, and Margaret.

Nadia took a deep breath. “Margaret, I—”

“Ms. Hoff, you are needed urgently in the finances meeting,” VERA’s voice boomed suddenly through the dome, her blue pixels rapidly replacing the stars in the sky. Nadia squeezed her eyes shut and opened them again.

Right. She was inside. She was inside HoffTech. And it was the middle of the day.

Margaret let out a noise of great frustration and pushed herself up to sitting. “Fine. Tell them I’m on my way.”

“They are becoming…impatient,” VERA added.

Margaret rolled her eyes and made a face at Nadia. She laughed. “Do you have to do this for G.I.R.L.?”

Nadia stood, brushing off the back of her pants and offering Margaret her hand. “No, that’s all Janet,” she said, helping the older woman up off the floor with ease.

“Daaang,” Margaret said, hopping up to her feet. “Biceps of steel. Pilates?”

Nadia walked with Margaret toward the spiral staircase that would take them out of the beautiful night and back into reality. “Ballet,” she offered. Nadia left out the part about her super-powers.

That was more of a (twenty-)second friend-date sort of conversation.

As they reached the bottom of the second staircase, Margaret was rushed by several people in jeans and hoodies, all inquiring about where she had been and why she was late and other things that made Nadia briefly change her mind about running a business at all. One of them touched Margaret’s lower back and began escorting her into a nearby glass boardroom, this one at least three times the size of the one in which Nadia had solved VERA’s bug problem.

“I’ll e-mail you, Nadia! Save the Insectarium for me,” Margaret said over her shoulder, before the glass door closed behind her and her coworkers.

Nadia peered into the room with curiosity after her new friend. Margaret walked straight to the head of the table and shook hands with a very dour middle-aged white man with a well-manicured beard and a shock of hair so black it was nearly blue.

He looked aside to see Nadia staring through the door. His brows knit. Margaret followed his glance and uttered something Nadia couldn’t hear through the glass—which instantly turned opaque. She was shut out.

Which was for the best. Finance meetings were definitely not one of Nadia’s things.

With a lightness in her step—she’d completed another item on Maria’s list! She didn’t feel empty inside afterward!—Nadia found her way back down to the lobby, which actually now looked a lot more STEM-chic than dentist office, now that she was seeing it for a second time. It really was quite classy, Nadia thought. Very aspirational. Also, she didn’t have a single pair of white tennis shoes. Why was that? She should absolutely get herself a pair of white tennis shoes. It would really complete her look. She would have to ask Janet.

Bzzz bzzz.

Phone. Fumbling for a second, Nadia fished her phone out from the front pocket in her sweatshirt. Must get back to pocket-dimension idea, she thought hurriedly, as she unlocked her phone.