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“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.
