Queen Bee & Wasp King (COMPLETE✔️)

Chapter 3 || My Broken Mind

(song: "Monster" - Colours)

"Mom . . . do you know anything about the Wasp King?"

    My mom had a nightly ritual of watching Law and Order while eating a bag of chips. It was her time to unwind and point out how unrealistic the court shows were, but it didn't stop her from watching them. I thought it was a good time to get answers from her.

    "Why are you asking me about that? You haven't even mentioned that name since you were about seven-years-old." She said.

    "So you know what it is?"

    "Yeah, you had such an over-active imagination as a kid. I used to think you'd become a novelist someday because you were so creative." Her eyes turned upward to the ceiling while her mind reminisced about my younger years. "You said you had a little imaginary friend called the Wasp Prince and one day he'd become the Wasp King."

    I sighed. "God, I was such a weird kid."

    She laughed. "You don't know the half of it. What made you think about him again?"

    My shoulders shrugged. "I don't know, the neighbor boy claims he knew me when I was a kid so I guess I must have mentioned it to him when we were kids."

   Mom shook her head and tossed a few more chips into her mouth. "We don't know the neighbors, besides their sons are way too young to have gone to school with you."

    "They have a third son, an older boy."

    Her eyebrows knit together with perplexity. "The neighbors across the street from us?" She asked.

    "Yes, mom."

    She shifted against the couch uncomfortably. "I met them, they only have two sons. It sounds like someone is playing a trick on you, are you sure it's not a friend of Sean's?"

    My heartfelt like it had stopped. First Amy thought I was seeing things, now my mother didn't know of this boy's existence either?

    He was real, I knew he was.

    "I'm going to bed." I said dryly.

    My mother squinted to examine the wall-clock. "But it's only seven-thirty."

    "I have homework." It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't the reason I wanted to go to my room either.

     I needed to know the truth.

    Once I was upstairs I stared at my reflection in the bathroom mirror and carefully brushed each one of my teeth. My mother always had told me, a good smile was all a person needed in life to win the hearts of people. It'd made me obsessive with oral hygiene.

    Right outside of the bathroom was the hallway window. From it, very clearly I could see that boy standing on the grass of our front lawn, gazing up at me.

    I was terrified.

    With my mouth full of toothpaste foam I waved for my sister to come to my side. "Justine!"

    "What do you want?" Justine said snappishly. She was already dressed for bed with her hair up in a bun and her phone in her hand.

    I tugged at her arm and pushed her in front of the window. "Just look out the window, what do you see?"

    She shook off my touch  with an irritated expression. "I see people living in debt in order to maintain suburbia."

    "Is it your goal in life to be difficult? I mean, who do you see?"

    Justine grinned at me. "Who do you want me to see?"

    I pushed a finger against Justine's temple to force her to look out the window again. "You don't see a boy standing on our front lawn?"

    "Is this some kind of game?" She groaned.

    "Just answer the question!"

    "No! I don't see some boy on the lawn."

    I poked her shoulder. "Are you lying to me?"

    "Ow! I'm going to tell Mom!" She whined. I had barely even touched her, but that was the nature of little-sisters. They loved dramatic reasons to get their elder siblings in trouble.

   "Fine, it was a joke. Okay?" I lied with my voice very flat.

    Justine ducked into her room and peeked out at me from the safety of her finger-print marked door-frame. "It wasn't funny. It's a good thing you're smart, because if you weren't, you wouldn't be able to do well off your personality. It sucks."

    It was a compliment and an insult rolled into one, but my nerves were too shattered to deal with it. I wordlessly turned to go into my bedroom and soundly closed the door behind me.

    He had to be real, he couldn't be a hallucination.

   I'd had conversations with him, I was creative, but not that creative. Either this was some horrible joke everyone was in on, or I was losing my mind.

    I slid into my computer chair and began to use google to self-diagnose what my problem could be. I searched for information about seeing people who aren't really there, but it simply led me to several articles about schizophrenia. I couldn't have been schizophrenic—I mean—yes, I was stressed from working so hard to get accepted into Brown and I was devastated by Sean, but that couldn't have trigger some kind of psychotic break.

    "Maybe your mind was always broken and just now you're starting to realize it," a smooth voice clearly spoke.

    I felt instant fear race up against my spine.

   Slowly, I turned my head to look at my window. Sitting up on the tree branch there he was, the Wasp King. He rested his arms against my window sill and had his head poked into my room.

    "You left me in hiding for many years." He continued.

    I pushed myself as far back into my chair as it would let me and rolled myself back until the wheels bumped against my closet door. "What do you want from me?"

    "I should be asking you that. You called me because you needed me."

    He helped himself to climb through my window and stand in my room. He certainly didn't look like a hallucination. He didn't fit the description of shadow figures, and he wasn't some faceless voice like I'd read in the articles for Schizophrenia. He looked just like a normal teenage boy.

    He paced my room, examining my awards and my posters. He looked at things, but didn't touch them. It was almost like he was trying to be polite.

    "You've done so many things over the years. You have all these pieces of paper stating everything you've accomplished. These pieces of plastic are supposed to make you feel pride. You even got a boyfriend that made every girl in your class envy you—until he cheated on you. Up until then though, you've had a fairly painless existence."

    My lips trembled, I could see him slowly moving closer to me.

    "Who are you?" I barely managed to even whisper the words.

     He tucked his arm in front of himself and delivered me a formal bow.

    "I am the Wasp King, but for the sake of having an easier name, you can just call me Wyatt I'm not some sort of monster and I'm not here to terrorize you. You may have forgotten me, but that's probably for the best because my purpose here is to serve you . . . "