The Other Team

Maya's team had a chant. It went like this: stomp, stomp, clap. Stomp, stomp, clap. Then everyone yelled "Riverside" and it felt like electricity running up through the floor and into her chest.

She did not think about why it felt that way. She just knew that after the chant, she would walk through a wall for anyone wearing a blue shirt.

Soren knew it too. He stood next to her in the Riverside cluster, shoulder to shoulder with nine other kids, and every time they did the chant he felt bigger. Not taller. Bigger. Like the edges of him extended outward to include all of them.

The regional science olympiad had forty teams. They had been competing since eight in the morning. It was now two in the afternoon, and the gymnasium smelled like sweat and dry-erase markers and the particular anxiety of eleven-year-olds who care too much about things.

The team from Lakeview wore red shirts. They had their own chant. Maya didn't know what it was because she had never listened to it. They were just a wall of red on the other side of the gym, loud and moving in unison, and she did not like them. She couldn't have told you why. They hadn't done anything. She just didn't.

"Final round," said the head judge, a tall woman who kept checking her phone between announcements. "We're doing something different. Each team will be split. Half your members will pair with half of another team. You solve the final challenge together or not at all."

The gym went silent, then loud.

Maya looked at Soren. Soren looked at Maya.

"Riverside Blue pairs with Lakeview Red," the judge read from her phone.

The noise Maya made was involuntary.

Five minutes later they were sitting at a long table across from five Lakeview kids. Nobody was talking. A girl with red-framed glasses and a red shirt sat directly across from Maya and was staring at the table surface like it contained instructions.

"I'm Soren," said Soren, because someone had to.

The Lakeview girl glanced up. "I know. You got second in the bridge event. We got first." She said it flat, not bragging. Just establishing the geography of the situation.

"Yeah," Soren said. "Your truss design was better."

Something shifted in her face. Not a smile. A notch of tension releasing. "I'm Priya," she said.

The challenge envelope sat in the center of the table. Maya opened it.

Inside: a single sheet of paper. The task was to design an experiment that could measure an invisible force. Not gravity. Not magnetism. A force that makes people cooperate. They had forty-five minutes and had to present their design to the judges.

"That's not a real force," said a Lakeview boy immediately.

"It says to treat it like one," Maya said. She had already read the whole sheet twice.

"Okay, but what would you even measure?" Priya asked.

Soren pulled out his notebook. The Lakeview kids looked at it like he'd pulled out a rotary phone. He didn't notice. He was writing.

"If it's a real thing that makes people cooperate," he said slowly, writing as he talked, "then it has to be in the body somewhere. It has to be chemical or electrical or something physical."

"Hormones," Maya said.

Everyone looked at her.

"There's a hormone. Oxytocin. It gets released when people touch, or look each other in the eye, or do things together. Like chanting."

She said this and then stopped, because something had just clicked sideways in her head. She looked at Soren.

Soren looked back at her. He was getting there too, but by a different road.

"Our chant," Maya said quietly.

"The stomping and the clapping and the yelling," Soren said. "Synchronized movement. Eye contact. Physical closeness. That would release it."

"So the chant is basically a chemical delivery system," Priya said, leaning forward.

"For trust," Soren said. "For wanting to help each other. For feeling like a team."

Maya was quiet. The sideways thing in her head was still clicking.

"But that's good, right?" the Lakeview boy said. "Cooperation is good."

"Design the experiment," Maya said. "What if you measured oxytocin in two groups. One group does the chant together. The other group just sits in the same room. Then you give both groups a task where they can share resources with strangers."

"The chant group would share more," Priya said. "Obviously."

"With each other," Maya said.

The table went quiet.

"What do you mean, with each other?" Priya asked.

"I mean the hypothesis isn't just that oxytocin increases trust. It's that it increases trust with your group. Specifically your group. And it might decrease trust with everyone else."

Soren stopped writing. He looked at Maya, then at Priya, then back at Maya. He put his pen down.

"That's why I didn't like you," Maya said to Priya.

It came out plain and honest and a little terrible. Priya blinked.

"You didn't do anything," Maya continued. "You were just wearing a different color shirt. And every time we did our chant, every time we all stood together and stomped and clapped, we were basically flooding our brains with a chemical that made us trust blue shirts and not trust red shirts."

"Same," said Priya. Very quietly. "Same for us."

"So the experiment," Soren said, picking up his pen again, because the inside of his head needed somewhere to put this, "measures oxytocin before and after group bonding rituals. Then tests sharing behavior. But the key variable isn't sharing with teammates. It's sharing with the other team. That's where you'd see the effect."

"The same chemical," Priya said. "The exact same chemical that makes you love your friends makes you suspicious of strangers."

"Not suspicious," Maya said. "That's too simple. It's more like. They stop being real. When you're full of the bonding feeling, everyone outside the bond gets blurry."

Soren wrote that down. Priya watched him write it and then said, "Can I see that?"

He slid the notebook across the table. Priya read his notes. She added a line in her own handwriting, small and precise next to his. A Lakeview kid leaned in to read it. Then a Riverside kid. Then another.

Six hands on the notebook, passing a pen.

Maya looked at the red shirts and the blue shirts mixed together around the table, heads bent close over Soren's pages, and felt the warmth start in her chest again. The same warmth as the chant. The exact same warmth.

She held still with that.

Across the gym, the Riverside kids started their chant. Stomp, stomp, clap.

Maya's foot twitched toward the rhythm, and she kept it still.