#juno au

*

Max drives to the old, run down Walgreens that smells like mold and stale pizza after her philosophy lecture. She digs her thumbnail into the paper cut on her finger as she looks at pregnancy tests, and picks the one with the overly happy woman holding onto her stomach.

She grabs five. Just to be sure.

*

Her suspicions are confirmed. She’s pregnant. Max stares at the stick that’s in her shaking hand, drops it in her book bag when she can’t stand the sight of it anymore.

She digs her fingers into her eyes to stop the tears, and curses herself for her own stupidity. She should’ve known it was a bad idea — the pull-out method was unreliable — and now she was sitting in front of a musty Walgreens in her beat up car, when she should’ve been doing homework, reading about metaphysics with her brain leaking out of her ears.

Max bites into the shaking fat of her bottom lip, going to the one place that would make her feel better. The pet store.

It was a weird habit she’d picked up in her freshman year, before she met Lando and Charles and made other friends. She’d head to the pet store and stare at the animals, thinking about owning a gerbil or a hamster. She knew, logically, that she couldn’t because a) she was a freshman in a cramped dorm and b) her dad would never let her spend her measly allowance on an animal. Still, it was a happy thought.

As Max stares at the ferrets digging their heads into their soft bedding, she thinks about how everyone might react to the news. If she’s going to keep the baby or get rid of it. The more and more she mulls it over, the more her stomach starts to turn as if to say, ‘too much distress for one day; shutting down’, like her hunk of a laptop would in high school whenever she wrote a paper that was two pages too long.

“Hello, ma’am?” A worker wearing a green apron and a name tag said to her, appearing as if he’d been there for a while. Small tendrils of embarrassment flickered within her gut. “Are you planning to buy one?” He motions his head towards the glass box, where the ferret she was once staring at is sleeping, curled up against the wall. Its nose twitches as it sleeps.

“No,” Max says, shaking her head. Being dragged out of her thoughts makes her smell the Auntie Anne’s cart a few feet away. She should buy a slushy. “Just looking.”

“Alright, well we’re closing soon.” She reads the name on his name tag. Tom. Regular name for a regular looking man. “Okay,” Max says, and hopes her face doesn’t do something weird. She walks away afterwards, fulfills her wish of buying a slushy. The blue raspberry colors her tongue and ails her consistent, 24-hour loop of nerves.

*

“Max!” Charles exclaims when Max comes inside, shutting the door as quickly as possible to keep the cold out. He’s wearing some bright cashmere sweater with weird geometric shapes on it, with a pair of very distressed jeans. Max pushes down a snicker at the sight.

“Hi, Charles,” She says tiredly, sitting down at the scratched up, mahogany kitchen table. Lando looks up from her laptop, glasses perched low on her nose. “You look like shit, mate,” She says, taking a sip of whatever was in her mug.

“Thanks,” Max says, “How kind.” Lando winces and mumbles a weak apology. “Where were you?” Charles asks, flipping a grilled cheese sandwich in the pan.

“Library,” Max says, the lie rolling off her tongue easily. “Philosophy homework. You know how it is.”

“Yes,” Charles says, looking solemn. “Unfortunately, I do.” Lando starts talking about Oscar’s bland responses to her memes, that she thought were absolutely hilarious, that Oscar thought were a little stupid. Charles listens to all she has to say and adds side comments, and Max lets their constant stream of conversation wash over her.

“Oh, Max,” Lando says, dragging Max out of her brain. “Daniel stopped by here to see you today. Said something about you not returning his calls? He told me to tell you to text him as soon as possible.”

Max sighs through her nose, picks at the healing scab on the bridge of her nose from where she scratched it too hard a few weeks ago. “Okay. Thanks.”

*

Just as Max is about to get around to actually doing her philosophy homework, her phone buzzes itself half to death on her bedside table, making her exasperation flare up. She was planning to ignore it, thinking it’d be Victoria or something, but it was Daniel.

Max knew that if she didn’t answer, he’d just come over here again the next day. And she might actually be there that time. Both Lando and Charles were bad liars, so there was no way they’d be able to cover for Max effectively.

Her thumb hovers over the green button, a picture of her and Daniel at some random club her sophomore year mocking her. They both look happy in the picture, but Daniel especially. His beaming smile makes her heart ache.

“Hello?” Max says, and Daniel’s sigh of relief is one that could be heard around the world. “‘Hello’? That’s it?” Daniel asks, and Max can almost hear the way his eyebrows must be furrowed. “I was worried about you. It’s been two weeks.”

Max winces. It has, and she somehow hadn’t realized. All that throwing up must’ve fucked with her memory. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry, I’ve been-”

“Busy? Yeah,” Daniel scoffs, and it’s Max’s turn to furrow her eyebrows. She feels that she somehow might’ve put her foot wrong in this situation. “What’s the problem?”

“The problem is Max, that you’ve been ignoring me ever since we slept together,” Daniel says. “Was it that bad? Now you can’t even speak to me, and Lando has to play the middleman for the both of us?”

It was anything but bad. The way Daniel had laid her down, made her feel important while he took her apart, and put her back together afterwards, was unlike anything she’d experienced before. Maybe if it was bad, it would be easier for her to get over this thing in her belly. God, she couldn’t even say or think the word.

“Daniel, it was not bad. I’ve just been sick,” She says. It’s technically not a lie. “Are you okay?” Daniel asks, concerned. “Yes. I’ll get better soon.”

“Okay,” He says, sighing. “Okay. I’m sorry for like, snapping at you. I’m not a dickhead, I promise.” Max just laughs softly, though her chest clenches. “I know.

“So what kind of sickness is this? The kind that spreads from kissing, the one that stuffs your nose so bad you can’t tell your ass from your elbow, or the one that makes you puke your guts out?” Daniel asks, teasing. If only he knew. “Definitely the last one. A little bit of the second. I think I should definitely consider going to what is it, the Mayo Clinic? Get put in a trial.”

Daniel’s laugh makes her chest warm and her cheeks heat up. “That’d be sick.”

“Literally,” Max says, her computer temporarily shutting off from her lack of use. “What are you doing?” She asks, and Daniel hums. “Watching Bob’s Burgers. You?”

“Philosophy homework.”

“Oh shit, should I call back later?”

“No, it’s fine. I can do it tomorrow.”

“Nah. Go be a scholar, Maxy. Make me proud,” He sighs, and Max could hear what was probably the shuffling of his bed sheets against his moving body. Max rolls her eyes, though there’s no heat in it. “If you do, I might just have a little gift for you tomorrow.”

Afterwards, Max has never been more interested in her philosophy homework in her life.

*

When Max gets back from an entire day at the campus library, she finds Daniel laying on her bed, completely naked, with a bow taped to his dick. Max drops her bag and her phone in shock, laughing.

“Here’s your gift. Me, obviously,” Daniel says, grinning mischievously. In that moment, Max usually wouldn’t be able to resist locking her door and stumbling towards the bed, letting Daniel pull her close and fuck her in her sheets that she hadn’t washed in god knows how long. But she couldn’t let herself.

She felt the words crawl up her throat with determination, her mouth dry as her lips formed the words. “I’m pregnant.”

She watches it land. The way his smile falls and he starts to half blink, slow, as if he was drunk. “What?”

“Daniel,” Max starts, her voice cracking. She did not cry. She would never let herself. Not in front of him, and not now. “I’m pregnant.”

“And it’s mine?”

Max scoffs, anger flushing her skin. “Yes, it’s yours. I wouldn’t be telling you this if it wasn’t.” Daniel sits up and throws his hoodie on, with a baggy pair of basketball shorts he’d left a few weeks before. Max hadn’t bothered to give it back.

“When did you find out?”

“Yesterday morning.”

“Wait,” He pauses. “So when I called you last night, and you said you were sick because you were throwing up, you knew you were pregnant? And you didn’t tell me?”

“You were already mad at me! I didn’t wanna give you this to think about too,” She explains. “I’m sorry.”

Daniel sighs. He pats the spot next to him. “Sit.” Max goes. She almost whines at the feeling of his warm hand finally meeting the flushed skin of her thigh after weeks of not touching him. “Enough of that. What do you want to do?”

“I don’t know yet,” She says, resting her elbows on her knees and covering her face with her palms. “I should probably just have an abortion, yes? Then we can..”

“Move on and act like this never happened? Fuck, Max,” Daniel sighs, and Max furrows her eyebrows. He takes his hand off her thigh. She misses it immediately. “What do you want me to do? Keep it? I can’t do that! Unless we give it up.”

“You can keep it or you can get rid of it. Is that what you want?” Daniel asked, eyebrows raised. “Because we’re doing whatever it is that you want to do. I just don’t want you to act like this never happened between us.”

She sighs, runs a hand over her face. “I don’t know, okay? Give me a few days.” He nods in the silence, before dropping a kiss to her shoulder. “I’ll see you later, okay? Let me know what you decide.”