Chapter Text
Shiv couldn't stop jiggling her leg on the toilet as she stared down at the second line on the stick.
It was dark. Thick. Red. There was absolutely no shadow of a doubt what it meant.
But she still felt like maybe she should do one more just to be absolutely sure. She set the test aside on the back of the toilet and reached for the next box –
Then came the knock at the door. Shiv jumped right out of her bones.
"Hey Shiv, you good? You've been in there a while," said Roman.
Shiv hissed a fuck under her breath and scrambled to stuff the positive test into the bathroom wastebin with the other two she just took. "Go away!" she called out, haphazardly covering them with wadded up toilet paper.
Roman rapped on the door a few more times. "C'mon, open up. I gotta take a biggole shit."
"What? Go use one of the twenty other bathrooms, freak!"
"I can't. That one's where Connor anally raped me when I was a little kid, and I have a psychological block going number two anywhere else. It's the only place I can open up my asshole wide enough for the turds to slide out."
Shiv stood up ramrod straight with her pants down, staring at the door to the hall in flabbergasted disgust.
"Roman, what the fuck do I even say to that?" Shiv exhaled.
"Nuffin," Roman said. She could just hear him smiling through the door. "Lemme in. What are you doing in there that takes an hour? Playing Parcheesi by yourself?"
Shiv flushed the toilet and pulled up her shorts. "Why, you want to see me masturbate that bad?"
Roman let out a long, contemplative hum. "I wouldn't say no to a matinée."
"You are the most sickening person I have ever fucking met," Shiv groaned, washing her hands in the sink. "What is wrong with your brain to make you like this?"
"AIDS," Roman said.
Shiv angrily turned off the taps, dried her hands, tossed her unused tests under the sink, and then threw open the bathroom door. She stood in the doorframe, blocking Roman's view into the room, and spat: "What. Is. Your. Problem."
When Shiv closed her eyes and pictured her brother, she still saw a little boy, and still heard his little boy voice. And, well, he was still a boy, and he was still little. But she had a moment of shock every time she saw him now: he'd grown something resembling a jaw, and while he still didn't sound quite his age, perhaps he could finally say at least one of his testicles had dropped.
Maybe it was just that between boarding school and college, Roman was away too much for this new image of him to ever stick in her mind. She simply couldn't get used to it. Who was this guy?
And then Roman announced, with the gravity of a death sentence, "Shiv, I am b-o-r-e-d."
"And that's my problem?" Shiv sneered.
"Yeah, if I make it your problem." This boy who was her brother, but looked and sounded nothing like the brother she knew, craned his head to get a look into the bathroom. "Which, I am."
"You've been back one day and already I want to kill myself. Fuck off."
"Were you doing drugs in there?"
"Why do you care so much?"
"Come onnnnn, Shiv," Roman whined. "Play with meeeee."
Rolling her eyes, Shiv gave Roman a push in the chest. He stumbled back, laughing with a nervous jitter – perhaps from the shame of being so effortlessly manhandled by his baby sister.
Shiv took the opening to start on a quick path back to her room. Roman recovered his footing and followed behind her.
"Wanna Smash?" Roman asked, upbeat.
Shiv stopped in her tracks so quickly Roman nearly bumped into her. She whipped around and glowered, "What?"
"Oh, that wasn't innuendo. I mean the game."
"I'd rather die," Shiv droned, turning back on her way.
"C'mon. We used to have fun."
"Don't you have actual friends to hang out with?"
"No."
Shiv sighed and let herself into her room. It was pointless to try to shut her brother out – Dad didn't let her have a lock on her door. She went to sit at her desk and turn on her computer, while Roman flopped down on her bed.
"You got any plans for the summer?" he asked.
Shiv was barely listening to him. "Nope," she said.
"Wanna do anything? I think Ken's staying with Rava's parents until July, but us two could go somewhere."
When Shiv looked over her shoulder, Roman was lying on her bed with his ankles crossed and his chin propped up on his hands like a teen girl at a sleepover.
"Yeah, sure," Shiv said. "You wanna go with me to get an abortion?"
Roman snorted. "What? Give me some credit. I never let the guys at school cum inside."
"Uh-huh," Shiv replied, turning back to her computer.
The little blocks crawled their way across the length of the loading bar under the Windows XP logo, cycling back to the beginning whenever they made it to the end. Shiv's eyes went out of focus as she stared at the screen, face blank, mind jumbled.
Well, Shiv did let the guys at school cum inside. And now she was absolutely, unbelievably, indescribably fucked.
She mulled over the prospect of calling the guy. She kind of didn't want to bother. She was never all that serious about him, and they were headed off to different colleges after the summer anyway – despite whatever delusions he may have had about holding onto something long distance, their relationship was, for all intents and purposes, already over.
The choice was comically obvious. Obviously, obviously she had to get an abortion – it wasn't like she was going to raise a baby together with some dipshit teenage boy, or derail her first year of college carrying a baby to term just to give it up for adoption. Dad would take her right to the vet and have her put down if she even entertained any other course of action.
Oh, god. Dad. The thought of Dad finding out was somehow the worst thing about it. He wouldn't even be that mad, she didn't think – probably not even surprised. That thought was more unbearable than anything. She could just picture the quiet exasperation on his face, his disgust – I thought you were smarter than that, Siobhan, he'd say, with a tone that made it very clear that he did not, in fact, ever think she was smarter than that.
"Shiv! Are you even listening to me?"
Shiv's shoulders jerked as Roman's voice tore her out of her own head. When she swiveled around in her chair and gave him a good look at the tears running down her face, he recoiled in shock.
"Whoa, what the fuck?" Roman said. "Shiv, are you all right?"
Shiv was not all right. Too embarrassed to let him hear whatever pathetic squeak her vocal cords would produce if she tried to speak, she shook her head.
Roman slid off of her bed and made his way over to where she was sat in her chair. He knelt down in front of her, putting both his hands on her knees, and gave her a real serious look. "What's up? Need me to beat up any guys for you? I mean I can't even take you in a fight, but I'll embarrass myself if it helps at all."
Shiv had to stifle a laugh. "No, no," she protested.
"What's his name? Kevin With Two Ns or something?"
"Kevin With Two Ns was two boyfriends ago," Shiv said. "It's Don."
"All right, gimme his address, I'll roll up, ring the bell and pass out on his doorstep from fright. With any luck he'll trip and die on his way out."
Shiv sniffled and wiped away her tears. She wanted to wallow a bit in her misery, but unfortunately she thought her brother was very funny and his tender concern for her did make her feel better. It really pissed her off.
"C'mon, stop," she complained, covering her mouth so he wouldn't have the satisfaction of getting to see her smile.
Roman took mercy on her. He gave her a quiet moment to sit with herself, rubbing her knee with his thumb. Then he asked, "Are you pregnant?"
Shiv nodded.
"Okay," Roman said. "So after we kill Jon, what do you want to do about it?"
Shiv shrugged like it didn't matter all that much. "I have to get an abortion. And I have to do it without Dad finding out."
"Yeah," Roman said, nodding like that was a reasonable conclusion. "There's no way Dad can find out."
Hearing that out of her brother's mouth slugged her with another wave of despair. She choked.
"Hey, hey! I'll help you, okay? We can figure out something to do. Yeah?" Roman said, rubbing the sides of her calves in a gesture that was a little weird but still nice. He didn't seem to care that she hadn't shaved in a while. "Maybe we should go out of state."
Shiv sniffled loudly. That made sense – Perez would have her photograph plastered all over the internet within two hours if she tried to show up at a health clinic downtown. Better to go somewhere a little out of the way. "Yeah," she said.
Roman climbed to his feet and spun Shiv around so she was facing her computer. He leaned over the arm of her chair and reached for her mouse so he could open up Firefox. Shiv watched with vacant, glassy eyes as her brother awkwardly contorted himself around her to one-handed hunt-and-peck "abortion" into Google Maps.
"Remember to clear your browser history after this," Roman mumbled.
"Yeah..."
There were plenty of options pretty much anywhere they looked. After scrolling around the map a bit, Roman suggested, "Newark?"
"Is that far enough away?" Shiv replied, chewing at her lip nervously.
Roman zoomed out a bit on the map. "We could go all the way to Philadelphia, I guess," he said. "Or what about Trenton?"
"Trenton might work," Shiv said. "We're not gonna be able to take the car, though..."
"Oh no, we'll have to board the subway with the proles," Roman said, shuddering theatrically. "Okay, how about we tell Dad we're gonna go on a weekend trip, but you're really into Al Gore right now so we can't take one of the PJs. Then we have a car drive us to Penn Station, say we're gonna take the Amtrak to Philly, but then we jump off early at Trenton. We pop into the Planned Parenthood, kill that shit real quick, and then it's like an hour in a cab over to the hotel in Philly."
Shiv twisted to look up at Roman beside her. "You sure this is your first time?"
"First time what? Going to extreme lengths to hide extracurricular activities from Dad, or specifically conspiring to murder an unborn child without his knowledge?"
"The baby one," Shiv said.
"I told you I don't let guys cum inside," Roman muttered, clicking onto the Trenton, New Jersey Planned Parenthood so he could note down its address on the pad of Post-it Notes next to Shiv's monitor.
The first time, Shiv was prepared to take the comment as a joke. The second time, she was starting to feel a little defensive.
"You're no fucking saint either, you know," she bristled.
"Never claimed to be."
"I'm on birth control. It's not like – it's not like I'm completely reckless! It just... didn't work. It wasn't my fault."
Now Roman was searching around for hotels in Philadelphia, half-listening. "Uh-huh."
Shiv wasn't sure why she found herself getting so worked up. Did Roman actually care that much? Probably not. But for some reason the thought that he might look down on her was completely unbearable.
"It's the 21st century," she said. "It's not a crime for a girl to have sex. A baby isn't a punishment. It's not a fucking sin for me to – for me to enjoy my life."
Roman gave Shiv a sideways glance as he added another address to the Post-it. "Wow. Never said any of that?"
"You implied it!"
"I didn't, but just for the record: I don't actually care if you let guys cum inside you, Shiv."
"I don't!" Shiv snapped, a totally kneejerk response.
Roman couldn't help himself. "Clearly you did at least once."
"So what!? I'm allowed to enjoy sex too!"
"The goalposts are moving back and forth at blinding speed."
"You're such a misogynistic pig," Shiv complained.
Roman awkwardly typed "Amtrak timetables" into Google. "Yeah, okay. Well, this woman-hating oinky-woinky is also currently the only one doing any work to help you evict the cum bubby you've got squatting in your uterus right now –"
"I really hate you –"
"– So next time ask your boyfriend to slurp that shit back out and save me the trouble."
Shiv couldn't help but recoil at the vivid imagery that conjured in her brain. Roman got a glimpse of the look of visceral disgust on her face and burst into laughter.
"That's what got the lemon sucker mug out of you?" Roman laughed. "What, does Ron not go down?"
Even talking about that felt beyond the pale. "Are you kidding? That's disgusting."
"I've been talking about creampie-ing you for five minutes but the concept of pussy eating is too disgusting to speak aloud," Roman said, voice flat in disbelief.
Pussy eating. What an utterly vile combination of words. Shiv hated hearing it, and she hated thinking about it even more. "Guys don't do that," she huffed.
There was a long moment where Roman stopped what he was doing and turned half his body to give Shiv the most baffled are you fucking kidding me look she'd ever seen on his face.
She didn't even know how to respond to his incredulity. "What – I don't –"
"You've had what, thirty boyfriends before you've even gone off to college and not a single one of them ever even offered to go down on you?" Roman said, astonished. "And you suck these dipshits off anyway?"
"That's – that's different," Shiv responded defensively. Why was it different? Now that she was thinking about it, she wasn't quite sure. "Guys just don't do that."
"I fucking would," Roman laughed, turning back to the screen to scroll through the Amtrak times. And then he added, as if in an absent aside: "If I was Ron I'd eat your pussy in a heartbeat, bitch."
Something about hearing that felt like being hit in the face by a baseball bat. An odd mixture of embarrassment, disgust, and something else she couldn't quite place bubbled in her stomach, the heat rising like steam until her face was the color of a beet.
But if Roman noticed, he gave no indication of it. "How about tomorrow morning at 10 AM? Is that too early?"
"What?" Shiv replied, blinking herself out of her stupor. "Oh – you mean for the train?"
"Yeah."
It was all a bit much to take in. While Shiv logically knew that this was what she needed to do, she only found out she was pregnant an hour ago – could she really just turn around and get an abortion tomorrow? It wasn't like she was worried she was going to change her mind, but –
"I dunno," she mumbled.
"How about the noon train, then?"
That wasn't the problem. But Shiv found herself answering numbly, "Yeah, maybe. Maybe that's better."
"All right," Roman said, adding another scribble to the Post-it. "Then I'll go feed Dad the story and get everything booked. You still have your fake ID?"
"Oh, probably," Shiv replied.
Roman tore the square of addresses and phone numbers off the top of the pad. "Cool. Smash in an hour?"
"Yeah, let's do it," said Shiv.