Chapter Text
Saturday
February 15th, 1986
Chrissy Cunningham is fully aware that the small bathroom at the Family Video downtown is probably not the best place to do what she is about to do. But she also doesn’t exactly have any better options, so she’ll just have to make it work somehow.
She knows she needs to do this somewhere public, somewhere where no one will question her being there, but also somewhere where she wont risk running into her mom or Jason.
Chrissy knows her mom would never come into a place like this, she hates movies and doesn’t even approve of anyone in the house bringing them home.
Chrissy also knows that Jason can’t stand the manager here, a classmate of his named Keith, so even though Jason does rent movies from here he never actually comes into the store. Instead whenever Jason wants to rent a movie he sends Chrissy or Andy in to go get it for him.
It wouldn’t be ideal to run into Andy here either, but…
It’s not like Chrissy knows anywhere else in town that’d be a better option.
The bell above the door jingles as she pushes it open and steps into the store.
Steve Harrington is behind the counter, talking to a woman and her kid, but he smiles and gives Chrissy a nod in greeting when he sees her standing by the door.
Chrissy smiles back at him. Perfect. Placid. Fake.
Steve goes back to his conversation and she wanders the aisles and pretends to browse. In reality she’s checking who else is in the store.
There’s a few other customers that Chrissy doesn’t really recognize browsing the aisles, but there’s no sign of Keith or the girl employee whose name Chrissy doesn’t know. As far as Chrissy can tell, Steve’s the only employee here at the moment.
There’s an ‘Employees Only’ door back behind the counter. Chrissy doesn’t know where it goes but there could be someone else back there, she supposes. The thought makes her anxious, but there’s nothing she can do about it so she tries to just push that thought aside.
Chrissy glances back over at Steve.
He’s leaning over the counter now, talking animatedly with the kid in front of him, an easy smile on his handsome face. The kid he’s talking to looks totally captivated by whatever it is Steve’s telling them.
Steve’s good with kids , Chrissy realizes with surprise. When the kid responds to Steve, they sound so happy and excited.
It’s not something she expected, not from Steve Harrington.
But… Chrissy supposes… it’s not like her and Steve Harrington have ever really been friends or anything. So maybe she shouldn’t be surprised that she doesn’t really know him all that well.
After all, how much can you really learn about a person just from seeing them around town and in the hallways at school, or from overhearing gossip about them?
Still, it's hard for Chrissy to mesh the way he’s acting now with the irresponsible popular party boy reputation she knows him for.
That’s not what’s important right now, she reminds herself sternly, she shouldn’t be wasting her time on these irrelevant thoughts.
What she should be focusing on is that Steve is distracted. Distracted enough, she hopes, not to notice her slipping into the bathroom at the back of the store, clutching her purse with stark white knuckles.
Once inside the bathroom she immediately whirls to lock the door behind her. Then she leans her forehead against the door, closes her eyes, and tries to get her heartbeat to slow back down to a more reasonable speed.
She tries her best to take deep breaths like Ms. Kelley tried to teach her, but the bathroom must have been cleaned recently and the strong chemical scent of whatever cleaning products were used is making her nausea worse.
Eventually, though it seems to take a very long time, her heartbeat begins to slow. Her stomach eventually stops rolling quite so violently, and she forces herself to open her eyes and turn around.
The bathroom is small and relatively bare.
But the smallness and simplicity of the space makes her feel a little bit better. There’s not much in here, so there’s less for her to worry about.
She sets her purse carefully on the counter by the sink and stares at it apprehensively.
It takes her a moment or two longer to work up the courage to reach inside with shaking fingers and search out the box containing the pregnancy test.
Chrissy sets the box on the counter carefully and stares at it nervously, chewing on her lip.
Buying this had been incredibly nerve wracking.
Especially since she had to buy it in town.
News has a way of spreading in a small town like Hawkins, and she’s so scared that the news that she made this purchase will make its way back to Jason or her mother.
She already has a lie ready for if it does, she’ll say the test was for another girl and that she was just trying to help, but she knows that even if her lie is believed that that will only help her so much.
Being associated with the type of girl who might need one of these is better than being one herself, but… it’s still not great.
If Chrissy could drive… she would have left town to buy and take a pregnancy test. But she can’t drive, her mom wont let her learn, so she couldn't.
Instead Chrissy’d made excuses to her mom about needing to figure out what she was getting her younger brother Matty for his birthday that is coming up soon and then she walked herself down to Melvalds.
She could have asked Jason for a ride.
It's one of the reasons her mom insists that Chrissy doesn’t need to learn to drive, because she has Jason and Jason can drive her anywhere she needs to go.
But asking him for a ride to Melvalds would be too much of a risk. He might decide to stick around and that would make it so she couldn’t buy what she actually needed.
Besides, Jason’s still upset with her for brushing him off on valentines day and making excuses about not feeling well because of her period.
Her period that she didn’t actually get this month.
It’s not the first time this has happened. Sometimes she just… misses a month or two. She tries not to think about it too much.
It’s never made her worried like this before. But this time…
Her brain skitters away from thoughts about why this time is different like a scared animal.
It’s fine. The test will come back negative. She’s just overreacting because she’s scared and ashamed of what she did. The reassurances sound false even in her own head.
Once Chrissy had reached Melvald’s, she had had to wander all of the aisles twice before she managed to work up the courage to add the test to the little pile of random junk in her basket.
Some stupid part of her had hoped that if she buried the test in enough other random crap, that no one would notice it.
She circled the store one more time before she finally managed to force herself up to the registers.
When the woman working the checkout started scanning her through, Chrissy held her breath. Hoping, praying, that the woman wasn’t paying attention. That she wouldn’t notice.
She did notice.
Her eyes lingered on the test, and when she looked back up at Chrissy and moved on with the transaction she kept her smile in place and her words light but her eyes looked sad .
Sad like she felt bad for Chrissy, but in an undefinably different way than the kind of pity Chrissy is used to.
It was almost enough to make Chrissy start crying right then and there, but thankfully she managed to hold off until she made it outside and tucked out of sight down an alley.
February can still be bitterly cold in a place like Hawkins, and Chrissy’s tears felt hot against the wind chilled skin of her cheeks.
The woman’s name tag had said her name is Joyce.
Chrissy’s pretty sure that she isn’t one of her mom’s friends, but she can’t be totally certain, and even if she isn’t a friend of Chrissy’s mom… the news could still spread somehow.
Planned lie or not, the possibility of her mother finding out she bought a pregnancy test fills Chrissy with a terror so intense she feels like she can’t breathe.
Chrissy closes her eyes and does her best to push those thoughts to the side. She knows that ignoring them for now is the only way she’ll have a chance of getting through this.
Chrissy carefully opens the box, and fishes out the information booklet. She reads the whole thing slowly and carefully, and then she reads it again.
She doesn’t know how much time she has before someone else wants the restroom and notices that it's already occupied, but she also can’t afford to mess this up. She knows that she doesn't have the courage to buy another test.
Chrissy follows the instructions methodically, robotically, because that’s the only way she knows how to push through and do what needs to be done.
She doesn’t like feeling like she’s running on autopilot.
She doesn’t like having whole chunks of her day that she just… can’t remember… because she was so checked out of the moment that she may as well have not even been there. But the ability to do that does have its uses, she supposes, and she has a lot of practice.
She uses a wristwatch that she stole from Matty’s room to time the wait. Twenty minutes.
She can’t imagine why they haven't come up with a faster way to do this yet.
The seconds ticking by feel like torture, and even though she knows Matty’s watch is silent she feels like she can hear loud ominous ticking each time the second hand moves jerkily from one place to the next.
This twenty minutes somehow manages to be both the longest and shortest twenty minutes of her life, and when the time is up it still takes her a while longer to be able to pull her eyes away from her brother’s watch to look at the test results.
Her heart sinks and her empty stomach clenches violently.
Positive. It’s positive.
She’s pregnant.
She does not make it to the toilet before her body’s first attempt to expel everything inside her stomach, but it doesn’t really matter because there’s not much an already empty stomach can bring up.