Getting Nuggy With It Shrunken First Semester chapter 3 by maximally

“Let’s just… not,” said Max.

 

Daisy blinked down at him. “Not?”

 

“Not answer her. Not right now.” He looked at the little row of emojis on her cracked phone screen, then back up at her. “It’s syllabus week. Nobody does anything real during syllabus week. Let’s just go get nuggets with Hazel.”

 

For a moment, Daisy didn’t say anything. Then her shoulders, each roughly the size of a beanbag chair from where he was sitting, slowly came down from around her ears.

 

“Okay,” she said softly, setting the phone face-down on the nightstand between the lube and the Mountain Dew cans. “Yeah. Nuggets.”

 

“Nuggets,” Max agreed.

 

*

 

Of course, neither of them actually went anywhere until Psych let out at 12:15. By then, Hazel had pounded on the wall eleven more times.

 

Getting Daisy Flores out of her room was never a quick process. Getting her out of her room and into public, in daylight, during the first week of the semester, was basically a NASA launch.

 

First came the hoodie: an enormous, faded gray thing with PROSERPINA cracking off the chest in letters that had probably been white once. Then came the sweatpants, which were technically clean, by Proserpina standards. Then came the long, anxious minute she spent standing in the doorway with one hand over the front pocket, making sure he was still there.

 

“You good?” she whispered.

 

“I’m good,” said Max, and he meant it. The hoodie pocket had been his spot for most of the fall. It was warm, roomy, and lined with a fine layer of Dorito dust that he’d long since stopped noticing. It was also, as Hazel had so eloquently put it back in October, the “fart filter” position, close enough to keep him safe and far enough from the business end that Daisy didn’t have to worry about stinking up a whole lecture hall.

 

Not that it was doing much for the hallway.

 

“Finally!” Hazel’s door flew open before Daisy could knock, and the six-foot buck-toothed genius came barreling out in a pair of polka-dot sweatpants, Crocs, and a striped blouse buttoned exactly one button too few. Her long brown hair was tied up in its usual greasy ponytail, her thick-rimmed glasses were crooked, and her hands were suspiciously shiny. “I’ve been starving since, like, nine. Do you have any idea how many calories gooning burns?! Because I do! I did the math!”

 

“Hi, Hazel,” said Daisy.

 

“Hi, sexy.” Hazel leaned in and planted a loud, wet kiss on Daisy’s cheek, completely unbothered by the way the giant shut-in’s whole face lit up red. Then she bent down at the waist, peering into the hoodie pocket with her prominent front teeth on full display. “And HI, Miniguy~”

 

“Hey, Hazel.”

 

Her breath hit him in a hot, rancid wave—energy drinks, Takis, and something that smelled suspiciously like the Indian food she’d stolen out of Daisy’s mini-fridge on Sunday. “You two looked so cute this morning, by the way. I could hear the whole thing. ‘I’m the size of a building now.’ ‘Yeah, but now I’m into it.’” She clutched her chest and swooned. “Ugh. Barf. Adorable.”

 

“Can you hear everything through that wall?” said Max.

 

“Babe. Babe.” Hazel patted the pocket with one sticky finger. “I can hear Daisy’s stomach through that wall. Speaking of which—”

 

 

It ripped out of Hazel like an outboard motor turning over, close enough that Max felt it before he heard it, a rumble that made the whole pocket buzz, followed a second later by a warm, sour cloud that rolled across the gap between them, crept up the inside of the hoodie, and settled over him like a blanket.

 

“H-Hazel,” Daisy mumbled, flapping a hand in front of her face.

 

“Ha!” Hazel threw her head back, too loud for the room. “That one’s been waiting since breakfast. Okay, let’s move before you get nervous and make it a duet.”

 

*

 

The closest chicken nugget dispensary to House Proserpina was the Ventus Student Union food court, roughly a ten-minute walk for an average student and a twenty-two-minute walk for Daisy, who had to stop twice on the way to “just, like, breathe.” The day was bright and clear, and the quad was crawling with returning students. Diana girls jogged past in matching leggings. A pair of Fortuna girls filmed a TikTok in front of the fountain. Somewhere near the library, a cluster of Juno goths in long black coats were smoking clove cigarettes and glaring at the sun like it owed them money.

 

Max ducked lower in the pocket as they passed.

 

“They don’t know,” Daisy whispered, without looking down. Her hand drifted over the pocket anyway. “Nobody knows. Remember?”

 

“I know,” he whispered back.

 

“And if they did,” Hazel added, at a volume that was not a whisper, “they’d have to go through this.” She pointed both thumbs at her own chest. “And this.” She pointed at Daisy’s ass, which was a much larger target. “Nobody’s getting through that. That’s a load-bearing wall.”

 

“Hazel.”

 

“What?! It’s a compliment!”

 

Still, Max noticed that Hazel’s eyes followed the Juno girls for a beat longer than Daisy’s did. Her grin didn’t go anywhere. It just went a little stiff around the edges, the way it did whenever she lost at Mario Kart and pretended she didn’t care.

 

He decided not to think about it.

 

The food court was packed, which meant Daisy spent the first two minutes in line trying to make herself as small as possible. This was, needless to say, physically impossible. At 6’4” and 375 pounds, the infamous Buttzilla parted the lunch crowd like a cruise ship coming into harbor, and Max could hear the whispers starting up all around them.

 

“Is that—”

 

“Dude, that’s Buttzilla.”

 

“I heard she sat on a guy and he—”

 

“Shh, she’ll hear you—”

 

Daisy’s gut let out a long, anxious gurgle. Inside the pocket, Max reached up and pressed both hands flat against the fabric over her stomach, the way he’d learned to back in November. It didn’t do much against the IBS. But it usually helped with the rest of it.

 

After a second, he felt her breathing slow down.

 

“Twenty-piece,” Hazel announced to the cashier, a terrified-looking sophomore who very clearly recognized both of them. “Make it two. And two large fries, a large Baja Blast, and every honey mustard you have. I’m serious. Every single one.”

 

“And a six-piece,” said Daisy quietly.

 

Hazel raised an eyebrow. “You’re getting a six?”

 

“It’s not for me,” Daisy mumbled, going pink. “It’s for Max.”

 

The cashier glanced at the pocket. Then up at Daisy’s face. Then, very wisely, back down at the register.

 

“Uh,” said the sophomore. “Okay?”

 

They ended up at a sticky corner table near the trash cans, which Hazel declared “the VIP section.” Daisy squeezed into a booth that groaned audibly under her weight, set a napkin down on the table, and gently lifted Max out of the pocket. She propped him up against the napkin dispenser so that it hid him from the rest of the room. Then she set a single chicken nugget down in front of him.

 

It was roughly the size of a sofa cushion.

 

“Bon appétit,” said Daisy, with the proud little smile she always got when she remembered to feed him first.

 

“You know a six-piece is going to last me until March, right?” said Max, tearing off a chunk the size of his head.

 

“I know,” said Daisy. “But I wanted you to have your own.”

 

And that, Max thought, chewing, was pretty much the whole reason he was still here.

 

Across the table, Hazel was already four nuggets deep and showing no signs of slowing down. “Okay, so,” she said through a mouthful of chicken, “Thursday. My night. I’ve been workshopping.”

 

Daisy nearly choked on a fry. “Hazel. We’re in public.”

 

“Nobody’s listening, D, they’re all too busy being scared of you.” Hazel waved a nugget dismissively. “Anyway. I’ve got a new toy. Built it over break. It’s got three settings, and one of them is—how do I put this delicately—Miniguy-compatible.”

 

Max swallowed. “What does ‘Miniguy-compatible’ mean?”

 

“It means you’re gonna love it.” Hazel grinned, buck teeth glinting. “Or you’re gonna pass out. One of the two. Statistically it’s, like, sixty-forty.”

 

“Which way?”

 

“Does it matter?”

 

“Kind of!”

 

“Ha!” Hazel slapped the table hard enough to make the fries jump. Then she leaned forward on her elbows, lowering her voice to what she probably considered a whisper. “Okay, okay, real talk. Ground rules still the same? You two are the thing. I’m the benefits. I don’t get mushy, nobody gets weird, everybody cums. Right?”

 

“Right,” said Daisy, glancing down at Max.

 

“Right,” said Max. That was the deal. They’d hashed it out over a very long night back in November, with a lot of boxed wine and one extremely awkward PowerPoint (Hazel’s idea). Hazel got Thursdays with Daisy. Max got to watch, or join in, or hide behind the TV remote, depending on his mood. And Daisy got to stop apologizing for having more than one person in her life who wanted her.

 

Honestly, it worked better than he’d expected.

 

“Cool cool cool cool,” said Hazel. “Love that for us.”

 

Then she let out a burp so loud that a Minerva girl two tables over dropped her phone.

 

 

“Excuse me,” Hazel announced, to nobody in particular. Then she grabbed her Baja Blast, took a huge slurp, and went uncharacteristically quiet.

 

Max noticed it because Hazel was never quiet. She was staring down at the table, at him, with an expression he’d only seen on her once before: in her room back in October, slumped in her gaming chair, telling them there was nothing she could do.

 

“Hey, Miniguy,” she said, in a voice about half her normal volume. “Can I ask you something? Like, for science.”

 

“Sure.”

 

“If I could fix it.” She turned the cup around in her hands. “Like, hypothetically. Would you even want me to?”

 

Daisy went very still beside him.

 

Max looked up at Hazel, then at Daisy, then down at the giant nugget in his arms. He thought about the coffee table. About waking up in his dream, terrified, and then waking up for real in the warmest place he’d ever been.

 

“I don’t know,” he said honestly. “But I don’t think I’d want to go back to how things were before.”

 

For a second, Hazel just looked at him. Then the grin came back, all teeth, all the way up to her crooked glasses.

 

“Good answer,” she said. “Because I can’t, so. Phew. Dodged that one.” She tossed a nugget into her mouth whole. “Just checking.”

 

Daisy let out a breath. Her hand came down and curled gently around Max, pulling him away from the napkin dispenser and back against the soft, warm front of her hoodie.

 

“Can we not do hypotheticals at lunch?” she mumbled.

 

“Fiiine,” Hazel groaned.

 

Still, when Daisy turned to throw away their trash, Max caught Hazel pulling out her phone under the table. She opened her notes app, typed something fast, and closed it again before he could read it. The only word he managed to catch was in all caps, which, in Hazel’s notes, meant it was important.

 

 

*

 

By the time they made it back to the Loser House, the sun was going down, Daisy’s gut was rumbling like a subway tunnel, and Max was so full of nugget that he could barely move. Daisy collapsed onto her bed with a groan that rattled the posters off the wall. Hazel collapsed right on top of her with no warning at all.

 

“Oof! Hazel!”

 

“Food coma,” Hazel mumbled into Daisy’s shoulder. “Five minutes.”

 

 

The room got noticeably warmer. Neither of the girls moved. Neither did Max, who’d been tucked safely back into Daisy’s cleavage and was, by now, honestly too comfortable to care.

 

“That was me,” said Hazel.

 

“I know,” said Daisy.

 

“Just wanted credit.”

 

Max laughed. Daisy laughed. Hazel laughed hardest of all, the whole bed shaking under the three of them, until somebody’s stomach gurgled again and they had to start all over.

 

It was a few minutes before anybody noticed Daisy’s phone lighting up on the nightstand.

 

izzy 💅: helloooo?? u guys seen my story?? 👀

 

Daisy looked at it. Then she looked down at Max.

 

“Tomorrow,” Max said.

 

“Tomorrow,” Daisy agreed, and turned the phone face-down again.