Chicago was a lot more familiar to Penny than Boston.
Don't get her wrong, Boston had been great, but she grew up in New York. Brooklyn alone was one of the biggest cities in the world. Chicago might not be quite on New York's level, but it was big, it was crowded, it was loud, and it was kind of wonderful.
She stuck to the South Side as much as she could - that's where a pregnant, homeless teenager wouldn't stick out much - but she also let herself go to the Museum of Science and Industry at one point, because she'd heard good things about it. It was kind of a ridiculous expense - why were museums so fucking expensive? - but she wanted to take a chance to enjoy the city while she was here. Due to how expensive it was, she didn't go to any more museums but she was able to visit Navy Pier and Millennium Park, which were both free.She was actually a little disappointed with the public libraries in Chicago - Boston's had been better - but she managed as best she could.
Someone pointed out that Planned Parenthood would be willing to give her a checkup for free since she was homeless, and she was very relieved to get an ultrasound done and see that the baby looked completely normal. According to the tech, she was officially about 32 weeks along, which put her conception right around Christmas, which made her laugh. It also made her more certain that she's be giving birth sometime in mid-May.
Once again, she stayed mostly in shelters, rotating so as not to let anyone see her unusual pregnancy too close. Other than the one visit to Planned Parenthood, she was stuffing her shirt and making it seem like she was around 8 months along already, so that when she gave birth in a month no one would be too surprised. She let herself be friendly with a few people she saw more regularly - mainly other homeless people and the volunteers at the shelters - but didn't get close to anyone.
She found herself stealing a lot of lotion - apparently, having your belly grow twice as fast meant that it itched like crazy. She even had developed a few small stretch marks, which surprised her slightly given her powers, but she supposed there were limits for everything. She wondered if they would stay after the baby was born. Her boobs had also gotten bigger - which wasn't saying much, she'd always been pretty lithe and had the lack of curves to go with it.
She was also beginning to leak. That was very annoying, but at the same time she was kind of dying to get her hands on a microscope or some kind of technology to analyze her milk, to see if it was different from most people's. She'd learned that scientists had spliced spider DNA with a goat, leading to the goat milk having spider silk in it, and she wanted to know if her milk had something like that. Most newborn spiders lived off each other, unfertilized eggs, or small prey, and as such were definitely carnivorous from the beginning, but she'd found one type of spider that had something very similar to milk that it fed its babies. She'd ended up doing a lot of research on that, mostly out of curiosity - it was rare to see milk outside of mammals. Plus, it was better than learning more about the cannibalistic spiders that were far more common.
April passed about as quickly as March had, and soon she was barely needing to stuff her shirt at all because she looked about as pregnant as she was supposed to be. She went around the city carefully checking out hospitals - she wanted one nice enough that she felt it was a decent place to give birth but crowded enough she could get lost in the number of people. In the end, she chose Mercy Hospital - it was slighter nicer than some of the other options, but Chicago had been a little too nice and she was worried she'd stand out there.
She ended up going back to Planned Parenthood - a different one this time - to make sure she was ready for birth at the beginning of May. Once again, the checkup went normally, and she was told she was nearly 38 weeks along, and could expect her baby any time in the next four weeks. She translated that to the next two weeks in her head.
She'd stolen baby supplies a while ago, during what the pregnancy books had called the "nesting phase", so she was ready for at least the first two weeks. After that… she wasn't sure yet.
She started getting very mild cramps on Wednesday, May 11th. She figured it was probably very early labor, which meant she'd probably go into active labor within a few days. Her belly had dropped at the beginning of the week - and hadn't that been a weird feeling - and she found herself packing and repacking all her and the baby's things most of May 12th. That night she woke up to weird pressure - and then release, and her thighs were soaked. Her water had officially broken - she was in active labor. She began timing her contractions, knowing that it wasn't recommended to go to the hospital until they were five minutes apart. She kind of wanted to wait even longer, but she had no idea how fast her labor would be and didn't want to risk literally giving birth in the street. So midmorning, when her contractions were finally 5 minutes apart, she grabbed her things and headed to the hospital.
She arrived around 10:30, and already it was pretty busy. It was easy enough to walk up to a receptionist, say she was an uninsured 18-year-old in labor, and claim to have lost her ID. They could tell she was homeless, and gave her the paperwork to sign in without asking many more questions except about the pregnancy itself. Soon enough, she was brought to a delivery room by a nurse who helped her change into a hospital gown and gave her a saline drip. Due to her uninsured status, she wouldn't be allowed an epidural, and due to her metabolism, she knew any painkillers they gave her would have little to no effect, so she decided to just handle it the way women had been for centuries.
An OB came in pretty quickly to give her an exam, and she was declared 7 centimeters dilated already. The OB informed her that she should probably settle in regardless, as most women took a while to have their first baby, but Penny was secretly pretty sure this would be over quickly - she could only hope it wasn't over so quickly as to be suspicious. On one hand, her belly hadn't dropped until Sunday - less than a week ago, when all her reading said it should be two to four weeks before giving birth - but her early labor had lasted two days, which was about average for a first-time mom. So far, her active labor had started at 2am (she decided to use when her water broke as a starting point) and it was now just past 11. 9 hours wasn't super unusual by any means, so she was pretty sure she was safe from being so fast as to be noticed.
The hospital, seeing that she was alone, had a nurse spend most of her time monitoring her so she wouldn't be on her own if an emergency happened. She mostly paced the room and ate ice chips, with the nurse encouraging her and telling her she was doing great. After about an hour, the OB came back to check on her again - to find her already at 9 cm. Both the doctor and nurse commented that she was lucky that her first labor was going so smoothly and progressing so quickly. She said she was pretty sure fast labors ran in her family - a blatant lie, she had no idea how long labor had lasted for her mom, much less any more extended relatives - and the nurse and doctor seemed happy enough to buy it. She worried they were suspicious, but the doctor left saying she'd be back in half an hour to check again, and the nurse had her back to pacing without any further comments, so she hoped they just assumed her a very lucky new mom.
When the OB came for her third check, she was declared fully dilated and told it was time to start pushing. She'd done a bunch of reading on how, and the nurse and doctor helped guide her through it very nicely, and within 10 minutes a second and third nurse were called into the room to prep for the baby that the OB said would arrive within the next half hour at most. Sure enough, less than five minutes after the new nurses arrived, she was told she was crowning. It hurt - she'd expected that, of course, and the contractions sucked and everything, but the "Ring of Fire" as it was called (the moment the baby's head passes through the vagina) was so bad she couldn't help but scream. Nobody seemed surprised by this, simply telling her to let it out. The contraction passed, she took a moment to breath, then pushed again, screaming. One more break, and then she pushed with all her might - the pain peaked - and then she felt something slip out of her, and a slimy thing was placed on her chest with a "Congratulations! It's a girl!"
Penny held her new daughter for the first time and felt nothing but pure relief. Her daughter was here. She was safe and she seemed healthy. She was slimy and covered in gunk and looked kind of like an alien, but Penny thought she was the most beautiful thing she had ever seen.
All too soon, the baby was taken for her first check-up. She noticed the nurses take a small blood sample, and knew she'd have to destroy it before she left, but otherwise she felt content to watch them gently clean the baby, look her over, give her two quick shots (a chicken pox vaccine and a vitamin k shot, standard for newborns), and then gently put on a diaper and wrap her in a blanket. Then, Penny was holding her daughter again.
The OB had finished with the afterbirth by then, and asked what Penny wanted done with it. She firmly said she wanted it disposed of.
An hour later, Penny had managed to breastfeed her daughter successfully for the first time, and the nurse had come in with the birth certificate. Penny had given a fake name when she arrived at the hospital, and used it on the birth certificate, but allowed herself to put her daughter's true first and middle names on the document.
May, for the woman who had raised her most of her life. And Teresa, for the little sister she never got to meet.
After the nurse left, Penny was finally alone with her daughter for the first time. She gazed down at the little face, watched the little hands grasp her finger.
"I have a daughter," she said to herself. "I have a daughter, and I need help."
She'd never quite decided what she would do after the baby was born. Originally, she's thought of staying in Chicago for another week or so before heading west. She was still fairly certain May would age strangely, and have Penny's powers, so she'd need to be hidden. But she had no idea how to go about that, especially on her own.
"I need help."
She was going back to New York.