Page 1 of Sugar

CHAPTER ONE

Juno’s laugh felt half-hysterical as it lodged in the back of his throat. His life wasn’t exactly known for the best possible outcomes in the worst situations, so he wasn’t expecting good news when the doctor had called him in after all his tests.

He just wasn’t expecting this.

He’d come in for the test thinking the doctor would tell him that he was straining his eyes and that he was going to need big Coke-bottle glasses or something. Or maybe laser surgery.

The idea of Lasik scared the absolute fuck out of him because he’d read up on it, and they cut into the eye while the person is awake, and shit goes dark. Like, entirely blind. Then they zap around and do whatever it is the surgery does and boom.

Let there be light.

Or whatever.

Of course, he also hadn’t expected the barrage of tests the doctor ordered when he first went in with the fuzzy spot in the center of his left eye. He figured the doctor would do that annoying, bright light thing and give him a prescription or something. Hell, maybe even send him to an eye specialist.

The point was he expected this to be a fixable problem, like everything else in his life. Not the best, but not the worst. Not…not this. The doctor sat in front of him and said a bunch of words in a tone that no one ever wanted to hear. It was medical jargon that sounded like Latin, and Juno had been alive long enough to know those types of diagnoses were never good.

“The things we do know about it,” the doctor said when Juno asked him exactly what it all meant, “is that it’s genetic. It comes through the mother’s line. We also know there’s no cure. There’s not even a treatment for it.” Well, fuck. The man wasn’t sugarcoating shit, was he?

Juno swallowed, and it felt like there was a boulder lodged against the back of his tongue. He tried to clear his throat. “So what? I’m going blind?”

“Yes.”

Yes. Just like that. Yes. Not even a “we’ll see what happens.” He’d never wanted someone to lie to him so much in his life.

He tried to laugh, but it came out like a sob. His breath was trembling as he exhaled. “So…how long do I have before it’s all gone?”

“That won’t happen.”

Juno stared at him. “You just said?—”

“I know,” the doctor answered, looking apologetic. “I didn’t mean to scare you. This condition doesn’t cause total blindness. The only problem is we won’t be able to accurately predict how much of your vision will be left. I can say in my experience most of my patients retain a significant portion of their peripheral sight. That’s something to look forward to.”

Peripheral sight? He was pretty sure he knew what that meant, but not exactly. Was that the shit he saw out of the corner of his eye? How was he supposed to function with that? What would that even look like? Right now, his left eye looked like he was having a migraine-induced blind spot…but on steroids. It was massive and static grey, and if he closed his right eye, it obscured a lot. And it was still growing.

And in the two weeks since his appointment, it had almost doubled in size.

“Is that a joke? Look forward to?”

“I don’t make jokes with my patients who are losing their vision,” the doctor said flatly.

That was something, he supposed. Juno was definitely a man of dark humor. You didn’t survive the foster system the way he did without it. He’d been raised by his grandmother until he was two and then unceremoniously lobbed into the arms of a CPS caseworker after she died because no one was willing to take him in. He was forgotten.

Unwanted.

He got exactly two birthday cards from his caseworkers in the sixteen years he spent bouncing around foster homes and centers for troubled kids, and that was about it.

Well, one time at the group home he’d lived at when he was with Miles and Oliver, they’d baked him a cake and built a fort out of sheets and old pillows. That had been the best birthday he’d ever had. It was still rough, and he got by because he learned how to laugh at himself.

But he wasn’t laughing now.

He squared his shoulders and focused on the doctor’s face with his good eye. “Explain to me what’s going to happen in very small words because I’m freaking out right now, and all that shit you said about retinas and genetics and whatever…none of that stuck.”

The doctor smiled. He was an older man, but he wasn’t unkind. He sat forward on his rolling chair and let his hands hang between his parted thighs. “At the moment, we don’t know exactly what’ll happen. This condition is inherited, but it’s different in everyone. So while you can ask your mother if she?—”

“Yeah, I don’t have those. I was a foster kid,” Juno interrupted quickly.

The doctor looked down and heaved a sigh. “Okay. Well, with this condition, some people don’t show symptoms. Some lose vision in one eye. Some in both. Some lose a significant portion of their visual field, and some people only lose the very center. There can be a secondary condition, which we call LHON-plus, but that doesn’t affect you. If you want me to explain that?—”

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