by Paige Rawl
Dedication
For my mom, who has always been my rock and believed in me. I couldn’t have made it without you. I love you!
To the memory of my dad, Charles Newman Rawl II.
For anyone who has ever been bullied or stigmatized—don’t give up on yourself.
FOREWORD
by Jay Asher
When you open a book about someone’s life, written by that person, you don’t expect the first words to be written by someone else. So you may be wondering, What’s this guy doing here?
Well, it might help to think of this less as a book and more as a powerful conversation you’re about to have with someone. Maybe you’ve heard a little about that person, and you’re drawn to know more. If you saw that person walking down a sidewalk or at a party, the most comfortable way to start that conversation is to be introduced.
Reader, I would love you to meet Paige Rawl. When you two have finished talking, I think you’re going to walk away a new person.
At the end of the book are a few pages filled with information about important issues—bullying, HIV/AIDS, and suicide. (Their statistics may surprise you, which highlights our need to make sure people know more about them.) There are also resources and ways you can help people dealing with these issues. Or maybe help yourself. Knowing more about these topics can, at the very least, make life better for a lot of people. At most, it can save a life.
But in between this introduction and those pages, you’ll meet Paige. She will tell you, in vivid, captivating detail, her story—and it’s a roller-coaster ride of emotion. It moves from heartbreaking to heartwarming, and will move you from feeling infuriated to uplifted and inspired.
Thirteen Reasons Why, my novel about a teenage girl who commits suicide, but only after making a set of audio recordings to describe her reasons why, was prompted by a personal experience. My character is fictional, but my understanding of that deep despair came from conversations with a relative who attempted suicide as a teen.
I believe life always leaves opportunities for hope, but through those conversations I understood how someone could give up looking for it—how even hoping for hope could be painful.
Over the years, countless people have explained to me the different ways my book has affected them. It reminded them of the ways, good and bad, big and small, that we each affect one another every day. It showed them that we never fully know what someone else is struggling with. And it encouraged people to fight for the help and respect they deserve.
Storytelling does that. It lets us see the world from someone else’s perspective. It lets us explore issues from a safe distance because they’re not happening to us—not in that precise way. We can judge a character’s emotions and decisions, weighing them against our own. We can decide not to become like one character, or try to be more like another.
But when the story is true, as it is in Positive, that safe distance can waver—perhaps feeling uncomfortably close. (“I’ve never behaved like that person, have I?”) It can lead us to ponder questions that are important yet difficult to ask on our own. And when a story does that, it changes the way we see everything, including ourselves.
Sometimes in life we get introduced to a person who helps us ask those questions. That person may be knocked down and held down for so long that she breaks. She shatters. But given a second chance, she chooses to rise higher than she ever thought possible. And she chooses to use her life’s experiences to bring the people she meets up with her.
And when, let’s say, she writes a book about those experiences, we’re all invited to rise with her.
That is why it is my great honor to introduce you to Paige Rawl, who I first met within the very words now placed in your hands. Once she tells you her story—once you read her truth—I know you will become fast friends and feel thoroughly inspired, just as I have.
Author’s Note
We all have our own truths. Together our truths form the human experience.
Surely, everyone in the pages that follow—friends and not-friends—have their truths to tell. Some people who I’ve depicted will barely recognize themselves; others don’t know and might never have guessed how they affected me.
Certainly, there are plenty of people whose stories intersect with mine, and whose truths I never got to know.
I’ll simply say this: while the names of many people and places have been changed—including the name of my middle school—the characters in this book are real people whose lives touched my own.
The sole exceptions are the kids I describe having met in the stress center. The real-life kids I met during my brief hospitalization can decide to share their particular stories, if they wish. But in the meantime, their literary equivalents are based on many I have met along this journey—real kids who shared with me their worries and fears, stresses and sorrows.
The pain of all those stories is real enough.
Otherwise, what follows in these pages is the truth of the world, as I remember it.
Preface
Nobody quite prepares you for the moment you see your own name scrawled on a bathroom wall.
To be honest, until I saw my own name, it never really occurred to me that all those names I’d seen before—all those names that appeared on the restroom walls of Dunkin’ Donuts and 7-Elevens, the Castleton Square Mall and the corner gas station—represented actual human beings.
If I ever bothered to wonder about those people, even briefly—Will Jasmyn actually love Shawn 4ever? What happened to Darren that we should never, ever forget him?—the moment surely would have passed long before I washed my hands and placed them beneath the whirring hand dryer.
Then one day, I walked into a bathroom in my middle school, and there was my name in thick black marker. Beneath it, other kids had added their own words in ball-point pen.
I never in a million years expected to see my name on this wall. I’d always considered myself a good girl—more Glee than Kardashians, more Taylor Swift than Miley Cyrus. I was born a joiner, not a fighter.
But I was beginning to realize that sometimes a person doesn’t get to choose whether she joins or fights. Sometimes the joining is impossible, sometimes the fight chooses you. The universe plucks you—you, specifically—out of all those souls out there and hands you something that makes fitting in and going with the flow utterly out of the question.
“I’m sorry,” the universe says. “I’m afraid you’re going to have to fight.”
And when you stare back at the universe, not understanding, it simply shrugs. “You’d better start now. Or this world will destroy you.”
I didn’t have a choice: I had to learn to fight.
As my story unfolded over the next few years, I’d learn some things. I’d learn that you can fight with a smile. That you can fight in a dress, or a cheerleader’s skirt, pom-poms in hand. You can even fight just by wearing a sparkling tiara and a satin sash that says MISS INDIANA HIGH SCHOOL AMERICA.
But I hadn’t figured those things out just yet. All I knew, standing in the girls’ room, was that everything I knew, everything I had planned for myself, was changing.
I stared at the writing and considered my options.
I could scribble it all out, just try to erase the whole thing. Unfortunately, the only writing utensil in my purse was a pen. It might cross out those added comments, but it would never, ever cover that fat black marker.
Besides, crossing out the words wouldn’t stop people from thinking things about me. It wouldn’t change anyone’s mind.
There was nothing to do. Nothing to do but look in the mirror and smooth down my hair, take a deep breath, and push the door open. By the time I stepped into the hallway I was smiling, as if I hadn’t seen a thing, as if all was exactly as it should be. As if that felt-tip
ped warning to all the other kids, that I didn’t belong—that I was to be shamed and shunned—never existed.
PAIGE HAS AIDS, it read.
Then underneath—Slut. Whore.
And finally, PAIGE=PAIDS.
Actually, I had HIV, not AIDS. They’re related, but they’re not the same thing—not that the facts mattered to the kids at Clarkstown Middle School.
Just like it didn’t matter that I wasn’t contagious, that HIV wasn’t like a cold or flu, that I posed no risk to them whatsoever.
Nor did it matter that there was nothing visible about my virus, that I looked and walked and talked exactly and completely like everyone else. It didn’t even matter that the kids who were giving me the hardest time had been my friends, my good friends, just last year.
You know how it is: I had something that others didn’t have. I was different.
And I was learning that when you live in a suburban neighborhood on the northwest side of Indianapolis, and you are in seventh grade, and all you want is to be surrounded by friends, different is about the very worst thing you can be.
Contents
Dedication
Foreword
Author’s Note
Preface
Part One: Beginning
What Was
Mom
Clarkstown: “Ready”
The Short-As-Possible Explanation of HIV (And Why My Mom Is Smarter Than an Evil Genius)
Clarkstown: “Come as You Are, Leave Different”
The Brochure
Clarkstown: Yasmine
Dad
Clarkstown: Laughter
First Pageant: “Be Yourself”
Clarkstown: XLI
Understanding
Lock-in
Deny It: Grade Six
Part Two: Stumbling
A New Year: Grade Seven
Don’t Let Them Get to You
Just Go
Ugly
First Seizure
Not Tell Them
Red
Withdrawal
I Just Want to Do Something
Part Three: Falling
Community
Herron High
Escape
Stress Center
Lila
Part Four: Becoming
Kindle
Moving On
Miss Teen Essence
“You Decide to Live a Good Life” (It’s All You Have to Do)
Afterword
Acknowledgments
Help and Resources
Back Ad
About the Authors
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
PART ONE
Beginning
What Was
Today, when I tell people that I took medicine every single day for almost a decade without ever once wondering why, they sometimes look at me like I have three heads. Or maybe like I’m the world’s biggest idiot.
I can see their point.
But from my earliest memories, the medicine has just been a part of my life.
There I am as a very young child, scrambling up onto the kitchen counter, folding my legs crisscross-applesauce, and waiting patiently. And there is my mother, twisting the child safety lid off a white plastic jar, scooping a heap of powder, and stirring it, still lumpy, into a plastic sippy cup filled with milk.
She places the lid on the cup and hands it to me. I make a face and begin to drink. The taste is awful; I call this drink “my yucky.” Still, I’m a dutiful child: I drink it all. I would have, every time, even if my mother hadn’t been watching me closely, her eyes focused on this ritual as if my life depended on it.
It did, of course, although I didn’t know that yet.
Other times, people ask about my hospital visits. There had to have been so many. Did I really think that was normal? The short answer is, yes. I did. Not only that, I liked it.
The Riley Hospital for Children is located in downtown Indianapolis. Its vast modern architecture and the hustle and bustle of the city around it seemed such an exciting contrast to our cozy one-story ranch home with its tidy patch of cut grass. Inside the hospital entrance, I looked up. All around the atrium I would see enormous teddy bears perched on beams high overhead, their legs dangling. I’d pass a shiny carousel horse surrounded by pennies; each time, my mother and I both made wishes and tossed our own coins toward the animal. I’d wish for dolls and dresses, for trips to the water park, for cupcakes and Christmas. My mother made her wish silently.
When I asked what she wished for, she never told me. Instead, she would simply answer, “Same as last time, pumpkin.” She’d hug me close, then, and finish, “. . . Same as every time.”
We’d step into the glass elevators, real glass elevators, just like Willy Wonka’s, and rise to the third floor.
Waiting in the doctor’s office, I could never keep myself from touching the medical equipment. I squeezed the rubber blood pressure pump, slipped the plastic caps on and off of the otoscope, pulled down on the rubbery black coils that connected these tools to the wall.
“Stop messing with the doctor’s stuff,” my mom would always try to scold me, unable to completely hide the hint of a smile on her face. “She’s going to get mad at you, Paige!” But when Dr. Cox at last breezed into the room, in her funky shoes and chunky jewelry, she was never angry. Instead, she greeted me cheerfully.
“Paige! It’s good to see you!” Her flowing, loose-fitting clothes peeked out from beneath her lab coat. Her stethoscope hung confidently around her neck.
I loved seeing her. One day, I planned to be her.
“I’m going to have your job when I grow up,” I would announce proudly at my visits.
“I know you will.” Dr. Cox would smile back, brushing a streak of blond hair from her eyes and holding out a tongue depressor. She always took me seriously, not the way some grown-ups treat kids.
She would press the wooden depressor on my tongue. “Now say ahh.”
I told Dr. Cox everything. About school, and sleepovers with my friends, that I swam like a mermaid, which I knew because my mother said it was true. I told her I loved karaoke and that I could jump high as the birds on my trampoline. She listened and laughed, complimented my sparkly nails. She asked about my vacations, teachers, classmates. . . .
I may have been her patient, just a young child, but Dr. Cox treated me like a real person, someone she genuinely liked. She wasn’t the only one. The nurses in the emergency room knew me by name, remembered details about both my health history and my life outside the hospital. They asked me about books I was reading, they cheered when I told them I’d learned to ride a bike. The lab technicians knew me, too—they asked me about school as they pricked my skin, distracting me by allowing me to hold the tubes that were filling up with my blood.
Being at a hospital so regularly, so young, sounds awful to folks who have no experience inside a place like Riley. But the truth is, I can think of far worse fates than to have a group of people this warm, this kind, be a part of your life from the start.
And when these things—the medicine, the hospital visits—become part of your routine before you even form your first memory—before you write your name for the first time, before you can skip, or turn a somersault, or even brush your teeth without assistance, the whole thing becomes a bit like the sun rising. If it somehow didn’t happen—if one morning the darkness never gave way to light, if the stars remained overhead even as the morning school bus lurched up to the corner and opened its doors for its line of bewildered kids—now that would get your attention. But as long as it happens, day after day without ever taking a break, you start to take the whole thing for granted. Your mind wanders to other things, like finishing your homework or an upcoming vocabulary test or last weekend’s sleepover.
Take it from me: the things that keep you alive can be like the hum of the refrigerator, or the television that your mom leaves on all day because she gets nervous when ther
e’s too much quiet.
They’re just there, just a part of your world, barely even worth a mention.
Perhaps you think it would have been different for you—that you would wonder sooner, that you would clue in earlier that something is different here. You would have started asking questions, all those what/why/hows.
I’ll be honest: I’m not so sure about that.
And maybe that was my problem from the start—the fact that those thousands of doses of medicine had been so routine, so humdrum. Bitter-tasting, sure. A bummer, I guess. But still just a backdrop to the parts of my life that felt like they really mattered. Perhaps that was the reason everything that happened later was such a surprise to me. Maybe, in the end, it was the very regularity of it that left me so unprepared when it all went so badly.
And that’s how it was, year after year. My friend Azra went to her grandmother’s to swim in her pool. My friend Jasmine went to her brother’s baseball games. I went to see Dr. Cox. I took medicine and played soccer and dressed my Barbies and sang country songs with my mother and watched my crimson blood flow into clear plastic tubes.
It was just what I did. Nothing more.
I had plenty of friends, and it was, to be honest, a pretty good life.
Mom
For my mother, of course, the hospital experience was completely different.
For one thing, she knew why we were there.
Mom knew that for all of their cheerfulness, those nurses and doctors and lab techs were actually engaged in a life-and-death battle—a fight for my young life. My mom knew that deep inside my cells, a tiny virus, a million times smaller than the period at the end of this sentence, was trying to kill me.
Here is the thing, the very simple reason I have any sort of story to tell: years ago, probably before I was even born, the human immunodeficiency virus, HIV, invaded my immune system, inserting its own genetic blueprint into the very cells that were supposed to keep me healthy. Every time my own cells divided, the virus replicated, too.