Positive

by Paige Rawl

  It’s not much fun to take these medicines, either. They can cause a bunch of nasty side effects. Patients get dizzy and tired (I sure do). Their skin can turn colors, and they are constantly dealing with stomach upsets (no skin changes here, but stomach upsets are an everyday matter). And I have read on the package insert that sometimes patients can’t sleep, or they get depressed. Sometimes they even hallucinate. I looked that word up the first time I read it, hallucinate, and I was glad that it hadn’t happened to me, because frankly seeing things that weren’t there sounded pretty scary.

  Still, the people who take these drugs are alive. I am alive.

  I lived until three years old, because I got lucky. But since my diagnosis, I’ve stayed alive thanks to two things: first is a series of astounding medical breakthroughs, a brilliant understanding among scientists of complicated processes that happen deep inside a cell.

  The second is the vigilance of my mother, who never once let me miss a dose of medicine, who watched over me with concern that I swear was second to no other parent on Earth.

  Her worry, her anxiety, her relentless and fierce determination to protect me: these things have literally saved my life.

  I’m telling you: face-to-face with my mom, even an evil genius doesn’t stand a chance.

  Clarkstown

  “COME AS YOU ARE, LEAVE DIFFERENT”

  I loved Clarkstown Middle School the moment I pushed open the glass front doors.

  The building was a riot of noise and energy, kids calling out to one another across the hall, waving and laughing. Overhead, flags draped down from the ceiling, flags of every country, every color. All around me were kids who seemed like the living embodiment of those flags. They were from so many different backgrounds it was almost dizzying—there were blond ponytails and beaded cornrows and silky head scarves all around me, in equal measure.

  I tightened the straps of my backpack—it was so heavy with all of these middle school notebooks and binders. I lifted my chin a little higher and followed directions to the sixth-grade lockers.

  And, seriously: those lockers! It may be silly, but I adored them. I loved having a locker, loved the sound of it slamming shut, loved decorating the inside with photos of friends and cutout words from magazines.

  I loved other things about Clarkstown, too. I loved that it had a football field in back, with a giant scoreboard towering over the field. The field was bordered by a track, a real track with lines dividing different lanes, just like you’d find in a high school. I planned to run track this year—it was one of the few sports that sixth graders could join—and then next year stand on that track in a cheerleading uniform. I imagined myself shaking pom-poms toward the metal bleachers as a football team collided dramatically behind me. I had everything I needed to be a great cheerleader, I was sure of it. People always told me how energetic I was, that my energy was infectious. (Yes, that is a word they actually used from time to time.)

  I loved sharing my enthusiasm, my infectious energy, with a group of people. Plus, I was small enough to climb easily to the top of a pyramid, so that would help.

  I loved that Clarkstown had tennis courts, and a case full of trophies outside the gym, and more activities to choose from than I could have possibly participated in. I loved that we were going to get to have real dances, and also lock-ins, which were like giant slumber parties at the school where no one sleeps. I loved that there were so many kids I didn’t yet know. Many different elementary schools fed into Clarkstown, which meant that all around me were faces I didn’t recognize, new kids to meet.

  Every one of those kids, I imagined, was a potential new friend.

  On that first morning at Clarkstown, the entire sixth grade—there were so many of us now!—filed into the auditorium for an assembly. On the stage in front of us stood a short woman with extremely white hair. She wore a tight, boxy suit, and she looked a bit like a Lego person—wide and square. She teetered precariously on pumps. She broke out into an enormous smile. All of us, some three hundred kids, shifted in our seats.

  “Welcome, everyone,” she said. “I am Norma Fischer, the very proud principal of Clarkstown Middle School.”

  From behind me, I heard someone whisper loudly, “She looks like a marshmallow.” A bunch of kids around me started laughing. I began to giggle, too.

  A few rows ahead of me, a girl whipped around. She had dark hair, the color of Coca-Cola, and eyes to match. She shot a withering look at the boy who whispered. Then she turned back to Miss Fischer, her back straight.

  I quickly looked down and stopped myself from laughing. That girl had snapped me back to attention. I never got in trouble in elementary school, and I didn’t plan to start now.

  If the very proud principal of Clarkstown Middle School noticed us laughing, she didn’t show it. “I like to say,” she continued, “that when you come to Clarkstown, you come as you are . . . and leave different.”

  She spoke to us about rules and expectations, about how privilege comes only with responsibility. She said that middle school was going to be more challenging and more fun than we’d imagined, that great opportunities awaited us.

  As she spoke, I glanced around the room, studying some of the new faces. After a while, I stopped listening to Miss Fischer at all. How was I supposed to pay attention to all those rules right now, when I just couldn’t wait to start meeting people? I looked at one kid after another, kids of every size and shape.

  Sixth grade was a funny age. Some of these kids still looked like they belonged in elementary school—short, skinny limbs, and loose-fitting clothes. Others looked like teenagers already.

  I realized that by the time we leave, we would all look like—we would all actually be—teenagers.

  Come as you are, and leave different.

  I glanced again at the girl with dark eyes. There was something about her, something I liked. She looked smart and practical and reliable. At the same time, though, I’d seen an intensity in those eyes. She looked like the kind of girl who would know exactly how to power her way into becoming a teenager.

  I decided right then that I wanted to be her friend.

  Miss Fischer introduced some of the other administrators to the students, told us where to go when we had problems. She told us that they—the staff and teachers and counselors and administrators alike—were there for us. Then she smiled at us, warmly, and sent us off to our classes.

  We spilled out of the auditorium, a river of movement, of chatter and laughter and denim and hoodies and Pacers T-shirts.

  We scooted off to classes, learned how to get to the gym, to the orchestra room, to the library. There were more textbooks and notebooks than I had ever had before, and I realized that Miss Fischer was right—it was going to get more challenging, what with science labs and typed book reports and algebraic equations.

  Between classes, I noticed the dark-haired girl again. She carried a musical instrument in a case—a violin, maybe. She must have sensed me looking, because she looked up, right at me. Our eyes locked, and I smiled. She waited a moment, eyeing me cautiously. Then one corner of her mouth turned up, almost imperceptibly.

  Oh, God, it was all so much fun, like a whole new world was opening up for me. For all of us.

  That was the thing—I was twelve years old, almost a teenager, and everything in my life, everything around me, was brimming with possibility.

  The Brochure

  You know how people say that things happen for a reason? I believe it.

  The best gifts seem to come out of the blue, no explanation. They look random—often they don’t even look like gifts at all. You pick them up, though, because they are the things that happen to be in front of you.

  You take a chance.

  Then years later, when you trace back your own steps, you realize that this thing was it, that this moment was the fork in the road, the one thing that changed everything. And you didn’t even know it.

  You hear it all the time: a missed train connection. A bum
mer at first, until the person realizes that his wallet was in the car in the parking lot and the lights had been left on. Or better yet: he has a random conversation with a stranger while waiting for the next train. Fifty years later, you’ve got a couple about to celebrate their golden anniversary. Three kids. Eight grandkids.

  That sort of thing.

  Or maybe the whole reason you can speak in front of people, feel comfortable getting up and saying something with conviction, all comes down to the fact that one day, back when you were a kid, you walked into the kitchen and saw something that had been mailed to you at random.

  For me, it was a brochure.

  I was eight years old when I saw it sitting on the kitchen counter: a colorful brochure, vibrant among stacks of bills and boring grown-up mail.

  On the cover, I saw a photo of a girl in a glittery gown, a dazzling crown on her head. I picked it up: it was an invitation to participate in something called a Sweetheart pageant.

  They were asking me to take part.

  I swear I thought my heart would burst. I’d been watching pageants with my mom ever since I could remember. I’d gazed enviously at every pageant queen that I’d ever seen in a parade—watched them wave to the crowd like they were real-life princesses. My favorite game was dressing up, wrapping myself in my mom’s scarves as if I, too, were a sash-wearing pageant queen. Now here was my chance: a real pageant, and they wanted me!

  Okay, so looking back I realize now that they probably sent that brochure to every girl my age in Indiana. But I didn’t understand that then; I thought they really and truly wanted me.

  I ran to my mom’s room and thrust the brochure at her. I was completely breathless. “Please, Mom,” I begged. “Please, please, please.”

  I was so sure she would say yes. She’d never been like other mothers that way. Other mothers almost always start with no. No, you can’t have cookies for snack. No, I can’t take you to the park. No, I don’t have time to be a customer in your pretend restaurant.

  But not my mother. My mom’s first instinct has always been yes. Yes to the cookies, yes to the park, yes to being a restaurant customer, and why yes, of course, I would like another heaping serving of string spaghetti. Her yes is why all my friends love her. It is why they want to be here, at my house, for playdates. And it is why, standing there in her bedroom, brochure in my hand, I was 100 percent certain she would let me do this pageant.

  But instead, Mom just frowned. She was silent for a few moments as she looked through the brochure carefully. Then she handed it back to me and shook her head. “I don’t know, honey.”

  I looked down at the brochure in my hands. The girl’s hair cascaded around her shoulders, and her dress fluffed out like the softest, fluffiest cloud. She looked so confident and happy. I could not understand why my mother didn’t want this for me.

  “Mom, please—” I started.

  “Paige,” she said, looking up at the ceiling. “There are things you don’t know, okay? I just don’t want you to get hurt.”

  “I won’t get hurt,” I said. “I’ll win.” I was certain of that, too.

  She paused. “I’ll think about it.”

  I can’t imagine how she thought about anything, though, with the amount of pestering I did.

  “Can I do the pageant?” I asked her every hour for the rest of that night.

  “Can I do it?” I asked at breakfast.

  “You’ll let me do the pageant, right?” I asked on the ride to school.

  “I’ve seen pageants on television,” I said when my mom picked me up at the end of the day. “Lots of girls earn money that they can use for college.”

  I heard my mother talk about money sometimes. She always said that her job—bartender at the American Legion—didn’t pay nearly enough. “Do we have money to send me to college?”

  She answered quietly. “No, Paige, we don’t. Not yet.”

  Before bed, I said, “Oprah Winfrey did pageants, and look at her.” I knew how much my mother loved Oprah.

  She kissed me and said, “I’m thinking about it, Paige.”

  And she was. But she wasn’t just thinking about yes or no. She was thinking that there were things in this world I did not yet know—things about myself. She was wondering what would happen if they found out about my HIV. Would they even allow an HIV-positive girl to enter pageants? What if we went, and they rejected me? It might hurt me more than if I’d never tried in the first place.

  But at the same time, she was thinking something else: why couldn’t an HIV-positive girl do pageants? I mean, there was nothing about my illness that would prevent me from being able to do the things that pageant contestants had to do. Really, what was so wrong with that idea?

  When I asked the next morning, “Can I? Can I please?” she sighed.

  “Okay.” She closed her eyes and shook her head. I could tell she was wondering what she was getting us into.

  By the time she opened them again, I was already rushing toward her. I threw my arms around her. “Oh, thank you, Mom! Thank you, thank you!”

  “You’re so young,” she murmured, in a way that made it clear she wasn’t really even talking to me. “The world is so complicated and you are so young.”

  “Don’t worry, Mom,” I said. My words were muffled against her body. “I’ll win. I swear: they will love me.”

  She hugged me hard and whispered in my ear, “Yeah, they’ll love you, Paige. I know it.”

  My mom was the mom who always said yes—even to Disneyland. Here I am on my seventh birthday, celebrating with Donald and the gang.

  Catching some sun in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with my mom.

  Clarkstown

  YASMINE

  The girl I saw in the auditorium on that first day of sixth grade? I met her almost right away, in the lunchroom. Her name was Yasmine.

  “What do you play?” I asked Yasmine as I opened up a bag of chips.

  “I like soccer,” she answered.

  I laughed, tilted the open bag of chips in her direction. She took one.

  “No, I mean I saw you carrying a musical instrument,” I said. “Was it a violin?”

  “Viola,” she said. “Similar. I play piano, too. Do you play anything?”

  “No, but I love to sing.”

  She nodded.

  “And I like soccer, too.”

  She laughed. “Cool.”

  It happened just that easily, our beginning. Within a few days, we were sitting together every day at lunch, passing notes to each other in the hallway. Within a few weeks’ time, she had become something else—a kind of friend I hadn’t had before. She became my best friend.

  Before long, I had learned every inch of the two-mile stretch between our two homes. Even now, all these years later, I could probably find my way to her house with my eyes closed. Now we are passing the Little League fields on West 73rd, now we are turning right onto Ditch Road. On our right is Greenbriar Elementary School, where Yasmine went. On my left, the Abundant Harvest United Methodist and CrossBridge Baptist churches. At the busy intersection with 86th Street, with its car washes and chain pharmacies and grocery stores and Office Depots, the trees started to seem more abundant, the houses a little larger.

  In Yasmine’s development, all the lawns had these little ADT security signs in them. Looking out the windows, I saw mothers power walking or pushing baby joggers. A block ahead, an older couple wearing visors walked hand in hand. It was a neighborhood of golden retrievers and potted plants on the front steps, of kids walking toward the clubhouse with tennis rackets slung casually over their shoulders.

  Ordinarily, my mother wanted me to hang out with other kids back at our house: “If you’re here, Paige,” she always said, “I know you’re safe.” But Yasmine’s father was stricter than my mom, and Yasmine’s neighborhood was a safe one. My mom relented, on the condition that she could call me whenever she needed.

  It was a slight burst of freedom, and it was deeply exciting to me.

&n
bsp; At Yasmine’s house, we spent hours and hours doing nothing at all. Sometimes, we sat on a big wooden swing in a park near her house. Other times, we’d play pool in what her family called the “great room,” a large, airy space off her living room. We sprawled out on the floor and talked about sports and show choir, about how quickly boys and girls seemed to be pairing up. I liked the idea of boys. I loved the idea of having a boyfriend, but actual boys—the real boys I saw every day—still seemed so silly to me.

  We looked at friends’ online profiles, and we listened to our favorite song, Augustana’s “Boston,” over and over again, screeching the lyrics—“She said I think I’ll go to Boston, I think I’ll start a new life, I think I’ll start it over, where no one knows my name . . .”—at the top of our lungs.

  Sometimes, too, Yasmine and I hung out with her older sister, Lila, and her sister’s best friend, Madison. They were both in eighth grade, and they shared their wisdom about sixth grade—which teachers were strict, which ones would notice if we copied each other’s notes, which ones got really mad if you turned in homework late.

  I loved being there. It was my home away from home.

  One day when the leaves had changed color, my mom dropped me off at Yasmine’s house. Yasmine must have been waiting at the window for me, because she came bursting out of the house as soon as we were in the driveway. Her cheeks were flushed. “Paige!” she exclaimed, running toward the car. “Guess what, Paige?”

  Later, I would hear rumors that Yasmine was descended from exiled Middle Eastern royalty. When I heard that, I would think of this moment—of her pushing her way out the front door, and running toward my car in her bare feet. Yasmine seemed as grounded, as unpretentious, as anyone I have ever known.

  My mother rolled down her window. “Hi, Yasmine,” she said.

  “Oh, hi, Mrs. Rawl,” Yasmine said with a wave. She was jumping up and down, tiny little jumps. Whatever it was, whatever the excitement, she could not contain it.