by Paige Rawl
Miss Ward handed them all copies of the note.
But I didn’t write it, I wanted to scream. And I hadn’t. I wouldn’t. First of all, I didn’t even believe what was in that note. I mean, if the invisible infection inside my blood didn’t change who I was as a person, then surely her family’s heritage didn’t matter, either. Yasmine was just a girl. She was a girl who played the viola and piano, who loved Augustana, who liked playing pool in her great room, and who kicked a soccer ball harder than anyone I knew.
She was a kid. Like me.
Beyond that, though, there was something else. Yasmine was my friend. That’s the thing: I still believed that. I couldn’t help thinking that this thing that was happening to us was just a misunderstanding, crossed wires somehow. I still believed it was something we could get past. I kept feeling that if I could just do the right thing, if I could just figure out what that exact right thing was, we might somehow wind up best friends again. I thought that there might come a day when we would sit together again on the giant swing near her house, when we would return to her family’s piano and play music and laugh like we used to.
If I could just figure out how to make myself clear, explain something (what? I still do not know), then everything could eventually return to normal. Perhaps that was a crazy thing to hope for. Maybe the fact that I hoped for it at all was proof that I was crazy. But I hoped for it. I believed it.
Still.
Later that night, I received an instant message from Lila.
Lila: WHATS UR PROBLEM??!?? don’t ever put a note in Yasmine’s locker again
Me: I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that and I don’t even know what the note says
Lila: I swear to GOD I WILL HIT U HARD IF U TALK TO MY SISTER AGAIN
Lila: AND THAT’S NOT A THREAT
Lila: THAT’S THE TRUTH
Except it was a threat. Anyone, even I, could see that.
I clicked off the computer. I grabbed a portable stereo and walked into the bathroom. I slammed the door, locked it behind me, then turned up music as loud as it would go. I sat down on the edge of the tub and wrapped my arms around myself, rocked back and forth.
My stomach hurt, my stupid stomach that always feels everything that happens to me.
Over the throbbing music, I heard my mom banging on the door. The banging sounded very far away, and so did her voice, calling my name. “Paige!” she shouted. “Turn that music down, honey.”
And then, when I did not: “Are you okay? Paige!”
Leave me alone. Just leave me alone.
She banged and banged—“Answer me, Paige!”—until I stood up, furious. I turned down the music, just one angry flick of my wrist, and threw open the door.
“Just go away!” I screamed.
For a split second, her jaw hung open. She was stunned. I had never spoken to her like that, had never screamed right at her.
I didn’t care. I couldn’t care.
She swallowed. “Honey, I just wanted to make sure you’re—”
“I’m fine,” I snapped. “Just give me some space, will you?”
“Okay, but I just—”
I slammed the door then, right in her face, turned the music back up, and sat back down.
I realized I hated it here, in this house. I hated it at school.
I hated it absolutely everywhere.
That May, Yasmine turned twelve. Over Memorial Day weekend, she and Lila had their big party at the clubhouse, just like Yasmine and I had talked about.
I could just picture it. I imagined the streamers and balloons and silver trays of food warming over tiny flames. I imagined the pock-pock from the nearby tennis courts and the ripples of wind through the awnings. The temperature was in the low nineties—hot at my mother’s house, but perfect for a summer party. Surely, all the kids went swimming, splashing and dunking and whooping, pool lights glowing, until late into the night.
I imagined all of that, but of course I was not there to see it. The party went on without me. It was just as if I never existed.
PART TWO
Stumbling
A New Year
GRADE SEVEN
It is probably not every kid who can say this, but I can: there was at least one day, at the start of seventh grade, when I sat in algebra class and was 100 percent fully and completely happy.
It wasn’t the algebra, of course. It’s that other things were good.
Cheering for the basketball team in seventh grade—I was so proud to have finally made the squad.
First of all, I had done it. I had made the cheerleading team. All those hours practicing with Amber, all those evenings bouncing around my own house, had paid off. Even better: not only was I on the team, but the coach had even given me roles in some of our stunts. And, wow, my uniform was the cutest thing I had ever seen: flouncy blue skirt, white trim, a tank top that said WILDCATS. I had blue-and-white ribbons for my ponytail, and blue-and-white pom-poms that rustled dreamily when I shook them.
I had spent much of the summer moping about Yasmine. I wish I hadn’t done that. I wish I hadn’t wasted a moment on her. But her absence from my life, her sudden and complete rejection of me, hurt. So this little victory, this whole becoming-a-cheerleader thing, the pom-poms and skirt and ribbons and all, made me feel a little victorious.
If she went to a game, after all, she wouldn’t be able to avoid seeing me.
Another good thing: I had made a new friend, Mariah, who was crazy friendly and who made me laugh. She was new to Clarkstown. After we met, she told me that she had spent some time with Yasmine and some other kids over the summer. They had told her about me. They told her I had AIDS, and that she should stay away from me. But when she finally met me on the first day of school, she decided she just wasn’t going to listen.
“You seemed okay to me,” she said with a shrug.
I was so glad. I was glad that she wanted to hang out, glad that we might even have a sleepover this weekend. And I was especially glad when she passed me in the hallway and waved really big and called out to me loudly, as if daring anyone to say anything, “Hi, Paige!”
In case you’re counting, that made Yasmine: 0, Me: 2.
There were other things, too. I had joined the Bluettes, an all-girl show choir, and Amber and I often hung out there. Our teacher, Mrs. Kay, had even told us that the Bluettes and some of the other show choir groups might get to perform in Walt Disney World. Yes, that Walt Disney World. The one and only.
And then there was Ethan.
Oh, my God, Ethan.
I had bumped into Ethan after my cheerleading practice the day before. He was in his soccer clothes, all sweaty in shin guards and mesh shorts. He walked toward the gym with a bunch of his teammates—Kyle Walker and Michael Jepson and a few other guys. My stomach did that fluttery thing when I saw him.
He flashed a grin and looked right at me. “Hey, Paige,” he said. God, his smile was so wide and so goofy. I could have gazed at it all day. “What’s up?”
Which might not sound like all that much, except here is the thing, the really important thing: he didn’t keep walking toward the locker room with his buddies. He stopped. The other guys slowed down then, like maybe they would wait for him if it was only going to take a second, but when he didn’t follow them, didn’t even glance at them, they kept walking. He stayed.
You can imagine how fluttery I got then.
And we talked for just a minute—How was your summer? You cheering now? Who do you have for English? Yeah, she’s tough. It didn’t matter that we weren’t saying much of anything at all. I would have stayed there forever saying nothing. It was enough just to stand there with him, breathing that air we shared, which I’m telling you felt different from any air I had ever breathed.
Another group of soccer players ran past us. One of them made a loud kissing noise as he passed, didn’t even break his stride, and I felt my cheeks flush. I looked down at the pavement.
“Well . . . anyway,” said Ethan. He sounde
d as embarrassed as I felt. “I should go change.”
And I nodded and was about to say “See ya,” when he added, kind of quickly, “We should hang out sometime.”
You can laugh if you want to, but if you have ever been thirteen years old with a fluttery heart, you probably know that at that moment, I felt like I could fly.
“Yeah. Okay,” I said. It was hard to look at him, but then I did. I felt my cheeks pulling my lips into a smile that no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t contain. I bit my top lip.
“So . . . okay,” he said, a corner of his own mouth curling upward.
“Okay.”
And we lingered just one tiny moment more, just grinning, and then he said, “I’ll text you, ’kay?”
And I said, “Cool,” and after he ran off, his cleats clop-clopping on the pavement beneath him, I was so happy I wanted to dance right there outside the gym.
Instead, I went home and put on my uniform and spent the rest of the evening bouncing around the house, practicing my high Vs and low Vs, right Ls and left punches. I cheered in the living room, in the kitchen. I did a split in the hallway, then leapt into a touchdown pose in the dining room. My mother watched and said it was nice to see me happy, and I stopped bouncing only when Mariah called. I took the phone into my bedroom and closed the door. I just had to tell her about Ethan.
Anyhow. I was still happy that next day, even sitting in algebra, with Mrs. Yates in the front of the classroom, droning on about square roots.
I was trying really, really hard to concentrate.
On the first day of school, Mrs. Yates had told us that if we passed this course as seventh graders, then next year, as eighth graders, we could take the bus to North City High School and take math with high school kids. She said that algebra is really just like all the math we had already learned—we would add numbers, subtract numbers, multiply, and divide. The only difference is that in algebra, one of the numbers would be a mystery.
She had showed us an example: x + 4 = 9, and asked, “What is x?”
It was a dumb question, because everyone was able to solve it immediately—x was 5—and I suppose that was her point. So right then, I understood that algebra is just a fancy term for using what you do know to figure out what you don’t know.
So now, even though I wanted to think about Ethan and cheerleading and Disney, I was really doing my best to keep my eyes on the numbers and letters she was drawing everywhere on the board. From the corner of my eye, I saw Yasmine raise her hand.
Oh. Right. How’s this for awkward? In seventh grade, Yasmine and I had five classes together. In addition to algebra, we also had English together, and social studies, and science, and we even had the same lunch period.
We were going to spend practically the whole day, every day, together.
Early on, it seemed like we had settled on an unspoken agreement: in each of these classes, we sat far apart from each other, and we refused to meet each other’s eye.
Or maybe it wasn’t an agreement, exactly. Maybe it was more of a competition. Which is to say, if she wasn’t going to look at me, I sure as heck wasn’t going to look at her.
The bell rang, and math class ended. We closed our notebooks and I went to my locker to change textbooks.
Walking toward it, I saw a note taped to my locker. I figured it was probably from Mariah. Or maybe Amber had slipped into the seventh-grade hallway on her way to gym.
Or maybe, there was always that chance, it was from Ethan.
I pulled it down eagerly. I don’t need Yasmine to have this experience, I told myself, unfolding it. I don’t need Yasmine to get a note on my locker, to plan for sleepovers, to have friends. There are others who will leave notes for me. I have Amber and Mariah and I am a cheerleader and a Bluette and I plan to take high school math next year, when I am just in eighth grade.
But the note was not from Mariah. It was not from Amber. The note had only four words—not even a full sentence, but those words were enough:
No AIDS at Clarkstown.
I became aware of myself standing there in the hallway, alone. Around me, kids slammed lockers, picked up books from the floor, called out to one another. They sounded happy. They seemed oblivious.
But one of those kids, at least, wasn’t oblivious. Someone had singled me out.
Use what you do know to figure out what you don’t.
There was so much I didn’t know. I didn’t know who’d left the note for me. I didn’t know how many people were in on it, or how they’d learned about my HIV. And I had no idea how to change any of this.
But I did know one thing. Whatever happened last year, whatever happened between me and Yasmine, whatever happened with that stupid note she got, with the kids not wanting to drink after me, wasn’t over.
I knew that being a cheerleader wouldn’t be enough to make it go away, that having new friends wouldn’t be enough. Maybe even having a boyfriend—if Ethan ever became that—wouldn’t be enough. I wasn’t going to get a clean slate.
Instead, this thing that had been happening to me was going to keep happening. It was going to get bigger.
The bell rang, and everyone moved toward their next class. The hallway drained of kids—in groups at first, and then one by one. Everyone just kind of disappeared into classrooms until I stood alone. Those words were still right there in front of me. No AIDS at Clarkstown.
I had an urge to throw it, to get that note as far away from me as I could. I didn’t want it, didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to hold it, didn’t even want to touch it. But I didn’t want anyone else to see it, either. I tore it up, my hands shaking. I crumpled the scraps, then brought them over to a garbage can and threw them in. I started to walk away, then turned back to the can, pushed the scraps of the note to the bottom, covering them with other kids’ papers, with an energy bar wrapper, with a half-finished Snapple bottle. I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood.
If I could have figured out how to set that whole garbage can on fire, I’d have done it right then and there.
Still: I did not cry. Not yet.
I didn’t cry then, and I didn’t cry when I stuffed my books into the locker, and I didn’t cry when I slammed the door shut. I didn’t cry until I was inside the girls’ bathroom, safe inside a bathroom stall.
But once I was there, I broke down.
My eyes were red-rimmed when I finally arrived, late and without a pass, to science class. There, Yasmine and I ignored each other again.
A few days later, I stood in my cheerleading uniform, blue and white, shaking pom-poms. Behind me, the Clarkstown football team ran drills, warming up for the big game against Lincoln Middle School. With just a few minutes before kickoff, the bleachers in front of me were already filled.
It was the kind of day that always made my mother sigh wistfully, say some dopey thing like “picture perfect.” And even though I probably would have rolled my eyes if she’d been there to say it, I had to admit, it was a pretty nice day: sunny, warm, mild breeze, fat puffy clouds in the sky.
It was the kind of day where it seems nothing could possibly go wrong. And yet wrong things happen all the time. They happen in every kind of weather.
We cheerleaders were giving our routines one last run before the game started. We stepped out, back in again. We jumped, then kicked, placed our hands on our hips. In a just a minute, my big moment would come: three girls were going to toss me high in the air, then catch me.
The move is called a basket toss, and it made me feel like I was flying.
We stepped and turned, moved our arms into a T formation.
“Everybody do that Wildcat rumble!”
I scanned the bleachers, hoping to see Ethan. A bunch of the boys from the soccer team were in the bleachers. I figured Ethan might come soon, too.
I hoped so. I wanted Ethan there. I wanted him to see me cheer.
Step out, then in.
“Everybody do that Wildcat rumble!”
Arms in T, arms at my hi
ps. I felt great. I was good at this.
That’s when I heard someone in the crowd calling my name. I looked up. Some of the boys from the soccer team—Michael and Kyle and Devin—were laughing. They were laughing too hard to just be cheering for me, and as I stepped out and clap-clap-clapped, I listened more closely.
“Paige!”
“Paige!”
For a while, I couldn’t make the connection between their laughter and their calling my name.
A low V. Arms crossed over chest. High V.
Then I realized. They weren’t saying my name at all. They weren’t saying Paige. They were saying PAIDS.
“PAIDS!”
“PAIDS!”
Clap. Step. Right arm punch.
The boys’ faces were pulled into wide grins, and they were doubled over laughing. Kyle noticed me looking and waved. “Hi, PAIDS!”
I looked away, lost my footing just a moment, then quickly fell back into step with the other girls.
Lean back, roll arms, lean forward, roll again.
Once I heard them, I could not un-hear them. And as I stepped and crossed, jumped and shouted—a smile on my face the whole time—I was intensely aware of those boys, of that name.
“Go, PAIDS!”
A whistle blew. The game would start soon.
It was like slow motion, the way the boys threw their heads back, laughing. The way they were laughing at me.
I thought about Ethan, and I instantly changed my mind. I prayed that he would not be at this game, after all. What if he heard them?
Please, God. Please, please, please don’t let him come to the game today.
It was almost time for my big moment, the one where the girls would toss me into the air.
I didn’t know what to do about the laughter. I was pretty sure I couldn’t do anything.
Two of the girls grabbed each other’s wrists, forming a square of hands. That square was the platform from which I would be tossed into the air. The girls bent down, readying themselves for me. I felt a third girl step into place behind me.