by Paige Rawl
She would have done something, anyway, something more than blink and turn away, pretending she hadn’t heard a thing.
Which, of course, is exactly what I did.
That night, I lay in bed and thought about names. I tried to think of any other name that could be morphed into the word AIDS. I even went online and looked at names.
There were none. They could have only done it with the name Paige.
It’s like I was destined to be this, somehow. Destined to be PAIDS.
That boy was right. I was powerless to stop it, powerless to stop any of this, the way it was all falling apart. All of it, so swiftly falling apart.
Just Go
“So, why pageants?” Ethan asked.
We were at Ethan’s house, on the sofa in his family room. His mom and brother were somewhere in the house, but right now, this moment, it was just him and me.
We were playing video games. Basketball, of course.
He was better at it than I was, which I guess was no surprise. I kept getting distracted by the crowds that were built into the game, by the commentary, by the high kicks of the video game cheerleaders.
My player dribbled slowly, turned, and looked for someone to pass the ball to.
Ethan moved a player past me; the player stole the ball as he passed.
“Jerk,” I said.
“Sorry,” he laughed. His eyes focused on the flat screen that hung on the wall. His player dribbled right down the center of the court, making an easy layup.
“Twenty-seven to eight,” he said, not looking at me.
“Shut up,” I said.
My phone hummed. I picked it up. It was a text from my mom. Everything ok?
“Oh, my God, my mother.”
I texted back. Yeah fine. Playing video games.
I turned back to Ethan.
“So what were we talking about?” I asked.
“Pageants.” His eyes were still fixed on the game.
“You don’t really care about pageants.”
Another text from my mom. Who is winning?
“I’m curious,” he said.
I texted back. He is. Gotta go.
“Okay, so what was the question?”
“I don’t know. What are they like?”
“They’re fun. You get to dress up. You meet lots of other girls.”
He tossed a three-point shot, and the crowd on his side of the court went wild. A band started up and his fans stood up and cheered, rolling their fists in the air.
“Do you win money?” he asked.
“Not usually. I just like doing them.”
“Because you dress up?”
“Well . . .”
It was a hard thing to explain. I loved so many things about pageants. I loved the patter and bustle of girls backstage, the laughter as we zipped ourselves into gowns, or ran a brush through our hair one last time. I loved watching Heather—she and I were good friends now—apply makeup, so carefully that you couldn’t see the makeup itself. Instead, you only noticed features that you might not have seen before, like the sparkle in her eyes, or her high, elegant forehead. I still was not allowed to wear makeup in my age division, but when I did start wearing it, I planned to wear it exactly the way Heather did.
I loved meeting other girls from around the state, from so many different backgrounds. Some girls came from unimaginably hard situations, and you could just hear their determination when they answered judges’ questions. “I plan to attend medical school.” “I plan to be a talk show host.” “I’m going to help children whose dads were injured while serving our nation, like my own dad was.”
I loved those girls especially, the ones with plans.
I loved the flurry and excitement of it all, the nervous butterflies that appeared as we all waited backstage, then the instant calm that came over me as I stepped onto the stage into the lights. I loved being with my mom while getting ready, then later, knowing she was out there in the darkness, silently rooting for me.
I loved the way pageants helped me feel so in control—of myself, of what happened next, of my own destiny. I loved the way they made me feel so confident, when so many other things made me feel the opposite.
I looked at Ethan now and shrugged. “Well, why do you like basketball?”
“I like shooting baskets.”
“That’s it?”
He smiled, his face still on the screen. “That’s not enough?”
“Okay, then. I don’t know why I like pageants. I like everything, I guess.”
A small face appeared in the room. His little brother. “Get out, Jake,” Ethan said in a warning voice. The face disappeared.
Ethan shouted, “Seriously! Go!” We heard the sound of footsteps running down the stairs.
“So you like everything,” he said.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
He took a three-point shot, sunk it, and paused the game. He looked at me. “Do you have pictures?”
“Oh, God, my mom takes so many pictures.”
“You should post them.”
“Like online?”
“No, like on a billboard, dummy.” He nudged his foot against my leg. “Of course, online.”
I laughed. But he left his foot there, right on my leg.
I wasn’t thinking about pageants then.
And that’s when Ethan leaned over toward me. His face was right next to mine. And then he came even closer, and then his face was touching mine. He kissed me. His mom was moving around in the kitchen just one room away, and his lips were on my lips, and it was wonderful.
We heard a noise in the doorway and looked up. His brother, Jake, again. Ethan threw a pillow at him, and the boy disappeared. We looked at each other and laughed, and he did not move his foot from my leg.
“You really should post a picture, you know,” he said, his eyes locked on mine.
God, I was happy then. I was so happy exactly like that, on the couch.
“Yeah, maybe I will.”
So I did. I did it that very night. I wanted to think about how Ethan grinned at me on the sofa, the way his foot nudged me. I wanted to think about his wide, goofy smile, and the way he was so embarrassed when I saw his baby picture by the door when it was time for my mother to pick me up.
I wanted to think about that kiss. Over and over and over again.
I uploaded photos, some of my favorite ones, then I walked away from the computer for a while to do math homework—Mrs. Yates was really getting on my case these days. And then I finished my homework, finished dinner, and even read some of Anne Frank’s diary, even though that was the last thing I wanted to read about. I returned to the computer, wondering if he might have sent me a message.
He hadn’t. But beneath one of the photos, there was a short comment from a girl who went to another school. I barely even knew her; the girl’s sister and I were once in an academic after-school program together. Both of them had always seemed really nice, super friendly. They lived in a big white house with columns on the porch and carefully trimmed hedges along the sidewalk. A nice family, most people would say. Nice girls.
She had left me this message. She had sought me out, looked for my online profile, even though she barely knew me.
Because there on my photo, this girl who I barely knew, this girl who attended a different school entirely, had left a comment, one I didn’t even entirely understand:
you look like an aids baby mama.
I looked at those words for a long time. It was like wolves circling or something, this situation. It started with just a few, but more and more animals were circling now. I stood up and went to the bathroom, slammed the door, and put on music. I turned on the shower but did not get in. Instead, I sat on the floor and rocked back and forth.
Just breathe.
I rocked for a long time. I rocked until the mirror became steamed up, then even longer. Drops of water rolled down the mirror, leaving clear streaks. I rocked until the throbbing music was all there was. Then I
got up and went back into my room, lay down on the covers.
A moment later, my mom knocked on my door.
“Paige?”
I just lay there.
“Paige,” she said. She opened the door a little and stood in the doorway. “Heather’s mom says that Heather’s signing up for the National American Miss pageant. She’s doing the junior teen division. You could do the preteen division.”
I didn’t answer.
“You and Heather could do it together.”
I moaned.
She walked over and sat down on the bed. “You should do it. It’ll be fun.”
I sat up then. Suddenly, I was furious. I was furious at my mother for coming in here, furious for her wanting me to do anything, furious for suggesting that anything would be fun, ever.
“Just get out,” I screamed.
“Oh, honey, what’s the—”
“I don’t want to do your stupid pageant.”
“Well, it’s not my—”
“You just want me to walk around and smile as if everything’s okay. You want me to smile and wave and wear pretty dresses so that you can tell yourself that everything’s just fine. But it’s not fine, and it’s never going to be fine, and so I don’t want to tell you that it is, just so you’ll feel better.” I grabbed the paper in her hand and ripped it away from her. Her eyes widened.
I crumpled it just enough to throw it, and I hurled it across the room.
“Paige, that’s not why I want you to—”
“Just go away, Mom.” I was pleading now, my face screwing up into a cry. “Just get out and go away and don’t talk to me about pageants anymore. Please, Mom. Please, just go.”
She stood up and looked at me with such concern, such sadness, I couldn’t bear it. I turned away from her.
“I just don’t know what to do, Paige.”
“Please, Mom. Please. The best thing you can do is just go.”
She did not move for a long time.
“Please go, Mom.”
“Okay,” she said. I felt her get off the bed and heard her pick up the crumpled paper. She left the room and shut the door carefully behind her as she left.
I lay there and did not move.
Ugly
Today, when I look through my middle school yearbooks, I have trouble connecting what I see on those pages with the hard tight feeling that comes over me whenever I think about Clarkstown. In those yearbooks, in color photos, are smiling, friendly faces, doing all the things kids are supposed to do. There are kids blowing into trumpets, slamming tennis balls with rackets, singing in costume at the center of a spotlight. There are kids walking in groups, arms draped around one another casually, giving an invisible photographer the thumbs-up sign. There are kids in football helmets, kids with hands raised in the classroom, kids grinning as they stroll, relaxed, into the gymnasium. These kids, all of them, look so at ease, so happy.
Maybe most of them genuinely were.
But the thing is, I keep seeing myself in these pages. In one photo, I’m standing in a cheerleading outfit, my blue-and-white Wildcats pom-poms placed confidently on my hips. In another, I’m surrounded by a crush of about twenty kids at a basketball game; everyone appears to be either laughing or hollering with glee. In all these photos, I’m smiling.
I look, in all honesty, happy.
And maybe that’s what Miss Ward saw, and my teachers, too. Perhaps that’s why they dismissed my pleas for help, made up their minds that my complaints were nothing more than the usual drama of early adolescent friendships. Maybe they saw a kid who was friendly and bubbly, who cheered her heart out at basketball games, who surrounded herself with other kids, who seemed to love being a part of things. Maybe they thought that those things, those things alone, told them everything they needed to know.
Maybe they really believed that the things they saw mattered far more than the words that were coming out of my mouth.
But I’m not so sure.
And the reason I’m not sure has everything to do with the history of HIV and AIDS.
In 1981, doctors began noticing surprising numbers of men affected by a rare cancer, Kaposi’s sarcoma, as well as a weird type of pneumonia, Pneumocystis carinii pneumonia (PCP). It didn’t make sense: the men who had gotten these diseases were young and had been in good health. We know now that these were just opportunistic infections—infections that had taken hold only because the men’s immune systems were so weakened. We know that the real cause of that was the HIV virus. But at the time, it was all a mystery. The New York Times reported on the rise of Kaposi’s sarcoma, noting that 20 percent of the men who had gotten it had died within two years of being diagnosed.
Oh, yeah, and the newspaper reported that all the infected men happened to be gay.
It was a different time in US history. Back then, there were virtually no openly gay celebrities. No openly gay actors, singers, talk show hosts, musicians . . . and certainly no openly gay politicians. The same year, it was reported that Billie Jean King, a widely beloved professional tennis player, was gay. She lost every endorsement she had. In every state in America, it was still legal to discriminate against someone based on his/her sexual orientation. In many states, being gay itself was a crime. Homosexuality was considered a mental illness by members of the medical community; it was years before doctors would remove sexual orientation from the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, the standard-bearer of the psychiatric industry.
News of a “gay cancer” spread rapidly. By the end of 1981, there was almost a new case being diagnosed every single day. And although by mid-1982 the disease started showing up in heterosexual men and women, that did little to destigmatize the disease. Nearly all those straight men and women were intravenous drug users who had gotten the disease from sharing needles.
So that’s how the disease was discovered in the United States: in gay men and in drug users. Not exactly the most stigma-free populations.
There was such disgrace in an AIDS diagnosis that no one—even the doctors who treated the disease—was immune to it. Caregivers who treated AIDS patients were sometimes shunned by their peers. Dr. Joel Weisman, one of the first AIDS physicians, once wrote about a conversation with a fellow physician. The other doctor, said Joel, declared that if AIDS were to “kill a few of them off”—meaning gays, I guess, or drug addicts, or anyone else who happened to get the disease—“it will make society a better place.”
For a long time, I didn’t know any of that; I still thought HIV was like any other disease. I knew people with diabetes. I knew people with arthritis. I knew people with high blood pressure and eczema and cavities and farsightedness. Perhaps if I’d understood that HIV had originally been seen—unlike those other conditions—as a disease of outcasts, I wouldn’t have been as confused by people’s reactions to me.
I had been a good girl, mind you. I had done what the adults told me. I had let that last meeting with Miss Ward be my final one.
No more drama.
My mom, though, was worried. She left messages for Miss Fischer. She stopped by the school to see her. She left a note in Miss Fischer’s office, handing it to the school secretary with the words, “Please make sure she gets this.”
Mom followed up with phone calls. She never got a call back.
It’s possible the administrators somehow never got those messages. Or maybe they simply didn’t know what to do.
But sometimes I wonder if the problem was HIV itself. These administrators surely remembered those early days, when AIDS had been seen as a telltale sign of depravity, of someone who is less worthy than others. What if they carried some of those old prejudices, even unconsciously? What if the fact that I had HIV was enough to put me, or my mom, in a new category in their eyes?
What if they heard HIV and thought only of those at the margins of polite society?
Yasmine’s a straight-A student. (As if I wasn’t.)
She could have been a good friend. (Except she wasn’t
.)
You can just deny that you have HIV. (Except I did have it.)
I recalled the time in sixth grade when I got in trouble for laughing in the hall, when I had to write an essay about why I shouldn’t be suspended. It didn’t make any sense: laughter was an offense worth suspending a kid over, but telling the school that I had HIV wasn’t? Calling someone “PAIDS” wasn’t?
I imagined Yasmine imitating Miss Fischer: I am the very proud principal of a school where laughing might get you suspended. But making up hurtful nicknames gets you a starting place on the basketball team.
When I imagined that, I laughed out loud, even though I was all alone in my bedroom. I laughed like a crazy person.
In fact, the whole situation made me feel like I was crazy, like a little part of me had gone completely nuts.
Mostly, it made me feel desperately alone.
By midyear, my grades had begun to plummet. I began missing school—a lot of it. I forgot assignments, lost homework. Sometimes I read over the same paragraph six or seven times, and still couldn’t remember what it said. My stomach hurt constantly.
Mrs. Yates, my algebra teacher, had grown particularly impatient with me. “You either do the work, or you don’t,” she said simply when I tried to explain what was happening with me.
“I’ll do the work,” I said, even though the numbers had long since stopped making any sense. All of those x’s and y’s and parentheses and sweeping angles on grids . . . they all required so much concentration.
I’ll try, I would tell myself. If I can just make myself focus, keep my eyes on the page, stop my mind from wandering, I can do this.
And then, when I didn’t turn in my next homework assignment, Mrs. Yates said, “Without a doctor’s note, you will not pass this course.”
I went to see Dr. Cox. She checked my vital signs, pressed down on my belly.
“Hmm,” she said. “How’s everything going, Paige?”
And I wanted to tell her.
I used to love going to school, I wanted to say. I used to love it, but then something changed.