by Paige Rawl
I’d had a number of seizures by now. I’d had one at Target. I’d had one in my mother’s car. I’d had one at the mall, and in the hallway after school. I’d had several in the morning, just when I was supposed to get up to begin the day. My mother would find me motionless in bed, unable to move or make eye contact.
Anyway, I recognized the signs by now—that strange distancing from everything around me, the way the world faded away.
I dropped the can of Coke. I stood still.
“Paige?” Amber said. “Is it happening again, Paige?” And already her words sounded too far away, and her face, the world, was turning that funny green-gray.
I felt cold and clammy and sweaty. Then in an instant it was all gone.
I woke up on the bed, Amber and my mom by my side. My mom told me that Amber had kept my head from hitting the floor, that she’d dragged me onto my bed. (“Oh, please, you weigh, like, nothing,” Amber said with a wave.) Then she got my mom, and the two of them stayed with me until I came to.
My mom tried smiling at me, but I could see that sadness in her eyes, and it made me feel sick. I felt so bad that she’d paid for a limousine, that she’d spent all that money to get me here to Disney, so that we could sing for almost no one and she could get a prank phone call one night, then be called to her passed-out daughter’s hotel room the next night.
I felt so bad that I couldn’t be better for her, that I couldn’t stop those boys, that I couldn’t keep that crazed half-angry/half-sad look from entering her eyes.
On the way home from the airport, we rode in a regular car, nothing fancy. Nobody spoke. We just looked out the window at the road signs and passing semitrucks of I-465 and remembered what it had been like in the limousine on the way to the airport, how giddy we had all been.
It felt like a hundred years ago, even though it had been just a couple of days.
The last time I visited Miss Ward’s office was because I was called there.
What did I do? I wondered as I walked down the hallway toward her office. I haven’t complained about the bullying since she told me to stop causing drama.
When I knocked on Miss Ward’s door, I saw Ethan sitting there, in her office.
Well, that just about blew my mind.
But when I entered, he did not look at me.
What in the world did I do?
“Paige,” Miss Ward said. “It seems we have yet another problem.” She gestured toward the seat next to Ethan. I sat.
“Ethan here has reported a situation.”
Ethan flicked his eyes at me quickly, then looked away. I could not make out what he was thinking.
Miss Ward explained that when Ethan entered the cafeteria for lunch, a boy shouted across the lunchroom at him.
“You’d better not kiss Paige,” the boy had warned. “Or you’ll get AIDS, too.”
Then other kids had laughed. “Ethan’s gonna get AIDS. . . .”
And then a few said things like, “I’ll bet he got AIDS already.”
I felt my face flush red as Miss Ward spoke. Ethan looked down at the floor. He did not say a word. When Miss Ward finished, we all sat in silence for a few awkward moments. She folded her arms.
Oh, God, I thought. This is the worst thing ever.
“Ethan decided to report the situation.” Then she looked at me. “Paige, I’ve already called the other boy’s parents and discussed it with them. I’m afraid I need to call your mother, too.”
Okay, wait. Here was a situation that happened when I wasn’t even around. It happened to someone other than me and was started by someone other than me. When it happened, I was half a school away. Yet for some reason, she needed to call me down here to tell me about it. She needed to call my mom.
There was nothing to do but sit and wait, so that is what I did.
She dismissed Ethan, who did not look at me, did not say good-bye, when he left her office. Miss Ward dialed my mother, her long nails tap-tapping the buttons on the phone. She described the situation to my mother.
“Mmm-hmm. Yes. Yes, I’m going to send her back to class now. Okay, yes, I’ll make sure Miss Fischer gets the message. Okay, Mrs. Rawl. Okay. Good-bye now.”
She placed the receiver on the telephone and she looked at me.
“You may go.”
I stood up.
“I really do not know what to say about any of this, Paige.”
I nodded and left the room.
That afternoon, just before cheerleading, I saw Ethan waiting outside the gym.
“Hey,” I said. I slowed down.
“Hey,” he said. His cheeks were bright red.
I liked him so much, I could have kissed him right then and there.
And although the whole situation was mortifying, I had to admit that I liked that he told Miss Ward, liked that he defended my honor like that.
I had a thought then: I want to show everybody. I wanted to show everybody that I was just as deserving of love as anybody else. I wanted to show everyone that no matter what people said, this boy chose me, chose me above the rest of them.
I wanted to walk through the cafeteria with him at lunchtime holding hands. I wanted everyone to see. It was a silly thought—it seems ridiculous in retrospect—but it’s what I wanted above all. I wanted it so badly I might have even slipped a note into my shoe, just like I did before winning the Indiana Sweetheart pageant.
Ethan and Paige will hold hands in front of the whole school.
He looked down at the ground. “Sorry about today.”
I was about to tell him that he didn’t need to apologize, that he was just reporting what someone else said. I was about to say, Forget it, which is what I really hoped he would do. Forget it, let’s move on, let’s be boyfriend and girlfriend just like we both want. But that was when he said to me, more quietly, “Let’s not tell people we’re hanging out anymore.”
I stopped walking. He added quickly, “We can still hang out, of course. We just don’t have to let anyone know.”
I looked away, over his shoulder, into the gymnasium, where the basketball team was already starting to warm up.
“Okay,” I said, like it didn’t matter to me at all. “Yeah, sure. That’s fine.”
Red
Here is a blade, and here is my skin.
It was almost funny—although I suppose it probably was not funny at all, not in the least—the way it reminded me of that old game I once played with my hands:
Here is the church, and here is the steeple.
Here is the blade, and here is my skin.
Open it up and see all the people.
Open it up, let the bleeding begin.
This is how it happened the first time. It really was that simple. One day, I cut myself until I bled.
I was in the bathroom, music blasting. My mom had long stopped banging on the door when I did this. She just left me alone until I was ready to come out. Then she hovered in my bedroom doorway chattering about nothing at all, flashing worried glances every time I moved.
But as long as I was in the bathroom, she left me alone. She was leaving me alone right now.
The music was loud, and my skin was pale, and my blood was red. And I wasn’t sure—I’m still not sure—if I was trying to hurt myself, exactly. It’s more like I was trying to feel something. Like I was numb, somehow, and I didn’t know any other way to make myself feel. Or maybe, instead, it was the opposite. Maybe the sharp blade was a distraction from what I felt all the time and had begun to take as normal.
My new normal. A normal where nothing was normal.
It’s kind of like when you can’t tell the difference between hot and cold; the two sensations—hot, cold, feeling, numb—start to seem exactly the same after a while.
But you can tell the difference between red blood and pale skin.
Here is the blade, and here is my skin.
I scraped just enough to get the top layers of skin off—not so deep that I wouldn’t be able to stop the bleeding. But i
t worked and my blood was red, and I felt something different from what I’d been feeling.
In the end, it didn’t really matter to me if that was something or nothing. Either way, it was a relief.
I felt calm.
I turned the music off and sat there, looking at my blood, listening to the sound of my own breath. (How funny, how rarely we notice that, how rarely we take the time to notice our own constant effort to stay alive.)
I pressed toilet paper down on my wrists until they stopped bleeding. Then I flushed the toilet paper, pulled the sleeves down on my sweatshirt, and went into my bedroom. My mother appeared in the doorway, and I gripped my sleeves, holding them over my wrists as she hovered. I gripped them until she was gone, until it was time to turn out the light and stare at the ceiling, waiting for sleep to come.
Withdrawal
Autumn. Eighth grade.
I was on the bench at an away soccer match.
My seizures had continued into the summer. I didn’t want to pass out in front of the whole school ever again, so I didn’t cheer. Instead, I tried out for the soccer team and made it. Yasmine was on the team, and I’m not sure what to say about that. Maybe I was refusing to let her get in my way—maybe I wanted to prove to her that I could go anywhere, do anything, and that she couldn’t stop me. Or perhaps, instead, some part of me wanted to bring things to a head. At any rate, when I showed up at practice on the first day, her eyes flashed surprise, and I jutted out my chin and did not look at her.
We had fewer classes together this year. For one thing, Mrs. Yates had held me back in math. There would be no studying math at the high school, which maybe was just as well. Middle school kids were scary enough.
At practice, Yasmine and I passed each other the ball when we had to. Otherwise, she and I had become like the magnets that a teacher once showed us in science class, the kind that don’t ever touch, no matter how much you try to push them together.
But I liked soccer, liked most of the girls on the team. Besides, I liked the coach, Miss Ryan. She was sporty and young and blond, energetic and pretty. She was cool, kids said. Miss Ryan is cool.
This match was early in the season. I sat next to Miss Ryan, waiting to be put into the game. Yasmine was in midfield, dashing toward an opposing player who dribbled the ball. Yasmine charged the girl—I swear, she was afraid of nothing. Everyone knew what would happen next. Even members of the opposing team saw it coming. One swipe of the foot, and the ball was Yasmine’s, just like that.
The parents behind us cheered. I watched, but remained silent.
Miss Ryan turned to me then.
“By the way, Paige,” Miss Ryan said. She said it casually. Too casually, actually. It was as if we weren’t in the middle of a game at the moment, as if we had all the time in the world for conversation.
The back of my neck felt prickly, and I sat up a little straighter.
“I heard”—oh my God, the laid-back voice of hers—“that you had AIDS. Is that true?”
I glanced at her. Miss Ryan’s eyes surveyed the field as if she hadn’t said anything at all.
We were mere inches from other kids, just a few feet from the parents behind us on the bleachers. An opposing player kicked the ball out-of-bounds. The ref blew his whistle, and the girls gathered for the throw-in.
It’s funny how you think about the right responses only in retrospect. I mean, now I can think of plenty of things I might have said. And I wish I’d said any of them. I wish I’d told her that HIV and AIDS are not the same thing, and that anybody who knows anything knows that. I wish I’d thought to say that it’s against the law to disclose someone’s health without their permission, so perhaps she should keep her voice a little lower.
Most of all, I wish I had said four simple words: “None of your business.”
But sitting there on the metal bench, blue-and-white jerseys moving all around me on a green field, I was just a kid. I was a kid who was different from all those other kids in shin guards and cleats, different from all those parents who might be listening. I was a kid who was sitting next to a teacher that everyone universally agreed was cool, and I wanted her to like me.
So I said just one word: “No.”
And while that was technically true—I didn’t have AIDS, and as long as I could keep my CD4 cells above two hundred, I wouldn’t have it—I didn’t say it to be accurate. I said it because it was all I could think to say, the only way I knew to make the conversation stop.
“Huh,” said Miss Ryan, as if we were talking about the weather. Like, Huh, it really is a lovely fall afternoon.
Huh, the trees are starting to change color, have you noticed?
Huh, might start to get colder next week.
Huh, I think you are lying to me and that you really have AIDS.
One of our players kicked the ball hard, and both teams rushed toward the opposing goal.
And then, just like that—so quickly I almost questioned whether the moment had happened—she put me back in the game. I ran past Yasmine on my way in, and we did not look at each other.
Later, when I told my mother what Miss Ryan asked, she was furious. A few days later, during team photographs, she confronted Miss Ryan.
“What are you doing, asking her if she’s got AIDS?” my mom demanded. Although she had pulled Miss Ryan aside, her voice was louder than usual. Miss Ryan glanced around, embarrassed. She told my mother that she had just wanted to dispel a rumor, that another child had told her I had AIDS. She thought she was merely putting a rumor to rest.
“Can you imagine what that felt like for her, to have her coach ask her in the middle of a game?”
Shhhh, I wanted to say to my mother. Everybody can hear you.
“Well, I looked in her medical file,” said Miss Ryan. “But I didn’t see any record of it.”
My mom’s face turned beet red. “Excuse me?”
“I just . . .” Miss Ryan started.
“You checked her confidential file?”
“Mrs. Rawl, I—”
Then my mother said what I hadn’t thought to say. “It’s none of your damn business!” By the end of the sentence her voice had risen to almost a shriek.
It is possible to be both mortified and satisfied at the same time. I know this, because I felt both things, in equal measure, when I looked at Miss Ryan’s stunned face.
Miss Ryan’s voice was lower than my mom’s, but I could still hear her. “Don’t you think that as her coach, I am entitled to know?”
“Entitled to know?” screeched my mom. “Entitled to know? You’re not ‘entitled’ to know anything!”
Miss Ryan frowned. “Why don’t we both calm down, Mrs. Rawl?”
“We? You mean me. You’re telling me to calm down. But I’m not going to calm down,” my mother said, “because I know the law. The law says that HIV status is confidential. Completely confidential.”
“Come on, Mrs. Rawl. I’m her coach.”
“Yeah, and how do I know you don’t have HIV?”
Miss Ryan took a deep breath, then looked right in my mother’s eyes. “Mrs. Rawl, what if something happened? What if she started bleeding on the field?”
“What if any kid started bleeding on the field!” my mom shouted. “You avoid all blood, everyone’s blood, because you never know who’s got what!”
Miss Ryan stared off in the distance for a moment, then turned to my mom.
“Actually,” said Miss Ryan, her teeth flashing. She burst out with a small laugh, a false laugh, the kind of laugh that has nothing to do with anything around it. “We can use Paige’s HIV to our advantage. The players on the other team will be afraid to touch her. She will be able to score all the goals.”
Later, Miss Ryan would deny having said this. Under oath, literally swearing to God, she would deny it. And who knows—maybe she truly didn’t remember that part of the conversation. But I’m telling you: I was standing right there, and I heard it. I heard those words clear as day.
I remem
ber them all these years later, just as I remember the wave of shame that came over me when I heard them.
Words like that, the kind that make you feel low and filthy and ashamed, you never forget.
I’d always loved playing soccer, but when my coach said the team could use my HIV status to score more goals, it was one of the lowest points of my time in middle school.
That night, I dumped out my backpack in the middle of the living-room floor—just shook it until there was nothing left inside. Then I picked up my notebooks and tore them, one by one. I ripped the pages out of my books, crumpled them and threw them on the floor.
“What are you doing?” my mom asked.
I tore. Crumpled.
“Paige,” she said sharply.
I made a noise, a cross between a scream and a growl. It sounded feral, and it scared me a little.
It certainly seemed to scare my mother. Her face contorted into a look I’d never seen before. “Paige,” she said more carefully. “Come on, you’re going to need those.”
I grabbed chunks of paper from my math notebook, as many as I could tear out in a single chunk, and I threw the pieces on the floor.
“Paige,” my mother started to plead. “Come on. That’s your schoolwork. You can’t do that.”
I didn’t answer her. I just took another chunk of paper, then another, until I held nothing but two covers, dangling from a pulled-out metal spiral. I threw that against the front door, and turned to my social studies book.
My mom was crying by now. “Stop,” she said. “Come on, just stop it, Paige!”
But I didn’t stop. I tore it all, workbooks, notebooks—all the careful notes I’d been taking in classes. Photocopied work sheets, one after another. Vocabulary words. Lab reports.
All that work. All of that optimism. It all lay in a giant heap on the floor.
No matter what I did, I was always going to be seen as the kid causing problems. I was the bad kid. It didn’t matter that I hadn’t done anything wrong, that my HIV, the source of all the trouble, just came out with me on my first day in this world, the way other kids emerged with blond hair or freckles.