Positive

by Paige Rawl

  But HIV wasn’t like freckles. It wasn’t freckles or curly hair or green eyes or dark skin. It wasn’t anything like those things.

  HIV made me bad, somehow. Less deserving.

  Those other kids would never get in trouble. I was the problem. It would always be me.

  I kicked my papers and books then. I kicked until my feet hurt, kicked until I was exhausted. Then I dropped to the floor and sobbed.

  I never wanted to go back to school there. Not ever. Even my mother couldn’t make me go. Not tomorrow, not next week, not ever.

  On September 23, Dr. Cox and my mother sat down with Miss Fischer for a meeting. There were others there, too: the director of the school district and the head of athletics. My mom had told Dr. Cox that she planned to withdraw me from Clarkstown, that she wanted to homeschool me. Dr. Cox thought it was important that everybody sit in the room together at least once, before we made the final decision.

  At that meeting, Miss Fischer told my mom that she hadn’t known I had HIV.

  (Really? I would wonder later when I heard this. Miss Ward never told her? Besides, Miss Fischer was always in the cafeteria, in the hallways, at games. She never heard anyone call me “PAIDS”?)

  She told my mom that no one in the administrative office knew what had been written in the notes I’d received.

  She told my mom that they did not keep records from the school counselors’ office.

  (Seriously? I would wonder. The counselors’ office doesn’t document anything? The counselors are just supposed to somehow kind of remember what happens to nine hundred children?)

  She told my mom that she would create a sensitivity plan and send it to Dr. Cox.

  (None of us ever saw it.)

  As the meeting came to a close, Dr. Cox said that in her professional judgment, my mom was probably right: that based on what she’d learned, she didn’t think the environment was conducive to my well-being. That it made sense to opt for homeschooling.

  She looked forward to seeing Miss Fischer’s sensitivity plan.

  My mom filed the papers the next day. I went with her and, as she stood in the office, I walked into my classrooms, placed my textbooks on the teachers’ desks, then walked out again. I felt my fellow students’ eyes on me.

  I did not know if I was doing something brave or cowardly.

  I saw Miss Fischer only briefly that day. She spoke to me slowly, the way you would speak to a very young child.

  “I wish you could continue to attend Clarkstown,” said Miss Fischer. “But I cannot promise to protect you.”

  I imagined her finishing that sentence. Although she didn’t say these words, here is what I heard:

  After all, there is only so much a girl with HIV can expect.

  I shrugged and did not look at her.

  I walked outside. It was a dazzling autumn day, the sun beaming down from clear blue sky. On one field, there was a football game, on another, a soccer game. If things had been different, I would have been out there, too, still cheering with those kids in skirts who jumped and kicked.

  A seventh-grade student, a girl named Erin who had just come to Clarkstown this year, rushed over to me. “Paige,” she cried out. “Is it true? Are you actually leaving?”

  “Yeah,” I said. I nodded. “I am.”

  “Lucky,” she laughed. Then she quickly added, “I’m just kidding. I don’t mean that you’re lucky for—”

  “I know.”

  “I’m just sad,” she said quietly. “That’s all.”

  Behind us, a referee blew a whistle. The crowd in the bleachers cheered. I felt the sun on my arms; it felt warm and lovely, totally out of sync with everything I’d been feeling for so long.

  “Hey, can we take a picture together?” Erin asked, perking up a little.

  I nodded “Sure.”

  I still have that photo. We are squinting slightly from the sun. I am wearing a red T-shirt. Erin’s arm, the one that holds the camera, is extended, and we are both looking up. Our faces are pressed together, and it almost looks like one of her eyebrows is running into mine.

  We look happy in that moment. Both of us do.

  My mom walked out of the buildings with a stack of papers. She looked tired—more tired than I’d seen her look in a long, long time.

  “Paige.” She waved to me.

  “I gotta go,” I said to Erin.

  “Okay,” said Erin, then she gave me a hug. When her arms were wrapped around me, she whispered, “Keep in touch.”

  “I will.”

  She pulled back and looked directly at me, her mouth twisted into a half smile, half frown.

  She was sad, I realized. This girl was genuinely sad I was leaving.

  “Promise?” she asked.

  I nodded and I smiled at her. “Yeah, Erin, I do.” I meant it, too. “I promise.”

  I ran to catch up with my mom. We got into the car and pulled out of the lot.

  I never returned to Clarkstown Middle School.

  I Just Want to Do Something

  Not long after I left Clarkstown, I sat on the sofa glumly flipping through channels on the television. A news show. An entertainment show. Some reality show where people eat gross things and try not to gag. I wasn’t interested in any of it.

  “You want something to eat?” my mom offered. I shook my head.

  She stood in the doorway for a while, watching me. Then she said, “You know what? I want you to watch something else.”

  “I’m okay.” I clicked the remote. A game show. An old sitcom. Some lawyer drama.

  “No, Paige. I want you to see something.” She disappeared for a moment; when she returned, she held a video. She handed it to me: The Ryan White Story. It looked old and grainy, like it was filmed in some long-ago decade.

  Ugh, I thought. One of my mom’s stupid old movies.

  “Do I have to?”

  She didn’t answer me. Instead, she turned off my channel, popped the movie in, and settled down on the sofa next to me.

  It was weird, because I recognized everything I saw in the opening credits. There was the Indiana War Memorial, one of the major monuments of downtown. There was the larger-than-life Marilyn Monroe cutout from a bar on Jackson Street, and the Indianapolis Motor Speedway. There, on the screen in front of me, were things I recognized from my own life: guys in Indiana University and Colts jerseys, cans of beer in their hands. JESUS SAVES mission signs and CASH FOR GOLD signs. I saw cornfields and silos, KIWANIS CLUB signs and LIONS CLUB signs, the long, flat roads of Indiana, looming water towers.

  I realized I’d never watched a movie that had been filmed in my own state. I leaned my head against my mom and snuggled my body closer to her.

  I watched. I watched as a skinny kid named Ryan—a kid with a paper route, a kid who was in middle school, a nice kid, the kind I would have liked—coughed uncomfortably. We watched as a doctor click-clicked his ball-point pen just before telling Ryan’s mom her son had AIDS.

  “Is this real?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “It’s a true story?”

  “Completely true,” she said, her eyes still on the screen. “He was about my age.”

  My mother pulled a cheetah-patterned fleece blanket over our laps.

  In the movie, Ryan’s school district expelled him, just for his having been infected. I turned to my mother.

  “That’s not fair,” I said.

  She hit pause with the remote control.

  “It’s not, Paige,” she said. Even then, she explained, doctors had been clear: there was no way Ryan’s classmates could have possibly contracted the disease from him at school. Mom repeated what I’d known for a long time—what everyone knew by now, even if they chose to ignore it: the illness cannot be spread by touch, by drinking fountains, by toilets, or by anything else that could have possibly happened within the walls of middle school.

  “Just like,” she finished, “there’s no reason for your classmates to feel like you’re any di
fferent. If they knew it even back in Ryan’s time, there’s no excuse for not knowing it now.”

  Ryan’s mother filed a lawsuit. She wanted him to attend school. Then other parents in the district responded by filing their own suit. They wanted him to stay home. People screamed that he should be quarantined until he died. Although a judge ruled that he could attend school, nearly half the students stayed home. Students moved their desks away from him; they steered clear of him in the hallway. People scrawled hateful messages across his books and on his locker.

  Someone shot a gun into the family’s living room.

  I watched, then, as Ryan’s mother tried to explain the ugliest part of humanity to her child.

  And I knew then, that this, right here, was my mom’s own way of explaining things. This movie, ordering it and watching it with me, was her way of trying to explain what had happened to me. This was her way of showing me, as best as she knew how, that it wasn’t my fault, that what had happened to me at school wasn’t something I’d deserved.

  In a funny way, I realized, what had happened to me wasn’t even about me. It was something about people. Something that was wrong with people.

  It hadn’t just happened to me, either. There had been this boy. There were surely others out there right this very moment.

  That fact, that there were others, made me feel better and worse at the same time.

  When the movie was over, I turned to my mom and asked her, “Mom, why do people . . . ?” My voice trailed off. I think what I wanted to say was, Why do they choose hate? I couldn’t quite find the words, though. I shook my head, frustrated.

  She seemed to understand. “I don’t know, Paige. They’re ignorant, that’s all.” That may have been the true answer, the right one—but it wasn’t good enough for me.

  “So . . .” I was mad suddenly. I was really, really angry. “So that’s it? We just accept that? People are ignorant and that’s that?”

  She placed the blanket back over us, but I pushed it away.

  She sighed. “I’m upset, too, Paige. I hate this.”

  “But it’s not right,” I said. I realized how young I sounded, how close I was to whining. I couldn’t stop myself. “It’s not fair.”

  My mom reached out to pull me close, but I leaned far away from her. I didn’t want her hugs, didn’t want her sympathy. I wanted things to be different—really, really different.

  “Paige, I just—”

  “No,” I insisted. “It’s not fair. It’s not fair that all of those other kids still get to go to school.”

  I began to cry, really cry.

  “They did this,” I continued. “They’re the ones who did the wrong thing.” I wasn’t even sure my words were coming out clearly, I was crying so hard. “They should have to withdraw, not me.”

  Tomorrow, all my classmates would be at Clarkstown, just like every other day. They’d be in classes, looking through microscopes, running around the track, cracking jokes in the hallway. They would be together, passing notes and cramming for the geometry quiz and shooting straw wrappers at each other at lunchtime. Their world would go on like it always had. The only thing missing would be me.

  I’d be here. I’d be all alone.

  I would have just disappeared, which is what some of them probably wanted all along.

  I sobbed and sobbed, my back heaving as I gasped for breath.

  “Oh, Paige,” my mom said. “Oh, my sweet Paige.”

  I cried into the darkness of the sofa. My mom rubbed my back, back and forth, back and forth, as I gasped and shook, and curled into a tiny ball.

  Eventually, I must have fallen asleep, because when I opened my eyes again, it was dark outside. There was a blanket over me, and I could smell fried chicken. I walked into the kitchen and saw my mother’s backside; her head was stuffed in the refrigerator, and I could hear jars rattling around. I stood there until she closed the door, looked up at me, surprised. “Hey, sweetie,” she said. “You hungry? I was just saving some dinner for you.”

  The light above the oven was on. I could see tiny droplets of grease glistening on the stovetop. Mom picked up a sponge and started wiping everything down.

  My mother, always trying to clean up a mess.

  I didn’t feel sad anymore. I didn’t feel angry. It turns out a person can cry those things right out of their system, drain themselves of all that.

  What’s left behind, after all of that goes, is a kind of determination.

  “Honey?” she asked. “You okay?”

  When I spoke, my voice was level—so flat I barely recognized it as my own.

  “I just want to do something,” I said. “That’s all.”

  On November 18, my mother and I filed a lawsuit in the US Federal District Court, Southern Indiana District. The suit alleged that the school had failed to protect me from bullying, and that this failure was against the law—against two laws, in fact.

  Lawsuits have lots of fancy terms—“mumbo jumbo,” my mom called it after we sat in the lawyer’s office for the first time. But the facts turned out to be pretty simple. Long before I was born, two laws—the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Rehabilitation Act of 1973—established that no one with a disability, or even a perceived disability, could be denied fair treatment under the law. “Fair treatment” included the ability to go to school without being harassed.

  In other words, kids who are disabled—or even perceived in some way to be disabled—have a right to free public education without harassment.

  “But am I disabled?” I asked my mom later as she tried to explain it to me.

  She told me that she never thought of me as disabled, and she was proud that I never considered myself disabled. But the law was clear on this: HIV and AIDS are classified as disabilities.

  “So if you were harassed in a way that interfered with your education,” my mom continued, “and the school didn’t change things, it meant the school broke the law.”

  She explained that our case boiled down to three questions:

  First, was I ever bullied?

  Second, did the school know about it?

  Third, if so, had the school taken reasonable steps to stop the bullying, to create a safe environment for me?

  If we could establish that they hadn’t—if they hadn’t done enough—then we would win.

  It’s a funny thing, filing a lawsuit. Everyone who files a lawsuit says they don’t care about the money. They all say that, again and again, using the same words every time: It’s not about the money. I know how suspicious that sounds. A lawsuit, after all, is all about money; if you win, you get money. Money is the end point, the reward for being right.

  And while that may be the case, I can also tell you that money is just a stand-in for something bigger, something more important.

  I walked away from Clarkstown needing something I hadn’t gotten. I needed someone to tell me that what happened to me wasn’t okay. That it was wrong for kids to call me “PAIDS,” wrong for them to make me feel ashamed of who I was, wrong for a coach to single me out, to look at my health records and make a joke about my infection. I needed someone to validate that: that the whole thing—the notes, the comments, the nickname, the whispers, the gossip, the fact that all my complaints were dismissed or labeled as drama—was just plain wrong. That there was nothing so wrong with me that I deserved to be humiliated.

  I wanted someone to tell me that I was okay.

  And I will admit, too, that I also wanted something else, something a little less noble: I wanted to see them squirm. All of them: the boys who called me PAIDS, and all the kids who laughed when they heard it. Miss Fischer and Miss Ryan and Miss Ward. Everyone who had made me feel so awful for so long. I wanted to see them take the stand, face the lawyer’s questions, look me in the eye.

  I wanted them to feel what I had, to know exactly what it was that I had experienced.

  Those were the things I was after: First, a recognition that I wasn’t really to blame for all that ha
d happened. Second, I wanted people to know exactly what it was like to feel on the defensive. And while I didn’t exactly want a lawsuit, neither my mom nor I could figure out any better way get the things I really did want.

  “We’ll win, won’t we, Mom?” I asked.

  “Well.” She paused. “Let me ask you this. Did those kids hurt you?”

  I nodded.

  “Did they hurt you so much you found it hard to learn?”

  I thought about my missed assignments, all those times I couldn’t concentrate, the seizures. “Uh-huh.”

  “You remember all those times I called the office and nobody ever called me back?”

  “Yeah.”

  “The notes I left?”

  “Yeah. I remember.”

  “So do you think the school took reasonable steps?”

  I shook my head. As far as I could tell, aside from that time my mom and Yasmine’s dad had been called into the office, and the time the boy had made fun of Ethan in the cafeteria, no one had ever gotten in trouble.

  She sighed and wrapped her arm around me tight. “So, we’ll win,” she said. “Open-and-shut case.”

  Then she leaned back and held up her hand, an invitation to a high five. I slapped her hand with my own.

  On the Tuesday before Thanksgiving, just a few days after we filed the suit, the phone rang. I was in my bedroom, trying to focus on reading. It was hard to concentrate on my work—the days at home just seemed to run into one another.

  I heard my mother answer, then I heard alarm in her voice. I walked out into the kitchen.

  “Okay,” she said. “Okay, uh-huh. Yeah. Okay, Oh, jeez. Oh, God. Okay.”

  She hung up the phone and turned to me.

  “Oh, God, Paige.”

  “What is it?”

  “That was our lawyer.”

  “What did he say?”

  My mom’s face was pale. She didn’t say anything. The refrigerator hummed. Outside the window, a car passed by, music blasting; I could hear the thud-thud-thud of the beat get louder, then fade quickly away.

  “Mom?”

  “He just got off the phone with someone at the Indianapolis Star.”

  My stomach lurched. “Why?”