by Paige Rawl
I turned the radio back on, and we heard the details: Hope Witsell, age thirteen. Good home, loving parents. Sent one explicit photo of herself to a boy she liked, and it went viral all over school, to kids at other schools. She was called names, taunted endlessly. Hung herself in her bedroom while her parents were in the house.
I turned the radio off. The streets grew more familiar outside my window.
“I won’t do it again,” I said quietly.
My mom kept driving, her hands on the wheel. She didn’t say anything.
“Mom? Did you hear me?”
That’s when I noticed her chin. It was quivering.
“I promise, Mom. I won’t do it. Okay? I need you to hear that. I won’t do that to you. Not again.”
She took her right hand off the wheel and reached over to me. Her eyes still on the road, she grabbed me by the hand and squeezed, so tight it almost hurt.
Lila
A few weeks after I got home from the stress center, I saw Lila for the first time since I’d left Clarkstown. Erin and I had walked to Broad Ripple shopping plaza—a cozy collection of stores near a walking trail a few miles north of downtown Indianapolis. We stopped in a McDonald’s for a soda.
Outside the McDonald’s, in the drive-thru lane, was a small sign with both the golden arches and the words FAITH AND BLESSED. Walking toward the front door, I wondered out loud if the sign meant that that particular restaurant was blessed, or if the restaurant owner was wishing all of us faith and blessings.
I felt better. Better than I had felt in a long time.
Ethan had texted me after I got home. He must have heard about my being in the stress center, because his message said simply, RU OK?
I’d replied, Yes. Thanks.
And then, after a little bit, I sent another message.
Me: Can I ask you something?
Ethan: Sure
Me: Do you remember when you said you didn’t want people to know we were hanging out?
Silence.
Me (after a minute): After the cafeteria thing.
Ethan: Kind of.
Me: Did you really think that was okay?
Silence.
I wasn’t sure why I was even writing this, whether it was that I wanted him to feel bad, or I simply wanted to understand. It was probably a little of both. Still, I needed to get it out there.
Me: That really hurt my feelings.
Me: I needed a friend.
Silence.
And then, after a minute:
Ethan: Sorry.
Ethan: I’m really sorry.
Ethan: They were making fun of me, too.
Me: Who?
Ethan: Everyone.
Ethan: They kept teasing me, saying I shouldn’t like you. They wouldn’t stop.
I bit my lip and looked out the window for a moment. It had never occurred to me that kids were teasing him, too, just for his association with me. And then I wrote him again.
Me: I didn’t know that.
Ethan: I didn’t know what else to do.
Ethan: It wasn’t cool. But I wanted them to stop.
A long pause.
Ethan: I’m sorry though.
Ethan: I really am.
Me: What did you say?
Ethan: When?
Me: When they teased you?
Ethan: I said stop, but they never did.
Ethan: I guess I was sick of it.
I stared at my ceiling for a long time. My mom and I had redone my room just before I started at Herron. The pink and purple were gone. Now everything around me was a deep shade of red.
Me: Hey.
Me: Thanks.
Ethan: For what?
Me: For saying sorry.
Me: I haven’t gotten a whole lot of apologies. It means a lot.
Me: I feel better.
Ethan: Thx, Paige.
Don’t let anyone say you can’t have a meaningful conversation via text. Because I was telling the truth. I did feel better. It really did mean a lot.
Now inside McDonald’s, Erin and I sat in the booth, sipping our sodas. People came and went; I didn’t pay much attention.
And then, I can’t say why, but I felt a kind of strange energy coming from near the counter, so I looked up. And immediately, I met Lila’s eye. Yasmine’s sister.
If I’d ever wondered if time had softened things between us, if she felt bad about how things had turned out, the answer was in front of me. Literally, it was right there in front of me. She stared at me with hard eyes, her chin thrust forward like she’d been challenged. She was with a friend who I did not recognize; that girl, a stranger, glared at me, too.
I felt a sickening sensation spread across my stomach. I struggled to swallow the drink that was in my mouth.
“It’s okay,” Erin said in a low voice. “They won’t do anything inside the restaurant.”
My heart pounded. I picked up my drink, then placed it down again on the table. My hand was shaking.
Notice the signs of stress, the voices from the stress center came back to me. Increased heart rate. Difficulty breathing. Trouble concentrating.
“We’ll just hang out until they’re gone,” Erin said. She gave me an encouraging smile, and I tried to smile back.
In the corner of my eye, I watched Lila and her friend. They took a paper bag filled with their order. They went to the drink dispenser and filled their cups. They leaned in to each other, speaking in low voices.
I became intensely aware of the smell of fried food. Why hadn’t I noticed it before?
Another wave of nausea. I wanted to be out of that restaurant, but I didn’t dare move.
Erin kept the conversation going—she leaned in to me and talked about cheerleading at Clarkstown. As an eighth grader, she had just joined the team and was telling me about some changes to the drills. She was smiling and making a point of having a good time. I forced my cheeks into a smile and nodded as she spoke. But I was barely listening. I was intensely aware of Lila, of the strange, threatening energy that I could feel—it was a thing in the room, her hatred. It had a shape and texture. I felt like I could have reached out and grabbed it, and I don’t doubt for a minute that it would have seared my hand.
Then, just like that, Lila walked out the door. A moment later, we saw her behind the wheel of her dad’s white car. Of course; she’d be a junior in high school now. She’d be driving.
She drove slowly, disappeared from view, then reemerged.
She was circling the restaurant. Like a predator.
“It’s okay,” said Erin. “She’ll go home in a minute or two.”
She passed by the window a few more times. Then she didn’t. We waited: two minutes, five minutes, ten minutes.
“She’s gone,” said Erin. I breathed a sigh of relief, and I nodded.
We gathered our empty soda cups, crumpled our cardboard fries carton. We stepped back out into a beautiful evening, streaks of pink already appearing in the sky above us. We walked.
We were on the back side of the restaurant, far from the windows, when we saw Lila’s father’s car. It was heading toward us. Right toward us.
So many things can happen in a span of just a few seconds.
First: I understood that she was coming for me, that she had waited for me, waited stealthily out of sight, the way a hunter waits for prey.
Second: I calculated the time it would take for me and Erin to go back into the restaurant. I compared it to the distance Lila’s car was from us. There was not enough time. Not nearly enough time.
Third: I thought, This could be bad. I didn’t know what that meant exactly—what would be bad? What might happen?
The sign in front of me said FAITH AND BLESSED.
Lila slowed down.
There was no place to run, no place I could go quickly enough.
She pulled over, leaned out of the open window.
The world went into slow motion. I looked at Lila’s face. It was so distorted, twisted in hate. Animal,
I thought. She looks animal. She raised an arm, pulled it back behind her head. I registered that before I registered what was in it. Something flew toward me. It hit me, straight on. Hard. I felt the impact first, the rough smack of it. Then I felt everything else: Cold, ice cold. Wet. A sharp pain in my ribs. Something hit the ground. I heard the thud, the tumble of ice, laughter. Lila pulled away, tires screeching.
Her soda. It was dripping down my front. That’s what had been in her hand, a twenty-ounce cup of soda, and she’d thrown it at me.
“You okay?” Erin’s voice. I realized I had heard it just a moment ago, too, calling out my name. I’d been too shocked for it to register, but now I was piecing it all together. Lila had waited for me—specifically waited, for the purpose of humiliating me. She’d thrown a drink at me. Erin, dear friend, had called out to me, called out a warning, when she, too, must have been just as shocked and scared as I.
It was just a drink—just a drink thrown from inside a car. It could have been so much worse. I realized I was shaking.
“Come on,” said Erin. “Let’s get you cleaned up.”
We walked back into restaurant, walked into the bathroom, where Erin blotted me with paper towels. I began crying then, crying hard. All these years later, and I still couldn’t go out to a McDonald’s in my own hometown.
Lila still hated me. She really just hated me.
She was always going to hate me.
“She’s a jerk, Paige,” said Erin, squeezing a rough paper towel against my shirt. “A jerk and a coward.”
I nodded. I couldn’t figure out why I felt so ashamed. Why was I always the one to feel ashamed?
Lila hated me simply for existing, for still being in the world at all. Lila had helped to drive me out of a school district, but not out of town, not out of this world, and I guess that infuriated her.
As Erin blotted me dry, I caught a glimpse of myself in the mirror. I was wet, but otherwise intact. I looked like me.
And that’s when I realized something: Lila hated me for something she couldn’t even see. I mean, my HIV was completely and totally invisible. Anyone looking at me on the street would think I was just a regular kid. They would never know—they never do know—that there’s anything different about some of my cells.
And if people hate me for something that they can’t even see, what chance do other kids—the ones who have things you can see—have? What about a kid who is overweight, or who has terrible acne? Who walks with a limp or, God forbid, has some sort of facial deformity? How about a kid who stutters, or whose clothes don’t fit in, or who is too short or too tall, or who wears glasses, or whose skin is a different color?
What about a kid like Louis?
When you stopped to think about it, there were so many reasons that one person could choose to hate another person.
If a completely invisible virus was an excuse to turn me into an outcast, then what about all those other differences that exist between people—hair color and skin color and nose shape and body type and physical challenges and even just plain personal style? But aren’t we supposed to be different? Aren’t we always told that we should be comfortable being exactly who we are?
I was exposed to a virus before I’d even had the chance to take my first breath.
That was a fact. I couldn’t change it. And if Lila hated me for my virus, then she hated me for something I couldn’t control, something I could never, ever change.
Nobody could change it. The best scientists on the planet, the best doctors in the world, couldn’t change it. My mother, no matter the intensity of her worrying, the fierceness of her love, couldn’t change it.
HIV was part of me, and it always would be. There was nothing I could do.
I met my own eye in that McDonald’s mirror. Suddenly, something about this situation seemed almost funny. Here I was in a McDonald’s bathroom, blotting soda from my clothes. Lila was angry. She was filled with hate.
There would never be anything I could do about that. So there was no reason to waste my energy trying to change it.
Erin took a heap of paper towels and threw them in the trash. She looked at me hard, then smiled slightly—the same warm smile that she’d shown to me on the day I left Clarkstown. “Are you okay, Paige?”
I nodded. I brushed a strand of hair away from my face. I realized something: my hands weren’t shaking. My arms weren’t shaking. My face wasn’t going blank.
The voices from the stress center came back to me: Recognize the signs of stress.
At that moment, I recognized several things that were all jumbled up together. I recognized that I had let those kids get to me, had let them make me doubt myself, for something that I never could have helped, anyway. I recognized that Erin, standing there by the trash can overflowing with paper towels, was one of the most loyal, faithful friends on this planet.
I recognized myself—the me that liked cheese puffs and Kit Kat bars, the me that loved to dance and sing. The me that would still be there, after I had changed my clothes, after this moment had faded into the past.
I might be wet, but I was going to be able to walk out of this ladies’ room, walk out of this restaurant, return to my house, with my head held high.
“Yes,” I said. I looked at Erin and shrugged my shoulders. “I’m okay. I really think I am.”
“You ready?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said. And I felt a lightness in my voice when I said it. “I’m ready. Let’s go.”
Erin and I walked out together into the warm September evening.
PART FOUR
Becoming
Kindle
“You must be Paige!” The woman was a stranger to me, maybe thirty years old, curvy and beautiful, her dark hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her arms were spread wide, ready to embrace me, even though we were meeting for the first time.
I knew exactly who she was: Eva Payne. Her eyes were so bright I couldn’t help but smile.
She wrapped her arms around me in a hug. “I’m so glad you’re here.”
“Hi, Eva,” I said. “I’m glad to be here, too.”
And I was.
I’d just arrived at Camp Kindle, Fremont, Nebraska—my first-ever sleepaway camp experience. Kindle looked just like I’d always imagined summer camp would look—wooden cabins, wide fields, dirt paths, swimming pool, duck pond. But this camp was a little different: it was specifically for children who were infected with, or otherwise affected by, HIV.
My transportation here was an Angel Flight—a private plane whose pilot volunteers to take kids to camp, or to treatment facilities. My mom had walked me to the tarmac and, as the plane lifted off, I had waved and given her the thumbs-up. I watched her get smaller and smaller until she disappeared.
The pilot and I headed upward, toward the sun, until the clouds sat below us, like piles of snow. Although I’d flown before, I’d never seen the ground like this, the wide-open view of Midwestern fields, my own country, my whole world, laid out before me.
So, I thought, the world can look like this, too.
From up there, the world, including my own problems, seemed very small.
Eva pulled back, held me by the shoulders, and grinned. “I am so glad you joined us, Paige.”
I already knew all about Eva. When she was in college, just a twenty-one-year-old theater major at the University of Nebraska, she had seen a play about a boy with HIV. Shortly after, an idea popped into her head—one that she couldn’t shake: There should be a camp for kids who are impacted by HIV/AIDS. She began researching camps all over the Midwest and found nothing for kids with HIV/AIDS. There was nothing at all. She knew then: it was up to her. After relentless fund-raising, she and her merry band of volunteers chaperoned a group of fifty kids to a campsite in Nebraska.
Camp Kindle was born.
I loved this story. I loved, first of all, that even as a student, she had done something, started something, something that mattered. She hadn’t waited until she was older, she hadn�
��t waited until someone had declared her a grown-up or given her permission to make a difference. She just did it. There was something so bold about that, so confident.
Here was someone who wasn’t HIV positive, whose family members weren’t HIV positive, who’d had every reason in the world to ignore HIV/AIDS. But she hadn’t ignored it. Instead, she had taken it on as her personal mission. She was like Dr. Cox in a way—fighting for kids who would be easier to ignore. I already loved her for that.
I watched Eva as she gave directions to the counselors, set up a registration table, scanned the camp with discerning eyes. Then we heard the rumble of a bus in the distance.
“Here come the Chicago campers!” whooped Eva.
She turned to me with a grin. “Just wait,” she said. “You’re going to love this.”
A short while later, after a busload of kids from the Chicago area had unloaded, and car after car had pulled in and left, everyone stood around greeting one another. Kids waved to each other and hugged—many already knew each other from previous summers—and there were flurries of introductions, of shaking hands, of “Where are you from?” and “Is this your first time?” and “Which cabin are you in?”
I met one kid after another, forgetting most names almost as soon as I learned them. I knew that every kid here was either affected (because someone they knew and loved had HIV/AIDS) or infected themselves, but for the most part, I couldn’t tell the difference.
My heart pounded.
“Hey,” said a voice next to me. “This is your first time, right?”
I turned to see a dark-haired boy, a little younger than myself, with a half-cocked, slightly mischievous grin.
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. “I’m Paige.”
He held out his hand. “Nice to meet you, Paige. I’m Wallace.”
Something about the way he shook my hand, like a miniature adult, and the way his mouth curled into a half smile, both mischievous and innocent, made me want to burst out laughing.
“I’m a little nervous,” I confessed.
“Don’t be.” He grabbed the arm of a blond girl walking past him.
“Hey, you!” he said.
The girl turned and threw her arms around him. They hugged tight, for a long time, then she pulled back and smiled at me. She had a name tag around her neck: Nikki.