Positive

by Paige Rawl

  When it was my turn, my counselor said, “Paige, each day has the potential of being your best day. You decide what each day will bring.”

  You just decide.

  “To kindle something is to spark a flame,” she continued. “Let the flame act as a reminder to believe in possibilities. You have the power to light the fire of change. Don’t wait to take action; if you see a need, fill it.”

  You decide to live a good life. It’s all you have to do.

  “We all hope for a cure and compassion for those living with this disease. We have a unique story. Being impacted by HIV does not define who we are.”

  Paige . . . you’ve got a lot of light.

  The wind blew through my hair. Tomorrow at this time, I’d be home, back with my mother in our brick house, two blocks down from Clarkstown. In a few weeks, I would be back at Herron.

  Almost a year had passed since I’d taken those pills. If I had succeeded on that day—if the pills had made it all go away, the way I’d wanted—I would never have been here. I never would have met Brryan or Eva or Nikki or Wallace or Cole, or the twins, or the counselors, or any of these amazing people.

  My counselor was still speaking. “With that you can open your eyes.”

  I took my blindfold off. The light came flowing in.

  “We all love you, Paige,” she said.

  “I love you, too,” I said. “I love everyone here.”

  And I meant it. I really did.

  Later that night, each cabin performed a dance. Wallace and Cole’s cabin did a lip sync to a Justin Bieber song. About halfway through, each boy in the cabin danced out into the crowd, grabbed a girl, and sang to her. Wallace pulled me up, and Cole pulled up Nikki. We laughed as we moved toward the stage. Before us, a crowd of friends—how quickly we’d grown to be so close—cheered for us. Wallace shook his hips in a way that was so silly and so endearing. I met Nikki’s eyes and we laughed.

  Then the counselors did a lip sync to “Don’t Stop Believin’.” Halfway through, they all lifted Eva above their heads, the way Brryan had lifted me in the photo shoot. Everyone cheered—I think I cheered loudest of all. Then the rest of the night was a blur: we danced in the dark waving glow sticks above our heads. We watched a slide show with pictures from the week, tears streaming down our faces. We hugged one another tightly before we all headed back to the cabins for one final night in our bunks.

  The founder of Camp Kindle, Eva Payne, and me goofing around at CK Nebraska. Camp Kindle is where I really found myself again.

  The bus was scheduled to take campers away in the earliest hours of the morning. I wasn’t leaving until much later that day—until a far more reasonable hour for an Angel Flight pilot—but Nikki and Wallace would be leaving with the bus, and I wanted to say good-bye. So Cole and Wallace and Nikki and I all met at the cafeteria just after 3:00 a.m., the morning that still looks like night. We stepped out into the darkness, kicked at the dirt, and promised to keep in touch.

  This was the beginning of the end of something magical, and I knew it. The bus would take these kids, all of them, back to their own communities, to the lives they led before coming here. Many, I knew, would pretend they had been at a camp for regular kids—some would make up a name for it, so that nobody could look it up. They would go back to hiding who they were and what they were struggling with. They would quietly take medicine and hope that no one saw or wondered why. They would attend doctors’ appointments and say things like, “I have allergies,” and not tell anyone the real reason.

  But I knew something else: I knew that they would hold this week inside of them. That they would carry this experience carefully inside them and would take it out when they felt alone, when they needed to remember that someone, somewhere, understood.

  I knew this, because it was what I was going to do with the week, too.

  When the bus finally pulled out, the counselors didn’t just stand still and wave good-bye. They followed it, walked alongside it, waving the whole time. They walked and walked long past the moment when campers could still see them. They walked until its taillights were out of sight.

  I walked with them, too.

  Then Cole and I walked to the duck pond, the same place we’d gone just after we met. We watched the sun rise over the lake, pink clouds like cotton candy above our heads. There was still a tiny crescent of a moon, and I loved that, loved being with the sun and the moon at the same time. Cole chased the ducks, who flew away, startled, flapping their wings and calling out wildly before returning, only to be chased again. We stayed together, the two of us, aware of the ticking clock, aware and unable to change that finality.

  I would have stayed there forever if I could.

  A few weeks after I returned home, my mom burst through the door.

  “It’s here, Paige!” she cried. She waved a People magazine. “It’s here!”

  We flipped through the pages: a healthy Cobb salad recipe from a celebrity trainer. An article about a reality TV star’s new bikini body. A story about Justin Bieber’s new haircut. An advertisement for hair shampoo. Then there we were: Brryan and Wallace and Anthony and me. It was the photo where Brryan held me over his shoulder, the boys leaning in. In the photo, I am horizontal, and Brryan is holding my wrist and ankle, and I am touching Anthony, who is touching Brryan, who is leaning toward Wallace. I had to look closely to see whose hand belonged to whom.

  The picture is titled “Heroes Among Us,” with the caption, “An AIDS survivor inspires kids with HIV.”

  Before we had left Camp Kindle, Brryan had handed me a note. I started to take it from him, but before he let go, he said, “No, wait.”

  Then he opened it up and read it out loud to me.

  Upon my homecoming, if anyone asks me who my hero is, I’ll give a name that has truly inspired me this week. The name is Paige Rawl. She may be a short one, but never underestimate someone until you see their heart. . . . She will never be forgotten. Forever, she has a place in my heart.

  Brryan Jackson

  HOPE IS VITAL

  When he finished, he handed it to me. I wrapped my arms around him, and we stood hugging for a long, long time.

  Now here we were in People magazine together. I looked at Brryan’s image; it looked like Brryan was smiling right at me. I grinned back.

  What is most remarkable about this picture is how utterly unremarkable we look. Brryan looks strong and healthy, the rest of us like any other kids. And that’s the thing: We are strong. We are healthy. We are just like anyone else; the evidence was right there on the page in front of me.

  Truth be told, we look like a whole lot of fun. We look like the kind of kids I’d want to hang out with.

  Moving On

  In October, I turned on the television and saw a photograph of an African American boy, a little younger than myself. He had beautiful, soulful eyes, and a grin on his face like he might know how to get into a little bit of mischief.

  He looked a little like Louis, actually.

  I knew immediately that something terrible had happened to this boy.

  I had called Louis several times, had called and texted to see how he was doing. Sometimes he texted me back, vague things like, You know me, I’m the belle of the ball around here. His texts always made me smile, but I remembered those scratch marks on his arms, and I worried.

  The boy on television was named Jamarcus Bell. He was from Fishers, Indiana, about twenty miles from my house. I was right—something terrible had happened. He’d committed suicide, the news reporter was saying, after years of bullying. Kids had teased him since middle school. They threw metal at him during welding class, they called him names.

  The report referred to him as the “boy who always smiled.”

  Last month, another boy in Indiana had died. Billy Lucas had also been teased for being gay. He’d had chairs pulled out from underneath him. Some kids had told him to go hang himself.

  So he had. Billy hung himself from the rafters in his family’s barn.


  Now here was another teen gone because of bullying. He was just like Billy Lucas, just like Hope Witsell, the girl who was in the news when I came home from the stress center.

  He was just like thousands that had come before.

  A few days later, my mother got a call from our attorney.

  I knew something was wrong by how still she was as she held the receiver to her ear. When she spoke into the phone, it was only in short bursts.

  “But how could—?”

  There was a long pause.

  “But four out of five—

  “Three instances? But there were so many—”

  “But that’s—”

  “Okay, but what can we—?”

  “And what would that—?”

  “How long?”

  I don’t even think she said good-bye. She just hung up the phone and looked down. I waited, but she did not speak.

  “Mom?”

  She did not look at me. She was extremely still.

  “Mom. What is it?”

  The refrigerator kicked on. Nearby, one of our neighbors was listening to the radio; I heard the deejay’s laughter ringing out into the afternoon. She shook her head again. I noticed how her shoulders sagged, and I sat down in a chair.

  “That was the lawyer?”

  She did not move.

  “Will there be a trial?”

  She looked up. Tears filled her eyes.

  “Mom?” I spoke slowly. “Will there be a trial?”

  She shook her head. I could barely hear what she said when she finally spoke. “No.”

  I didn’t say anything—I just let the news flow through me.

  There would be no trial.

  They would never take the stand.

  I would never make my case in court.

  My mom closed her eyes for a long time. Her only movement was to shake her head back and forth slowly. “I’m so sorry, honey.”

  I bit my lip so hard I tasted blood. “How?”

  She shrugged. It was not a shrug of indifference. It was the kind of shrug that signaled loss of hope.

  “Tell me, Mom.”

  “The judge said we won on four out of the five counts. But we needed to win all five.”

  I had known that we needed to win five points. From the start, the law had already been clear about the first two counts—that HIV is a disability under two different laws, and that kids with HIV should be able to attend school without harassment. Our case had required winning the three remaining points—that bullying occurred, that the school knew, and that the school had not taken reasonable steps to protect me. I couldn’t imagine which of those points we’d lost.

  “Which didn’t we win?”

  She threw up her hands. “I—”

  “Which one, Mom?”

  “They agreed there was bullying. . . .”

  “And?”

  “They agreed the school knew about some bullying.”

  I just looked at her. That meant that the judge thought the school had taken reasonable steps to protect me.

  My mind started racing. Reasonable steps? They called it drama. They ignored my mom’s phone calls and the notes she left. They defended Yasmine because she was a straight-A student. They told me to deny who I was.

  I thought about Kyle, Michael, and Devin calling me PAIDS and laughing while I cheered. What reasonable steps had been taken in that moment? What about those messages on my online pictures? What about Lila’s instant message? What about the notes we had told them about?

  No AIDS at Clarkstown.

  You bitch. You hoe.

  What about my name on the bathroom wall, plain as day?

  As far as I could tell, nobody had ever gotten more than a warning. Not once.

  My mom was speaking slowly. “The judge only considered three instances of bullying. He said the school responded appropriately to all three.”

  My mouth felt dry, which perhaps explains why the only word I said came out in a whisper.

  “Three?”

  “The first incident with you and Yasmine, the one with the note someone signed your name to. The one where kids called out to Ethan in the cafeteria. And Miss Ryan’s comment.”

  The fake note, the cafeteria, and Miss Ryan. But there were so many more.

  “My nickname? PAIDS?”

  She shook her head. “They didn’t consider that.”

  “The instant messages? The online comments?”

  She looked down; the shake of her head was only barely perceptible.

  “And what about the notes you left? The phone calls? They didn’t even call you back. That’s ‘reasonable’?”

  She took a deep breath and spoke very softly. “Remember, honey,” she said. “The school didn’t remember my leaving any notes. They had no records of my phone calls. Nothing was ever documented. The judge had nothing to go on.”

  She looked me right in the eye then, and I understood she was telling me something about the world. She was telling me something that until that moment perhaps we’d both been too young, too naive, to fully understand. It was in that moment that I understood what I’d done wrong.

  I’d been a child.

  I’d been a child, and I’d gone to the adults in my life with a problem, expecting that their first priority would be to help me. I’d expected them to behave like I’d always been taught that adults would behave. I’d expected them to look out for me.

  But sitting there in the quiet of our kitchen, shades drawn, I realized that I’d been wrong. I went to them needing adults. Instead, they had responded like potential defendants—then actual defendants—in a lawsuit. They protected themselves.

  I’m sure their attorneys advised them that it was the only logical thing for them to do.

  To have won this case, I would have needed to document things, needed to photocopy things, to make sure there were records of everything that had happened. To bring in witnesses.

  I had needed to behave as no child would have ever thought to behave.

  I knew something else, too. I knew that I had just crossed some sort of threshold. It was like I’d walked across a bridge and turned to look backward, only to find that the bridge had burned behind me. I could never go back. I would never return to a place where I believed that adults would do the right thing, that a child could count on the grown-ups in her life.

  My mom would look out for me—she would look out for me forever. I had no doubt about that. But aside from her, I had to be careful. The world looked different from what I’d imagined when I was a child. It was a whole lot more complicated.

  I felt hot tears running down my cheeks. I placed my head in my hands and sobbed.

  Almost instantly, I felt my mother’s hand on my back, rubbing up and down. “We can appeal, you know,” she said to me. “This isn’t the end. We can file an appeal.”

  She was speaking faster now, the way she always does when she is angry or anxious. “We might have better luck outside of Indianapolis, with another judge. We know what we’re up against now. We just need to insist on bringing in witnesses for some of the other events. We can prove—”

  “How long?” I asked, and looked up at her. “How long would that take?”

  “Well.” She stopped talking. When she answered, it was quietly. “I don’t know. Probably a couple of years.”

  A couple of years. It would go on through the end of high school. It might still be going on when I was in college.

  I’d left Clarkstown behind when I was in middle school, and the lawsuit might still be going on when I was in college.

  I shook my head. “No, Mom.”

  I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t take them with me that far into the future. I had given Clarkstown my middle school years, and already far too many of my high school years. They didn’t deserve any more of my time. I wanted them gone.

  All the people that hurt you just kind of fall away into your past.

  I wanted them—all of them—firmly in my past.


  My mom looked at me carefully. “Pumpkin, you don’t have to—”

  “No.”

  “Paige, do you understand that this is the only way—”

  “It’s not the only way.”

  She stopped, shook her head, confused.

  “Mom, if the law says that the school handled this the right way, then somebody needs to change the law.”

  “What are you—”

  “Right now, the law is so narrow it can’t keep anyone safe.” It didn’t keep me safe, it sure as hell didn’t keep Hope Witsell or Billy Lucas or Jamarcus Bell safe. I shrugged my shoulders. It really did seem so simple now.

  “Let’s help change the law,” I finished.

  I didn’t know how anyone could do that, exactly. But I knew I wanted to help. There were so many kids out there. So many kids who had been treated so badly. You couldn’t even turn on the news without hearing about them.

  Mom stood up, walked to the window, and stared out of it for a long time.

  “I am so angry,” she said finally. “I am just so angry, I can’t even see straight. I don’t want them to get away with this.”

  “Mom?” I said. “If the law changes, then they have to change. They won’t get to hide behind policy and procedure. They’ll have to fix things.”

  She nodded, but it was a vague nod, a distracted nod. She still was not looking at me.

  “I stood up for myself, Mom. Can you see that?”

  Another nod, a tiny one.

  When she didn’t say anything, I said, “Mom, this is so much bigger than me. I wish it weren’t. But it is. It’s happening everywhere, and it’s so bad.”

  I was crying again, then. “It’s really just so bad.”

  She came back to the table and sat down. “So, no appeal?”

  I thought about it, thought about the fact that this would be it, the end of the road. The lawsuit would end here. My relationship with Clarkstown would end here.

  This is the way it would end—with nothing at all.

  “No,” I said finally. “Let’s not appeal. Let’s do something else instead.”