by Paige Rawl
“What, though?”
“I don’t know,” I said. They were maybe the truest words I’d ever spoken. “Not yet. But I can tell my story, and that’s a start.”
She took a deep breath and closed her eyes. Then we sat together in silence for a long time.
Finally, she spoke.
“Paige?”
I lifted my eyebrows.
“I’m proud of you. I’m really, really proud of you.”
I met her eyes. With the tears still staining my cheeks, my heart a jumble of sorrow and disappointment and anger and hope, I smiled.
“Thanks,” I said.
I was a little proud of me, too.
Part of the prom court at the end of my junior year.
Miss Teen Essence
It was the summer before my junior year at Herron, and I was onstage again. I was wearing the greatest dress—white and poufy with bold red roses all over it. The lights were bright, and the crowd was loud, and I loved it.
It had been almost two years since I’d been in the stress center, a year since I’d been to Camp Kindle for the first time. Since then, I’d been speaking more, traveling some, meeting kids and activists from around the country.
A few months before, I’d helped Herron High organize its first-ever HIV/AIDS Awareness Week. The halls had been plastered in posters. Every student, every teacher, every locker, was decked out with at least one red sticker. Kids wore them on their clothes, on their cheeks, on their foreheads. I passed one boy who had stuck them to his earlobes, like earrings. Red ribbons were everywhere.
In December, I had spoken at a Delaware youth forum in honor of World AIDS Day. I’d worn a black T-shirt that said simply HIV POSITIVE, and I’d told the audience members—all teens like myself—about my experiences.
After I spoke, I had noticed two pageant queens—one my age, the other a little older—in crowns and sashes.
I went right over to them.
“I love pageants!” I said. “I used to do a lot of them.”
The older one had very dark skin and long, dark hair. She wore a sleek red dress and her sash read, MRS. ESSENCE. She extended her arms wide and I gave her a hug.
“Girl,” she said, “you are just so brave. I loved what you said out there.”
When we pulled back, she extended her hand. “Tamika Hall. Mrs. Essence 2010, and loving it.”
The other girl, the younger one, said, “I’m Melanie Haynes, Miss Delaware Essence. You really were great.”
“Tell me about your pageant,” I said.
“Oh, honey, it’s the best of them all,” said Tamika. “Essence women are real women.”
“It’s true,” said Melanie. “Girls come from all walks of life.”
“Like what walks of life?” I asked.
“There’s every kind of woman, all backgrounds, all colors.”
“Last year’s Ms. Essence lost a hundred pounds over two years and she talks all about how hard it was,” said Tamika.
“And there are women who have been in bad relationships,” said Melanie.
“We’re talking real bad relationships,” said Tamika, pointing to herself. “My platform is relationship violence, if that tells you anything.”
“We’re the Essence of the modern woman,” said Melanie dramatically.
“We’re about inclusion,” said Tamika. “Giving a voice to every kind of woman.”
She leaned in toward me. She had the most expressive eyes I’d ever seen. “And we are loads of fun,” she said.
And just like that, I wanted to do it.
To compete, I flew to Kansas City. Tamika and Melanie had been absolutely right. This was the most fun pageant I’d ever been to—we’d rocked out to a soul band, we’d gone roller-skating, and I’d even tried doing the limbo on roller skates. We’d danced and laughed, and it turned out that bringing together so many different kinds of people made the whole thing that much more fun.
Now we were down to the final five in the Miss Teen Essence division. Each of us would get a question picked from a bowl.
The lights were bright. I could hear rustling in the audience.
The judge leaned in to the microphone and read my question.
“If you could write a book, what would it be called and why?”
I smiled, remembering the morning in eighth grade when the news of my bullying, the lawsuit, made the papers. I remembered the joke my mom and I kept making: I’m front Paige news now.
I spoke straight out into the audience. “I’ve been thinking about writing a book, actually. I’ve thought about calling it Front Paige News. That’s a pun. My name is Paige, and I once made the front page of the newspaper, because I had been bullied in middle school. . . .”
I paused. It would be so easy to stop there. It would be so easy to just end on that note and say nothing else.
Remember, I was the kid who never wanted to rock the boat or make anyone uncomfortable. I was the good girl, the one who just wanted to fit in.
But if I could talk about my HIV onstage in any pageant, surely I could say it in this one.
And besides, maybe being good, really being good wasn’t about fitting in and keeping quiet. Maybe being good required being a little more like Amber—foulmouthed, ready-for-a-fight Amber.
Amber, who would defend anyone, who would stand up for what was true, what was right. Maybe being good required standing up to what is, and fighting a little harder for what could be.
I took a deep breath. “. . . because I am affected by HIV.”
There was no question that the audience understood. I swear, I literally heard gasps in the audience.
When I heard those gasps, I had an immediate urge to take my words back, to reach out and grab them and stuff them back inside me. Maybe it was too much, I thought. Maybe the pageant world just wasn’t ready. I remembered when that first pageant brochure showed up in my mailbox and my mom was reluctant to let me do it. There are things you don’t know, okay? she had said. She’d been so nervous. She had also been correct. I had been so young.
There had been so much I didn’t know then.
But that’s when I realized that people were clapping—just like that.
I’d said it, they’d gasped, and now they were applauding. I stepped back out of the lights, walked back to my place among the other girls.
And walking offstage, I thought, Or maybe I’ll name it Positive.
It would be nice to say that I won. It would be nice to say that standing up there and saying it out loud—I have HIV—was so powerful that the judges agreed unanimously: the winner is the girl who spoke her truth tonight. Here is the first openly HIV-positive pageant queen. Here is her crown. See how she is just like everyone else?
In the end, though, I didn’t win.
But I didn’t exactly lose, either.
I won first runner-up. It was a national pageant, and I’d told them I had HIV, and I here I was. First runner-up.
Standing there onstage, I remembered my very first pageant, when I was standing there in my David’s Bridal gown with Heather’s mom next to my own mom, both of them out there with their eyes shut and their fingers crossed.
I’d been through hell since then. I’d been to emergency rooms and stress centers and McDonald’s bathrooms. I’d learned my truth.
And now I had spoken it.
Huh, I thought. How about that?
There was another pageant coming up—Miss Indiana High School America. Maybe, just maybe, I should enter.
Just to see.
“You Decide to Live a Good Life”
(IT’S ALL YOU HAVE TO DO)
The following summer, I saw a photo of Yasmine online. She was at a party for kids at North City High School—the high school into which Clarkstown Middle School feeds. The picture was part of someone’s online photo album and I clicked through, looking at image after image. I recognized almost all the kids in the pictures; many of them were the same kids who had been so mean to me.
; By this point, I had been on television several times, I’d spoken all over the country. I’d led antibullying vigils, I had attended the United States Conference on AIDS. I’d dined with celebrities and recovered drug addicts. I had been honored as one of just five HIV heroes in the country in a national competition; I had been flown to New York City, driven around in a limousine, and had my photos snapped on a red carpet outside of a downtown theater.
I would be eighteen in a month.
It had taken this long—longer, honestly, than it should have. But it had finally started happening: Clarkstown Middle School had begun fading into the distance, settling deep into my past.
And here, in these photos, were many of the kids who had picked on me, almost adults now. I knew that they still talked about me, still laughed about me—Mariah had told me that. Just a couple of weeks before, I had gone out for ice cream and seen one of them. I saw the hardened narrow eyes, and I heard the whispers. I heard only one word inside the whisper. I heard the word AIDS.
To them, I supposed, I would always be—would only be—the girl with HIV.
I scrolled through the photos, clicking on one after another. The kids were in a basement, sprawled out on a sofa. They were drinking from red plastic cups, holding their drinks up to the camera. An Indiana University pennant hung above them. In their hooded sweatshirts and jeans, they blended together, almost like they were wearing uniforms.
I thought about what my own life would look like in photographs, thought about all the people I’d met since I’d been in school with these guys—the drag queens and recovered drug addicts and activists and good, earnest people who chose love over judgment. I thought about Brryan, remembered the feeling of him lifting me up during the People photo shoot, about Eva and Wallace and Louis and Ms. Lane.
I thought about my mom, too. Something had started to dawn on me recently—something I’d always known, but had begun understanding in a new way. Mom had HIV, just like I did. All these years, when I’d been so focused on my own journey, she’d been on her own. In fact, she’d been on two journeys—mine and hers. She had been there so completely for me that I had almost been able to forget that she had struggles, too.
I turned back to these images. For years, these kids had loomed so large in my memory, like they were some kind of demons that had been pursuing me, reaching out, grabbing hold of me from behind, pulling me back every time I tried to move forward. But sitting here in front of the computer, it felt as if I’d finally stopped running. I’d turned around and looked at them, looked right at them. For the first time, it was clear what they really were. They weren’t demons at all. They weren’t evil or monstrous or even all that scary.
They were just a bunch of kids.
They had been middle school kids when I knew them. Now, they were high school kids who had probably snuck some beer into their parents’ basement in the suburbs of Indiana.
They looked, I realized with a start, almost dull.
In that instant, I was oddly grateful to them, grateful for the whole experience. Had it not been for their nicknames and laughing, for the seizures and the depression, the stress center and the desperate sorrow, I probably would have been right there with them in these pictures. That world I was looking at—the sectional sofa, the paneled walls, the carpeted basement floor—would have been the only world I knew.
My world now was so much broader than that. It was more colorful. It was infinitely more textured.
My HIV, I realized, had done something for me that I wouldn’t have known to do for myself: it had given me a way out. It had taken me out of the smallness of the world I’d started in, and given me a glimpse of something bigger. It had shown me things that were far more meaningful than I might have seen otherwise. The things I’d seen were filled with heartbreak and humanity, compassion and caring.
My HIV had given me a purpose, something I might otherwise never have found.
I shouldn’t have needed HIV to see these things. All those things are out there—all those amazing people with their strength and stories. They’re there for anyone, for everyone. You don’t need HIV, or anything in particular, to discover them. You just need a heart that’s a little bit open, a head that’s ever so slightly curious.
But would I have discovered them on my own? Or would I have been just another kid without a purpose, surrounded by people who were exactly like me, dismissing anyone—everyone—who was different?
Would I have thought that my little world was the world?
I clicked off the pictures, shut down the computer, and walked away. I already knew the answer.
And I was grateful.
Graduating high school in June 2013. The storm had passed. I felt happy and confident, and I knew I could accomplish great things. All I had to do . . . was go and do it!
One month before I was crowned Miss Indiana High School America—openly, with my HIV simply a fact—an honor roll student at a religious school went to a party in Steubenville, Ohio. The girl was younger than I was at the time. At the party, she got drunk. Boys who were supposedly her friends raped her, peed on her, and otherwise mistreated her. Pictures of the event were circulated all over the internet, sometimes with comments like, “Some people deserve to be peed on.” The case made national news; eventually, two football players were convicted in the attack.
But similar cases, elsewhere, were playing out differently. In Canada, a teenage girl was gang-raped at a party; her classmates circulated photographs of the event. After that, she was harassed and taunted, called a slut by friends and strangers alike. SLUTS AREN’T WELCOME HERE, said one note. She received numerous propositions for sex. Former friends turned their backs on her, called her names in the street.
The girl had been a straight-A student with a goofy sense of humor. After months of being bullied, she killed herself. Later, people left notes on a website her family established in her memory, commenting that she deserved to die.
In California, yet another girl who was gang-raped at a party killed herself after being bullied online about the event.
In Minnesota, a thirteen-year-old girl—a girl who had never even kissed a boy—killed herself after being called a slut and a prostitute by classmates.
A twelve-year-old boy in New York killed himself after having been teased for his height, and for the fact that his father had died when he was just four years old.
A thirteen-year-old California boy shot himself after having been bullied for being gay.
The stories go on and on. Suicide is the third-leading cause of death in young people—and at least one study suggests that half of those suicides are related to bullying. You can find a thousand stories online—a thousand kids, born with hope, happy for some period of their lives, and dead today because people in their lives chose cruelty instead of kindness.
What struck me most about those stories was the way people turned against the victims—kids who had never done anything wrong in the first place. Their biggest crimes were having been raped, being pretty or not pretty or autistic or having a health condition or being gay or simply being themselves. I thought about some of those messages I got once upon a time—You look like an AIDS baby mama. You bitch. You hoe. I am far enough away from having received those messages that they no longer feel as personal—but they aren’t so far away that I can’t remember what it felt like to be on the receiving end of them.
What is this thing we do, I wonder, this all-too-common human tendency to attack other people, or to pile on to attacks? Why do we choose to shame people, mob style, for who they are? Or worse, for something bad that happened to them, something they never even did wrong in the first place? Are we so convinced that our world is just, that it’s fair, that we can be sure that people are always, somehow, to blame for everything bad that strikes them? Is there no such thing as bad luck?
Or, maybe it’s the opposite. Maybe we are so afraid of bad luck that we punish those who have it—punish them ruthlessly—as a defense against any bad
luck that might strike us. Or maybe we’re at once so tribal, and so insecure, that we only know that we’re inside a group by pushing someone else outside.
Or, who knows, perhaps it all comes down to this: humans are afraid of what they don’t understand. And we are at our absolute worst when we are afraid.
I don’t know. I don’t expect I’ll ever know.
I just know it has to stop.
On April 3, 2013, I testified before the Indiana Senate on behalf of House Bill 1423, an antibullying law. I testified along with the mothers of several Indiana children who, because they were bullied, no longer walk this earth.
The bill defines bullying as anything that creates a hostile learning environment for a student—whether it happens in school or out, whether it seems trivial to an administrator or not. It requires every public school to develop bullying prevention programs. It mandates reporting of bullying, and requires that teachers and administrators are trained in the best ways to address bullying.
On April 10, 2013, that bill became law.
That’s a good start. I’m glad we’re demanding that schools do more than just create a bullying policy. I’m glad we’re asking them to really get in there, to document, to intervene, to stand up for every one of their students exactly the way a child would hope adults would.
But it’s just a start. There’s something else that needs to happen—something that kids, too, can do.
I speak to school groups all the time and I hear stories. I hear stories of kids who feel different. I’m telling you: all of them feel isolated in their differences. And I know exactly what that’s like—God knows, when I was in middle school, I was so aware of my own struggle, it was almost all I could see.
But now that I hear these stories, I keep thinking. And now, as I talk, there is always this thought in the back of my mind: what if our differences could be the thing that brings us together?
Think about that.
What if, instead of feeling isolated in the thing that makes us different—I have this rare thing, you have that rare thing, each of us in our own world—we joined forces? I mean all of us—every one of us who has ever felt different, for any reason.