My Life After Now

by Jessica Verdi

  But as hard as these facts were hitting home, they were still just words. I needed to see it, in living color. So, in a morbid fit of self-sabotaging curiosity, I did an image search. In less than a second, my computer screen was filled with dozens of the most awful photographs I had ever seen. Horrifyingly thin, failing bodies hooked up to oxygen machines. Skin covered in lesions so bad it looked like it was rotting. The helpless, pleading faces of African children staring straight into my soul.

  A shiver rolled over me, and I grabbed my trash can just in time for it to catch a surge of vomit. It was as if my body was trying to rid itself of what it had just seen. As if it was trying to evict the sickness that was taking up residence inside.

  But I couldn’t unsee what I’d seen—even when I closed my eyes the images were still there.

  And I couldn’t get rid of the virus. If there was anything my little Internet excursion had reinforced in my brain, it was that.

  As quickly as I could manage, I erased my browsing history. Then I turned off my lights and dove under my covers and vowed never to allow myself to be tempted into researching this disease ever again.

  14

  What I Did For Love

  Like always, my mind wouldn’t shut up. When I heard that the flu was going around, I panicked, worrying about what would happen if I caught it. When I brushed my teeth a little too hard and spit out blood-tinted toothpaste, I questioned if I should douse the sink with bleach to kill any left-behind bacteria. During class, I tuned out the teacher and studied my classmates, wondering if anyone else was carrying around a secret like this.

  The worst part was that I felt totally fine. Exactly the same as always. But I wasn’t fine. My body was lying to me. It was deceiving me, and everyone I knew, into believing that it was healthy. And that made me hate it even more.

  The thing they don’t tell you in sex education classes is what to do after. It’s all, “Don’t do this, don’t do that. And if you do do this or that, make sure you do it safely.” But what about when you screw up? Then what? Where do you go? Who do you tell? How do you act? Sex “education” prepares you for nothing.

  So, for lack of any better ideas, I went on autopilot: school, rehearsal, homework, chores. Keep up appearances on the outside, and no one would know what going on inside. But it was arduous work; the HIV that crept and crawled through my veins was all I could think about.

  When my phone buzzed on the weekends or after school with calls from Max or Courtney, I sent them to voicemail. It was hard enough trying to act normal during the day. I could only pretend so much.

  I was completely lost, but it actually looked like my act was working. At least, no one said anything that made me think otherwise.

  No one except Evan, that is. He knew something was up. And I knew why. I may have managed to put up a passable façade everywhere else in my life, but there was no way I could fake intimacy. Every time he tried to hold my hand or move in for a kiss, I recoiled. I no longer knew how to be in a physical relationship. How could I share my body with someone when it felt alien to me?

  “All right, Lucy,” he said with a sigh as he drove me home after rehearsal. “Just say it.”

  I looked at him. “Just say what?”

  “Whatever it is that’s going on in that head of yours.” His brown eyes were clear and his face was smooth. He wasn’t angry. He should have been; I wouldn’t have blamed him. But he seemed like all he was after was an explanation.

  Of course, that was the other thing I couldn’t give him.

  Instead, the words I had been thinking all week but trying not to say flowed out of me before I could stop them. “I think we should break up,” I whispered. I meant it too—he would be far better off without me.

  Evan swallowed and nodded, but his expression didn’t change much. I realized he’d been expecting me to say that.

  “Why?” he asked.

  I looked away. “I don’t know.”

  “That’s not good enough. Give me a real reason.”

  “It’s…just not working. With us. You know?”

  “But that’s what I don’t get,” he said quietly. “It was working. You said you wanted to be my girlfriend. I don’t understand what changed.”

  I opened my mouth to reply, but nothing came out.

  “Lucy, I love—”

  I sucked in my breath sharply. “Don’t say that,” I said, and ran out of the car and into my house, slamming the door behind me.

  I threw myself onto my bed and buried my face in my pillows to muffle my sobs. It was the first time I’d cried since I broke down in front of my dad that first day. I felt like my heart was being shredded apart. The pain was so bad that it was almost…good. At least I was feeling something. It reminded me, albeit in a sick, terrible way, that I wasn’t dead just yet.

  But my meltdown was interrupted by a knock on the door.

  God, why couldn’t I just have parents who ignored me, like everyone else did?

  “Come in,” I croaked.

  I was startled to find that it was Lisa. She hadn’t set foot in this room since she’d blown back into town.

  She handed me an envelope.

  “What’s this?”

  “It’s a picture of the baby. I went to the doctor today. My five-month checkup,” she said.

  I studied the ultrasound image. I didn’t know what to think, sitting there holding tangible evidence that life goes on with or without you. So all I said was, “Is its head supposed to be that big?”

  Lisa shrugged. “Yeah, they said that’s normal. Yours must have looked like that too. I don’t really remember.”

  I slid the photo back in its envelope and handed it back to her.

  “It’s a girl,” she said.

  I blinked. “Really?”

  “Yeah.” Lisa looked like she was expecting something more from me, but I didn’t know what else I was supposed to say. “Aren’t you going to congratulate me?” she asked eventually.

  “Oh. Uh, yeah. Congratulations.”

  She beamed. “Thank you,” she said, like she hadn’t just had to pry that out of me.

  “Do you know what you’re going to name her?” I asked.

  “Not yet. Maybe you could help me come up with something?”

  What was this? Mother-daughter bonding time? “Oh. Um, I don’t know. I’ll…think about it.”

  “Okay,” Lisa said. “Good.”

  15

  The Past is Another Land

  “I still don’t get it,” Max was saying. “Why did you break up with him, again?”

  We were in the cafeteria. Evan hadn’t arrived yet, so it was just me, Max, and Courtney, and Max was pelting questions at me like I was on trial.

  “I told you, it just wasn’t working,” I said for the zillionth time.

  “What wasn’t working? He’s hot and he adores you. This doesn’t make any sense,” he said, popping open his Diet Coke with an incensed flourish.

  I turned to Courtney, who hadn’t been saying much. “You understand, right, Court? When it’s not right, it’s just not right. Must be a women’s intuition thing,” I said with a little shrug, hoping getting her on my side would make Max feel outnumbered and give up on the whole subject.

  But Courtney surprised me. She put her sandwich down and sat back in her chair. “You know what, Lucy? I don’t understand. In case you haven’t noticed, I’ve never even had a boyfriend. And neither has Max, unless you’re counting online relationships.”

  Max stuck his tongue out at her. “There’s nothing wrong with Internet dating.”

  “That’s not the point. We’re here, desperately wanting what you always seem to find so easily, and you don’t even appreciate what you have when you have it. You broke up with Evan on no more than a whim, as far as I can tell, and now you want me to back you up on that? Gimme a break.”

  Max burst into a round of applause. “Amen, sister.”

  I glowered back at them, unmoved. They weren’t going to make me fee
l bad.

  I did have a good reason for breaking up with Evan. Courtney was accusing me of being selfish, when I was actually doing the most unselfish thing I knew to do.

  “Whatever,” I said, pushing away my untouched lunch.

  “What the hell is going on with you, Luce?” Max demanded.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Oh really, you don’t?” he said sarcastically. “Well, lemme fill you in. You’re obviously lying to us about whatever it was that happened with Evan, and you’ve been acting really freaking weird since your little disappearing act last week.”

  They’d noticed? “No, I haven’t!”

  Max glared at me. “Okay, you’re right, weird isn’t the right word. Bitchy is more like it.”

  I felt like I’d been slapped across the face. I stared at Max. He stared right back, unblinking. I kept waiting for Courtney to say something, to stick up for me, to tell Max he was overreacting. But neither of them said anything, and his last words hung heavy over our table.

  “You know what, Max?” I said finally. “You really don’t understand anything, so just shut up.” Then I pushed out of my chair and stormed out of the lunchroom.

  I rounded the corner, blood boiling, intending on spending the rest of the lunch period in the auditorium, and of course, that’s when I crashed right into Evan.

  I dropped my bag, and books, pens, and makeup spilled everywhere.

  “Oh. Sorry,” he said, helping me collect everything.

  “It’s fine,” I said automatically, silently cursing the fates.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the auditorium. Why?”

  “Well, I was hoping we could eat lunch together,” he said.

  I was so not in the mood for whatever this was. “Why?”

  He handed me back my bag and squared his shoulders. “Because I decided to give you another chance.”

  I swore silently.

  “You do remember our conversation yesterday afternoon, right?” I said.

  “Yeah. But I don’t accept.”

  “It’s not your choice, Evan.”

  “But why not? Who says you get to decide whether we get to be together or not?”

  “Um, life? The world? That’s how these things work: if you don’t want to be with someone anymore, you get to decide that. Relationships are not democracies.” I hitched my bag further up onto my shoulder. “I have to go.”

  I turned to leave, but Evan caught my wrist. “Lucy.”

  “Let me go. Please, just…let me go.” I wriggled out of his grasp and continued down the hall, not looking back.

  • • •

  It was the day from hell. And it wasn’t over yet.

  At least luck was on my side in one infinitesimal respect: we were working on act 2, scene 4 in rehearsal. That meant I didn’t have to have any on-stage interaction with Evan, Max, or Courtney. It was just me, Ty, and our Nurse and Benvolio. (Amazing how being around Ty suddenly didn’t seem that formidable compared with everything else.) But even so, the vibe of the whole rehearsal was horrible. Max and Courtney were obviously avoiding me. But what did they even have to be mad about? They weren’t the ones who’d been accused of being a bitch. Evan, on the other hand, wouldn’t leave me alone, even though he should have been the one avoiding me.

  He was like a harpy, lingering around in the wings for any little break or moment where he could swoop in and try to get my attention. I spent the first part of the afternoon attempting to flat-out ignore him, and when that didn’t work, I switched to cutting him off as soon as he starting talking, with variations of “Go away, Evan.” But nothing worked. He was relentless.

  The second rehearsal ended, I booked it out of there and went straight home, relieved to finally be free from all of it, if only until tomorrow.

  I should have known that wouldn’t be the end of it. I was in the kitchen helping Dad with dinner when Evan showed up on my doorstep.

  Papa answered the door; from the next room over, I heard their whole conversation.

  “Hi, Evan,” Papa said.

  “Hi, Mr. Freeman.”

  “Oh, you can call me Seth.”

  “Cool. Is Lucy around?”

  I tried to wave at Papa, to get his attention and mime that I wasn’t here, but he didn’t see me. I still hadn’t told them that Evan and I had broken up, so Papa didn’t know that he was doing anything wrong when he invited Evan in for dinner.

  They came into the kitchen together. “Did you know that Evan here has never had pizza on the grill before? We are going to have to fix that immediately,” Papa said. But his lighthearted demeanor faded when he saw my face. “You okay, Lu?”

  I was gripping onto my knife so tightly my fingers were going numb. “Don’t you ever give up?” I said.

  “I just want to talk to you,” Evan said.

  I glanced at my dads, who were watching us in confusion. I wasn’t going to have this conversation in front of them. All I needed was yet more people hounding me about my seemingly nonexistent reason for breaking up with Evan.

  “Fine. I’m going out,” I told them. “Save me some pizza.” I tossed the knife onto the counter, and pulled Evan out of the house.

  We got in my car, but I didn’t drive anywhere.

  “All right, you win. Let’s talk,” I said.

  “You owe me an explanation—” he began.

  “No, actually, I don’t. You’re the one who owes me an explanation.”

  “For what?”

  “For harassing me—no, stalking me—to no end. What the hell, Evan?”

  “I just want to understand.”

  I groaned in frustration and slammed my hands against the steering wheel. “We’ve been through this.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Evan, we were only together a month.”

  We glared at each other, deadlocked. I was prepared to stay there all night if that was what it took to get it into his thick skull.

  But it didn’t take nearly that long. A couple of minutes, maybe. I don’t know what caused it, but out of nowhere something in Evan’s face changed. He broke my stare, his expression grew softer, and he let out a long, heaving sigh.

  “You’re right.”

  “I am?”

  “Yeah. I’m really sorry, Lucy. About all of this,” he mumbled. “I just…I just needed to know why everyone always leaves me.”

  Okay, this conversation was not going at all the way I’d anticipated. “What do you mean?”

  He cleared his throat and looked down at his lap. “First my dad bails on me and my mom for a twenty-seven-year-old spin instructor. Then Sarah goes away to school and all of a sudden starts acting like I’m some child who she never took seriously. So I come here and meet you and think maybe things aren’t so bad after all, and then you dump me too. I just want to understand what about me is so entirely repellent, so I can stop doing that.”

  My heart was breaking. I’d thought I was protecting him but the whole time I was hurting him more than I could have imagined. “Oh, Evan.” I placed a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry.”

  He looked up at me. “Please. I promise I’ll leave you alone and never talk to you ever again if you just tell me the real reason why you don’t want to be with me.”

  I hesitated.

  I was certain of only two things.

  One: I couldn’t keep dodging his question with half-answers. I hadn’t realized how much that was wounding him, and I wasn’t going to do that again.

  Two: I should absolutely make up a lie. I’m not ready for another serious relationship or I’m still in love with Ty or my grades have been slipping and I need to spend all my free time studying. That was the smart thing to do. But I didn’t want to lie to him. My life was already complicated enough without having to keep track of deceptions.

  That tiny voice, in the far recesses of my head, was saying, Tell him the truth. What’s the worst that could happen?

 
I honestly didn’t know what the worst that could happen was, and I didn’t want to think about it. But as I studied Evan, and the little voice grew louder, I considered the possibility that maybe I could tell him the truth. He’d opened up to me, and it had gone okay. Maybe I could do the same.

  I suddenly knew that if I was ever going to tell anyone, now was the moment.

  “Lucy?”

  I looked him straight in the eyes and took a deep, frightened breath. “If I tell you the truth, do you swear not to tell another soul as long as you live?”

  His eyebrows crinkled together. “Of course.”

  “Say you promise.”

  He nodded. “I promise.”

  I couldn’t believe I was about to do this. But it all came out anyway. “Back in September, I was going through some stuff. Ty dumped me, Lisa came back, all that. It all seems so dumb now, but I was really upset. So Courtney and Max and I went to the city and got really drunk and I ended up going home with this random guy.”

  He nodded to show he was following, but he was clearly confused as to what any of this had to do with him.

  “Afterward, I went and got tested for STIs. And…” I took one more deep breath. “I tested positive for HIV.” It was the first time I’d said it out loud, and as the words escaped my mouth, I felt a shift somewhere deep inside me. Like one teeny-tiny shackle was unlatched, and I was one small step closer to freedom.

  Evan’s eyes grew wide and his hand flew to his mouth. “Oh my god.”

  I watched his face carefully, searching for symptoms of what he could possibly be thinking. But I couldn’t read his expression.

  “Does anyone else know?” he asked after a minute.

  “No.”

  “Not even your dads?”

  “No.”

  “Lucy, you have to tell them.”