Positive Page 18

  Nikki who is friends with Wallace, I thought, hoping I would remember her name later.

  “Nikki, meet Paige,” said Wallace. “Paige here is a little nervous.”

  “Oh, don’t be,” she said with a laugh. “In five minutes, everyone here will be your best friend.”

  “You’ve been here before?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “I’ve been here lots of times. It’s the best.”

  Across the crowd, I noticed a blond boy, older than I was, surrounded by kids and counselors. Even several yards away, I noticed his startling blue eyes, his ruddy cheeks, the tiny space between his two front teeth that somehow made his smile even wider. I squinted and read his name tag: Brryan.

  Brryan with two r’s.

  Kids kept throwing themselves into Brryan’s arms and hugging him tight. Just then, Brryan looked up and winked at Nikki. Nikki stuck out her tongue at him, and he laughed.

  Then she saw someone else and waved excitedly. “Hey, Cole!” She turned to me. “Hey, Cole’s here.”

  She grabbed my arm and pulled me over to boy about my age, with shaggy hair and a wry smile. Wallace jogged after us. “Hey, wait for me,” he said.

  “Hey, Cole,” Nikki called out. “This is Paige. Paige is coming with us to the duck pond.”

  “I am?” I asked.

  “Sure you are,” said Cole, as if it were the most obvious thing in the world.

  And just like that, we were friends, heading toward the water: Nikki, Wallace, Cole, and me.

  We checked into the cabins, which counselors had decorated for us—my group’s was decorated with the theme “Derby Divas,” with roller skates everywhere. Then we headed back out to our first camp meeting.

  Counselors taught us camp songs. The songs were goofy, childlike, but that didn’t matter; everyone, even the oldest kids were singing loudly. There was nothing to do but sing along, laughing.

  “They ooze in the gooze without any shoes,” we sang.

  “They wade in the water till their lips turn blue.”

  I tried not to wonder if my mom was lonely back at home. I imagined her face, imagined her knocking around the kitchen without me. I sang a little more loudly. Above me, a soft breeze rippled through trees. I was six hundred miles from home. When I looked up, Nikki was watching me. When I met her eye, she grinned, singing the whole while.

  “And that’s what makes a hippopotamus smile.

  And that’s what makes a hippopotamus smile.”

  I had a feeling I was going to like it here.

  As the afternoon gave way to evening, Eva and another director, Michael, suggested that we might tell some of our own stories, explain what had brought us here.

  “Does anyone want to volunteer to share their story?” Michael asked.

  I looked around and no hands went up.

  “I know that it’s not easy,” Michael said. “Sometimes it takes a lot of courage.”

  The room was still.

  I could do it, I thought. I could start.

  I tentatively raised my hand.

  Michael smiled. “Paige. Thank you. Go ahead.”

  “Okay, well,” I began. And I told them the story that had begun feeling so natural on my lips. I told them about my dad. I told them about Yasmine, about the lock-in when I told her a secret, about PAIDS and the seizures, the notes on my locker and about leaving school.

  I told them how lonely I’d been.

  The room was quiet as I spoke. When I finished there was just the briefest pause, one of those pauses where you can hear a pin drop. Then people applauded.

  I looked out and saw Eva, nodding approvingly. She winked at me, as if to say, “Right on, girl.” I grinned, and took my seat. Several people leaned over to touch me, as if to silently say, “Good job.” Nikki’s words came back to me: In five minutes, everyone here will be your best friend.

  Yeah, I thought. Yeah, I can see that.

  “Anyone else want to share?” asked Michael.

  No one spoke for a few long moments. Then Brryan stood up.

  “I’ll go,” he said. His words came out a little funny, which surprised me. Then he looked at the group. “I have some hearing loss because of some medications I’ve had to take. I’ll speak as clearly as I can. Please bear with me.”

  Brryan’s story began when he was just seven months old. He’d had an asthma attack, and was admitted to the same hospital where Brryan’s dad worked as a lab technician. At the time, his parents were in the process of splitting up. They had been arguing about child support. Still, they had come together when their son got sick. They had sat together by Brryan’s bedside, praying for their baby, for his tiny, fluid-filled lungs.

  What his mother didn’t know—couldn’t possibly have known—was that Brryan’s dad had brought to the room a syringe filled with HIV-tainted blood. He had stolen the blood from his lab. When Brryan’s mom left the room to get a soda, his dad took the needle out. He injected the HIV-tainted blood into his son, into Brryan.

  “He didn’t want to pay child support,” explained Brryan evenly. There was no malice in his voice, no anger or sorrow. “So he tried to kill me.”

  Brryan’s dad didn’t tell anyone what he’d done. Instead, he occasionally dropped hints, saying things like, “Why should I pay child support when the boy’s not even going to live very long?”

  Five years went by like that. For most of that time, Brryan was a healthy, rosy-cheeked little boy. Then, almost overnight, he became very, very sick. He dropped weight. Like my mother, he got sick with mysterious fevers. Unlike my mother, Brryan wasn’t diagnosed until the virus had progressed to AIDS in his body; his CD4 cells had plummeted.

  The doctors gave Brryan just months to live.

  “That was more than a decade ago,” said Brryan.

  He took a deep breath. “My father is in prison for what he did to me, and he’s due for parole in a few years. His name is Brian Jackson. That was my name, too,” said Brryan. “So in eighth grade, I legally changed the spelling of my name. I didn’t want to carry his name anymore.

  “Anyhow, that’s my story. I’m still here, all these years later, and I plan to be for a long time.”

  “Wow,” I said under my breath as I watched him return to his seat. “Just—wow.”

  Later, we stood around a campfire, roasting marshmallows. We had to keep moving to avoid the gusts of smoke that changed direction with tiny shifts in the evening breeze. That was okay; it gave us a chance to meet new people. I chatted and laughed with lots of campers, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Brryan. He moved so easily, his smile was so open. I watched as he high-fived some of the older boys, chatted with Eva, laughed with other campers. I saw him bend down to talk to two seven-year-old girls, twins whom I’d noticed earlier had G-tubes, a way of feeding when AIDS makes eating too risky or difficult. I couldn’t hear what he was saying, but I saw him wink at the twins; they laughed and scrambled off into the night, still smiling from their encounter with him.

  He just seemed so relaxed in this world.

  My own father had given me the virus, just like Brryan’s dad had given it to him. But mine, at least, had not done it on purpose. And I, too, had seen some of the less flattering parts of human beings—the teasing and the name-calling. But if pressed, I could acknowledge that what I had seen came largely from ignorance.

  What Brryan’s dad had done wasn’t ignorance: it was evil.

  I couldn’t quite imagine how Brryan could remain so at ease in a world in which another human being, his own father, had deliberately tried to kill him. I thought about the first time I sat in Miss Ward’s office, after someone had signed my name to a note I hadn’t written. I could still remember how unbearable it was to think that someone hated me.

  Yet there was Brryan in front of me, just laughing and having a good time.

  There was some word, some phrase, that described the thing I saw when I looked at him. The word was on the tip of my tongue, but I couldn’t quite name it.


  The fire crackled, sending sparks toward the sky. From across the fire, Brryan must have felt me watching. He looked up at me, met my eye, and smiled. I smiled back, then almost immediately looked down at the ground.

  Wallace sidled up to me. “Hey, baby,” he said. “Come here often?”

  He cocked one eyebrow at me, and I laughed out loud.

  It was only later that night, walking back toward the cabin, the smell of campfire still in my clothes, that I realized what word I’d been searching for, the one that described Brryan.

  Forgiveness, I thought. That’s what forgiveness must look like.

  Mornings at Kindle were spent talking frankly about HIV and AIDS: how to keep ourselves healthy, how to talk about the infection with others, what was myth (myth: you could spread it by kissing or toilet seats) versus reality (reality: when the time came, we’d need to practice safe sex). Each day, more kids shared their stories—I quickly learned that Cole’s mother was positive, that Nikki’s brother had an AIDS diagnosis, that Wallace had been adopted as a baby, and his parents had learned only later that he was HIV positive, that there were a ton of others just like me—kids who had been born positive and just wanted to be treated like everyone else.

  I learned, too, that many kids were keeping their HIV status secret from even their closest friends.

  Afternoons, though, were pure fun—a release from the serious issues we’d spent the morning discussing.

  The day after we arrived, for example, counselors organized the Camp Kindle Carnival. Before it began, Eva brought us to a room filled with wigs and capes and other costumes. Campers and counselors laughed as we tried on outfit after outfit—Hawaiian shirts and clown noses, Mylar wigs and sparkly sunglasses, capes and cowboy hats, tutus and sequin-covered spandex. Wallace tried on a cheerleading costume and shook pom-poms. Girls wrapped men’s ties around their heads like warriors. One counselor, already wearing spangled biker shorts and ladies’ sunglasses, threw a Bozo the Clown wig on his head.

  All of the campers laughed and rummaged around for the silliest outfits we could find.

  Outside, a face painter drew intricate patterns of butterflies, while counselors arm-wrestled with campers, dramatically letting the youngest kids win. There were games set up everywhere—water balloon tosses, sack races, competitions for carrying eggs on spoons. I rolled an apple with my nose, then went over to the Hula-Hoop competition, where I Hula-Hooped with a kid whose face was half painted as the Incredible Hulk.

  “You go, Paige!” whooped Eva. She was festive in a polka-dot shirt, a polka-dot scarf, and a pink tutu over her jeans. I laughed and managed to keep the hoop circling around my hips.

  A few minutes later, I was celebrating with a grape-flavored snow cone. Cole walked up to me wearing a balloon animal hat. A lollipop stuck out of his mouth. When I smiled at him, grape juice dribbled down my chin. I wiped it with the back of my hand.

  “Lookin’ good, Paige.”

  I laughed and took another slurp of my snow cone.

  Nearby, a group of campers were having a pie-eating contest, planting their faces in pie tins filled with whipped cream. Nearby, two counselors—guys in sequined spandex—danced in sync. I could see Wallace walking with a stuffed pig strapped inexplicably to his baseball cap. Near them, Brryan walked stiffly; two small kids clung to each leg, one on his back. “I don’t know why my shoes are so heavy today,” he said as the kids fell into peals of laughter. “My shoes are just so heavy.”

  Anything goes, I thought. After today, we can be anything. We can be anyone here, and still be okay.

  At that moment, I heard one counselor shout, “The degree of awesome is so high we could melt glaciers!”

  I threw my arms wide and shouted to Cole, “Oh, my God, I love Camp Kindle!”

  “Yeah.” He nodded thoughtfully, twisting the lollipop in his mouth. He surveyed the scene around us. “Yeah. I know exactly what you mean.”

  That night, after running through the cabins with Nikki, singing and dancing, I lay in my bunk bed. Many of the girls around me had already fallen asleep; I listened to their breathing, and beyond the walls of the cabin, the sounds of crickets crying out into the night.

  This is what it would be like, I thought. This is what it would be like to be just a regular kid, to not be the girl with HIV. This is what it would be like to be normal, to have nothing that needed explanation, nothing that made me different from anyone else.

  I was a regular kid, I realized. Here, at least, at Camp Kindle, I was.

  Toward the end of the week, Eva approached me. “Paige, People magazine would like to do a photo shoot with some campers. I was wondering if you’d like to be in it.” Already, my mother and I had given permission to have my picture taken, to be one of the kids that could be used in promotional materials for the camp. Yes, we had said. Yes, you can show the world that Paige Rawl goes to a camp for kids touched by HIV/AIDS.

  People magazine: I had seen it so many times, on magazine racks near the supermarket checkout counter, in so many doctors’ offices. I imagined someone picking up the magazine, casually flipping through the pages the way I had so many times, and seeing my face staring out at them.

  “Who else will be in it?”

  “Brryan and Wallace and Anthony.” Anthony was a few years younger than me, a skinny kid with large glasses. He, too, had been born with the disease.

  “Yeah,” I said without hesitation. “Yeah, I’ll do it.”

  We spent the next several hours having our picture taken—Brryan wore all black, while the rest of us, the three younger campers, wore bright T-shirts. We tied Camp Kindle bandannas around us. The photographer stood us in front of a campfire for a long time but, just like on the first night, the wind kept shifting the direction of the smoke, which made us cough.

  Finally, they brought us indoors and stood us against a white background, where we stood on top of a painted red ribbon; they posed the three of us so that we leaned against Brryan, all of us standing confidently with our arms crossed.

  Then Brryan scooped me up, pulled me over his head, square over his shoulder and I burst out laughing. I felt as light as air.

  The other two campers leaned into Brryan as he held me, and the photographer snapped away. “That’s good,” she said. “Yes, that’s great!”

  That evening, as the sun was setting, Brryan tousled my hair walking toward the campfire. “You did a good job today,” he said. “It takes a lot of courage to let your HIV status be known to three and a half million people.”

  “Three and a half million, huh?”

  He shrugged. “Just three and a half million of your closest friends.” Then he grinned, his full lips crinkling into a wry smile.

  There was something I wanted to ask him, but I wasn’t even sure how to begin.

  “Brryan,” I started.

  He waited.

  “How . . .” I frowned. I felt like it was impossible to explain what I wanted to say. “I just . . .”

  “What is it, Paige?” He stopped then, and looked at me. I loved the way he looked at me, right at me, not taking those blue eyes off of my own.

  I shook my head. I didn’t even know how to begin. What I wanted to ask was “How do you do it?” but even I didn’t know what I meant by “it.”

  Somehow, Brryan seemed to know exactly what I was trying to say. He eyed me carefully, then looked down at the ground. When he looked up, he was deadly serious.

  “I can’t make myself into the kind of person he was, Paige. I can’t hold that kind of hate in my heart.”

  In the distance, I heard the campers’ voices, ringing out in song: “They ooze in the gooze without any shoes . . .” I could see smoke rising from the fire. Above us, the sky blazed pink and orange.

  In two days we would be going home.

  “But . . . how?” I asked.

  He looked up at the sky for a long time, then he looked back at me and shrugged. He said simply, “You decide.”

  I thought about that, a
bout the idea that maybe you could just decide. Brryan said, “That really is it. You decide to live a good life. It’s all you have to do.”

  I nodded as if I understood, even though I didn’t fully. Not yet.

  “Paige,” he said, looking hard at me. “You have to shine your own light. And when you do, when you shine your light, you begin to notice all these blessings around you. And you realize that you are blessed. And all the people that hurt you just kind of fall into your past.”

  I looked down and thought about that, thought about Yasmine and Lila and the PAIDS boys and Miss Fischer and Miss Ward falling backward into darkness, disappearing from sight.

  The lawsuit was still going on; we still hadn’t been granted a trial. It felt like it could go on forever.

  But I wanted that—I wanted them to fall away.

  “Paige.” His voice was soft. “You’ve got a lot of light, you know.”

  He smiled at me, and I smiled back at him, and we stood that way for a little while.

  I heard footsteps approaching. I turned around, and Nikki and Wallace and Cole were running toward us.

  “Guys,” Nikki said. “Come on, the counselors are jumping in the pool in their clothes!”

  She grabbed my hand and started pulling me. I laughed, and waved at Brryan as Nikki dragged me away. He winked at me. Then Nikki and Wallace and Cole and I dashed toward the rest of the group.

  Above us, the light of the sun gave way to the sparkle of a million stars, the light of a million other suns.

  On our final night of camp, the counselors took their campers on a trust walk. They blindfolded us, made us walk around camp with hands on each other’s shoulders. No one spoke; we just shuffled along, totally silent. Periodically, we had to stop. A counselor would take one of the campers by the hand, lead them carefully to a location where they sat down. We all waited for the counselor’s return, then shuffled along until the next camper was pulled away. Without vision, my other senses were acute. I heard the birds chirping, the rustling of wind through leaves. The breezes were warm on my skin.