Breaking Night

by Liz Murray

  A few days after my eighteenth birthday, we met up at our regular place to celebrate. I arrived on East Eleventh Street first and Daddy showed up a few minutes later. Together, we waited for Lisa.

  “How’s school?” he asked, picking our safest topic.

  It was going well. He knew it was going well. That was probably about the only thing Daddy knew about my life. He fumbled for more small talk, and surprisingly came up with something he’d read in the paper: “You know, Lizzy, they are doing remarkable research on AIDS and AIDS medication these days. They think they’re close to finding a cure.”

  Normally we avoided any topic that could lead to one of us mentioning Ma. The confusion must have read on my face, because when I looked at Daddy again, he turned his head away, pretending to look for Lisa. But he did not change the subject. “With the medication they have now, the quality of life for someone who’s got it. . . . It’s so much better than it used to be. You really can live for a long time.”

  I was trying to figure out how to respectfully tell him to talk about something else when he let it out. “I’ve got it, sweetheart. I’m HIV positive. I was diagnosed in April.”

  April? It was almost October. All that time, and he hadn’t told me? Even with the distance between us, how could he keep this to himself? It felt like someone had punched me in the chest—my heart started pounding and my face grew flush. I looked up at him, my only living parent, and was struck by the idea of losing him, too; the idea of even more loss. Standing on the sidewalk beside him, my world drained of color.

  Out of the throng of people making their way up the sidewalk, Lisa emerged. Before she came close, Daddy leaned over and quickly whispered, “Please, Lizzy, do me a favor. Don’t tell Lisa.”

  We sat down to cake on Eleventh Street and I listened to Daddy and Lisa strain through conversation. My head was spinning. I tried to look normal. Get Lisa’s birthday cards, make reservations, call and remind him of the holidays, “I’m HIV positive, Lizzy, don’t tell Lisa.” That night, he joked and laughed harder than I had seen in a while, harder than he really meant it, I suspect. When the cake arrived, glowing with eighteen candles, they both sang me happy birthday and Daddy gently squeezed my hand below the tabletop—one awkward touch with his own shaky hand. The physical contact was out of place coming from him, and I know it took a lot for Daddy. In his gesture, I could feel him reaching out to me across our distance, assuring me silently, “I know, Lizzy, and I’m with you.” I couldn’t take my eyes off him. I was captured by this image: my father clapping his hands before the smoke of my extinguished birthday candles, so vulnerable and still full of life right in front of me, for now. I wanted to grab on to him, to protect him from AIDS. I wanted to make this stop happening to our family, to keep him safe and to make him healthy again.

  God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference . . .

  I did not make a wish over my candles. Instead, I chose to forgive my father, and made a quiet promise to work on healing our relationship. I wouldn’t make the same mistake that I’d made with Ma, I would be there for him through this. We would be in each other’s lives again. No, he hadn’t been the best father, but he was my father, and we loved each other. We needed each other. Though he’d disappointed me countless times through the years, life had already proven too short for me to hold on to that. So I let go of my hurt. I let go years of frustration between us. Most of all, I let go of any desire to change my father and I accepted him for who he was. I took all of my anguish and released it like a fistful of helium balloons to the sky, and I chose to forgive him.

  The irony is, despite all the years I spent avoiding it, school became my refuge. For my remaining two semesters at Prep, I squeezed into my schedule as many classes as I could possibly take, and I fell in love with the process of using my education to rebuild my life. I began to relish the sense of achievement I took from completing long hours of course readings, and I savored the creative process of ever so carefully constructing essays on authors like Shakespeare and Salinger. Deciding exactly how to fit which words into which sentences felt like a puzzle to solve, a challenge made compelling by Perry’s enthusiastic class discussions on character motivation, syntax, and even his bold assertion one afternoon that “grammar saves lives!” “Punctuation changes everything,” he proclaimed in white chalk across our blackboard. “Let’s eat, Grandpa!—versus—Let’s eat Grandpa! To Grandpa, these are very different sentences,” he teased, making the class erupt into chuckles and groans. I smiled widely at Perry then, filled with joy by his exuberance.

  But I know I didn’t love school for school’s sake. I had never really been what people call an “academic” person, nor did I see myself becoming one. Instead, I took pleasure in the fact that my work existed in a social setting, one that was based on the promise of a brighter future. I knew that what I adored about school was that each of my assignments—readings, essays, or in-class presentations—was inseparable from my relationships, both with my teachers and with my new friends at Prep. If I loved school at all, I loved it for what it provided me access to: bonds with people I grew to cherish. And nothing was better than working toward my dreams alongside people I loved who were doing the same.

  Like those study nights at Eva’s place, when she, James, and I would work sprawled out across her living room, our books and papers littering the tabletops, couches, and floor. We’d study side by side, passing the hours together. I’d curl up on the couch, my head resting on James’s lap while he ran his fingers through my hair. Sometimes we’d make faces at each other, or laugh at one another’s stupid jokes while I read for class, and James flipped through his book on Japanese Kanji. Diligently, he’d practice writing neat rows of characters on dozens of fresh notebook pages. Eva cooked for us, typically making pasta with chicken, peas, and carrots in creamy sauce. And on days when we could afford it, she’d cook with extras like portabella mushrooms or scoops of avocado on the side. For my part, I always liked to show up at Eva’s apartment bringing food to share, making sure that I had something to contribute. Despite my full schedule, it wasn’t difficult to make time to stop and get a few things; the grocery store was close enough—on Twenty-sixth Street, just off of Eighth Avenue, two blocks from Eva’s place.

  On one particular evening after night school, when I was on my way to Eva’s place from Union Square, I devised a small plan. As I had on many other occasions, I would stop in the supermarket, slip groceries into my book bag to steal them, and then exit discreetly through the sliding doors. This way, Eva, James, and I could pig out while we watched a movie on Eva’s couch later that night. The three of us would be well fed and cozy in our pajamas, and it would be perfect. Eva had already gone shopping and because I had no intention of showing up empty-handed, from a pay phone on Fourteenth Street I’d promised Eva a pack of chicken cutlets and a jar of Parmesan cheese (both items I knew I could slip into my bag in mere seconds). It’s not that I didn’t have money to purchase the food. In fact, I carried with me everywhere I went my savings from my second summer working at NYPIRG. But money equaled survival, and I did everything I could to conserve it. So that night, just as I had done many nights, I entered the supermarket with absolutely no intention of paying.

  At first, the plan was going smoothly. I had both items in hand and was searching for a place to hide them in my bag when, to my surprise, I stopped myself. It was the sight of the manager that triggered me. He was a short, thick, Latin guy wearing a tie, with a pen tucked behind his ear. I saw him reading papers off a clipboard in the distance, checking a shipment, managing several employees. He was sweating. I looked over at the cashiers ringing up groceries, and then over at an older woman filling her cart with bags to bring home. I stood and watched each of them and realized, I didn’t want to take anything from this store; something about it felt wrong. Here was this manager working hard to make this business work, and for the firs
t time, I could actually see that. Standing there, I didn’t know how I hadn’t seen it before. Holding that jar of powdered cheese and those chicken cutlets in my hand, ready to steal, I suddenly felt off, creepy.

  Earlier into my current semester at Prep, there had been an incident of someone taking a student’s wallet. A town meeting was called, and Perry led the discussion. “It’s not the wallet that is our biggest loss,” Perry said. “A trust has been broken in our community. This creates a question of whether or not we are safe with one another. It’s going to take a while before we can build back that trust. It’s a hurt to our community.”

  The cause and effect of one person’s actions onto a larger group of people, at that moment in Prep, was clear. But as far as out in the world was concerned, the idea had remained abstract to me. Until, that is, I found myself standing in that supermarket, considering yet another theft in a long line of thefts, and my eyes found that store manager. Before Prep, I had never been a part of what everyone kept calling a “community,” and the idea that what I did impacted anyone other than myself, than my small circle, had not been real to me. I felt like an island.

  But standing in that supermarket, recalling our Town Hall meeting, I was beginning to identify more clearly the connection between my own cause and effect. At best, the impact of people stealing from this store would cause prices to go up. Families would have to pay more for their groceries to compensate, if they could afford to pay more. At worst, the store could go out of business and the cashiers and this manager would lose their jobs. People’s trust in people would be tarnished, I imagined. I looked at the manager again and thought of Perry’s words. Then I approached the register with the chicken cutlets and the jar of cheese.

  It was not that I never stole again, because truthfully, I did. But that day was the beginning of my never stealing again, and it was the start of a long process of me understanding that I was not, in fact, an island unto myself.

  I walked over to the register with my groceries and dug out some loose bills from the bottom of my book bag. The cashier smiled and gave me some change. I stopped to watch the man at the end of the counter pack my bag, filling it in two quick swipes. It felt like ages ago that I was packing bags in the supermarket myself. On my way out, I gave the guy my change. “Gracias,” he said, and I went on my way.

  The poster boards were bloody with red ink, wet with blues and yellows that lit up the white page, bringing the biology lesson to life: “The B-cells tell the T-cells to fight illness and disease.”

  As part of a student team of three, Eva and I selected an original design for our presentation depicting the roles of cells at work in the immune system’s fight against HIV/AIDS. Together, we stood back to take in the image our team had chosen: boxers in a boxing ring, red gloves raised chin-high. On the outskirts of the ring a coach with a towel wrapped around his neck, water bottle in hand, was the B-cell, the communicator. The smaller boxer represented the T-cell, the hopeful fighter. The largest contender represented HIV itself, and it stood tall and menacing in opposition.

  Crouched down low, lifting her long hair over her ears, hoop earrings dangling, Eva puffed out her cheeks and blew on the ink. Sam, now in her second semester at Prep, passed her a Sharpie to deepen the bold headline: “Empower Yourself, Fight the Spread of HIV.”

  “Shoulda made ’em the Crips and the Bloods fighting. Like, ‘I’ll cut choo! Ya feel me?’ ” Sam said, motioning a knife-swing through the air. All three of us laughed. Living in the group home, Sam was full of gang and prison references, and her slang now had a deeper street twist to it. Having her at Prep was like having a piece of my family back together again. Sam didn’t come to school every day, but she came in often enough to enjoy the experience of our little community; she made friends and was well loved by our teachers. I was so happy to have her there. That afternoon was a big day for us, and Sam had dressed for the occasion: her long skirt was tattered, and she wore a man’s blue button-down shirt with a pinstriped tie and combat boots.

  “The boxer thing is cool, though,” Sam conceded, shrugging her shoulders and snapping her gum. She leaned down and spontaneously penciled a black eye onto HIV’s face. “Forget this guy,” she said, etching it in deeper. “He should get knocked out.”

  “Word,” I said to Sam, smirking. “Good idea.” Suddenly, I was on my knees, too, pencil in hand, giving HIV a busted lip. “Let’s ugly him up,” I told her. Side by side, we vigorously scratched our pencils to the page.

  We had a presentation to make; a small crowd of students waited for us in Prep Central. Our job was to use these characters to engage our classmates in HIV/AIDS awareness, to have the cellular struggle between HIV/AIDS and the immune system jump out from the page to create prevention in the lives of others. Bobby, Josh, and Fief were also in the waiting crowd, sitting among the other Prep students. It was their second semester at Prep, too. It had taken me only a few weeks at Prep to understand how welcoming the environment was, for me to feel and trust the safety that these teachers were. But as soon as I knew what Prep could be like, what high school could be like, I went back to my friends and encouraged them to interview. They got in, and now several of us were enrolled. Sam, Bobby, and I even had a few of the same classes together.

  At times, having my friends at Prep could be rocky. More than once, a couple of them wanted to skip class and they urged me to come with them. It was so tempting, seeing them huddled by the exit door, slipping out into the bustling streets of Manhattan. I wanted to hang out, like the old days. And it could feel so stale in the classroom compared to the fun I knew they would have walking all around Greenwich Village and Chelsea, sneaking into a movie or sitting in the park. Plus, I didn’t want to be the uptight one in our group, serious and obedient of school regulations. There were moments when it was hard not to cut class too. But I kept thinking about my transcripts, the neat little columns of A’s that I’d written in blue pen sitting in the stairwell that night, and that woman running track, jumping hurdles, checking off one A at a time. They were adding up, and I was writing my ticket; no one could get me into college, but me.

  Still, my group at Prep was my family, and meant everything to me; it made the school feel like a kind of home. It reminded me of those late-night episodes of the TV show Cheers that Daddy and I used to watch sitting on the couch together, how whenever the character Norm walked in, everyone would call out his name in unison. As a child I didn’t understand the show much, but I understood the sense of belonging shared by the characters, and I longed to have it for myself, a place where I could belong. Before Prep, and especially before my friends came to Prep, I’d never had a place where everyone knew everyone’s name, a place where everyone was welcome and working on their goals together. And now here we were working to make our lives better, side by side. It meant everything to me.

  “Let’s go, guys, I think they’re ready for us,” Eva said, lifting a poster board up high. The characters she’d drawn were a worried couple seated bedside, troubled because neither could remember whether or not they had used a condom during a night of drinking and irresponsible sex. Eva had given the girl bee-stung lips, a nose ring, and eyebrows arched in concern. Their thought bubbles were decorated in glitter, highlighting words like trust, choice, and consequences. Armed with our materials, the three of us, Eva, Sam, and I, stepped through the doors of the meeting room.

  “No one ever expects to contract HIV,” I said, opening our discussion to the room of students. I wore a green sweater and blue jeans for the occasion, one of many articles of colorful clothing that I’d begun to trade in place of my standard black uniform.

  “But it happens anyway, and it breaks up families and it takes lives. We’re here today to keep it from happening to you. That’s what this is about.”

  For a half hour, Sam, Eva, and I used our posters and the information we learned with CASES for our presentation. When it came to the part about exactly how HIV spreads through the human body, I saw Ma. But not t
he sick version of Ma in the hospital—instead I saw a smiling one, full of life and love. I saw her laughing with me, clasping my hand on Mosholu Parkway, blowing dandelion fluff into the sky and making wishes, the HIV virus already multiplying in her body. Her wish for me to stay in school, her wish for me to build a life of options, her wish for me to be okay.

  The Xerox machine spit out ten clean copies of my transcripts. Sitting in Jessie’s empty guidance counselor office, I ran my fingertip down the columns of grades: 92, 94, 100, 100, 100, 98—more than ten classes per semester in total, many of which were high A’s. As I’d planned, I was moving at a pace of one full school year per semester. That morning, the rest of the school was in an assembly in Prep Central, just on the other side of the wall from Jessie’s office. My task that Friday, I decided, was to finally deal with scholarship applications. I wouldn’t fill out college apps until later in the year, but my plan was to have the funds gathered ahead of time.

  Jessie Klein, my guidance counselor, helped me decide this. Throughout the last few months, we’d sat in her small office during lunch or after school and talked about college.

  “With your grades, Liz, you have so many schools to pick from. You’re in great shape,” she’d said. “But you want to think about how you plan to pay your tuition, and sooner rather than later.”

  On one of those afternoons, Jessie had handed me a manila envelope packed with scholarship applications that she had personally taken the time to select as well suited for me. State schools, Jessie explained, would probably give someone with my grades full funding, no problem. I just had to fill out something called a FASFA form, Free Application for Federal Student Aid. But, Jessie explained, tuition for other types of schools could be much more expensive, so the best thing to do would be to fill out lots of scholarship applications so that I could secure all the funding possible and keep my options open, which sounded great to me.