by Paige Rawl
And it worked. I won.
Annie, the reigning Sweetheart, placed the crown on my head. We met each other’s eyes and Annie beamed. My whole body felt so light—like I could walk on air. I knew I had never, ever been that happy.
That win confirmed something for me. It taught me that if you just believed something hard enough, you could make anything come true.
Of course, a day would come when I would learn that it’s not enough to want something, even to want it with all your heart. But in those early pageant days, when the world seemed to be opening up all around me, all I understood was that confidence was everything. And I had that in spades.
I could make anything happen. Anything at all.
I loved everything about being in pageants. Here I am serving as the Miss Indiana Sweetheart State Hostess.
Clarkstown
XLI
In February, the Colts played their first Super Bowl since 1971.
For weeks prior to Super Bowl XLI, the city was plastered in Colts blue. The upturned horseshoe that is the team’s logo appeared everywhere—in yard signs, in store windows, on jackets and hats and backpacks. Even babies wore pajamas emblazoned with the logo.
On Sunday, February 4, Yasmine and I watched together as the Colts defeated the Chicago Bears 29 to 17 in the pouring rain. The team’s quarterback, Peyton Manning, completed twenty-five of thirty-eight passes, even as players slipped and slid all over the muddy field.
It was the Colts’ first win since they left Baltimore to become our hometown team, and it was the first major professional sports victory for Indianapolis in nearly thirty years.
When the game ended, we could hear house upon house, the entire city it seemed, explode in cheers.
I texted my mom almost immediately: They won!!!!!!
I knew she would know, of course. But she would want to hear from me.
She texted back: I know!!!! Best team ever!!!
I spent the night at Yasmine’s house; Madison slept over with Lila, too. We were so excited we barely slept.
In the morning, on the bus to school, all the kids wore Colts blue. A group of kids were talking about the victory parade—the Colts were scheduled to arrive in a ticker-tape parade that day. Madison said wistfully, “I wish we could go.”
“Yeah, me too,” I said. Last night was so exciting. The whole city was so happy, and now we were just going to shuffle between boring classes at Clarkstown Middle School.
That’s when I got an idea. I looked up excitedly, glanced from Yasmine to Madison to Lila, then back to Yasmine.
“Let’s call my mom,” I said.
Lila rolled her eyes. “She’ll never say yes.”
“I don’t know,” I said slowly. “My mom might, actually.”
And the more I thought about it, the more it seemed like she really might. My mom, after all, was still the mom who said yes.
Yes, we can turn the song up loud.
Yes, I will take you and your friends to the water park.
Yes, whatever it is, as long as you take your medicine and call me and don’t make me worry any more than I already do—as long as I can be with you and know you are safe—yes, yes, yes.
When Mom answered her phone, I told her about the parade. “Can we go?” I pleaded.
Yasmine leaned over my shoulder and shouted in the direction of the phone, “Yes, please, can we, Mrs. Rawl?!”
Then Madison and Lila joined in: “Please take us, Mrs. Rawl! Please!”
I held up the phone so she could hear them plead.
When I put the phone back to my ear, my mother was speaking. “. . . their parents will have to say okay.”
I covered the phone with my hands and looked up at my friends. “Oh, my God, I think she’s saying yes,” I whispered. Their eyes widened in disbelief. “But only if everybody’s parents say okay.”
The next half hour was a flurry of phone calls, of reassurances and promises that somehow—magically—worked. We had “Colts Fever” to thank; it had apparently captured us all. We walked into school just long enough to put our belongings in our lockers. A few minutes later, we sat outside the main office, watching kids come into school for the day.
That’s when I saw a girl I knew. Amber was in seventh grade, a cheerleader. She had crazy curly hair, which she always just pulled back in a rough ponytail like she didn’t give a hoot. She walked with her mother, who looked young—about a decade younger than my own mom—and very pretty.
Something was wrong, though. They walked slowly, and it almost looked like Amber was holding her mother up. Her mom’s arm rested on Amber’s shoulder. She took tiny steps, as if she were afraid she’d trip.
Amber’s mom stumbled a little, and Amber wrapped her arm tight around her mom’s waist to catch her.
We must have been staring, because Amber’s eyes flashed toward us, fiercely. “Can I help you?” she asked, her eyes narrowed.
I looked away quickly. Amber snapped, “Can one of you at least make yourself useful? Hold the door for us, maybe?”
I jumped up and held the door to the office open for them.
Amber’s mom smiled at me as she walked through the door, and Amber, still bracing her mom, said quietly, “Thanks, Paige.”
Moments later, my mother rolled up in front of the school. We signed out, stepped out into the winter air, and climbed into her car. We giggled excitedly. We forgot all about Amber, all about Clarkstown and classes and textbooks.
The day was bitter cold, in the single digits, with the radio newscaster announcing that the wind chill made it feel like it was below zero.
We parked downtown, joined the crowds lining up on the sidewalk, and we waited.
The streets were a sea of blue and white. Around us, people held signs: WE LOVE YOU, COLTS, or simply, THANK YOU, COLTS. There were camera crews everywhere. Cars honked their horns as they passed. Each time they honked, the crowd cheered in response, holding up forefingers in a show of “We’re number one!”
My toes and fingers were numb, but it didn’t matter. This was a whirlwind party—“a once-in-a-lifetime party,” everyone kept saying.
We waited. Afternoon came. A heavyset man walked up and down on the street, calling out to the crowd, “We’ve waited all day? Hell no, we’ve waited years. Let’s get loud!!!” Fans hollered and whooped and cheered in response.
Day gave way to darker skies, and lights went on inside the office buildings around us. And then, right when the day was at the edge of darkness, it happened.
I knew that the team had arrived before I could see them. It was unmistakable: the crowd, which had been cheering off and on all day, suddenly reached a fever pitch. Almost instantly, all around us, arms were raised in a show of victory.
I turned to Yasmine. “They’re here,” I said. “They’re really here!”
We craned our necks to see past all the Colts fans. Yasmine was taller, and she saw them first.
“Here they are!” she cried. I jumped up and down trying to catch a glimpse.
And then I saw them. They were there, right there: the Colts—our team, our home team. Some players rolled along on floats, others waved from the backs of pickup trucks. At first, I saw only the vehicles, but then I saw the players themselves, their arms spread wide, embracing the crowd’s roars with obvious pride and glee.
They were real, and they were really there.
People screamed, shook their signs and flags, called out messages of love that were impossible to hear over all the shouting. It was incredible to me, the way, in this single instant, an entire city’s energy was directed right at one place.
It was electric, absolutely thrilling.
And then Yasmine gripped my arm, and I saw him. Peyton Manning. Right there, right in front of us. He stood inside a moving car, his head poking out of a sunroof. He waved and grinned at the crowd. After all these months seeing him on television, there he was in the flesh. It was actually him. I screamed at the top of my lungs and waved my arm wildly at
him.
“MVP!” people chanted. “MVP!”
I begin chanting it, too.
When he passed, Yasmine and I looked at each other and hugged.
Everything was amazing. Endless victories lay ahead.
Understanding
No one stays a child forever. Just as my sippy cups gave way to glassware and my powdered medicine gave way to pills, as I grew older, I began to pay more attention in those doctor’s visits. I didn’t ask many questions, but I noticed I heard certain words repeated: HIV. Immune system. T-cells. Viral load. I didn’t know what they meant, exactly, but I had begun to notice how serious my mother’s face was in those visits, the look of relief that came over her as Dr. Cox read numbers out of my chart.
In fourth grade, I visited the dentist for a checkup. My chart lay open on the table next to me, and I glanced down. At the bottom of the chart were two handwritten words, both circled in black pen: Asthma was one. HIV+ was the other.
Later, when I was in fifth grade, I heard the words “HIV/AIDS” in a health class. I pictured Dr. Cox’s waiting room, filled with pamphlets like HIV/AIDS: Get the Facts. I remembered my father lying in his hospital bed, the tears in his eyes as he opened his mouth, then closed it again.
I began to wonder.
One spring day, five years after my father died—just a short time before I met Yasmine—my mom picked me up from school. I didn’t say a word for most of the drive. Then, when we pulled into the driveway of our house, Radio Disney pulsing through our speakers, I asked my mother a simple question: “Am I HIV positive or negative?”
My mother took a deep breath, then parked the car. She took me into the kitchen, sat me in the tall stool at the kitchen counter, the one where she’d served me countless meals. She stood on the other side of the counter, leaned in toward me, and told me the truth: that I’d been HIV positive since birth.
That HIV was a blood disease.
That she’d wanted to tell me for a long time, but hadn’t known how.
That she knew it would raise complicated questions for me, including some about my father’s death.
That she hadn’t wanted to scare me.
That we would talk lots more about it as I got older.
That she had it, too.
That we would be okay. That as long as we both took our medicine and took care of ourselves everything would be okay.
Then she made me my favorite meal, spaghetti with meatballs. After we ate, we did what we often enjoyed in the evenings: we belted out oldies tunes together into our karaoke machine. We sang and sang, our bare feet dancing on the carpet of our living-room floor. My mom tucked me into bed that night, just like she always did. She kissed my forehead before turning out the light.
I rolled onto my side and listened to the sound of my own breath.
Everything was the same, and everything was different, all at once.
Lock-in
One month after the Super Bowl parade, Clarkstown Middle School held a “lock-in”—a dusk-to-dawn, chaperoned slumber party at the school. The school was filled with different stations—a dancing station, a station where you could play board games, a snack station, a sports station.
Yasmine and I dashed from one station to another. We ate junk food from the concession stand, guzzled soda directly from the cans. We danced to Justin Timberlake and Rihanna. We dashed to the board game station, watched for a few minutes, then ran back for more snacks. It was so strange. We were at school, but for once our only job was to play and talk and laugh.
Then we wandered into the gym. A group of seventh graders, mostly boys, were shooting hoops. There was just one girl among them—Amber, the girl I’d seen holding up her mother outside the building on the day of the Colts parade.
Lila and Madison sat on the floor with some other girls. Yasmine walked over toward them, while I watched the basketball players.
“Hey, Paige.” Amber waved.
I walked over.
“Hey, is it true you do pageants?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“You wear ball gowns and stuff?”
“Evening wear. Yeah.”
“Swimsuits?”
I laughed. “No. In fact, we wear church-like outfits for the interview portion. Dresses or business suits.”
“Ugh. I hate dresses.”
She picked up a basketball and started dribbling it, moving away from the boys, toward one of the other baskets.
“Come play,” she said. I followed her.
“You do that on weekends?” she asked.
“Summers mostly,” I said.
“You ever win?”
“I have,” I said. “I did once, anyway. I’ve also been a runner-up.”
I wasn’t sure if she would make fun of me then—she didn’t seem like the kind of girl that would get excited about pageants. But instead she stuck out her lower lip, like she was impressed.
“Cool,” she said.
Amber and I took turns casually shooting baskets. On the other side of the gym, the boys she’d been playing with were playing a more intense game. Some of the best players on the boys’ basketball team were there—Kyle Walker and Michael Jepson and Devin Holt, all seventh graders—along with a handful of others.
One of them was a boy with dark, shaggy hair. He was wiry, with a long, thin face. He wasn’t exactly handsome, but he smiled a lot. I liked his eyes. There was something kind about those eyes. I watched him for a while, and he must have sensed it. He looked up, right at me.
I immediately looked away.
Amber dribbled for a while. “Holy crap, it’s just so nice to be out of my house,” she said. “My family had to move last week, and our whole life is in boxes back home.”
She took a shot at the basket, jumping a little as she threw. The ball bounced off the metal rim.
“Why’d you have to move?” I asked.
She grabbed the rebound, then bounce-passed the ball to me. “My mom has MS.”
I caught the ball and dribbled it a few times. “MS?” I asked. I tossed the ball toward the basket. It hit the backboard, nowhere near the basket. It bounced back toward us, and Amber grabbed it.
“Multiple sclerosis,” she said. She dribbled the ball a couple of times, then stopped. “It’s where your immune system attacks your central nervous system. Isn’t that a bitch?”
I didn’t know what to say, so I looked out at the boys’ game. The boy with shaggy hair dribbled the ball past Kyle.
“Makes it really hard for her to walk sometimes,” said Amber. “We needed a smaller place because it’s so hard for her to get around.”
That’s when she noticed me watching the boys.
“Hey, who are you looking at, anyway?” She followed my gaze. “Ethan?”
I felt my cheeks flush red.
“Huh. Ethan’s a really great guy,” she said. “But kinda goofy.”
And then, as if on command, he looked up at us. When he saw we were watching, he made a big show of running across the floor with huge, slow strides like he was in slow motion. Then he purposefully and dramatically tripped over his own feet, tossing the basketball out in front of him. A moment later, he lay on his belly, his legs splayed behind him.
Amber burst out laughing. “He’s always doing stupid stuff like that.”
Just then, Devin Holt picked up the ball that Ethan had let bounce away, and he threw it at us.
“What the fuck?” Amber shouted, hurling it back at him.
She turned back to me. “Sorry,” she said. She shrugged. “The F-word is my favorite word.”
“You know, you don’t exactly seem like a cheerleader,” I said.
She shrugged. “I like being loud,” she said. “And I hate sitting down. I’ll take any sport that lets me jump and shout. Why, you want to cheer next year?”
I nodded.
“Want me to show you a couple of cheers?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed. And right as I did, I looked at Ethan, and at that exact moment
he looked at me. Our eyes met, and my cheeks flushed red.
“Oh, my God,” said Amber, shaking her head. “I can’t believe you like Ethan.”
Somewhere in the early hours of the morning, a few hours after I shot baskets with Amber, Yasmine and I were seated on top of a table outside the gym. I peeled back a wrapper on a Kit Kat bar and crossed my legs. We talked.
Nearby, in the girls’ bathroom, I knew a bunch of girls were looking in the mirror, reapplying thick mascara, smacking their glossy lips at their own images. I felt good that we were out here. Neither Yasmine nor I wore much makeup, and it was a relief to have a friend who was so down-to-earth.
That’s when Yasmine said, “I’m a little worried.” She shook out some candies from a box of Nerds and popped them in her mouth.
“What about?” I asked. I thought she was saying something about tonight, some mild worry about the lock-in. Like, what if she got really tired and wanted to go home?
Instead, she told me something I didn’t know. She told me about a family member who had not been well. The family member was going to live with her. She was worried, about this person, worried about some erratic behavior, worried about the effect the illness would have on her whole family.
I understood that she was telling me something important. I wanted her to feel better, to feel less alone.
“Everybody’s got something,” I told her. I thought about Amber’s mom, needing a small apartment because of her MS, so she wouldn’t have to take too many steps. I thought about all those kids I saw at Riley all the time—the ones in wheelchairs or with crutches or bald heads.
And then I told her that I had something, too.
I told her I had HIV.
If her face changed at all when I told her, I didn’t notice it. If she looked at me differently, I didn’t see it. But of course, I would not have been looking for it. I mean, I knew kids who had diabetes, kids who had knee troubles, kids who had acne. I really meant what I said to Yasmine: everybody had something. HIV just happened to be my thing.
A group of kids walked over and we began talking to them. Then Amber poked her head out of the gym. “Hey, Paige,” she said. “We need one more kid to help us practice our L-up.” An L-up was one of the basic cheerleading stunts—one where someone gets lifted in the air. It looks effortless, even though I knew it took a ton of practice.
