7 Days at the Hot Corner

by Terry Trueman

  Travis looked at me. “You too.”

  I looked down at my hands and there was blood all over them; I held my fingers out, all crinkled, and pointed them at Travis. “I vill drink your blood,” I said, trying to sound like Dracula.

  He laughed at that one and even more blood dripped from his nose. It took us a while longer to finally stop his bleeding.

  Dorothy, the nurse, listens quietly as I explain, nodding once in a while, but the look on her face doesn’t give anything away about her feelings.

  After I’ve told the story, she nods and smiles and then says, “It’s true that HIV is transmitted through direct blood contact—and most frequently that involves an open wound or tear in the flesh or through sharing an unclean hypodermic needle with someone who has the virus—or by an exchange of fluids through sexual contact.”

  “I’m not gay,” I blurt out. It’s important to me for her to know that if I have AIDS, I didn’t get it because of sex stuff—at least not gay sex.

  She says, “Okay.”

  I add, “And I don’t do any drugs at all.”

  “That’s good,” Dorothy says. “Has your friend told you that he is HIV positive?”

  “No …” I say. “It’s just …” I can’t think of how to put it.

  “You just want to play it safe?” Dorothy asks.

  “Yeah,” I say. “I mean, even the trainers on our baseball team wear rubber gloves when they wrap ankles or wrists, and that isn’t even about blood, right? But they’re still being careful. Plus I have other reasons to be worried, and my team is on a run at the city championship—it’s the most important thing ever.... I just can’t be distracted by this thing right now. I hope to someday get drafted to play pro ball and …” I don’t finish this sentence. I feel stupid even saying it, as the chance of my getting a call from the pros is probably slim or none.

  Dorothy looks a little confused by my rambling explanation, but at least she doesn’t ask me about the “other reasons.” Instead she questions me some more about the blood at the batting cages, and I explain about it again.

  She asks, “May I examine your hands, please?”

  I hold out my hands, sweaty palms up. Wearing white plastic gloves, she turns my hands over and stares at them intently. “You bite your nails a bit, huh?”

  My head reels again, and I feel even more dizzy than I did earlier, out in the foyer. The room begins to spin. I drop my head down between my knees to keep from passing out and falling off the chair.

  “Whoa!” Dorothy says, putting her hands on my shoulders and steadying me. “You all right?”

  I mutter, “No.”

  Blood to blood! My raw skin where I bite my nails and Travis’s blood all over my hands! Sweat runs down from each of my armpits and a sheen of it covers my face. My mind screams: AIDS! AIDS! AIDS! AIDS!

  “Breathe deeply now.” Dorothy’s voice calls to me from somewhere. “Steady, easy, breathe deeply. Come on, you’re going to be fine, take it easy.”

  I follow her directions, and soon the room stops spinning. I sit back up in my chair.

  “I’m a dead man,” I say.

  “Not at all,” Dorothy responds. “That’s not true at all.” She pauses until I look at her.

  She says, “Even if your friend is HIV positive, which we have no reason to believe he is, especially given his age and how little we know about his sexual history—even if your friend is sexually active, there’s no reason to assume that he’s infected. You don’t get HIV just by being sexual. You may get it by having unsafe sex with someone who has the virus.”

  “May?” I ask. “I thought you definitely got it by doing that.”

  “That’s not accurate,” Dorothy says, her voice calm and reassuring. “Many people, not knowing that their partners were HIV positive, have had unprotected sex with those infected partners for years without contracting the virus at all. Based on what you’ve told me about your history, you have a very low risk factor. I wouldn’t even recommend an HIV test for you at this time.”

  “What?” I can’t believe she is serious. “What about my fingernails? What about all that blood?”

  “I can see how worried you are,” Dorothy answers softly. “If you want to have an HIV screening, I’d be glad to do the procedure. If you think it would make you feel better, I’m glad to help.”

  “Yeah,” I answer. “I don’t wanna keep worrying about it.”

  Dorothy smiles again and says, “Okay, roll up your right sleeve.”

  The procedure is no big deal. Just a regular blood test, I guess. I look in the other direction, not wanting to see the needle go into my arm. Dorothy must have done millions of these, because I don’t even feel it. I honestly don’t even know she’s stuck me until several seconds after she’s finished, when she says, “Okay, that’s it.”

  “You’re done?” I ask. “I didn’t even know you’d started.”

  She smiles.

  Settling back in the chair, I take over the little cotton ball that Dorothy presses against the pinprick. It stings a little, but nothing too bad; now for the scary part. I take a deep breath and ask, “Can you look at it right away? I’d like to get the results before I leave.”

  Dorothy half smiles and says, “I’m sorry, but it takes five business days to get the results back.”

  “What!” I hear my voice get loud, almost yelling. I quickly do the math. “Today is Tuesday. If it takes five business days, doesn’t that mean—Monday! Monday before I’ll have the results?” I say, still in a loud voice. “Counting the rest of today, Monday is seven days away! The tournament will be over by then!”

  “I’m sorry,” Dorothy says.

  I don’t say anything. I am stunned.

  Dorothy looks at me sympathetically. “I know that these seven days are going to feel like years, but here in Spokane there’s just no way for us to do the test any faster. I’m sorry.”

  I take a couple of deep, slow breaths so that I won’t get dizzy again. “Seven days,” I say softly to Dorothy.

  “Counting today, yes,” she says, “but I’m sure the news will be good.”

  It’s the only time I feel that Dorothy has lied to me. Not that she doesn’t believe the test will be all right—I don’t think that’s a lie—but for her to say she’s “sure” it will be okay just isn’t true. Not knowing is why people have to take the test. Only the test can make anybody sure.

  And the test takes seven days!

  Ahhhhh!! All I ever wanted to do was play baseball, and now I’m trapped at a hot corner that’s real different than just playing third base.

  How did my life change so quickly? Everything was so good, and then blam!

  It started two weeks ago.

  That’s when Travis Adams moved out of his parents’ house and in with my dad and me. He wouldn’t say exactly what it was his folks were so upset about that he’d had to leave their home. He seemed pretty upset himself. He showed up at our door on a Thursday night at about eight o’clock with a suitcase. He asked Dad if he could stay with us.

  “For tonight?” my dad asked, not so much inviting Travis in as getting out of the way; I can’t remember the last time Travis rang the doorbell at our house.

  “Yeah, for tonight,” Travis answered Dad. “Tonight and maybe some more nights too.”

  “Do your parents know you’re here?” Dad asked.

  “Yep,” Travis said, looking away from Dad, down at the floor.

  Dad said, “You’re always welcome, Trav.”

  I know that later the same evening Travis’s dad, Roy, phoned my dad and they talked about what was going on, and that Travis’s parents said Travis had their permission to stay with us “for the time being.” Actually, because he’s seventeen years old, Travis can live pretty much anywhere he wants—that’s the law in Washington State—but I knew he didn’t leave his parents’ house on his own, and my dad wouldn’t tell me more.

  A couple of times since he moved in, I tried to get Travis to talk about wh
at was going on, but he kept saying, “It’s kind of private. I’d rather not discuss it.”

  That was enough to shut me up. But my curiosity had been killing me. I’ve known Roy and Rita Adams, Travis’s parents, for as long as I’ve known him. They’re really nice people. When my parents got divorced I was seven, and I’d just met Travis; his parents became real important to me—the whole family did. I was too young back then to talk much about how I felt about my parents’ divorce—in fact, to this day, I’ve still never talked about it with Dad or Mom. What’s the point? Yakking about it won’t change anything. But the divorce was hard—real hard. I cried a lot. Not many kids in our class had divorced parents, so Travis’s friendship and my feeling that I was almost a part of his family was big for me. I’m not saying Trav’s parents are perfect; Roy is gone a lot in his work and I’ve heard Rita lose her temper and swear more than once, but she’s also put her arm around my shoulder and comforted me when I was upset—lots of times, actually. She’s always made me feel safe and okay. And Roy is a great dad. He took Travis, Travis’s little brother, Hank, who is now ten years old, and me across the state to see the Seattle Mariners every summer for five years: driving us to Safeco Field and back (six hundred miles round-trip), hassling with the traffic, motels, the comic book/baseball card store in the Pike Place Market where we always demanded to go. He put up with all of that garbage just for us.

  The first time I met Travis was right after the weekend my dad moved out of our house, a few days after my parents told me they were getting divorced. I was really scared. Travis was new to my school. We were second graders, standing near each other at recess, and out of the blue, like the total wack job I was that day, I just blurted out, “Are your parents married?”

  He looked at me kind of funny, but answered, “Yeah.”

  I said, “Mine are getting divorced.”

  He said, “Oh,” looking at the ground before looking up and adding “Bummer.”

  I said, “Yeah, I guess.”

  Then I said, “You know, if one of my parents just died or something, everybody would feel sorry for me.”

  Travis nodded his agreement, as if what I’d said wasn’t pretty nuts.

  We were quiet awhile, and then he said, “When they get divorced, though, you’ll get twice as many Christmas presents.”

  I asked, “How do you figure?”

  Travis said, “In our church, this girl, Ashley Anderson, her parents are divorced and she said she gets twice as many presents for Christmas and her birthday because her mom and dad feel so guilty or something.”

  I thought about it a second and said, “Cool.” Then I thought more about what I’d said about Mom or Dad dying. “It’s not like I wish my parents were dead.”

  Travis said, “No, yeah, I know what you mean.”

  I said, “I’m just saying that if one of them died, it’d be easier than a divorce. I hate it.”

  I started to get some tears in my eyes then, so I looked away from Travis so he wouldn’t see.

  He said, “You can borrow my parents any time you want. You can pretend they’re your parents too, if you wanna.”

  I asked, “Really?” even though it seemed like a pretty goofy idea.

  Travis said, “Sure, I don’t care. I’ve already got one brother anyway—why not have another one?”

  We both laughed then. And that was the first time I’d laughed since I’d heard that my own family was blowing apart.

  The very next Saturday, Travis and I went together to try out for the first organized baseball I ever played; actually it was T-ball. I was great at it. Trav wasn’t. My first time at bat I smacked the ball off the tee and watched the kids in the outfield chase it as I legged it out a triple. From that moment on I was in love with baseball and I’ve never looked back.

  So Travis and his mom and dad have actually been in my life as long as baseball has. Somehow, Roy and Rita kicking Travis out of their house changed everything—I just couldn’t get my brain wrapped around it. I couldn’t imagine what Travis could have done for such an impossible-seeming thing to have happened—until yesterday, when he handed me a copy of an article that appeared today in our high school newspaper.

  Coming Out

  by Margo Fancher

  A senior in our school is gay. He doesn’t want to have sex with every good-looking guy he sees, and he doesn’t think of himself as weird, though he knows some of us will think he is. Since “coming out,” telling his family he’s gay, he’s been kicked out of his parents’home. (They don’t want him to “influence” his younger brother.)

  He’s a kid a lot of us know. He doesn’t want his name used in this article because he doesn’t want to embarrass his family or his friends, but he does want us to know that he’s here at our school. He says that even though coming out to his family has been the hardest thing he’s ever done, he doesn’t want, or need, our pity. He is not ashamed of who he is. He’s gay and he knows other kids who are gay too, though he says he would never “out” anyone else. But he’s starting the process for himself; he’s coming out.

  The reason this student has talked to me is best summed up in this statement from him.

  “If I were black and walked into a room, I’d like to think that people would stop telling a racist joke or speaking racial slurs while I was there, but also after I’d walked out. Being gay, I never know what I’ll hear when I walk into a room. I can’t control what people say after I leave, or even when I’m there, but I can’t and won’t keep pretending that gay jokes are funny or that homophobia is any more okay than racism.”

  Our classmate hopes that this article helps increase our sensitivity to his and other gay students’ needs. If it doesn’t, and where and when it doesn’t, he’s going to start standing up for himself. He doesn’t say this like it’s a threat or a warning; rather, he’d like us to treat it as a simple declaration of his right to be treated with the same dignity and respect that every other student here expects and deserves.

  It’s funny: Not in a billion years would I have guessed the story was about Travis except that he handed it to me himself. In fact, I said, “No way,” the second I finished reading.

  Here was my best friend for the past eleven years, now living at my house, sharing my food, sleeping in my room, and it just so happens that he’s gay and I never knew! I stared down at Margo’s article for several moments after I’d finished reading. I was afraid to look up at Travis. I knew that when I did look up, I would have to see him differently than I’d ever seen him before, and I wasn’t sure I’d still like what I saw.

  I asked, “Are you saying your folks threw you out ’cause you’re queer?”

  Travis said, “Gay.... Yeah, they said they didn’t want me around my little brother anymore—like he might catch it or something.”

  “Wow,” I said, unable to think of anything else at that moment.

  “Yeah,” Travis said.

  All right, here’s the thing: I know that in lots of places, like big cities, the whole gay thing is not that big of a deal. Even here in Spokane the local community college has a club for gays and lesbians and there’s a Gay Pride parade every year—but at Thompson High School, at any high school in Spokane, for a lot of kids there’s still a stigma attached to the whole homosexual thing. I’m just being honest; the word “gay” is even a synonym for “bad,” as in “This party is so gay, let’s get out of here …” or “This pizza tastes gay!” There are “out” gay kids in our school, but they are often kind of ignored, and the best they can do socially, whether anybody wants to admit it or not, is to be left alone. Until this thing with Travis, I never really thought much about what you might call “the gay issue.” But then Travis handed me the article.

  Truthfully, I felt like screaming at him! I don’t need my teammates finding out about Travis being gay and then looking at me, wondering if I’m queer too. Most of them know that he’s been my best friend forever and that for the last couple of weeks he’s been my housemate. Nev
er mind how totally mind-blowing it is to think I know people as well as I thought I knew Trav and his parents, only to find out something like this.

  “Gay, huh?” I asked him, unsure of what to even say. “Why didn’t you ever tell me before? Why’d you bring this up now, of all times?”

  “Margo and I were talking,” Travis said. “It just kind of came up, and I didn’t feel like lying anymore.... Sorry if the timing isn’t perfect for you.”

  He sounded pretty sarcastic with the thing about timing, so I said, “Kind of came up?” not even trying to keep the annoyance out of my voice.

  Travis looked at me and said, “I’m not trying to hurt you or your dad or anybody. She was asking about my being out of my parents’ house, wanting to write a story for the paper about kids who get kicked out. She asked me what was going on, and I just told her the truth.”

  I couldn’t think of how to ask the next question, but Travis seemed to read my mind. “She’s not gonna tell anybody that I’m the guy in the article. She gave her word.”

  With lots of kids that wouldn’t mean squat, but with Margo Fancher Travis’s secret is safe. When Margo was only a freshman, she got written up in Spokane’s real newspaper, The Spokane Herald, for refusing to “divulge her sources” for a school newspaper article she wrote about kids who were stealing cars. It almost went to court, but the cops dropped it when they caught the car thieves and when they realized how serious Margo was about respecting the “confidentiality of the press.” Travis is safe from Margo. But what about all the kids who’ll try to find out in other ways? And what about me?

  “I don’t get it, Travis. How could you tell her before you even told me?”

  Travis stared into my eyes and answered, “Are you kidding me? Tell you? Yeah, right.”

  I felt my ears start to burn. “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Travis said, “Look how you’re reacting.”

  I heard my voice go up. “I’m reacting fine—what’s your problem? I mean, it’s cool, you telling her. You did what you had to do, right?” I hoped my words sounded genuine enough, but my heart was definitely not behind them. Really, I wished the whole thing would just disappear.