My Life After Now - By Jessica Verdi Page 0,23

get down the hall and out of the school and into my car and away from the prying eyes. Home schooling couldn’t be that bad—

Then suddenly, as if on cue, everyone started talking at once. “Oh my god, how are you feeling?” “Where have you been?” “That wasn’t cool, Lucy; you don’t even have an understudy!”

Wait…maybe they didn’t know.

“Some of us were pretty sure you were dead,” Elyse said, not sounding particularly concerned.

My head scrambled to keep up. They were acting like this just because I was away for a few days? But that was so ridiculous! Kids stayed home sick and took mental health days all the time. Just because I’d gotten the perfect attendance award every year since eighth grade didn’t mean I wasn’t entitled to a break.

But they really couldn’t tell. They didn’t know. I was so relieved.

Courtney watched me from across the room. I couldn’t read her expression—it was something between scowling and questioning—but before I could go over and talk to her, I was sidetracked.

Ty appeared in front of me and spoke to me for the first time since we’d broken up. “Welcome back,” he said. “Everyone really missed you.”

“Not everyone,” I said, nodding in Elyse’s direction.

“Okay, almost everyone,” he admitted with an apologetic grin. “I mean it, though—it hasn’t been the same without you.”

His dark eyes burned into mine, and for the smallest moment I wondered if maybe he was talking about more than just the play. But then a warm hand clasped around my wrist, and I was being pulled out into the hallway.

“Are you okay?” Evan whispered once we were alone.

I nodded weakly.

He took a deep breath. “So look…if you don’t like me anymore, you can just tell me. I can handle it.”

I blinked, uncomprehending.

“What are you talking about?” I asked.

“I’m talking about what happened last weekend in your room. Things ended weird that night, and then you fell off the face of the planet for nearly a week.”

“Wait—you think I was avoiding you?” I couldn’t help but laugh a little.

“Weren’t you?” he said, less sure now.

“No, of course not.”

“So what was it?”

“I was sick.”

He waited for more of an explanation, but I was overwhelmed and trying to keep it together and that was the best I could do.

“So you…still like me?”

“I still like you,” I said, and it was the truth.

But as soon as the words passed through my lips, I knew I should have lied.

13

It’s a Hard-Knock Life

Here’s the entirety of what I knew about HIV:

1. It’s the virus that causes AIDS.

2. It’s communicable through unprotected sex and needle sharing.

3. It’s incurable.

It wasn’t much; I needed to know more. So, one night that weekend, after everyone else had gone to bed, I went online. It only took a few quick keystrokes to discover that when it came to the subject of HIV and AIDS, the Internet was a bottomless well of overwhelmingly depressing statistics. But I just couldn’t look away. As the data piled up, my outlook became increasingly pessimistic. But at least I was beginning to get answers to some of my questions.

I learned that, apart from sex and IV drug use, the two main routes of HIV contraction are breast milk and perinatal transmission—which means a mother passing it onto her baby. So, no, I would never be able to give birth to my own child.

I learned that, for most people, HIV progresses to AIDS within ten years. For some, it takes longer, and for some, it happens much sooner. So, yes, at some point, most likely before I turned thirty, I would get AIDS.

I learned that AIDS killed over twenty-five million people between 1981 and 2006, and several more million since then. So, yes, I was going to die. And not in the, “Oh, everyone dies someday, but only after they’ve lived an extra-long life and had kids and grandkids and great-grandkids” way. I was going to die in the far-too-young, oh-so-tragic way.

I pressed on and learned what, exactly, that death would look like. It was ironic—I’d sung along to the Rent song “Will I?” about a thousand times without ever really thinking about the meaning behind the words. But now, for the first time, I understood why the characters were asking if they would lose their dignity. It was because that’s what AIDS does to its victims. There would be lesions and loss of bowel control and high fevers. But those are just super-fun bonuses of the syndrome—they wouldn’t kill me. There was no knowing what