Ryan White - My Own Story (13 page)

“I can’t believe it!” I exclaimed. “He was my favorite teacher!”

Next the reporter talked to the school nurse, who had always been really nice to me. She thought I should stay home too.

As for the students, the reporter only found one girl, God bless her, who wouldn’t mind being in school with me.

“All these people are so two-faced,” I complained. “I take that back: I mean three-faced. Four—if you count their butts.”

Another thing I couldn’t believe was all the rumors going around about me. One night when I was still home, a kid I didn’t know too well called up and asked to speak to me. He said he needed the math homework.

But when I picked up the phone, he asked me, “Why do you spit on vegetables in the supermarket?”

“I never did!” I said. I was really shocked. How could anyone think I’d do anything so gross?

“Yes, you did,” the kid insisted. “My cousin saw you, and my cousin doesn’t lie. He says you sneeze on them too.”

I hung up on him, and after that, Mom or Andrea screened all my calls.

But the next Friday night that Andrea and I were down at the roller rink, another kid, only about five or six years old, skated up to me and asked, “Ryan, is it true that you spit on people when you’re mad?”

I said to him, “Who told you that?” And then he pointed to a group laughing in the corner. I just said, “No,” and skated away.

Sometimes we did get the last word. Once Grandma took me shopping. We stopped at a big drugstore, and I went roaming through the aisles, looking for the comic-book stand. Some older teenage boys spotted me and started whispering and snickering to each other. I always figured the best strategy with mean kids was to act like they’re invisible, pretend they weren’t there. Grandma did things differently. Before the bunch could start after me, she marched right up to them—all taller than she was.

“That young boy doesn’t have long to live,” she told them loudly, so other people in the store could hear. “When he’s dead, wouldn’t you rather remember that you had said something nice to him?”

You could tell the boys knew they looked foolish. They shifted their weight from one foot to another, and then kind of melted away into the stationery section.

I
DIDN
’
T
get home from the hospital until the day after the hearings, so Mom and Mr. Vaughan went without me. Both sides had to present their case to the hearing officer, another lawyer. The school board had found a law that Indiana had passed way back in 1949, long before anyone with AIDS was around Kokomo, that required any child with an infectious disease to get a health certificate before he or she could come to class. Since I didn’t have this piece of paper, the school board said they would be breaking the law if they took me back.

Mr. Vaughan brought along three doctors: my pediatrician in Kokomo, the Howard County health official, and an infectious-disease expert from the Indiana State Board of Health, Dr. Myers’ agency. All of them said I was no threat to other kids. I belonged in school.

The hearing officer wasn’t planning to make up her mind for nearly a month.

“They’re trying to drag this out as long as possible,” I said to Mom. “They’re hoping I’ll die, and the problem will go away, right?”

Mom said nothing.

“They better not hold their breath,” I said.

Since I was sick again, Andrea had taken over my paper route. One afternoon she was folding the papers she was going to deliver, when Heath dropped by. He and Andrea started fooling around with a tube of fake blood that she had bought at her favorite magic store.

When Mom came home, she found an angry neighbor who was on Andrea’s route, shaking a copy of the
Tribune
at her. At least he was shaking it as well as he could: He had stuffed it in a plastic bag, and he was holding a corner of the bag between his thumb and forefinger. He held the paper out for Mom to inspect.

“Who bled on my paper?” he cried. “What’s going to happen to me now?” He threw the bag down and took off.

Mom picked it up and saw what certainly looked like blood on his paper. She went after Andrea.

Andrea looked at the paper sheepishly. “Heath and I were playing vampires,” she explained.

“How could you?” Mom wailed. “When you know how everyone feels? This is all we need.” The only thing I could do to calm down our neighbor was to give up my paper route, so I did.

The rumors were pretty hard on the rest of my family too. My aunt Deb is a nurse. She was working in a doctor’s office with four other nurses. One wouldn’t touch her or go anywhere near her, and she didn’t want Deb around her own kids. Meanwhile my cousin Josh, Monica’s second brother, was coming home from school every day in tears. Uncle Tommy and Aunt Deb couldn’t figure out what was wrong. Finally Josh fessed up. A kid at school had said to him, “If Ryan White’s your cousin, you’re going to catch AIDS and die too.”

But Mom caught it the worst—I don’t know why. She had four loyal friends at work, but when she walked into the cafeteria, no one else said anything to her—they just stared, like she was from Mars. If she dropped into Scotty’s or McDonald’s, the same thing happened. People would get up and walk to the other side of the restaurant to get an unobstructed view. She certainly had no dates. When Mom ran out to pick up some milk at a convenience store, the clerk didn’t want to hand her the change. She dropped the coins into Mom’s palm from about a foot and a half in the air.

There’s an institution in Kokomo called “Male Call.” It’s a radio call-in show that’s on the air five days a week. The two hosts, Dick and Charlie, know most everyone in town. Their friends call them up, and they let them rattle on and on over the airwaves. At Delco everyone on the assembly line listens to Dick and Charlie over the public address system. Lately they’d been getting a lot of calls about me and Mom.

One woman who called in must have been in the convenience store when Mom came by for milk. “She bought groceries!” the woman was saying, over and over. From the tone in her voice, you’d think Mom had held up the cash register. “I thought we collected money so Jeanne White could pay doctors!” Mom doesn’t smoke or drink; she hadn’t blown any contributions on six-packs. How dare Mom spend money on food!

Other callers repeated all the rumors, and came up with some new ones. For instance, they had unusual theories about how I got AIDS. Mom hadn’t fed me properly. She didn’t clean. She was a trashy housekeeper. What’s more, she was lying: She knew perfectly well AIDS was infectious. Hadn’t she sent her own daughter away last summer?

Mom is even neater than I am—and that’s saying a lot. And for as long as I can remember, Andrea has gone to what I call “skaters’ camp” in the summer. She lives with her coach or another pro for several weeks, and practices all day long. The summer after she placed in the nationals, she went to the Olympics training camp in Colorado.

One day I was home from the hospital with nothing better to do, and I made the mistake of tuning in to Dick and Charlie. Some of the calls could be good for laughs. But then they started in on how Mom was taking her sick son to the cleaners, trotting me out on television so she could get money and publicity. “She obviously doesn’t care about her boy,” someone said. Enough was enough—I was furious. I reached for the phone.

“You got no right to talk about my mother!” I screamed at whoever was on the other end. “She’s a great person, and she
does
care about me!” Then I hung up fast. I didn’t want to talk to those guys; I just wanted Mom to hear me at work. She didn’t, but she was glad to hear about it.

Dick and Charlie really got to Grandma too. She hated knowing that people in Kokomo, where she’d lived all her life, were bad-mouthing us. As far as she was concerned, Mom was the best mother in the world—Grandma was right about this, of course—and she was furious that anyone would criticize her.

“Just don’t listen to Dick and Charlie, Mom,” my mother told her. “Then you won’t know what people are saying. You won’t even know they’re talking about us.” Mom never called the radio show because she had decided that she didn’t want to say anything she might regret. It didn’t work to say anything thoughtful or logical to Dick and Charlie anyway.

But Grandma wanted to beat them up. One day she heard the mayor of Kokomo call Dick and Charlie, and claim that the police had never caught our Christmas burglar because Mom hadn’t reported the robbery. Grandma got right on the line.

“This is Gloria Hale, Jeanne White’s mother,” she told the mayor and anyone else who was listening. “I want you to know I discovered the theft. I called the police and reported the theft myself.”

One day the paper ran a letter that criticized Mom
and
the other side. A woman in Indianapolis thought that “some parents, including Ryan’s mother, have climbed aboard a bandwagon that just keeps rolling them along into the limelight.” Along with the letter, the paper ran a photo of me on a bad day. The writer thought I looked “so alone and confused most of the time.” Thanks a lot. It didn’t seem to occur to the people who criticized Mom that she was only doing this because it was what
I
wanted. You’d think they’d agree with me that that made her an even better mom.

People at work wanted to make sure Mom didn’t miss any letters in the paper about her. She found many, including this one helpfully stapled to her time card, with the “bandwagon” part underlined and an anonymous note scribbled on it: “Get a look at this!! In the news again!”

Grandma decided it was time to take on Kokomo in writing too. She sent off her own letter to the editor: “Jeanne White is a compassionate and loving mother. The medical experts have told her that Ryan is not a threat to other children or adults. If she had the slightest doubt that Ryan could transmit this disease to other children, she would not be trying to get him back in school. I’m proud of my daughter. She has a daughter living in the same house that she loves just as much as you love your child. Do you think if Andrea could get AIDS from Ryan, Jeanne would let Andrea live there? No way. Andrea would be living with us.”

Mom was getting some anonymous hate mail at home, signed “An interested citizen” or whatever, all with Kokomo postmarks. Some people wrote us all the time—we could tell by their handwriting. Mom didn’t want to open any of these letters; they were starting to upset her. She wanted to throw them away as soon as they arrived. But I always opened them and read them aloud for laughs.

“Listen to how silly these people are,” I would tell her. One of these letters opened with, “Mrs. White, I can’t believe you are such a puke! We all in Kokomo are so sick of seeing your face in the
Tribune
and on TV!” It cracked us both up. For a month or so after that, every time I thought Mom sounded down, I’d say, “Hi puke!”—and we’d both start laughing again.

Mom got particularly confused by letters from ministers. Some of the healers said that the reason I wasn’t cured was that we weren’t good Christians. If we joined
their
religion, I wouldn’t have AIDS. The Reverend Jerry Falwell, who’s on the radio a lot, said that AIDS was homosexuals’ punishment for their sins. He thought Mom was using me to give AIDS a good name.

“A minister saying these things!” Mom said. “It doesn’t sound very Christian. God wouldn’t give anyone AIDS, especially a child.”

She started to cry. “Ryan, forgive me, honey. All this trouble we’re in is my fault. I gave you hemophilia.”

“Mom, please don’t,” I said. “It’s not your fault.”

“I gave you AIDS,” she went on.

“You gave me
life,”
I said, hugging her.

I had to write a theme for English class, so I tried to cheer Mom up by writing about her. “My mother is the greatest person in the world,” I began. “We’ve been through a lot together, and she has stuck behind me all the way.” I mentioned how much Mom loves to decorate the house for holidays, and how she doesn’t like messiness. “She stayed home from work when I was in the hospital for so long. When I got out, she helped me gain my weight back. That’s my mother,” I ended up, “and I love her.”

I got an A on my theme, and even more to the point, Mom was very happy.

T
HE NEXT DAY
I was watching TV when Heath came running into the house.

“Ryan, Barney’s been hit!” he shouted.

My heart did a flip-flop in my chest. Barney had gotten out of the house and run into the middle of our busy street. A policeman, of all people, had hit him—and then driven away.

“Barney tried to drag himself out of the traffic,” Heath panted. I wished so badly I could have helped him. Mom, Andrea, and I rushed Barney to the vet, who told us he would be okay—he was probably in shock.

The next day the vet called. Barney had died during the night, he said. But I was suspicious. People in Kokomo were acting so crazy, this could be a trick. And I guess I was like Mom who wanted all my AIDS tests done over—I just couldn’t believe that news this bad could be true.

“I want to go to the vet’s and see for myself,” I told Mom.

“Let’s let the vet take care of Barney,” Mom suggested. “Seeing him will be so hard on us.”

“I
have
to see Barney,” I insisted. Andrea said she’d go into the vet’s with me. Mom could stay in the car.

When Andrea and I found Barney, he was sealed in a plastic bag. I patted his head through its wrapping.

“ ’Bye, Barney,” I said. “I’ll see you in heaven.” As we drove home, we all cried.

Mom called Grandma. “Mom,” she said, “what else can happen?”

Just then in the bottom of the ninth, with our team trailing way, way behind, we hit a home run with the bases loaded. The hearing officer ruled that Western couldn’t use the law to bar me from class. The school was planning to appeal, but for now we were ahead.

Mom called Grandma back. “Oh shoot,” she said, “it’s kind of nice to have something go right for a change.”

I was almost fourteen, and I had the birthday present I wanted most—though I definitely did want another dog too. I planned on being a real Kokomo First: the first kid with AIDS to speak out, fight back—and win.