[My first attempt at a fact-based creative story.]
Cradling baby Jonah in her arms, the brand new mother smiles down at her newborn affectionately. With only the doctor and a nurse by her side, the woman is triumphant in creating life. She stares into his tiny eyes unknowingly; she doesn’t realize that the child she has just birthed flows with the same virus she does, a virus she contracted because of the life she chose.
“Jonah, Ms. Bard needs to see you.” The Teacher’s Aide from the counselor’s office handed Jonah a yellow slip of paper. It was a pass to see his counselor. Jonah was half-excited about the pass; it meant relief from the droning of his math teacher.
Jonah got out of his seat where he was carelessly scratching algebra solutions onto the worksheet for the day. He grabbed his work, which was only half completed, and the hall pass he had just received. His math teacher looked up from her work and watched Jonah as he inched toward her desk.
“I need to go to Ms. Bard’s office,” he said, handing his teacher the pass and his assignment. “Can I finish this when I get back?”
The teacher eyed the pass and handed him back the assignment. “Finish this in the office, Jonah.” Her tone was one of annoyance. “You can’t afford any more missed assignments.”
Jonah wasn’t, by any means, a bad student. He just missed a lot of school.
Reaching the door to the counselor’s wing, Jonah at last wondered, why would the counselor need to see me? He stared quizzically at the letters stuck to the door marking the offices on the other side. Counselors are for seniors trying to get into college and kids who cut themselves. He smirked to himself and opened the door.
“Hi, what can I do for you?” The same T.A. that brought the pass into his classroom was sitting at the receptionist’s desk. Jonah handed her the slip of paper. She looked at it and then back up at Jonah. “Oh, yeah. Hold on, lemme get ‘er.” The girl dropped her professional demeanor at the sight of Jonah, who was just a typical student from the halls of her high school.
The T.A. rose from her seat and left Jonah in the empty office. He stared around him for a moment before he realized there was a row of chairs behind him, where he sat and glared at his remaining math work.
He had just begun to consider taking out a pencil to finish his work when Ms. Bard came from behind a closed door, smiling at Jonah as he looked up.
“Hi, Jonah. Come on in.” Jonah folded his algebra assignment and stuffed it into a pocket. He followed his counselor, a short woman with short hair. When they stepped into her office, Ms. Bard pulled out a chair that was at the front of her desk. “Have a seat.”
Ms. Bard fumbled with a few papers before she sat at her cushy chair opposite from where Jonah was. While she was busying herself, he looked around the room at all of the posters for colleges and universities around the area. He hadn’t even started to think about college. Maybe that’s why he was in the counselor’s office, to plan out his future.
Jonah’s thoughts were interrupted when a file fell before him on Ms. Bard’s desk. “This is your attendance record, Jonah.” Jonah breathed deep. He wasn’t there to find a college. He was there to be reprimanded. “It seems like every semester you miss more and more school. I know you always have a note. There’s always an excuse. I hate to say it, Jonah, but it’s getting really hard to believe all of these passes were really written by your mother.” Ms. Bard opened the file and pulled out every note that his mother had ever sent with him to excuse his absences. “Every one says that you were sick. ‘Jonah was sick in bed today’. ‘Jonah missed 1/10-1/16 because he had the flu’. How many more of these are we supposed to excuse?”
Jonah didn’t know what to say. All of the excuses were true. As much as he would like to say that he was just that rebellious, he was really just that sick.
“I’m going to be in contact with your mother. Is your file up to date, Jonah?”
“Yeah,” he replied, unsure of how to bring up his next point. “But you probably won’t be able to reach her.”
“If she works during the day, I can call her this evening instead.”
“No, that won’t work either.” Jonah was biting the inside of his cheek without realizing it. “During the day she goes... over to her boyfriend’s house. Well, fiancé really. I think he’s… well, anyways, she works at night.”
Ms. Bard stood up and began pacing around the room. She didn’t look at Jonah when she spoke. “What does your mother do for a living?”
Jonah wasn’t sure what his mother did, and he wasn’t sure he could really call it a “living.” She was never home when he was unless he woke up early enough to catch her before she ran off to her boyfriend’s apartment. She always smelled a different way when she rolled out of bed. Was she a bartender? A waitress? A stripper? She never spoke to him about personal matters, and Jonah never asked.
“Odd jobs. Here and there. We get by.” Jonah was becoming short with his counselor for lack of what to say to her. She muttered something about having his mother call the school as she scribbled a pass back to class for Jonah. He got up and walked back to class just as the bell was ringing to conclude the day.
On his walk home, Jonah began to feel dizzy. Reaching his house, he couldn’t wait to collapse on his bed and not wake up until the morning. He hated his mom being gone all the time, but was anticipating a quiet house where he could be a sloth and no one would say anything about it.
It was with great surprise, then, that Jonah found his mother passed out on the couch where he wanted to enjoy a bowl of cereal and a half an hour of television before retiring. “Hi mom.” Jonah was frank as took his shoes off and placed them, along with his back pack, next to the door.
His mother barely stirred but managed to look up at him. Her face was pale and her eyes had the usual hollow look to them. As she turned into the light, Jonah noticed that one eye was darker than the other. “Mom, do you have a black eye?”
“No, Jonah. Go get mommy’s phone book. I need to call a friend.” Jonah’s eyebrows crunched together as he went to get his mom’s phone book from the kitchen table where she always kept it. When he got to the kitchen, he noticed that her leather bound book had a few pages falling out and wrinkling under the weight of the thing.
“Mom?” Jonah heard no answer but went to the book and began shoving the pages back to where they fell from. As he picked the book up from the table, the last remaining page fell to the floor. Jonah sighed and set the book back down on the table, reaching to pick up the fallen page. He tried to smooth it out with his hands and noticed a red circle around one of the names on the page. Next to the phone number, his mother’s handwriting read Thursday 9pm. Jonah glanced up at the calendar at noticed that the day was indeed Thursday.
Jonah peered again at the paper and noted the name, which he didn’t recognize. He shoved the page back into his mom’s address book and took it into the living room where she lay.
“Oh, honey, did you bring the phone?”
“It’s on the end table, mom. I don’t feel good. I’m going to bed.”
The phone was ringing as Jonah walked up the stairs towards his room. He paused on the stairs to make out the mumblings of his mother on the phone. It was useless because he couldn’t understand a word.
“Jonah!” his mother yelled from the bottom of the stairs. She didn’t realize he never made it to his room. Jonah began the trip back down and answered his mother. “That was your school. They didn’t believe all those notes I wrote you, kid. They say I need to take you to the doctor to get a note for all those times you were sick or you’re gonna fail this year. I have a… an appointment tonight for work so you better call the doctor and make one for yourself. ‘Kay?” Jonah wasn’t looking at his mother. He was annoyed that his school had really bothered calling her. But Jonah waited patiently for the phone while his mother took it and her black book into the kitchen to call her “appointment.” When she was finally done, dressed, and out the door, Jonah picked up the phone to call the doctor for himself. The smell of his mother’s perfume lingered through the house and he began to get a headache.
Jonah scheduled his appointment for the following day. He left a note next to the phone for his mother and went to his bed to sleep off the perfume-induced headache and clammy feeling on his forehead.
The next day, Jonah woke up late knowing his appointment would interfere with the school day. He knew there was no reason to go to school for the first hour when he’d just have to leave anyway. He threw his comforter off of his still-clammy body and threw on the jeans he wore the day before while searching for a clean shirt.
When he was finally dressed, Jonah went downstairs to make sure his mother was awake. Surprisingly, she was dressed and staring blankly at a cup of coffee. “Um… I’m ready, mom.” She nodded and picked her purse up from the table where she sat. She reached into it and searched the change at the bottom. The jangling finished when she fished out two dollars worth of silver change.
“The car’s not working again. We’re taking the bus. Grab your back pack. You’re going to school after your appointment.”
The two locked up their house and walked the two blocks to the bus stop. The spring air was a little chilly, but Jonah’s temperature had been up since the night before, so he welcomed the cold air against his sweaty face.
The bus came and Jonah and his mother sat amongst the poor college students, the kids without driver’s licenses, and the various other people who rode the bus to their destinations every day. Jonah, bored, tapped his fingers against his thigh in an attempt to forget that he didn’t feel good.
“Get up, Jonah. This is our stop.” Jonah was leaning against the window with his eyes closed. His mother thought that he had fallen asleep. He picked up his bag from the aisle and followed his mom down the steps of the bus and on to the sidewalk outside. He didn’t realize it while they were on the bus, but they had pulled up directly in front of his doctor’s office, a Community Health/WIC/Welfare building. Jonah was usually embarrassed that he and his mother were on a government funded health plan, but that day, he was so relieved that he didn’t have to walk anywhere that he didn’t care.
In the waiting room, Jonah pulled the wrinkly math assignment from the day before out of his pocket and stared at the problems he hadn’t attempted yet. He started daydreaming and before he could pull out a pencil, a nurse was calling his name. “Hi, Jonah, I’m Vicky. Come on back. We’ll be on the second door to the right.” Jonah looked at his mom. When he was younger, she liked to come into the examining room with him. As he grew older and the doctor visits became increasingly more embarrassing, she stopped following so that she didn’t have to bother walking back and forth when the questions became too personal for a mother’s ears.
In the stale examining room, Jonah sat on a skinny leather mattress covered with a paper sheet that was intended to keep germs away, but was about as useful as the toilet seat covers in public bathrooms that were made out of the same material.
He was waiting for what felt like more time than it was, and became restless so he laid back and stared at the Public Service posters on the ceiling. “Practice Safe Sex,” they announced. The one he was reading listed facts about AIDS. “You don’t have to be a drug user to have HIV” and listed several myths about the disease. Jonah rolled his eyes. He had never met anyone with AIDS and didn’t think he ever would.
Jonah was lost in thought when the doctor knocked before opening the door, which was already cracked. “Hi, Jonah. I’m Dr. Scullery. What are we looking at today?” The doctor asked as he looked down at his clip board. “Ah hah, lots of absences from school huh? Says here you’ve been fatigued, nausea, headaches, blah, blah, blah… basically you’ve been sick a lot, huh kiddo?”
Jonah nodded. “I didn’t think it was that big of a deal… just a bad immune system or something.”
The doctor set down his clipboard and breathed heavily. “Okay Jonah, we’ve got to get a few questions out of the way here.” Doctor Scullery went on to ask Jonah all the basic questions of a check-up, leaving the most embarrassing for last.
“And are you sexually active, Jonah?” Like all young teenage boys, Jonah was uncomfortable with this question. He blushed and looked away from the doctor’s eyes.
“No.”
The doctor breathed as if deep in thought. “Okay Jonah, the next couple questions are going to seem strange, but bare with me, okay?” Jonah nodded. He was nervous and had already felt sick; his palms became sweaty.
“Are you taking or have you ever taken any drugs of any kind that involve the sharing of a hypodermic needle?”
“Why would you ask me something like that? I’m not dying. I don’t have AIDS or something.”
“The reason I ask, Jonah, is because you’ve been sick quite a lot the past couple of years. It’s interesting you bring up AIDS; while it’s a long shot, AIDS literally stands for Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome… generally speaking, it kills your immune system, causing you to get really sick a lot more than the common person. You’re a little old… usually we catch this in kids when they’re eight or nine years old. I know it’s scary, but I’d like to have you tested for HIV, Jonah.”
Jonah became angry. “That’s stupid. I’m a virgin, I don’t do drugs, and I’ve never had surgery in my life.” He was using the information he had just learned from the poster above the bed. He stood up. The paper sheet crumbled under his weight and tore at the corners of the bed. “Don’t you have to have permission from my mom or something?”
“Well, Jonah, do you want to talk to her together, or should I talk to her alone?”
Jonah was getting angrier at the doctor. Of course he wanted to be there. He thought it would be interesting to see his mother’s reaction to this heinous suggestion. “Call her in,” he said frankly, sitting back down on the torn sanitary sheet.
Dr. Scullery called for a nurse to get Jonah’s mom from the waiting room. She came in with the same nurse he had followed into the examining room. His mother was carrying a Home and Garden magazine from the lobby with the address label ripped off. She looked worried, but not enough so to slip her finger from the page she was holding in the magazine. The doctor nodded at the nurse and she left the room.
“Mrs. Kemp, you may want to have a seat.” The doctor had a more serious tone when talking to Jonah’s mother. Jonah was surprised to hear someone speak to his mother so respectfully. His mother sighed heavily and obviously. She set the magazine down on the bench next to where she finally sat.
Noticing the dark circle around one of Jonah’s mother’s eyes, the doctor spoke in a somewhat curious tone. For the first time, he seemed unsure of how to speak to the mother. “Mrs. Kemp,” she was looking right at the doctor, “what do you do for a living?” At the end of his question, Jonah’s mother averted her eyes.
“Can we have Jonah leave for a minute?” Jonah was confused by his mother’s tone. She sounded childlike and afraid.
The doctor shook his head. “No, Mrs. Kemp… I believe it is what I feared. We are going to need to test Jonah for HIV.” Jonah’s mother’s eyes grew wide as Doctor Scullery pulled his clipboard from off of the counter. “I just need you to sign this. We’re going to draw blood or we’ll need a urine sample, whichever Jonah and yourself are more comfortable with. You’ll need to be tested, too.” Mrs. Kemp’s eyes darted to where Jonah sat. He looked fearfully at his mother, naively wondering what it was she did for a job.
Jonah shook his head. “The blood test, I guess.”
The doctor produced a needle from the cabinet he had been leaning on and put on a pair of rubber gloves. He proceeded to do all the necessary steps and, after Jonah lifted his sleeve, took a sample of the infected blood in Jonah’s veins.
Three days later, Jonah Kemp and his mother returned to Dr. Scullery’s office; Jonah was annoyed and his mother was fretting the results.
After entering the same examining room with Dr. Scullery, and hearing him speak, Jonah’s thought’s became a blur. Positive? How could he be positive? Protease Inhibitor… that sounded like a video game, not a medicine. Jonah couldn’t make out anything that was going on.
“Am I going to die?” he asked, his entire future blurring.
