My Life After Now

39

Day By Day




“Did it start yet?” Dad asked worriedly, hurrying into the living room armed with snacks.

“Not yet. They said seven-oh-eight, so we have a few more minutes,” I said. I raised an eyebrow at the colossal popcorn bowl. “You do know it’s only a sixty-second commercial, right?”

“So I’m excited. Sue me. It’s not every day my daughter is on national television,” Dad said.

“I agree, Adam,” Evan piped up and helped himself to a giant handful of the buttery stuff. “This occasion absolutely calls for popcorn,” he said through a full mouth.

“We third that!” Papa said from the big red armchair, bouncing my little sister on his lap.

I rolled my eyes at the four of them, but I was secretly loving every second of this. I’d already seen the completed commercial, and I was incredibly proud of the way it had turned out. But Dad, Papa, and Evan had insisted on waiting until it aired to watch it—claiming it was more fun knowing they were watching it along with the rest of the country. Or, at least, the percentage of the country who tuned in to Jeopardy! at seven p.m. every night.

“Shhhh!” Papa said, as the show cut to commercial. “It’s starting!”

I didn’t pay much attention to my face on the screen. Instead, I took the full sixty seconds to observe my family as they watched, their faces full of pride and joy.

In the four months since Romeo and Juliet closed, I’d come to appreciate exactly how lucky I really was.

• • •

Mr. Fisher had turned out to be an incredibly useful ally in my mission to open the eyes of my peers. As I’d lain fake-bleeding to death on the Romeo and Juliet stage back in December, I’d realized that I had to do something. The HIV/AIDS plague wasn’t going away, and yet no one was really talking about it. At least, not in the same way they had a decade or two ago. We’d become complacent and we’d become ignorant. Dedicating a health class here or there to discussing statistics and the ways you could and couldn’t contract the virus clearly wasn’t doing much. If it was, Evan wouldn’t have been wary of touching me back when he’d first learned the truth. If it was, Elyse wouldn’t have been worried about having caught it through kissing. If it was, I wouldn’t be in this situation in the first place.

We needed to talk about it, so that kids would understand that the plague was still spreading across every single demographic—including our own. There needed to be an unrelenting, ongoing discussion so that HIV/AIDS would no longer be this phantom, ghoulish hypothetical and instead be understood as everyone’s problem—something that we all need to be fighting, positive or not. And for the people who were already positive, people like me, we needed to stop the rampant discrimination and judgment in our schools and workplaces and families. The only way to do that? Keep talking about it.

So, as my dead body rested on the stage floor that night, I’d asked myself what I could do. I still wasn’t comfortable with the assembly idea, and I wasn’t the preaching, happy-go-lucky, let’s-start-a-student-club type. But there was something I was good at.

Mr. Fisher and I approached Andre together.

“Lucy has come to me with a rather intriguing idea,” Mr. Fisher said, “and I’d appreciate your full cooperation.”

Andre narrowed his eyes at me in suspicion. “What idea?”

“I think we should do another straight play this spring,” I said simply.

Andre guffawed. “No way,” he said, shaking his head vehemently. “We always do a musical in the spring. It’s our biggest moneymaker of the year.”

“True. But Mr. Fisher and I have been talking, and we agree that we should do a show that has the ability to truly change our audience’s lives. Or, at the very least, make them think. Isn’t that the real purpose of theater, after all?” I challenged.

“Of course,” Andre mumbled, knowing he couldn’t very well disagree with that. “That’s why I chose The Sound of Music. What makes you think more than Nazis?”

“The Normal Heart,” I said without missing a beat.

Andre quickly looked to Mr. Fisher. I could see the possibilities turning in his head and tried to hide my smile. We had him.

“The school would really let us do The Normal Heart?” he asked, cautiously optimistic, The Sound of Music all but abandoned.

Mr. Fisher nodded. “Lucy has been kind enough to lend me a copy of the play, and though there is some…questionable language involved, I think the overall message is important enough that the school board will overlook the standing no-profanity rule. Just this once,” he added.

Andre’s face lit up, as the rare chance to do gritty, contemporary theater grew real. “Screw the musical!” he said with a conspiritorial grin.

As was his way, Andre played with casting so that the normally almost all-male play included a few women as well. It was an extremely brutal and challenging show, in my opinion even more of a tragedy than Romeo and Juliet. Set in New York City in the very early years of the AIDS crisis, before anyone even had a name for the mysterious disease that was killing so many gay men, the play tackled the very issues I wanted my classmates to be thinking about.

The cast had really stepped up and so far rehearsals were going brilliantly. Every day, I thanked my lucky stars that I lived in a community that was willing to let us do a play like this, and that the administration had such faith in our ability to pull it off.

It was a smaller cast than Romeo and Juliet, but all the central people in my life were in it. Evan, Max, Courtney, Ty, Elyse. It was scary at first, working on a project like this with them, when so many of them knew what I was going through and how close to home it rested with me. But I think that made them work even harder, like they didn’t want to let me down.

And as far as I could tell, Elyse had kept my secret from Ty. I was impressed, especially considering the fact that we were doing a show about AIDS and it would have been so easy for her to accidentally-on-purpose let it slip at any time. But she was keeping her word. So far, anyway. She and I would never be friends, but at least our feelings toward each other had evolved past sheer hatred and were hovering a little closer to tolerance. I considered that progress.

• • •

The commercial ended, and suddenly my family was pulling me to my feet for a deluge of hugs and kisses. I radiated with accomplishment—I was finally, officially, a professional actor. I had to admit, it felt good.

All at once my cell phone started chirping, and for a while I was busy fielding calls and texts from a gushing Max and Courtney, telling me again how amazing the commercial was—even though I’d already shown them my DVD copy. Then my dads started getting calls from my grandparents and their friends from work, so I took the baby and let them do the proud-parent thing while Evan and I went and sat on the stoop out front. The April air was warm, and the trees were beginning to blossom.

“You’re going to be a star,” he murmured in my ear. I turned my face to his and answered him with a deep kiss.

“I love you,” I whispered, my eyes still closed and my lips still grazing against his. I felt his mouth curl into a smile.

We still hadn’t had sex, but we weren’t in any rush. Sex complicated things, especially in our case, and after Evan’s HIV test had come back negative, neither of us was particularly eager to go down that road again. So, for now, we were perfectly content taking it slow.

I rested my head on his shoulder and readjusted my sleeping baby sister in my arms. She was the mellowest, happiest baby I’d ever seen. I couldn’t help but suspect that somehow, she knew what a bullet she’d dodged.

As planned, Lisa had stayed with us until she gave birth. After Papa’s virtual in-home imprisonment of her, we all knew she’d be out the door as soon as the baby was born, but what I never could have predicted was that she would leave the baby with us. My dads told me later, though, that they’d known it was a possibility for a while. Lisa asking me to name the baby was the red flag.

I don’t know how she looked at that gorgeous, tiny, healthy baby girl and saw anything other than perfection, but Lisa took one look at her and freaked, just as she had with me time and time again. I finally came to realize that it wasn’t me that wasn’t good enough; it was her. She would never be a mother, and she knew it.

I thought about it a lot, and my theory was that all Lisa really wanted was someone to love her. But when her drug addiction and severe lack of any form of compassion prevented that, she decided she would have a baby. In her mind, her baby would love her, no matter what. And who knows, that may have been true. But the variable in the equation was Lisa. After she gave birth, it became clear that she simply wasn’t capable of loving the baby in return. And that posed a problem.

So Dad and Papa adopted her, and I finally gave her a name. Viola Freeman-Moore. She’d only been in the world a month and already it was impossible to imagine life without her.

• • •

After dinner, I walked Evan to his car.

“I’ll call you later,” he promised, and kissed me good-bye.

I watched his taillights disappear around the corner, and then looked down at the object in my hands. A stamped envelope, addressed to Lee Harrison, 177 Spring Street, Apt. 5B, New York, NY, 10012.

Inside was a single sheet of hot pink paper: a schedule for Roxie’s meetings. I slid it into the empty mailbox and flipped the little flag up.

Maybe Lee would never show up, but maybe he would. And if he did, we would be there to help him. Because, when it comes down to it, life really isn’t all that bad.

And of that I was absolutely positive.