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Mina didn’t know exactly what right was, but she’d known that it hadn’t been with those guys. And she also knew it was right when she looked at a sick Levi with the same swelling sense of affection and—dare she think it?—love that she felt when looking at well and robust Levi.
Because he was Levi.
“Your father and I are too far away to mend any broken hearts. And you’ve been dating this boy for a couple months now. Longer than anyone since...”
The bag of chips crinkled when Mina set her hand on it.
Since Enrique. The boyfriend who had nearly literally broken her heart. Enrique had been poz, too, which her mother knew, and seemed unable to understand how that had been part of the problem. Not that Mina had anything against dating someone with HIV—that would be self-hatred, and she wasn’t into that—but Enrique had an activist streak she respected but wasn’t ready for.
He had wanted her to be out, to be loud and to be proud. And she wanted that, too, eventually.
But first she wanted to be known for herself. She didn’t want to be Mina Clements, the chick who drew autobiographical comics about HIV. She wanted to be Professor Mina Clements, who taught, studied and drew Russian literature.
What she’d admired about Enrique was that he’d been open about his HIV status and still managed to define himself, rather than let other people—and his poz status—define him.
Mina didn’t know how to do that. She’d wanted to. Hell, she still wanted to. But the how of it eluded her.
Their breakup had sent her to her bed and, at her roommate’s urging, to a therapist’s couch, because she’d been brokenhearted but also because she’d felt like a failure. By the time the relationship ended, she’d felt like her desire to keep her status on a need-to-know basis meant she was a weak-willed, cowardly person, and it had been a relief when Enrique had finally dumped her.
Her therapist had told her that her status was her own business, that Enrique seemed to want a partner in his activism as much as a partner in his life, and that the fact that she’d withstood his pressures to out herself made her the opposite of weak-willed. Mina got to define herself as she chose, the woman had said. And, the woman had said, that definition was allowed to change over time.
Which was good, because often Mina felt “Who am I?” was one of those questions that would elude her until she died.
She gave in to the chocolate, popping a few chips in her mouth. Repeatedly asking herself these questions was probably why she was a professor of Russian language and literature, instead of something practical like...well, almost anything else. If one wanted to contemplate the existential questions of life, there were few better texts than the Russian classics.
As the chocolate slid down her throat, it served its purpose. Her shoulders relaxed. Her jaw relaxed. And she was able to refocus on her conversation with her mother.
“Since Enrique. I know.” Mina waited, her hand in the bag of chips, for the wave of self-doubt and indecision that always followed mention of Enrique’s name. When it didn’t come, she eased her hand out of the bag without a single chip.
She wasn’t the same person she had been then. She was a stronger person. A person who didn’t need chocolate chips to get through a tough conversation with her mom.
Her hand darted back into the bag for one chip.
She might want the treat, though.
Putting the last chip she would have today in her mouth, she took a deep breath. “Mom, Enrique was over two years ago. Yes, he broke my heart. Yes, part of the reason we broke up was because of my HIV. But I’m a different person now. The job. The house. The boyfriend. I got my life together. And sometimes—” she paused, looking at the bag of chocolate chips but not reaching for any “—sometimes when you worry about me so much, I wonder if the real problem is not my HIV, but that you don’t have faith in me.”
There was rustling on the other end of the phone, but no words.
Mina could imagine what her mom was doing, though. Her mouth was probably open. Her dad had probably looked up from some Micah Blackwell interview on the National Sports Network, decided that the open mouth was a scary sign and looked quickly back at the television before she could notice and say something he might have to respond to.
