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In the drawing, Mina stood in her college-self’s idea of sexy clothing. So, basically, she wasn’t wearing anything but strips of cloth. She hadn’t seen Chase since college, when she’d occasionally pass him on campus, and he remained impossibly young in her mind. Everything about him was easy to draw. All the lines of his body were permanently etched in her memory, like her mind had taken a photo that would never fade. She’d sat in the Planned Parenthood room when the doctor had come in and told her that her HIV test had come back positive and—snap—she’d never be able to forget anything about that night, down to the green, red and yellow plaid of the flannel shirt she’d felt so privileged to remove.
That panel drawn, she flipped the page and started on the next. Chase’s smile and the way she’d felt sexy and grown-up, silly to think about now while trying to arrange the speech bubbles in the dorm room in between the posters and clothing on the floor. How to draw his confidence as he said he’d pull out and not to worry. How to draw the wanting. The wanting of sex. The wanting to trust. The wanting to believe.
So different from now, when there was no wanting; there was only believing.
In her drawing, she leaned forward.
Poor naive Mina on the page. She’d wanted to have sex with him because he was Chase, and she’d had a crush on him since their first semester together in calculus. She drew it all, not skimping on the awkward uncomfortable sex that had been college and twin beds.
Mina flipped the page and started another. Another dorm room, almost exactly the same, except piles of clothes on the floor were on only one side of the room, and there was more food in the fridge by the window. Different posters on the walls.
She jumped and gave her roommate a third arm when Levi kissed the top of her head. “You look busy. Shall I finish dinner?”
“Yes,” she said, not looking up and scrubbing out Kaitlyn’s extra arm.
“What were you making?”
“Carrots.” Different clothes on this very different Mina. Nothing sexy. Pajama pants—they had been pink, with daisies—and an old T-shirt of her brother’s.
“Anything else?”
“Carrots.” Kaitlyn had been wearing pajama pants, too, and a tank top. Blue pants and a light blue tank top. They had both been color-coordinated, so careful in their choice of clothing, even when casually lying in bed, telling each other their dreams. Even if they pretended not to be, Mina with her art and Kaitlyn with her physics, they had both been so concerned with the outside. Even though in this moment the virus was already replicating and spreading on the inside.
What was inside was what mattered, and Mina had HIV inside her. She didn’t have to let the virus define her, but she needed to start letting people see what was inside. The good, the bad and the buggy.
She leaned back in her chair, bumping her head against Levi, who said, “I’ll go make carrots, then,” with amusement in his voice. She nodded, only barely aware of the press of another kiss on her head.
The panel had two girls, both sitting on their dorm beds. Kaitlyn, leaning against the wall, legs hanging over the edge of her bed. Mina, hugging her knees, her head resting on her knees. She remembered that moment. She had been curled up against all the bad consequences of unprotected sex. Naïveté meant they’d been worried about only one of the consequences.
“Are you on the pill?” Mina drew in a speech bubble above Kaitlyn’s head.
“No.” Another speech bubble, lower, with Mina’s answer. And then, though it wasn’t usually her style, Mina drew in little viruses dancing around her head. Round, space-alien half creatures with suckers sticking out all around. The microscopic portents of death that she hadn’t even considered. Because why would she have? She was at an elite private college, and she’d had heterosexual sex. Pregnancy was the worst thing either of them could imagine, and Kaitlyn had convinced her to go to Planned Parenthood and get on the pill, even though Chase wasn’t returning her calls.
She flipped to the next page. All the waiting at Planned Parenthood in one panel, tightly divided into three separate spaces. That was how it had felt. Everything, all crammed in. A vise of worry.
