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A busy, if kind, front desk worker. Mismatched and worn seats in the waiting area. The exam room, cold and hard and sterile, with posters on the wall reminding her about condoms. As if she didn’t know. As if she would forget again.
Levi set a plate next to her. Carrots. And rice, with what looked like one of the stir-fry sauces from her fridge. For a brief moment she wondered where he’d gotten the chicken.
Then she flipped the page. Sitting on the exam room bed, with a white sheet covering her lower body and her feet dangling over, not able to touch the small step at the end of the bed. The door was closed. The curtain was closed. And the doctor was sitting in a chair, her hand on Mina’s knee.
“You tested positive for HIV,” Mina wrote in the doctor’s speech bubble.
“Okay.” It had been such a stupid thing to say, but Mina hadn’t expected that news. Hadn’t known what else to say. The support groups she eventually went to had included people who hadn’t been surprised by the news. Hemophiliacs who had been getting blood transfusions during the height of the infection. Gay men who’d had risky sex. Intravenous drug users. All the stereotypes of someone with HIV, and at the back of their brains had been the thought that it could happen to them.
And then there had been people like Mina, who didn’t fit the media’s portrayal. But the disease didn’t care who the media said was at risk for HIV, and it didn’t care who the public thought “deserved” it. They had all sat stunned in an exam room, probably saying something as inane as “Okay.”
“Is there someone here with you?” the doctor had asked. She’d been kind. They’d all been kind at the Planned Parenthood. Busy, occasionally brusque, but kind.
“No.” Kaitlyn had offered to come, but Mina had turned her down. Going alone had been part of Mina feeling grown-up, taking the bus by herself to get her pelvic exam and prescription for the pill. She was learning the hard way that feeling grown-up didn’t mean facing things alone, so much as it meant being alone.
At some point when she was editing the panels, Levi came back in, picked up her full plate, kissed the top of her head and said, “I’m going to bed. It’s late, and I’m tired, so after I clean up, I’m going to sleep here, okay?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
She erased Kaitlyn’s arm and redrew it. Sharper elbows. Kaitlyn had been sympathetic but pointed. Mina redrew her roommate’s mouth. Once that was done, she spread the panels out on her desk and leaned back in her chair.
As she spotted minor problems, she pulled a panel toward her, fixed what she saw and put the page back in place. All little fixes. The curve of the doctor’s eyes. The sweep of the hair of Chase’s Einstein poster on the wall, looking amused at the earnestness of the condom negotiation happening below.
How many times had Chase made the same “I’ll pull out” argument, but with a different girl?
Mina hadn’t ever considered that she wasn’t the first, though she had hoped she was the last. When she’d called Chase to tell him her test results, he hadn’t sounded surprised. And she’d never figured out how to tell women he was dating that he was bad news without sounding like a jealous ex-girlfriend. Eventually she’d stopped. Cowardly, maybe, but she’d stopped.
When all the drawings were to her satisfaction, she got out her pens and inked in her story. HIV became as permanent on paper as it was in her life.
She laid the panel out on the table again and stood on the seat of her chair, gaining as much of a bird’s-eye view as possible. Something was missing.
The chair rolled back a little on its wheels as she leaned forward, trying to get even more over her desk and her panels. The seat rocked when she moved a little to the left and the right. If she wasn’t careful, she would fall on her ass and wake up Levi.
She wasn’t quite ready for his soulful brown eyes to see this part of her life in living color.
Color! She grabbed at her face when she realized that was what the drawings needed. Then she almost hopped off her chair to climb into bed with Levi and be done with the whole thing. Wait till morning, like he’d suggested. Or just hope and pray that people didn’t find some Russian literature professor having HIV to be all that interesting, and they started talking about something else.
