“You don’t know?”
“Know what?”
“William’s in the hospital.” Tony turned toward the far counter and laid flowers out next to the row of vases so Bob, the head designer, could assemble them faster.
“He might not make it this time,” Tony said, his lips moving slightly as he counted off the Gerbera daisies, liatris, and Stargazer lilies that were the shop’s signature look.
“Oh,” she said, hating the childlike banality of her response, but not sure what she was supposed to say. “No one told me.”
“You should really go visit him,” Tony said. “It might be your last chance.”
She set up her workstation with green florist wire, tape, and the bows she pre-made and kept on a pegboard. She was in charge of the bodywork—the corsages and boutonnieres. Ryan had taught her to mix bear grass and seeded eucalyptus in between her rosebuds and filler flowers, and now Girl was the only one who made them. She loved Fridays. Her mind could wander down any path while her fingers worked automatically, taping and wiring the stems together. Girl loved making pretty things, and she loved that Ryan trusted her enough to delegate one section of his business to her teenaged hands.
“Was this, um, self-inflicted?” Girl asked as she pulled buckets of flowers from the cooler, using her thumbnail to detach the rosebuds from their stems, leaving the headless spines in the bucket to deal with later. William is such an arrogant asshole, she thought. I wonder if he tried to kill himself? Mother always said people who acted full of themselves generally didn’t have great self-esteem. Suicide was the only thing that made sense—William was young, just twenty-four. The only people Girl knew who got sick enough to go to the hospital were her mother’s age or older.
“Well, I guess you could say that,” Tony said. “I mean he didn’t take care of himself properly. He was always out partying till three or four in the morning, and never got enough sleep. You can’t burn the candle at both ends like that.”
“Huh?” She was totally confused. Staying up late and getting up early was what most of her friends did in high school. It didn’t seem like something that would make you wind up in a hospital.
“You know he’s HIV, right?” Tony asked.
“Oh. I didn’t know.”
She remembered how last month Ryan had asked her to clean the bathrooms and Tony had insisted that Girl wear a pair of old, white medical gloves with stains on the fingers. It was weird—Mother never wore gloves when she cleaned. Girl had gone into the bathroom and the toilet rim was covered in diarrhea splatter. She was glad Tony had found the gloves after all. She wondered if gay men got diarrhea more often than straight people, because both toilets were in covered in such a variety of color that it couldn’t have been just one person. Ryan should hire someone to clean the bathrooms, she thought. Then it hit her—he had. At just over minimum wage, she was the lowest-paid employee in the shop. She was probably cheaper than a cleaning service. After that Girl stopped bitching to herself when she cleaned. It was worth it to work there. She never wondered if the guys were HIV positive, but it wouldn’t have kept her from cleaning the bathrooms if she had. She knew that you couldn’t get AIDS from a toilet seat. At least, Mother said so, and right now Girl clung to that. Mother was so sure of it that when her seventh grade health teacher had said, “no one knows if you can get AIDS from a toilet seat,” Mother had not only called the principal but had left work early to talk to him in person. If there was any doubt, she wouldn’t have done that, right?
Girl had taken an AIDS test once, but was too scared to ever go back and get the results. In her senior government class they had debated quarantining people who were HIV positive, and honestly, Girl had been all for it. Send ’em to an island and keep the rest of us safe, she had thought back then, but now Girl was ashamed of herself. It was different when you knew someone who had it, someone regular and young and not a freak at all.
“What hospital is he at?” Girl asked Tony, not looking at him. The work area had two counters on opposing walls, and she was glad it wasn’t set up for eye contact. They sat on tall, backless stools diagonally across from each other, and Girl kept her eyes on her work so he wouldn’t see her face. For him, people with AIDS were common, and Girl didn’t want him to think she was shocked or appalled or anything. She didn’t want to betray herself as a dumb straight girl.
“St. Mary’s.”
She had heard of the hospital down in the bad part of the city, but had never been there before. Mother had had seven eye surgeries since Girl was a kid, including three cornea transplants, so she had been in most of the local hospitals at one time or another. Only one of Mother’s surgeries had been at St. Mary’s, the very first one, when Girl was too young to visit. Mother said the hospital was so bad that after the first surgery she always asked the doctors to schedule her at one of the other hospitals. Dirty, she had said, and understaffed. Girl wasn’t sure why William went there when Genesee Hospital was right down the street. She didn’t really understand that AIDS patients weren’t welcome everywhere.
“I didn’t know what to bring,” Girl told Mother, sliding into the blue front seat of her Toyota. William was a florist, so it seemed weird to bring him flowers. Instead, Girl got a small box of Russell Stover’s chocolate and a get-well card.
“Candy is good,” Mother said, “If
