Read Ryan White - My Own Story for Free Online

“You hurt?” The coach ran up with a towel in case I was bleeding. That was scary. I quit at the end of the season. I was never going to be an athlete, and I decided I had to learn to live with that.
    W E SEEMED pretty well settled in Windfall. My grandparents weren’t so close by to worry about me. But in 1982, when I was eleven, Mom and Steve decided to divorce. Like Dad, Steve wasn’t home much. But after Steve and Mom separated, and she moved back to Kokomo with Andrea and me, Steve didn’t disappear the way Dad had. He called us every week, and he came to see us every Sunday and mowed our lawn. Lots of times he still drove Andrea to skating practice, and he took Andrea and me skating at the rink in Kokomo, though I paid more attention to the pinball machines. After I got AIDS, he always visited me in the hospital when other people were scared to come near me. When my friends asked who he was, Steve would laugh and say he was my unwed stepfather. He has something like twenty or thirty nieces and nephews, so he’s used to being the official baby-sitter. He and Mom talked on the phone constantly, about everything, like brother and sister. They were so friendly that people asked Mom why they didn’t get back together. Mom said the point was they were like brother and sister, not husband and wife.
    Even though I couldn’t play baseball, and my mom was divorced, I felt like I had a pretty normal childhood. Mom had to be two parents in one, but lots of kids in Kokomo had single mothers. Women could support their families on their jobs at Delco, so they didn’t have to stay married if they were in bad situations. Andrea and I never felt out of it at school. We went away on vacation—once my grandparents took us to the NASA Space Center—just like other kids. And you’d never guess I had hemophilia unless I told you. Andrea might tell you not to play rough with me, but I never would. If I got hurt, I called Mom, and she drove home and gave me some Factor in the kitchen. There wasn’t anything to worry about. So I couldn’t figure out what was going on when Grandpa started fussing about my Factor.

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    How I Got AIDS
    I n August 1984 I was twelve and a half—looking forward to turning into a typical obnoxious teenager. I was an honors student just about to start junior high at Western Middle School, a few miles outside Kokomo in Russiaville. Kids from Kokomo are bussed to Western along with kids from other towns close by. Indiana has lots of towrns named after foreign places—Valparaiso, Vincennes, New Paris. Russiaville is pronounced ROO-shaville—just so you won’t think you’re really in Russia, I guess.
    Andrea was eleven, and after four years of practice, she was the ace roller skater she’d always dreamed of becoming. This month she was finally going to the national championships out in Lincoln, Nebraska. She and Mom were very busy. If you want to be a skating champ, you have to practice, and if you’re too young to drive to the rink, someone has to take you. So, on weekdays Mom got up at 4:00 A.M. to be at Delco from 6:00 A.M. until 2:30 in the afternoon. She worked on a computer, making sure that three assembly lines in the plant had all the parts they needed. When Mom got home, she and Andrea left for the skating rink, and didn’t come back until 8:30 at night. On weekends Mom and Andrea commuted to meets out of town, or to Chicago where Andrea practiced with a boy who would be a great partner when she competed in events for pairs.
    Well, we all went to the nationals, and saw Andrea place second in dance, fourth in freestyle, and fifth in pairs. I was really so proud of her! We all figured, next stop—the Olympics.
    I couldn’t go on all her skating trips, so I stayed home alone a lot. Mom wondered whether I’d be scared, especially after the year before, when the tornado hit our house in Windfall. But I wasn’t lonely. I had a girlfriend named Kris who went to Western too, and lived in our