“Messed up they couldn’t even tell you,” Nicole said, as I continued to robotically wash the last few pots and pans. No wonder it had been so easy for me to get in here. Nobody else would take a room with somebody who had AIDS. Motherfuckers! As if I didn’t have enough to worry about. What were we supposed to do if she got really sick and started coughing all over the damn place? Janice looked like she had nowhere else on earth to go, that she’d sleep with wolves to avoid sleeping outside. No wonder Tiny never asked anybody to hold or change or burp that baby. Even its spit-up was crawling with a virus. Then when I thought about it, she never even kept her trash in the room but took it downstairs each and every night. No wonder she was so damn bony. Come to think of it, she had a pretty face but it was messed up because she had a tooth missing. And there was this funny sore on the side of her right temple that she kept covered with a bang. There was no telling what I had touched in there that had their germs on it. How dare they not give me a choice in this matter?

Nicole and I finished up in the kitchen, and I washed up for bed before returning to my room. Thankfully, Janice, Tiny, and her baby were sleeping when I got up there, so I didn’t have to be phony. I would go ahead and sit next to her in morning classes. I didn’t want her to know I knew. But right after that I was going to go to the head sister—Gladys herself—and beg to have my room changed.

“YOU GOT SOME nerve coming in here with nothing but the clothes on yo’ back and talkin’ ’bout who you share a room with.”

Gladys’s arms were folded across the hump in her chest. Nerve wasn’t the least of my problems with a Black woman stout as this in front of my face.

“It’s just that I’m worried if I touch something or—”

“Well, quit worrying!” The force in her voice not only shut me up, but made me sit straight up as if I had been struck by lightning. “You can’t catch no HIV or AIDS or just ’bout nothing else ’cept the flu just by standing next to somebody, breathing the same air. She got just as much right to be here as you. You girls need to all mind ya business and focus on gettin’ right with the Lord. Spreadin’ gossip is shameful, it’s blasphemy, and I ain’t allowin’ it in my house. Where the Bible you got when you first moved in here? ’Cause I know you got one.”

“In my drawer.” She could barely hear me because my head was down.