“I suggest you go to the hospital right away. Get your body checked, and then your head.”
With that, I didn’t spare her another glance and walked away.
Chloe finally couldn’t take it anymore and went to the hospital.
The doctor frowned after seeing her test results.
“This isn’t a regular infection… this is an STD, a nasty mixed infection. Such a young girl, how did you end up like this?”
Almost that very day, the news spread like wildfire on the campus SnapChat group.
“Chloe from the Lit department caught an STD from sleeping around!”
“The true face of the pure campus queen‘? I’m absolutely disgusted!”
“Can someone please go hose down Building 8 with some bleach? Don’t let this mess affect the other girls!”
Leo panicked too.
He’d been running a fever every day lately, and rashes had started appearing on his body.
He secretly went to the hospital.
And sure enough, he was infected too.
The moment the diagnosis came out, he was completely stunned.
He came to me, looking miserable.
“Did you do something to *me* too? Are you getting revenge on me…?”
I looked up and smiled.
YOU TOOKtu up wIMT CHICG, mi
revenge?”
“If I had that power, I’d have had you two disgusting lowlifes hit by a truck already.”
I enunciated each word.
“You’re filthy, you know that?”
“Stay away from me from now on. You make me sick.”
He was so stunned by my words that he couldn’t say anything, and he slinked away.
Chloe, meanwhile, stayed in the hospital, receiving daily IV drips, medication, and injections.
She initially thought the most painful days were finally over.
She even naively believed that if she just got serious about treatment and got through this, there would still be hope for the
future.
But a few days later, things suddenly changed.
6
The symptoms that had started to improve came back with a vengeance overnight, worse than ever.
Black spots appeared on her ulcerating skin, and pus began to ooze from her eyes.
The doctors re–examined her, and the results came back: HIV positive.
A buzzing sound filled her ears, and she couldn’t hear anything the doctor said afterward.
The doctors had no choice but to notify her family.
Her parents rushed in from their rural town. Her mom burst into tears the moment she saw her daughter like this.
Her dad’s face went completely dark when he saw ‘AIDS‘ on the chart, and he slapped her right across the face.
“We worked our fingers to the bone to send you to college, and you just went around sleeping around and getting *this* disease? Have you no shame?”
Her mom also cried and scolded,
“Didn’t you say you were studying hard at school? What the hell did you do? Do you know how hard we worked to scrape together that tuition every year? What unspeakable things have you done! Now that you have this disease, how are you ever going to get married? Without a proper dowry, how will your brother ever find a wife? How can we ever show our faces in this town? Are you trying to destroy our family line?”
Chloe cowered in her hospital bed, sobbing uncontrollably.
“I didn’t… I really didn’t… I didn’t sleep around…”
11:26 AM P
<
The doctors didn’t believe her, the nurses didn’t, her parents didn’t, and the whole world didn’t.
