The kid eagerly raised his hand at the back of the room at the Lincoln Middle School. He had the answer.

“A condom,” he said.

Right he was. A condom is the safe way. Abstinence is probably not going to work for most people, Scott Mitchel told the class.

“You can make a choice,” he said.

He sat on a table at the front of the room. He is half of the speaker’s bureau of AIDS Project Rhode Island. He and Darren Wells, the other half, would like to see more people signing up to sit in classrooms and bring students what can be basic, life-and-death information.

They know it isn’t easy. They know it isn’t easy to go into a classroom as a walking, talking exhibit of what can go wrong when precautions aren’t taken, when the advice they now give isn’t followed. They talk of the early days after diagnosis, when the only people they felt comfortable talking with were others who were HIV-positive.

“It was like a secret society,” said Mitchel.

But they also know that they are the best ones to deliver the message. They can tell anyone who wants to listen what can cause AIDS and what it can do to a person’s body and mind and place in the community.

“The paradox is that since I’ve come out I feel so much healthier,” said Wells, 39. “I swear my immune system is stronger.”

“And I know in my heart that Darren and I have changed lives,” said Mitchel, who is 51.

Wells has been HIV-positive for 9 years, Mitchel for 10. They both struggled with keeping it a secret. Then they struggled with the decision to put it to good use, to walk among students and tell them that this thing called AIDS, this disease that first claimed a place in public consciousness less than 30 years ago, is still very much with us.

For that is part of the problem now, the sense among many that AIDS has moved to other, less developed parts of the world and that medications have made it manageable for those who still suffer from it in this country. Just look at Magic Johnson.

“People think that it’s over?” said Mitchel. “I tell them 18,000 people died from it in this country last year.

“And most kids don’t know that there are teenagers who are HIV-positive in Rhode Island.”

He and Wells talked of the work they do with Al Wroblewski, AIDS Project administrator, in a conference room at Family Service of Rhode Island. Family Service and AIDS Project Rhode Island merged in June.

“What we’ve learned is that this has applicability beyond HIV-AIDS,” said Wroblewski. “It deals with the consequences of decisions made and not made. The future is in the moment. With Scott and Darren, the credibility is off the charts.”

The two men, who both look extremely healthy, have seen a whole lot of Rhode Island in their years of taking AIDS into the classroom. They have been reminded how very small the state is.

“The very first presentation I gave, the daughter of a former coworker was there,” said Wells. “She went straight to her mother. It’s one of the fears when you’re still working.”

He used to be a customer-service rep for an airline. It made him accustomed to speaking to strangers, he said.

“We’re alive for a reason,” said Wells. “We didn’t die all those times when we could have died.”

They have a full schedule. At first, some schools made it clear they weren’t interested. Some invited, then dis-invited the speakers’ bureau. But times have changed. There is more openness, more acceptance. When Mitchel went to the Lincoln Middle School last week, it was a return visit.

He started, as he always does, with “HIV101.” He talks of the virus attacking the immune system, of T-cells and how their numbers are a barometer of health or sickness. He points out there are four bodily fluids — blood, breast milk, semen and vaginal fluid — that can transmit the disease. Tears, saliva and sweat cannot. And taking the risk of injecting drugs with a needle is just too stupid to consider.

With the brief course in the basics over, he tells his own story. He tells of growing up in Rhode Island in poverty and abuse. He was expelled from school for fighting when he was 13. He walked from the school to the side of Route 95, put out his thumb and hitchhiked to California.

It is a story that holds’ eighth graders attention. He talks of partying young and continuing to party as he grew older. He got married at 18 and had a son and got divorced. He came back to Rhode Island and built a career and provided him and his son with an affluent lifestyle.

He lost it all to AIDS. He kept telling himself that his serious weight loss was due to too much partying, which it probably was.

“The doctor told me ‘you have AIDS. Without meds, you’ll be dead in six months.’ ”

He’s still here, still teaching, still taking his disease where it can be a lesson to hundreds and thousands of young people.

“Girls — you have a responsibility to keep yourselves alive and safe,” he tells the class in Lincoln.

He doesn’t get specific about sex, and the questions from the students don’t take him there. He says that when he speaks to college classes, he gets into more detail.

He has also developed the ability to read his audience. When he talks of being sexually active, he can detect facial expressions that betray that very thing.

At the end of the class, he thanks the students for being respectful.

“Kids really just want someone to be honest,” said Mitchel. “I’ve noticed a change in the last five years. At first, they would keep their distance. Now, there are hugs.”

bkerr@projo.com