I Swear I'll Make It Up to You Read Online Free PDF Page A

how to tattoo yourself with a pencil, a sewing needle, and ashes. I taught him how to speak English by explaining heavy metal songs on the radio, sitcoms on TV, and Police Academy movies. When we left for school in the morning, he echoed my farewell to my mother: “Bye, Mom!”
    In seventh grade, his uncle finally threw him out, and he was assigned to foster care in Albuquerque. My mom and I were heartbroken. Each time we went to visit him, his situation was worse.He had dropped out of school; then his foster family had kicked him out; then he had run away from the group home. Our last visit, it had taken hours to track him down through his friends. He was thin and gray from smoking more than he ate. He had cut the tip off a finger making jewelry in a sweatshop, then stuck it back on with a Band-Aid.
    Our last Christmas in New Mexico, Chuong came to spend a week with us. I spent the entire time lobbying for him to come to New Hampshire with us. My parents finally assented. It only took one visit to his social worker to get permission. Nobody else wanted him.
    I could not believe my parents had agreed. Chuong, my hilarious best friend, singing filthy made-up lyrics to Skid Row songs while dancing with the dogs . . . Every night would be like a sleepover.
    Still, getting out of the car in New Hampshire to those oppressive clots of wet snow, I couldn’t shake the feeling that, by leaving New Mexico, we had made a terrible mistake.

    Our house in New Hampshire was a ramshackle five-bedroom on a swampy one-acre lot off a minor highway. It was an old farmhouse that had been extended twice, first on one side, then the other. The basement leaked and stank of black mold and cat piss. There was no air-conditioning, and the ground floor was only heated by a small woodstove. Los Alamos had been subject to extreme weather, with summer days that regularly broke a hundred degrees and massive snowstorms that buried our vehicles, but it was dry heat that disappeared each night, and the sun shone brightly between dumps of snow. New Hampshire was a hot, wet, inescapable jungle all summer, an icy and sunless gulag all winter, and gray for weeks in between.
    Our house was surrounded on three sides by woods that quickly devolved into swamp. Our lone neighbor across the highway wasan old farmer who had more than eighty cats. He was hunched with age, long past working. The only thing his farm produced was more cats. He fed them each morning but declined to neuter/spay them or to provide veterinary care. Virtually all of them developed huge, crusty scabs in the corners of their eyes, eventually creeping off to the woods to die or getting run over by the heavy trucks that barreled down the highway in front of our house.
    â€œWhite trash” was not a phrase I’d heard in Canada or New Mexico. In Canada, nearly everyone had gardened, hunted, and fished and knew how to stretch a dollar. Everyone wore hand-me-downs without shame. In fact, a hand-me-down shirt was almost preferable to a “new” shirt from the Whistle Stop Thrift Store—a hand-me-down was something of Tatyana’s I had coveted for months, maybe even a year. That it now fit me proved that I had grown into it, which meant I was becoming like my older sister, whom I envied, and had also won a victory over her by getting something away from her. In New Mexico, I was vaguely aware of us having more money than some of my friends’ families and less than others, but poverty was not something I was keenly aware of.
    In New Hampshire, poverty was everywhere. According to the 1990 census, New Hampshire was more than 98 percent white at the time. I recall there being a total of three black kids in our school—one set of twins and their cousin—and one Puerto Rican. Our school district was the poorest in the state. In our town, poverty and white trash Yankee pride had curdled into something toxic, a specific decaying northeastern despair.
    The locals gave