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

and white from the effort of my run. Though I’d dried my face three times, sweat still poured out of me. But I no longer had that “cornered animal” look I had gotten used to. My body was still in a blind panic, fervently trying to recover from the exertion, but my eyes looked almost serene. As torturous as the run had been, I felt strangely at peace.
    People had been accusing me of wanting to kill myself since I was a kid. I only ever wanted to kill half of myself—the good half, the half that, against logic, kept hoping, kept trying, kept caring. I’d gotten everything else wrong—maybe I’d just picked the wrong side?
    In exhaustion and wonder, I looked up the distance from my house to Beauty Bar. I had run nearly five miles without stopping.
    I had run that far once before, when I was thirteen. I tried to remember it. It felt like a lifetime ago. But almost twenty years later, it had mysteriously happened again. My life seemed to shift a few degrees. New possibilities had only been negative for a long time—it was possible that I would wind up in rehab; it was possible that I would wind up in jail. On my run, some invisible divider had cracked and then shattered. It was now possible that I could do good things too.

CHAPTER 2
    Chemical Youth
    A lcohol is written into my family’s genetic code. My parents were poor farm kids from Saskatchewan, Canada. Three of my four grandparents died from alcoholism. I don’t remember my first drink. Apparently, my folks got a giggle out of watching me slurp down the last drops of my dad’s beer when I was a toddler. “It was a cultural norm then,” my mom said when I quizzed her about it. “We all had pictures of our kids with beer cans to their lips. God, I can’t tell you how many times I’ve thought back to that and wondered if we weren’t making a huge mistake.”
    My parents sometimes put a little wine in our apple juice at dinner. I couldn’t have been seven then. Uncle Albert, my mother’s youngest brother, slipped me a couple of rum-and-Cokes on the sly at a family reunion when I was nine, a trespass for which I think my mom is still mad at him. But my first drunk was on seven Budweiser tall boys when I was thirteen. That’s where it all began.

    We moved to New Hampshire from New Mexico in the winter of my eighth-grade year. We had followed my father, a nuclear physicist and our sole provider, to Kingston, New Hampshire, as we hadfollowed him from Ontario, Canada, to Los Alamos, New Mexico, five years earlier. He was the eldest child and only son, fawned over by his mother, grilled relentlessly by his father. Whether doted on or cut down, he was the center of the universe, and his sister, Marilyn, came a distant second. When he returned to his father’s farm with his PhD from the University of Saskatchewan, his father said, “Don’t think this makes you any better than us.”
    The second of seventeen children, my mother had always been a mother, minding the children under her, practically raising the youngest as her own. She was independent, the first in her family to get a college degree. She created a small stir in our tiny town by keeping her maiden name when she married, but she had always known she would have children. She had wanted to have “only six,” she told us. She seemed to have her hands full with half that.
    Tatyana maintained a hurt silence nearly the entire, days-long December drive to our new life in Kingston. Two years older than I, she’d been popular in Los Alamos, got good grades, and had a boyfriend who skated and drove a pickup with oversize tires. She’d always been getting picked up or dropped off, swapping clothes with her friends, GUESS and Vuarnet and JIMMY’Z, and talking on her Swatch phone for hours. She was distraught about being plucked from her high school clique in the middle of her sophomore year. Not that I cared. Tatyana