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

and I had been embroiled in a cold war for years.
    Our grueling cross-country move was just another road trip adventure for my sister Tashina. She was eight, four years younger than I, my mother’s brother’s child. She’d come to live with us when she was four because her parents couldn’t afford to look after her. She was Native American, adopted, and wore hearing aids, which made her unforgivably bizarre to other kids her age. I worried for her.
    I worried for me too. My transition from Canada to New Mexico had not gone smoothly. My first day, my teacher made a big production of stopping the Pledge of Allegiance because I wasn’tstanding up with my hand over my heart. No one had told me! I stood up, but I didn’t say anything, because I knew she couldn’t make me. Instantly, I became that weird kid from that weird country that had something to do with hockey. Did I speak Canadian? Did we still have dirt floors?
    I had skipped a grade and was in the gifted program, a freak even among the freaks. “Potential” was a word frustrated teachers often deposited on my report cards, a word I came to hate: “Mishka has such potential, it’s a shame that his performance is marred by behavioral issues and lack of focus.” Such a bullshit word. Finally, I looked it up: “showing the capacity to develop into something in the future.” Something good? Something bad? It just meant that, right now, I was nothing. When I was nine, I started having panic attacks. When I was ten, I started cutting myself.
    By seventh grade, my awkward entry had compounded into genuine alienation. I couldn’t skate, and I sucked at sports despite my size. I didn’t have the confidence to wear clothes I thought were cool, so I wore my dad’s old clothes or clothes from the thrift store. I thought I looked tough. I probably looked like an aspiring hobo.
    I was the tallest in my class, but I’d become a target for bullies who recognized I lacked the sense of self to fight back. I got beat up on the bus to school or between classes. My lunch got stolen so frequently that I started bringing two. They just took them both. During one lunch break, I was held down, and my shoes were stolen off my feet. I got jumped by a ninth grader after school, and he cracked my new glasses. I’d broken down in tears, which only made it worse.
    By eighth grade, I felt I deserved to be alone. When the possibility of leaving New Mexico came up, I was all for it. I knew nothing of New Hampshire, but anywhere was better than here. I didn’t tell anyone we were moving, just downgraded myself one notch from “ignored” to altogether absent.

    Mom had always been my first and best friend. It wasn’t unusual for her to draw open the curtains while we were eating breakfast before school and say, “You know what? It’s far too nice a day for you kids to go to school. Run and get ready, we’re going cross-country skiing.” Or to the beach. Or berry picking, us kids just eating what we picked, my mom taking off her halter top (“So I can get some sun,” she said) in the privacy of the berry patch and filling pails with blueberries for muffins and pies. Mom had always been my protector: dragging me out of an apple tree I’d climbed when I was six while she was photographing the mother bear and cubs in the next tree for the town paper; standing up for me when I got kicked out of Cub Scouts for fighting; stunning us kids into silence and then hysterical laughter when she told the lady at the gas station to “fuck off” for calling me a retard when I was nine; standing up for me when I got kicked off the swim team; taking me to get my ear pierced at the mall in sixth grade when I got suspended from school; driving me to school each morning when the bullying on the bus got out of control.
    But even this had soured. The summer before we left New Mexico, my mother took off her