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

shoe to whack me for some vile thing I had said to Tatyana. We struggled, and I took the shoe away. I was 5'10" and already towered over her. We stood there in the hallway to my bedroom, staring at each other, neither of us knowing what to do, a pair of actors who had gone off script and had no idea what to say or who to be.
    The lone ray of light that bleak winter was Chuong.

    A new kid had appeared in my sixth-grade class one morning. He was Asian, a couple of inches shorter than me, well muscled but with a finer structure. Chuong was from Vietnam, our teacher explained, and he had just arrived in America. He had endured a dangerous boat ride and then spent two years in a refugee camp in Malaysia. He was fourteen, a couple of years older than us, but hespoke little English, so he would study with our class. We were to make him feel welcome.
    When we all stood for the Pledge of Allegiance, he stayed seated, his head down.
    â€œChuong,” I said under my breath.
    He looked at me.
    I gestured for him to stand, and he did. While the rest of the class said the Pledge of Allegiance, Chuong stood there silently, not speaking. Like me.
    My teacher pulled me aside at lunch. The new boy had moved in across the street from me with an uncle he didn’t know. Could I try to befriend him? That night, after dinner, I went over to call on him.
    A tall, thin, stern Vietnamese man answered the door. Chuong had run away, he told me. That quick, huh? Well, which way did he go? Chuong’s uncle pointed to his left, up the street.
    It was dark by the time I caught up with Chuong, walking stiffly upright in Bugle Boy pants, a long-sleeve plaid shirt, a green baseball hat perched high on his head, and flip-flops. I fell into step with him.
    He spoke almost no English, and I spoke no Vietnamese, but he was able to communicate to me that he had a friend in Houston. He was going to walk there. The moon was already high in the sky, and it was starting to get chilly.
    I stopped him and went down on one knee on the sidewalk. Chuong dropped to his haunches next to me. I put one little stone down.
    â€œUncle. Yes?” I said.
    He nodded his head.
    I took another little rock and held it up for him to see.
    â€œChuong. Yes?”
    Again he nodded.
    I made a walking gesture with the fingers on one hand to signify walking for a long time and then put the stone down about aquarter of an inch away from the Uncle stone. I grabbed a third, larger stone and held it up for him.
    â€œHouston. Yes?”
    Again, Chuong nodded, cocking one eyebrow at me, curious.
    I stood up and threw the rock as far as I could down the street. We watched it bounce once and then disappear into the darkness. Chuong looked at me, his eyes wide.
    â€œAhhh,” he said, crestfallen.
    â€œIt’s really far,” I said. “Really, really, really far.”
    He let out a deep sigh. We turned around and headed home.
    Chuong was a marvel. He could outrun anyone, and in flip-flops. He could fart on command. He’d grown up on the streets of Saigon, and his body was covered in scars, a slash across his chest where he’d been cut with a sharpened key and an ugly star on his forehead where he’d been hit with a bottle. My mother told me that people had committed suicide on the boat to Malaysia by throwing themselves overboard because the conditions had been so bad. It was whispered that Chuong had only been sent on to America because he and some friends had ganged up on and killed a guard in the refugee camp who had been abusing them. His life was so cool, vastly superior to my boring life of spelling homework and cleaning the cat litter.
    Chuong’s uncle had little patience for the nephew he didn’t know, so Chuong slept at our house more than at his home, cooking mountains of egg rolls for us on the weekends. Chuong taught me how to make weapons out of scrap metal, how to shift your center of gravity when running so no one could catch you, and