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called him out.
    â€œOkay, okay, enough. Everyone has spoken here except the one person we really need to hear from. Chuong, what have you got to say for yourself?”
    There was a long, pained silence. Chuong sniffed. More silence.
    â€œChuong?” my dad said.
    â€œDon even wanna live here anymore!” Chuong blurted out, then jumped up and ran off.
    He didn’t come back that night. Or the next. Or the next.
    Finally, Chuong called my mom one day while I was at school. He had taken a bus back to Albuquerque, as my mom had guessed he would. He called her the day he arrived, as my mom had guessed he would. He wanted to tell her that he was safe, that it had been a very long ride, and “I’m sorry, Mom.” He asked her to hang on to his Vietnamese-English dictionary, that he would get it from her one day.
    I didn’t say anything to anyone at school. But each day, when I came home from class and went out to the chopping block to split and stack the wood for the woodstove for the winter, I cried.
    Chuong called me once. He wanted me to sell his leather jacket and send him the money, along with some stuff he’d left behind. I did. One letter came for me, dated September 29, 1990, in Chuong’s careful, almost feminine hand: “If you guys don’t understand, some day I’ll call you guys, ok? I don’t know what to say, well, I’m miss you guys very much. Love, Chuong.”
    We never heard from him again.

    That fall was a wasteland. I felt like someone had reached inside me with a pair of vise-grips and torn something out. The hole was too ragged to heal, just kept bleeding and bleeding. I was lost without Chuong. I hated him. I was sick with worry for him. And I was angry as hell.
    We’d been had. My mother had made New Hampshire seem exciting, exotic even. We’d leave the cold wars—between my mother and father, between Tatyana and me—behind. New Hampshire would be a fresh start, not just for me but for our entire family.
    It was a sham. We’d found a filthy, impoverished dump where everyone acted like they were better than us. We were as shitty to each other as we’d ever been, or worse. Now my only friend, the brother I’d never had, had been driven off. New Mexico had been hell for me, and I had been eager to escape, but New Hampshire was just a fresh hell.
    Everyone had lied to me—my mother, my father, my teachers. Life wasn’t some grand adventure, as my mother would have us believe. It was just fleeing from one shithole to the next, each one worse than the last.

    After hounding him about it all summer, Lon let me drink with him in the fall of my freshman year. He bought a couple of six-packs of Budweiser tall boys, and we lit a fire out by the railroad tracks with some of his friends. That first sixteen-ounce can felt heavy in my hand and, by extension, dangerous, like a brick or a gun. I had sipped from my dad’s beer occasionally, but having my own felt wild, exhilarating. Putting the frosty can to my lips, I drank as long and as fast as I could, relishing the grown-up, unsweet taste, the coolness pooling in my belly. Then I was laughing and stumbling, wrestling with Lon, peeing in the bushes, falling in the bushes, lying down next to the fire. This was hilarious, he was hilarious, everything was hilarious.
    When I awoke the next morning, I laid in my bed for a moment. I knew from reading what hangovers were, but I didn’t have a hangover at all. I felt great, better than great.
    What a night I’d had! Some older girl—a junior!—had put me in her car and driven me around. We had been smoking cigarettes together and listening to the radio. When I had hung my head out the window to barf, there had been two moons! Then we had been lying down together for some indeterminate time, and I had felt her up, or we had kissed or maybe just hugged? The police had been called. The police had been out looking for