Chapter 1
I was born with water on the brain.Okay, so that's not exactly true. I was actually born with too much cerebral spinal fluid inside my skull. But cerebral spinal fluid is just the doctors' fancy wa...
Chapter 2
Okay, so now you know that I'm a cartoonist. And I think I'm pretty good at it, too. But no matter how good I am, my cartoons will never take the place of food or money. I wish I could draw a peanu...
Chapter 3
My mother and father are drunks, too, but they aren't mean like that. Not at all. They sometimes ignore me. Sometimes they yell at me. But they never, ever, never, ever hit me. I've never even been...
Chapter 4
But my lips and I stopped short when I saw this written on the inside front cover: THIS BOOK BELONGS TO AGNES ADAMS. (4.52)
Chapter 5
"You've been fighting since you were born," he said. "You fought off that brain surgery. You fought off those seizures. You fought off all the drunks and drug addicts. You kept your hope. And now,...
Chapter 6
"Who has the most hope?" I asked.Mom and Dad looked at each other. They studied each other's eyes, you know, like they had antennas and were sending radio signals to each other. And then they both...
Chapter 7
I was the only kid, white or Indian, who knew that Charles Dickens wrote A Tale of Two Cities. And let me tell you, we Indians were the worst of times and those Reardan kids were the best of times....
Chapter 8
They stared at me, the Indian boy with the black eye and swollen nose, my going-away gifts from Rowdy. Those white kids couldn't believe their eyes. They stared at me like I was Bigfoot or a UFO. W...
Chapter 9
I wished Rowdy was still my friend. I could have sent him after Roger. It would have been like King Kong battling Godzilla.I realized how much of my self-worth, my sense of safety, was based on Row...
Chapter 12
And my sister had married one of those crazy Indians.She didn't even tell our parents or grandmother or me before she left. She called Mom from St. Ignatius, Montana, on the Flathead Indian Reserva...
Chapter 13
We decide to order room service, to have the food delivered to our room, and guess what they had on the menu? Indian fry bread! Yep. For five dollars, you could get fry bread. Crazy! So I ordered u...
Chapter 14
I always think it's funny when Indians celebrate Thanksgiving. I mean, sure, the Indians and Pilgrims were best friends during that first Thanksgiving, but a few years later, the Pilgrims were shoo...
Chapter 15
"Arnold," she said one day after school, "I hate this little town. It's so small, too small. Everything about it is small. The people here have small ideas. Small dreams. They all want to marry eac...
Chapter 16
Yesterday, during a game, Penelope was serving the ball and I watched her like she was a work of art.She was wearing a white shirt and white shorts, and I could see the outlines of her white bra an...
Chapter 17
Traveling between Reardan and Wellpinit, between the little white town and the reservation, I always felt like a stranger.I was half Indian in one place and half white in the other.It was like bein...
Chapter 18
"The people at home," I said. "A lot of them call me an apple.""Do they think you're a fruit or something?" he asked."No, no," I said. "They call me an apple because they think I'm red on the outsi...
Chapter 19
I have a lot of free time, so I have started to write my life story. Really! Isn't that crazy? I think I'm going to call it How to Run Away from your House and Find Your Home. (19.1)
Chapter 20
"Your mother was thirteen and I was five when we first met. And guess how we first met?""How?""She helped me get a drink from a water fountain.""Well, that just seems sort of gross," I said."I was...
Chapter 21
I picked up the other boot and dug inside. Man, that thing smelled like booze and fear and failure. I found a wrinkled and damp five dollar bill."Merry Christmas," he said.Wow. (21.15-21.18)
Chapter 22
But my family had to bury my grandmother.I mean, it's natural to bury your grandmother.Grandparents are supposed to die first, but they're supposed to die of old age. They're supposed to die of a h...
Chapter 23
People had either ignored me or called me names or pushed me.But they stopped after my grandmother died.I guess they realized that I was in enough pain already. Or maybe the realized they'd been cr...
Chapter 24
Okay, so it was Gordy who showed me a book written by the guy who knew the answer.It was Euripides, this Greek writer from the fifth century BC.A way-old dude.In one of his plays, Medea says, "What...
Chapter 25
"And I have to be honest, guys," Coach said. "We can't beat these guys with our talent. We just aren't good enough. But I think we have bigger hearts. And I think we have a secret weapon."I wondere...
Chapter 27
Gordy gave me this book by a Russian dude named Tolstoy, who wrote: "Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." Well, I hate to argue with a Russian genius, but...
Chapter 29
I realized that, sure, I was a Spokane Indian. I belonged to that tribe. But I also belonged to the tribe of American immigrants. And to the tribe of basketball players. And to the tribe of bookwor...
Chapter 30
"So, anyway," he said. "I was reading this book about old-time Indians, about how we used to be nomadic.""Yeah," I said."So I looked up nomadic in the dictionary, and it means people who move aroun...