Buddha Baby by Kim Wong Keltner Read Free Book Online Page B

Western-style shirt with pearly snap buttons and stitched boots peeking from beneath his flared Wranglers. He didn't have his uniform for the first few days, and to Lindsey and the other kids, no one seemed more fascinating than this boy who hailed from exotic Houston.
    Who knew they even
had
Chinese people in Texas? When the kids all questioned him on the playground during that first recess, Dustin insisted he wasn't Chinese at all, but a direct descendant of the great general, Robert E. Lee. No one was quite sure what to make of the slender boy in his Tony Lamas, but Lindsey took his delusional claim to be a sign that he, too, was as ambivalent and confused as she was about being Chinese. With sixth-grade dreaminess, she fantasized that they were kindred spirits, maybe even soul mates.
    As the bus swayed, Lindsey recalled how Dustin quickly got himself ostracized by the entire sixth-grade class. He was freakishly obsessed with robots and the television show
Mork and Mindy
, spending recess, lunch, and after school talking like Mork or pretending he was one of the members of Kraftwerk or Devo. He was downright bizarre from the get-go, and as a newcomer who refused to conform, had set himself on a oneway trajectory to getting pummeled.
    Lindsey had overlooked Dustin Lee's eccentricities, secretly hoping for a love connection. She suspected that he liked her, too. Frequent swipings of her various vanilla-scented Hello Kitty erasers were his main display of affection, and when he returned them later in the day mutilated with his teeth marks, she was fairly certain that someday they would marry. On the playground she claimed to despise him, but she harbored secret affection for his Southern drawl and silly spurs.
    And today, Dustin looked much the same, except with less baby fat on his handsome face, a more self-assured demeanor, and not a single trace of his spastic freakiness of yore. She had recognized him right away, especially when she spotted that crescent-shaped scar on his chin.
    It was near the end of the sixth-grade school year, after eight long months of Dustin ruining upwards of ten of Lindsey's Hello Kitty erasers and breaking her Little Twin Stars pencil sharpener. Despite her secret affection for him, several times she asked that her desk be switched away from his. But her pleas went unheeded. Sister Constance liked him smack-dab in the center of the room, where she could see him, so Lindsey's only recourse was to stare for hours directly at the back of Dustin's head and wonder what it'd be like to touch his hair.
    As it was, the class of pimply-faced pubescents was fraught with enough sexual tension. But to complicate matters, Lindsey wasn't the only person in the classroom to have a crush on Dustin Lee. While Lindsey's feelings were a secret, everyone knew for months about the other person's infatuation with the preteen Texan. Being subjected to the sight of daily public displays of affection toward Dustin made all the kids despise him even more.
    It was Sister Constance who was deeply in love with him. On the first day of school, she took a fancy to the lad, and although his cowboy boots showed blatant disregard for uniform rules, she allowed the infraction, she said, as a special favor to the great Lone Star State. From that day on, every morning after recess, she sought out the opportunity to lavish particular attention on the boy. The students all eventually came to expect the commotions, and sometimes even looked forward to Sister Constance's bouts of inappropriate behavior as a break from the monotony of their schoolwork.
    One day Dustin turned around and said to Lindsey, "It's a well-known fact that Chinese people eat rats. Do you eat rats?"
    She tossed her eraser at his face and he yelled out with surprise when it bounced off his forehead.
    Sister Constance immediately noticed the ruckus and stopped the math lesson. In her trilling singsong voice, like the haughty, deep-throated goose from
Charlotte's