Going Rogue: An American Life by Lynn Vincent, Sarah Palin Read Free Book Online

helped raise him. I learned from Todd that Native youth are taught to listen and learn from their elders and not to run their mouths.
    Todd absolutely loved children. He had a cousin with Down syndrome whom he cherished, and even with all my babysitting jobs I had no experience with children with special needs. I always wondered how 1’d handle someday meering this special relative.
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    SARAH
    PALIN
    Our senior year, when my girlfriends were receiving rhe srandard “cool” gifts, like Van Halen cassette tapes and L.A. Lakers sweatshirts, Todd gave me gold nugget earrings, nestled in a grass-woven Native basket instead of a gift box, the consummate Alaskana gift. He didn’t worry about money as much as my friends and I did because he knew he’d fish rhe next season and would be rewarded according to how hard he worked the waters. Because Todd had been exposed to conditions in rural Alaska many of us cannot imagine, he’d made tough decisions on his own from a young age. Because of that, principles like honesty, justice, and accountability became crucial to his life perspective, and he understood intuitively that you get to choose how to respond to circumstances around you-even those out of your control. You get to decide what’s really important and what your attitude will be.
    Our background differences were exciting to me and opened up my more sheltered world. We spent more and more time together, and when we couldn’t, we still stayed connected. With four teenagers in our house, our single landline phone was offlimits for long boyfriend-girlfriend calls. But Todd and I discovered we could close the five miles between our homes if we stood on our back porches and used the handheld VHF
    radios he used on his fishing boat in Bristol Bay. For months, we snuck whispered nighttime chats until we discovered that the commercial rruckers barreling through town could hear us. I snuck other things with Todd, too: Copenhagen dipping tobacco, which I tried for the first time about an hour before I met his mother, Blanche.
    cracked up watching me trying to
    make conversation with her, while I gagged with dry heaves and cold sweats caused by the nauseating chew.) My first chug of beer, with Todd and Tilly the summer after we graduated. My first PG13-equivalent movie, which Todd and I watched on the VCR at my friend Karen’s house.
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    Going Rogue
    Then, on the drive home in his Mustang, he tried to kiss me for the first time. But the truth was, I was a never-really-been-kissed nerd. As soon as Todd hit my driveway, I jumped out of the cat, scared to death that this suave worldly guy that I was ctazy about would find out what a wallflower I was.
    The next day,.my sheltered little world felt shatteted when he told the boys in the locker toom-my “brothets” whom I’d grown up with-that I didn’t even know how to kiss. I was mortified. He thought it was sweet and figured it reflected innocent modesty, but I was humiliated, sure that the whole school now knew the story. My young, crushed spirit learned a lesson about guys that day: even the good ones can act like jerks.
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    My friends and I lived for basketball, and at the beginning of my senior year, we counted down the days until the season began. A reportet from the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman asked for my preseason prediction. Speaking for rhe team, I declared that we’d go all the way, that we wanted a state championship. To us, losing state for a third straight year would be intoletable. I spoke off the cuff and from the heart, but walked away from the interview with a sense of dread, fearing that my wotds would be interpreted as cocky and naive. When the spOtts page came out, I swallowed hard, read what I’d said, and decided I’d have to work that much harder to live up to my bold proclamation. It was supposed to be a rebuilding year for the Warriors. But Karen and I, and other benchwarmers, like Jackie Conn and Michelle Carney, Amy, Wanda, Katie, and