She broke free of Jules’s arms and tore after the boy. He zooted across the street, dodging speeding bikes, squealing, gleeful, impossible to catch. When he got to the other side of the street, he yelled back at Kate till his demonic voice cracked: “VIETNAM WHORE!”

“I’ll kill you, motherfucker! I swear I will!” she screamed. People stared now. Jules wrapped his long arms around her, and she realized she was shaking. He held her so close to his chest that she smelled the Old Spice under his arms. He put his lips against her hair and shushed her.

“Let it pass. Let it pass.”

The rest of the trip was a blur. She remembered the others teaming up against her, saying she was wrong to attack the Vietnamese boy. Gullible guilty liberals, always on the side of the supposedly oppressed! Yet they’ll brag about haggling down old ladies trying to sell them Tintin T-shirts for two dollars. After a series of quarrels, they left her alone in the hostel so she could sleep every day till noon. She remembered going over to the coffee bar next door where she ate croissants, drank coffee and listened to mid-eighties pop on the jukebox, ten years out of date. Wham!, Sheena Easton, Pet Shop Boys, Chaka Khan—Chaka Khan, for hours on end. She remembered crawling back into bed as the afternoon monsoon rains fell. One of those afternoons she bumped into Jules, who had returned to switch shirts after a sweaty excursion to the Cu Chi tunnels where the Vietcong once hid. They had comforting sex in the shower—she came, he didn’t—before he once again brought up the incident with that little rat.

“Maybe you overreacted a little?”

Her mother had been right. She should have gone to London or Paris.

She tried to forget about Vietnam after that and stopped seeing those “friends” of hers. She took on a second job and within two months, paid her mother back for the trip and never talked about it.

Vietnam, however, refused to release her. The flashbacks returned, every bit as vivid and ferocious as they’d been when she was eleven. And as then, they tormented her whenever she was menstruating, keeping her awake all night, rendering her worthless the following day. She tried her mental exercises but this time they did nothing. She got a prescription for Xanax at the psychological health center but the drugs made her dopey during class. Besides, she liked having an edge.