“Oh, fuck,” I said without really meaning to, my mouth open wide. I pulled the headphones from my ears and let them hang around my neck, the music still playing, a kind of muffled buzz emanating from me.
“Hey, Cameron,” Irene said, seeming totally recomposed, or maybe she hadn’t ever lost composure. She even folded her arms and did a kind of half smile, almost like a smirk, but maybe not quite.
Somehow it seemed like we’d already missed the right moment to have hugged, so we just stood there in front of each other. I hadn’t seen her since Easter Break her first year away, and then it was with a whole group of us left-behinds, and we had all just kept asking questions about how great it must be to be Irene Klauson, and she’d delivered the shiny answers we were hoping for. I thought I’d see her during the summers, but she spent them on the East Coast as a junior counselor at some hoity-toity camp. We’d only written each other a couple of times, and that was right when she’d first left and was probably a little lonely, though she didn’t ever say so in her letters.
She was taller, but so was I. She had on a blue polo shirt, a sweater honest-to-God tied around her neck, diamond studs that glinted even under the bad fluorescent hallway lights. She had her hair pulled back like I never remembered her wearing it. I was in a long-sleeved T-shirt from the previous year’s state swim meet and my warm-up pants, a sloppy ponytail, just an older, taller version of the me she’d dropped off in front of my house a couple of years before. But in her time away it was like Irene had become grown-up Irene.
“What are you doing back?” I asked.
“Maybrook does a fall break. A bunch of my friends went to London, and I could have gone, but Mr. Frank asked my parents if I wanted to come and talk to his science classes about what’s going on with the dig.”
“Why not just have your dad come and save a plane ticket?” I was feeling our old competitiveness despite myself.
She waved to someone in the hallway behind me. “He’s really busy, and he’s not the best public speaker. I’m more relatable.” She paused, considering, I think, whether or not she should say what she ended up saying next. “We don’t really need to save on plane tickets anyway.”
“Must be nice,” I said.
“It is,” she said. “It’s very nice.”
I felt like she might just end things there, the way she kept looking past me into the hallway, the way it felt like her body was almost leaning away from me, like a magnet pulling her along, and I didn’t want her to go. So I asked, “What is going on with the dig, anyway?”
Irene ignored that question or didn’t hear it or decided it wasn’t worth answering. “My mom tells me you’re in the paper all the time for sports,” she said.
“Yeah, I guess. Are you still riding?”
“Seven days a week. We have our stables and all of these trails through the woods, right on campus.” She ran one hand through her hair in a way that mirrored my memory of her mom. “My boyfriend, Harrison, rides too. He’s a polo player, actually. He’s really good.” She tried to pull the mention of boyfriend off as casual, but we had too much history for it to work.
“His name is really Harrison?” I asked, smiling.
“Yeah,” she said, jerking into that stiff pose again. “Why’s that so funny?”
“It’s not. It just sounds like the kind of name you’d expect from a rich guy who plays polo.”
“Well, he is and he does, like I said. I’d make fun of your boyfriend’s name too, but, you know”—she leaned in a little closer—“there’s not one to mention, is there?”
“Yes, actually,” I said, smiling, trying to undo what it was that I’d done. “The weird thing is that his name’s Harrison. And he plays polo.” It didn’t work.
“Whatever,” she said, not even looking at me anymore but pretending to be interested in the kid in the attendance office asking for something or other. “I need to go—my mom’s waiting outside in the car.”
“Yeah, go ahead,” I said. “You should call me sometime this week.”
“Maybe,” she said, just like I knew she would. “I’m really busy.” And then Irene seemed to remember her new breeding and added, in the kind of voice characters in movies set in the Victorian era use when reading aloud the formal letters they’ve written to one another, “It was nice seeing you, Cameron. Give my best to your grandmother and your aunt.”
“Um, okay,” I said. “That was weird.” But Irene was already walking away.
I could still remember the exact way her boots used to click-clock as she walked; it was something about how she planted her foot, a distinct sound that I always paired with her. But those loafers she was wearing didn’t make any noise at all on the shiny hallway floors. Nothing. Not one sound.
Somewhere around this time I became aware that Aunt Ruth was having sex with Ray the Schwan’s man. I heard them one afternoon when Ruth thought I was off somewhere with Jamie, but I was actually in my bedroom, working on the dollhouse. I’d ganked a vial of metallic glitter and a tub of decoupage paste from Ben Franklin and was covering the floor of the attic with a thick carpet of glitter interspersed with pennies that I’d flattened into smears of metal by placing them on the train tracks by the feedlot. The Witches of Eastwick was in the VCR, the volume low.
When I was doing anything to that dollhouse, I was so much in my own world that Ruth could sometimes call for me three times before I’d hear her, so when I first noticed the moaning, I guessed it was from Cher or Susan Sarandon, but when I looked at the screen it was just Jack Nicholson alone in that big mansion, overacting and plotting revenge.
It wasn’t that Ray and Ruth were being all wild, but it was sex, and there were certain sounds, and being in the room above them I heard those sounds. I didn’t want to listen, but I didn’t want to do anything to make them aware of me either, so I kept on with what I was doing, the best I could, anyway, and waited them out, and tried not to imagine what was going on, exactly, in my parents’ old bedroom.
Ray seemed nice enough. He liked Monopoly and made good popcorn and he did keep us stocked up with Schwan’s stuff—even some of the high-end crab legs and whatever. He and Ruth loved to compare notes about traveling the cracked highways of eastern Montana to sell their wares, and I was glad they had each other to talk to about that shit. Sometimes they even caravanned to certain towns together.
When things had been quiet for a long time, I went downstairs, and the two of them were on the couch under an afghan, watching football.
“Hey, Cammie,” Ruth said. “You just get in?”
I could have told her yes, but I didn’t see the point. If anything, knowing that Ruth was having sex made her seem more like a real person to me. For two years she had been mostly just this force in my life, my parents’ replacement, and someone whose standards I didn’t think I could ever live up to. The Ruth who was into nonmarried sex was maybe someone I could get to know, so I said, “No, I’ve been in my room doing some homework.”
Ray cleared his throat at this, loud, and breathed in a little. He didn’t take his eyes off the screen but started fiddling with the tab on his beer can.
“We didn’t even know you were up there,” Ruth said, making a face I was having trouble reading. She wasn’t blushing, she didn’t seem embarrassed, necessarily, but she didn’t look like typical Ruth, either.
“Yeah. I was,” I said, leaving that hanging there as I went to the freezer for a Push-Em, feeling a little like I’d earned it. Then I wandered downstairs to Grandma’s area. She was in her big recliner, crocheting an afghan for Ray in the colors he’d picked: Custer pride, of course—blue and gold and white.
“There’s my spitfire,” Grandma said, looking up at me over the tops of her reading glasses. “Aren’t you a sight for sore eyes.”
I slumped onto her couch. “You saw me at dinner last night. You saw me in the kitchen this morning. You saw me—”
“That’s enough of that, smarty-pants,” she said. “You know what I mean.”<
br />
“Yeah,” I said, because I did. We hadn’t really done anything together for a long time, just the two of us.
“So what do you have to say?” she asked. She always asked that.
“Nothing,” I said, pushing up the last of the orange sherbet from its paper tube.
“You know you’re only bored if you’re boring.”
“Maybe I am boring,” I said.
“I never have thought so,” she said. “Go on and hand me that navy, will you?” She pointed with her hooks to a tube of yarn in a basket near my feet. “And don’t drip that thing all over my floor while you’re doing it.” I kept the Push-Em in my mouth while I tossed the roll to her.
Then we just sat like that for a while, listened to the ag report on her radio.
“Ray still up there?” she asked me eventually.
I nodded. “I think he’s staying for dinner.”
“So what do you make of him?”
“I don’t know. I think I like him okay,” I said. “He seems nice.”
“I think you’re exactly right about that,” she said. “I think he’s a nice guy, hard worker. Now the fellas she was dating back when your folks got married—all hat and no cattle, those guys, and Ruth was just something to wear on the arm. But I think this one might stick.”
“You think that already?” I asked. I guess I hadn’t really thought that far ahead, about Ruth, about whatever she might plan for her own future. “They just got together.”
“Not just, Spunky,” she said. “Not when you’re Ruth’s age. You forget that she’s had just about as much change to her life as you have. I think this is a real good thing for her.”
“I’m glad then,” I said. I meant it. And then I said, I hadn’t planned to, I just did, “I saw Irene Klauson at school the other day. She told me to say hi to you.”
“What’s she doing back?”
“Visiting,” I said. “She was on fall break. I think she’s gone again now.”
“You should have had her over,” Grandma said. “I’d have liked to say hi. You two gals used to be thick as thieves.”
“Not anymore,” I said, feeling sorry for myself again, thinking we’d end it there.
But Grandma said, “No, not since they died, huh?”
“Not just that, Grandma,” I said.
“No,” she said. “Not just that.”
Coley Taylor wasn’t one of the ranch girls who were always wearing their blue FFA (Future Farmers of America) jackets and spending all their free time in the farm shop. The farm shop was this all-metal Quonset of a building sprung up in the faculty parking lot. They held some of the ag classes there; students worked on tractors and identified grain funguses, cussed a lot. Some of those farm-shop girls were actually as townie as I was, so they overcompensated with gleaming hubcap-size belt buckles and by blowing Seth and Eric Kerns—future National Finals Rodeo champions and high school demigods—in the boys’ pickup during lunch.
Coley didn’t need to cowgirl-up her persona. She was the authentic version. She drove the forty-some miles into town from her family’s ranch every morning, and then back again after classes. She’d been in kindergarten through eighth at the little country school in Snakeweed, and was first in her class of twelve, but then they stopped letting Snakeweed do high school credits, and those twelve joined the rest of us.
I had biology with her fall semester of freshman year, and Coley didn’t huddle at the back table with the other FFAs, though they had saved her a seat. She picked the table dead in the front of the room and asked intelligent questions about dissection methods, while I spent the semester watching the summer highlights fade from her hair, which had a little natural curl and which I imagined smelled like peony and sweet grass. I spent a lot of time imagining the smell of Coley Taylor’s hair.
With her at the head table were a couple of student council kids, including Brett Eaton, who had the jaunty good looks of an ad for astronaut recruitment. Plus he was a genuinely nice guy and a decent soccer player. They were an item by Halloween, which at that point didn’t upset me as much as it did those cowboys at the back table who spit wads of Copenhagen into the lab sinks when Mr. Carson wasn’t looking.
Sometime that December, in the days before Christmas, Coley and her mom joined Gates of Praise. It was the time of year when the strays return (Grandma Post included) for two or three Sundays so they feel like they’ve earned their holiday. I hadn’t noticed the Taylors during the crowded service, but while I was arranging powdered doughnuts for what I referred to as the “coffee communion,” partaken of only by the over-sixty crowd and obligated church newcomers, in they came. Coley and her mom cut quite a figure, is what Grandma said. And they did. Both of them somewhere around five ten, both of them slim but not skinny, and both of them in turtleneck sweaters—Coley’s black, her mom’s red. It was at a time when Cindy Crawford was still cover-modeling and making workout videos and hosting that lame style show on MTV, but that morning in the fellowship hall I would have given Coley the edge over the supermodel with the famous mole.
I had moved on to fanning out the paper napkins (which was a joke, because Ruth redid practically every little half-pinwheel that I made) by the time Coley noticed me. Or by the time I noticed her noticing me. She was standing just slightly behind her mom and strobed me a huge smile right before this old ranch-hand bachelor grizzled his way in on her for a kiss on her cheek. When he moved on to her mom and I could just see her face beyond his flanneled reach, she winked at me. A wink coming from anyone else, like that ranch hand or one of the community-college boys who hovered around and took the leftover doughnuts to their dorms, would have been predictable and annoying—something you did to the orphaned tomboy. But the way Coley did it made me feel like we already had some sort of secret between us.
If it hadn’t been coffee communion, there would have been a whole lot more teenage classmates around, kids who knew Coley better, her crowd. Firepower was then some ninety members strong. But I was made instantly more appealing that morning when stacked up against the under-twenties currently snacking in the hall: a motley crew of shrieking and running elementary-school kids glad to be free of the pews they’d sat in for the last hour and a half; Pastor Crawford’s ever-increasing brood, only one of whom was old enough for high school, and he had skipped out right after the service; and Clay Harbough, the computer genius who, despite being so gifted a programmer that he was allowed to spend his afternoons in the Custer computer lab setting up systems and wowing the librarians, spoke in a rapid monotone to his Nikes and smelled often of black licorice, which I never once saw him eating.
Considering my competition, I wasn’t all that surprised when Coley launched herself toward me, even though the most we’d ever said before was Are you done with that scalpel? I was surprised, however, when she didn’t stop at the other side of the long table to talk to me over the platters of foods built for coffee dunking but instead came right around to my side, the server’s side, and stood next to me like she had always been there, every Sunday, helping fan the napkins.
“So what do you think the dissection final’s gonna look like?” she asked, leaning in front of me to grab a packet of orange-spice tea. I flinched at the way her sweater sleeve brushed across my chest, felt my heart twitch around for a second. It was uncomfortable, like an itch buried deep inside my lungs.
“No clue. Probably me with a pair of forceps pulling at intestines while Kyle sings ‘Enter Sandman’ under his breath.” I liked watching her stir her tea with the little red straw, three turns clockwise, then rotate, then repeat.
She laughed. I liked it.
“Yeah, that kid’s a hoot,” she said. Coley Taylor made sipping cheap tea from a chipped yellow JESUS IS LORD mug seem cultured and Julie Andrewsish. “You guys are a thing?”
I was both horrified and sort of flattered. Kyle Clark, lab partner, was as rocker-dude as Custer High could offer, and so asking me if I was dating him meant that Coley somehow thought that
I was rocker-chick enough to do so, which wasn’t a mistake that anyone made very often.
“No. Definitely not. We’ve just known each other forever. Like everyone else in our class,” I added.
“Not me.” She smiled again, her face just a few inches from mine, and I felt the itch.
I stepped back a little. “Be glad, or you’d already know that Kyle puked SpaghettiOs on me at third-grade field days.” Talking to Coley as she drank tea in her chic outfit, all of her so put together, made me feel like I might as well have still been in third grade, my gangly pose with my stupid arms hanging weirdly at my sides. I busied myself, putting out more of the heavy cake doughnuts even though the plate was already stacked high. With each doughnut some of the glaze and frosting pasted itself in the spaces between my fingers.
“Sorry,” she said. “I guess I shouldn’t assume that everyone’s dating their lab partners.”
“Well, you set a good example, right?” I focused on the now-towering doughnuts, wondering how that sounded to her. Bitchy? Or worse, jealous?
But she laughed and grabbed my arm for just a second, which made me tense up all over. “Yeah. Exactly. I thought you guys must be together because you always seem to be having a better time with your fetal pig than me and Brett.”
“You mean Hambone?”
She smiled into her mug. “You guys named your pig?”
“You guys didn’t? There’s your problem. You could do Porky, but it’s pretty obvious. What do you think of Coulda-Been Bacon? But you have to say Coulda-Been really fast, so it sounds like a name.” I was doing my little stand-up shtick, the one I did for pretty girls, so they’d like me quickly and wouldn’t try too hard to actually get to know me beyond my role as wisecracking Cameron the orphan. Maybe it was a little like flirting, but also a kind of protection: Don’t get too close; I’m just jokes without substance. And it seemed to be going over, so I would have kept on if Ruth hadn’t suddenly been there with us too, a cloud of White Diamonds (her new fragrance, compliments of Ray) settling over the table. She took the doughnut box from me, and my weird arms just had to hang there again.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 11