“This is way too many, hon,” she said, plucking this custard filled and that raspberry glazed and reboxing them. “Coley, I just met your mother. We’re so glad to have you here to worship with us.” She finished with the doughnuts, set the box down, and wiped her hands on a napkin before offering her palm to Coley. “I’m Cameron’s aunt Ruth. You’re both freshmen?”
Coley answered right as Pastor Crawford pulled in for a maple bar, “Yeah. We were just talking about dissection.”
“Well, that’s a way to spend a Sunday morning. Good gravy, girls, you’re no fun.” Aunt Ruth grinned her Annette Funicello grin and put her hands on her hips and did some sort of hula-hoop motion, a move that played like the 1950s and a poodle-skirted malt shop.
Pastor Crawford kept hovering, chewing, laughing at Ruth, some of the tan icing flaking onto his collar. “You know,” he said, “I’m having one of those great moments of epiphany.” He paused and chewed more. Pastor Crawford was the king of the drawn-out revelation. Eventually he turned to me. “Cameron, Coley’s going to start coming to Firepower, and I know that Ruth’s been driving you. Why don’t you two gals ride together instead?”
It was a move that I can only assume he meant as gregarious and pastorly, but really he had just forced me into the truck of one of the it girls in my class, since I was the sad sack without her own car whose aunt or grandmother had to pick her up and drop her off.
While I was grinning like a jack-o’-lantern and shrugging, rolling my eyes, trying to play off these meddling adults to Coley, she answered, “Yeah, that’d be good,” and she didn’t hesitate or anything, but there was something so grown-up about her that I thought maybe she was just better at maneuvering these awkward chitchats than I was, and so I didn’t take much comfort in her easy tone.
I also wished that we could have this conversation without the group of adult onlookers planning our playdates. “You know, like half of the school comes here on Wednesdays,” I told her. “And I start track in March, anyway. Don’t feel obligated to pull a Driving Miss Daisy.”
“Don’t be stupid,” she said, “I don’t.” Her mom was beckoning her from a table of really old people, and as Coley turned to head over, her face too near mine, a smile flitting across it, she said, “We could just call him Fetal Piggly Wiggly, right, Miss Daisy?”
It probably doesn’t seem like much that she would play off my lame movie reference, mention the grocery store from that scene where Miss Daisy finally accepts a ride from her own chauffeur, but I’d been making movie references just like that for so long that they came out without me even thinking about them, and certainly without me expecting anyone but Jamie to make one back. And definitely not one based on the grocery-store scene from Driving Miss Daisy. And most definitely not someone like Coley, who I thought I had already figured out just by sitting behind her in science for a semester.
In the Fetus Mobile on the way home, Ruth gave Grandma the Taylor family rundown. Mr. Taylor had died from lung cancer two years before, but Coley’s older brother, Ty, and her mom were still running the cattle ranch, making it work. Ty was supposed to be some sort of debonair wild card, a real cowboy, and after her husband died Mrs. Taylor had fallen apart some—drinking and staying out and making bad choices—but she had recently found her way back to Christ.
“She’s getting things back on track for her family,” Ruth said. “That takes real courage.”
It was Coley, as she understood it, who had been keeping things together in the interim. Coley, according to Ruth, was pretty and smart and just a real go-getter, loved by all.
“I’m glad that you two are friendly, Cammie,” Ruth said, eyeing me in the rearview mirror the way she liked to. “She seems like a very put-together young lady, and maybe if you get to know her, you won’t have to spend so much time with Jamie and the boys, you know—”
“Jamie’s my best friend,” I told the mirror, cutting her off. “I don’t even really know Coley. We just have a class together.”
“Well, now you can get to know her,” Ruth said.
“Yeah, whatever,” I said, because it was easier than again trying to explain high school politics to a former head cheerleader. But I just figured Coley would offer me the obligatory ride the following Wednesday, and it would be a little awkward, but she would be sweet about it, and then she’d mention, casually, that she had an errand to run before Firepower the next week and could I get a ride with my aunt, and then we’d forget about this arranged friendship altogether. Which would definitely be for the best, I decided that night in bed, when I closed my eyes and saw her drinking tea and opened them and still could see her, and I wanted so much to see more.
Chapter Eight
It took until March, the still-crispy days of early-season track practice already under way, for me to stop waiting for Coley to tell me about that errand she had to run. By that point she and Brett had adopted me as some kind of tag-along kid sister, despite our being the same age. The only problem was that the more time I spent with the two of them—in a corner booth at Pizza Hut creating contests that involved shooting straw wrappers at various targets, or in the top row of the Montana Theatre, watching whichever movie was showing that week, a tub of popcorn on Coley’s lap for all of us to share, or boonie bashing at the Honda Trails in Brett’s beat-up Jeep, AC/DC blaring from the stereo—the more I fell in love with Coley Taylor. But the weird thing was that I really liked Brett, too. I would have these moments of jealousy over the tiniest of things—Brett grabbing Coley’s hand as we crossed a street or Coley ruffling the back of his head as he drove us somewhere—but for those first months I was mostly content just to be near her and to make her laugh, which was harder to do than with other girls; I had to try harder, which made it more worth it.
Prom season, with its torrents of confetti and satin gowns and sparkle stars to accompany the Van Gogh Starry Night theme, was met with the flannel-cloaked apathy of the late-blooming grunge crowd that made up a very small but riotous portion of the Custer High Senior Class of 1992. Some of the grunginess had trickled its way down to my class, too, a Hacky Sack cluster here, the smell of patchouli there, but it seemed to have mostly infected students nearest to graduation. Those almost-adults, many of them with college acceptance letters already tacked to bulletin boards in their bedrooms at home, were into raging against machines and not washing their hair, and certainly not punch fountains and dyed-to-match pumps and a spotlighted Grand March through their soon-to-be-former high school gymnasium. I could totally sympathize, and I had my share of flannel shirts; I just wasn’t full-blown grunge. However, when the administration announced a mandatory formal dress code (in response to the hallway buzz that several of the senior grunge couples planned to attend Starry Starry Night barefooted and in unisex jumpers made entirely of hemp), most of the senior class sympathized too, and the FFA kids and the jocks and student council geeks united with the grungeheads to begin an outright boycott of the prom.
The promise of low ticket sales, coupled with the poor fundraising efforts of the junior class, whose car washes and bake sales had yielded far less than was needed to throw such an event, resulted in a first-time-in-history scenario for Custer High: freshmen and sophomores would be allowed to attend prom, in formal attire, and at the very fair price of only ten dollars extra per couple.
“You’re coming, Cam,” Coley told me, appearing next to my locker right after last period and just before I was due at track practice. It seemed like she just appeared, anyway. School was out for the day, it was just barely starting to feel like spring, and everybody streamed through the hallways drunk on 3:15-p.m. freedom, leaving the rush of students headed for the main doors only long enough to pause at their lockers before rejoining it, like all of it was choreographed, every movement rehearsed, every sound and sight a special effect—the slam and rattle of the metal locker doors, the call me laters and fuckin’ chemistry tests loud and throaty, the thick smell of just-lit cigarettes as soon as you hit the outside s
teps, the sound of mix tapes blaring from cars as they tore away from the student parking lot, windows down on both sides. I usually liked to soak in all of that for a minute or two, just linger at my locker before heading off to change for practice. But that day there was Coley.
Vice Principal Hennitz had just explained the “new deal” prom scenario during the end-of-day announcements in that pasty voice of his, each word somehow sticky sounding: Prom is a place for decorum, and in offering you underclassmen this opportunity, the administration and I feel confident that you will treat it as such.
Because we’d been presented with this opportunity literally minutes before, I knew exactly what Coley was talking about with her you’re coming, Cam, but I pretended not to so she’d have to work even harder to convince me. I liked the feeling I got when she needed something from me.
“What are you talking about?” I asked her, pretending to dig for something in my backpack.
“Only the primary event of the spring fashion season,” Coley said in this highfalutin socialite voice she did really well. Then she switched it off to add, “If you’re gonna double with me and Brett, you need to find a guy to actually make you a double.” She did this thing that she always did with her hair where she put it up in back and held it there with a pencil all in one move and it always got me how incredibly, carelessly sexy she was when she was doing it.
“I guess I can see if Grandma is free. What night is it again?” I asked, trying to keep that locker door between us. Brett was almost always around when Coley was, and when he wasn’t I sometimes still got all flustery like that first coffee communion at GOP.
“Don’t do the thing where all you do is make a bunch of jokes and it becomes impossible to talk to you about anything,” Coley said. “This will be classic—we’ll never have the chance to crash prom as freshmen again.”
“There’s absolutely nothing in what you’ve just said that makes your argument any more convincing,” I said.
She reached around the locker door and grabbed my arm all dramatic-like. “I’ll call Ruth. I’ll do it. I’ll call her and tell her you’re being a weirdo loner again and won’t come to prom and you know she won’t let off you. She’ll have all sorts of ideas about eligible bachelors.”
“You’re a terrible person and I hate you.”
“So who do you want me to ask? Travis Burrel would totally go with you.” Coley pushed the locker door open wider and stepped around it, helping herself to the pack of Bubblicious I had on the top shelf and, as she was doing it, brushing up against me in a way that she didn’t even notice and in a way that made me notice nothing else.
I backstepped into the hallway a little so that we weren’t wedged into that space so tightly. “Travis Burrel would go to prom with anyone he thought he might be able to dry hump on the dance floor.”
“So you want me to call him first?” The gum coated her words in all-sugar strawberry.
“Yeah. Get right on that. I’m gonna be late,” I said, trying at the same time to push her out of the way with the back of my arm and also grab my backpack, my practice bag. She didn’t move very far and I had to reach around her again, brush up against her again, feel a little shudder roll along my body and end in my stomach, again, just to latch the door, clip shut the padlock.
She stayed right next to me as we wove back into the hallway, walking against the stream toward the women’s locker rooms. “C’mon, just ask Jamie; you know you’re going to anyway.”
Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the poster she was carrying, some sort of project about World War Two—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed Sieg heil, a gaunt concentration-camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some sort of poignant music, put us in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the posterboard chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.
“Ask Jamie today because I want to buy the tickets tomorrow,” Coley kept on, back at my side again, the full-color atrocities of a war both of our grandfathers had fought in clip-clopping away from us, offscreen where they belonged, not staring us down during prom season.
“Jamie isn’t gonna want to fucking go to prom. I don’t want to fucking go to prom. The whole point of the boycott is that nobody in this school wants to fucking go to prom.”
Some shaggy junior in a Pantera T-shirt turned and shouted as we passed him, “I’ll fuck you at prom!” His two equally shaggy buddies high-fived him and giggled the way high school boys and certain cartoon characters giggle—Barney Rubble, for one.
“You’re a troglodyte,” Coley yelled back. We were at the blue metal door that signified the locker room entrance. She grabbed both of my arms at the biceps. “Jamie will go with you if you ask him, even if he doesn’t really want to.”
“Coley, I don’t really want to.”
“But I do, and we’re friends, and this is the sort of thing friends do for each other,” she said with a kind of earnestness that maybe would have been laughable if I wasn’t so much in love with her.
“Oh, is this the sort of thing?” I asked, both of us knowing that I would ask Jamie to prom that very afternoon and that he would give me shit about it but would eventually say yes because that’s the kind of guy Jamie Lowry was. “What are the other sorts of things friends do for each other? Do you have a list?”
“No, but I’ll make one,” she said, waving at a group of shiny juniors who were mostly Brett’s friends. They were lolling around the pop machines and called her over. “It’s gonna be so, so good,” she said.
“You so, so owe me,” I said back from partway inside the locker room.
“You know I love you forever.” She was already walking toward the knot of fresh-faced couples on their way to soak up the sunny afternoon, no doubt, like some sort of J.Crew ad, and leaving me to think about that list of “things friends do for each other” the whole time I was changing, the whole time I was jogging over to the track at the community college, the whole time I was doing extra laps after practice because I was just barely late. If Coley ever were to actually write out a list like that, I knew that I’d do each and every single thing on it. I just knew that I would.
I’d mentioned my Coley crush to Lindsey in a few brief paragraphs in one of my letters, but I filled in all the angsty details during a three-hour phone conversation we had the weekend before prom, while Ruth and Ray the Schwan’s man were at a couples’ Bible weekend in Laramie and Grandma was napping in front of the TV, empty cellophane wrappers from those sugar wafers on the coffee table. She was favoring the strawberry variety that month, so she had weirdly pink wafer shards and sugar crumbles in the creases of her shirt, like the fiberglass bits that had sometimes coated my father’s overalls when he was installing insulation.
It was Lindsey who had called me, so it was her mom who would get the phone bill, not Ruth. And when it took her twenty minutes just to tell me about an Ani DiFranco concert she’d been to the night before, I knew this would be a long session, so I grabbed a couple of Ray’s Bud Lights from the fridge (I was pretty sure he knew that I w
as taking them sometimes, but he wasn’t saying anything to me or to Ruth), and then I took the cordless phone into my room and spent the better part of those three hours decoupaging the floor and ceiling of the guest bedroom of the dollhouse with stamps saved from Lindsey’s letters. Lindsey wrote me a lot, probably four letters to each one of mine, but I still didn’t have nearly enough stamps to do the whole thing. It was just a hopeful start.
While I had been running track, and contemplating Leviticus and Romans, and being the tag-along sister to Custer High’s favorite couple while in private imagining Coley every time I watched any movie with even a hint of lesbianism (Coley as Jodie Foster in Silence of the Lambs, Coley as Sharon Stone in Basic Instinct—that movie had just, finally, come to Miles City), Lindsey had been getting it on with, to hear her tell it, every lesbian in the Seattle area between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Many of them had names, or probably they were nicknames, that sounded frightening to me in a “too cool” sort of way: Mix, Kat, Betty C. (for Betty Crocker? I wondered, but never asked), Brights, Aubrey, Henna, and on and on.
Lindsey was good with details and she was always very specific about which conquest had smelly white-girl dreads, and which girl had totally shaved her head, and which girl wore a leather jacket and rode a Harley, snorted coke, was anorexic and too bony and whose body felt like scaffolding; but there were so many different girls that I couldn’t keep track of any of them once the phone call or letter ended, and I didn’t usually need to, because Lindsey herself would have seemingly forgotten those girls and moved on to a half dozen more by the next time we spoke or she wrote.
The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 12