The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  “Betty C. has a tongue ring, you know? Well, a stud, actually, but it’s crazy because I heard those make a difference but I had no idea just how much of a difference, you know?” This was typical Lindsey style of conversing, phrasing everything in such a way that it forced me to ask her to explain things to me, keeping her forever in the role of my personal lesbian guru.

  “It made such a difference how?” I asked, situating a flag stamp next to a stamp of the State Bird of Maine, the black-capped chickadee.

  “Seriously, Cam, grow an imagination—while she was going down on me. It’s like, it’s this tiny piece of metal, you know, but if you know how to use it—and Betty C. does, she totally does—it’s otherworldly.”

  “Yeah, I got that part,” I said, because I had actually understood that she was talking about oral sex but was still so unsure of the mechanics of it all, the actual process, what it was like on either end, that I had a hard time understanding how the tiny piece of metal made any significant difference. When I daydreamed about Coley and me, it was always a lengthy fantasy lead-up to our first kiss, and then a whole lot more intense kissing, shirts off, maybe, some touching, but never anything else. Ever. It was such foreign territory that my brain couldn’t even imagine the map for it.

  “Right, okay,” Lindsey said. “I forgot what a sexual aficionado I was talking to. You and your varied conquests out in cattle country.”

  “Whatever,” I said. I took a drink of the beer, which was growing warmer by the minute. I wasn’t such a big fan of drinking alone, but something about these phone calls with Lindsey made the alcohol seem necessary, partly because I liked the idea that while she was filling me in on everything I wasn’t doing (and she was), I could be breaking the rules too, and partly because I needed to be just a little numb to listen to her exploits.

  “The point is,” she said, “I’m totally getting one the next time Alice goes out of town.”

  Lindsey had recently started referring to her mother only as Alice, and usually with disdain, which annoyed me, because as far as I could tell, Alice, the city-living, former-hippie type with liberal leanings, was a pretty awesome choice in the mom category.

  “She lets you do whatever you want, anyway,” I said, with more hostility than was probably warranted. “Why not just get one now if you’re gonna do it?”

  “She does not let me do whatever I want,” Lindsey said. “She grounded me, or she tried to, over the goddess fiasco.”

  (Lindsey had recently tattooed a Triple Crescent symbol—which, according to Lindsey, represented some Wiccan things and also the three stages of the moon and of a woman’s life—in purple on the upper part of her left shoulder.)

  “And it’s like really, Alice? How puritanical can you get? It’s my body. She’s the one out at Planned Parenthood with an A WOMAN’S BODY, A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE sign, and she goes postal because I choose to put something meaningful on my own shoulder.”

  “Did you seriously just say that getting an abortion is like getting a tattoo?” I asked, not because I thought she was necessarily wrong, but because I knew it would piss her off.

  “Yeah, that’s what I said if you have a first-grade understanding of logic,” she said. She put on what I thought of as her professor voice. “The point is not the severity of the action done to the body, Cameron; it’s a matter of the ownership of the body in question, and even if I’m fifteen, my body belongs to me.”

  I took another drink and put on my best sarcastic-student voice. “So again, I ask you, why wait on the tongue ring?”

  “Because they heal like a bitch. Sometimes you have to go a solid four days on just milkshakes, and if you take it out you’re screwed. I’m waiting until Alice’ll be gone for at least that long. And then once it heals, I can take it out, if need be, while I’m around her.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, opening the second of the two beers and checking at my door to listen down the stairs, make sure I could still hear Columbo, which I could. Not that Grandma was much for climbing the flight up to my room.

  Then there was a pause in the conversation, with maybe twenty seconds of quiet between us, and because that almost never happened when we spoke, it felt especially uncomfortable; and when Lindsey didn’t end it, I said, just to say something, because even though lately Lindsey had become a little bit sneering and self-important, she was still my one and only connection to authentic, real-life, not-in-the-movies lesbianism and I wanted to keep her on the phone: “I’m going to prom with Coley Taylor.”

  “What the fuck? Why were you sitting on that? Your Cindy Crawford cowgirl crush? You have to be shitting me—you’re not even old enough to go to prom.”

  “Well, not with her, with her—not as dates. But we’re going together as couples. Coley and Brett and me and Jamie.” I was glad to have kept her from hanging up even if it was embarrassing to admit this. “They changed the rules for this year,” I added, “because not enough upperclassmen bought tickets.”

  “Of course they didn’t,” she said. “Prom is an antiquated institution that reinforces outdated gender roles and bourgeois dating rituals. It’s worse than cliché.”

  “Thanks for remembering to always make every moment a teaching moment,” I said.

  “Well, I’m fucking sorry that I have to, but this is not healthy progress for a dyke in training. Pining after straight girls—straight girls who are, by the way, in happy relationships with good-looking straight boys—when you live in a town filled with angry, Bible-pounding, probably gun-toting cowboys is a total no-win.”

  “Who am I supposed to pine after in Miles City?” I asked her. “It’s not like I have a buffet of every lesbian imaginable just hanging around the local tattoo parlor, waiting in line to get their tongues pierced.”

  “Piercing parlors and tattoo parlors aren’t always one and the same,” she said, and then softened some. “Do you think Coley has any idea about you?”

  “I don’t know. Sometimes, maybe,” I said—which was only partly true. The whole truth is that once, just once, when Brett had canceled our movie date last minute because of a math test he needed to study for, Coley and I went anyway, and even though I was my usual fidgety, alone-with-Coley, electrified self as we sat together in our top-row seats, she had seemed sort of electric too—not making eye contact and pulling her arm back when we’d both set it on the armrest between us at the same time. “But she’s definitely not gay,” I said, as much to myself as to Lindsey.

  “So then what’s the best that could possibly come of this?” she asked me, and then went on before I could answer. “That’s what you have to ask yourself, because it seems like there’s all sorts of things that could be really bad about this scenario, and not much that could be good.”

  “Yeah, I get it,” I said, draining off the last of the beer and putting the can beneath my bed. I had been saving beer cans for a while then, cutting shapes out of them, tiny shapes—flying birds and diamonds and crosses—as small as I could make them, often cutting my fingers in the process. I was using the shapes on the pattern I was doing in the dollhouse nursery. “But I can’t just stop having a crush on her because I get it,” I said. “You know that’s not how it works.”

  “Okay, but what’s inspired this megacrush, anyway? I mean really—why the fuck Coley Taylor?”

  Which, of course, was an impossible question to answer. “It’s just how she is. I don’t know—it’s how she says things and what she’s interested in, and the way she’s somehow more grown-up than anyone I know, and she’s funny.” I paused, realizing how stupid and obvious I sounded.

  Lindsey went on for me. “And how her ass fills out her jeans and—”

  “You’re seriously ten times worse than all the guys on the track team combined. You are,” I said.

  Lindsey laughed, then she put her professor voice back on. “Hear me out, my foolish and young apprentice: There’s dykes out here who only go for straight girls, or straight-by-day, slut-by-night girls, to try to turn t
hem or whatever; but they never get anywhere beyond one night, and they always end up pissed off and sad when the girl inevitably says something like how she was only experimenting or shit-faced or whatever, and that she’s really into guys, not girls. And that’s at least out here, where there’s bars and concerts and a whole dyke scene to loosen their inhibitions. Prom in Montana is so not that scene.”

  “Duh,” I said, sounding like someone who had just pounded two cans of Bud Light.

  “Just continue to jill off to her or whatever, but end it there. Seriously.”

  Since, in a previous conversation, Lindsey had taught me that jill off was the female version of jack off, I was spared having to ask her to clarify. “Well, I’m going to prom, still,” I said. “We have tickets and outfits and the whole setup.”

  Lindsey snorted. “I bet Ruth is beside herself with excitement.”

  “She’s making us all a sit-down, gourmet dinner. She keeps saying how gourmet it’s going to be. She’s used that word maybe twenty times.”

  “Of course she has,” Lindsey said. “I bet she makes a bunch of things she thinks are totally representative of haute cuisine but in fact would make a trained chef weep with disdain.”

  “I don’t know. Whatever. I’m just telling people when to show up.”

  “Trust me,” Lindsey said.

  Ruth made Schwan’s chicken cordon bleu and a salad (with Kraft French dressing) and green beans amandine (also from Schwan’s), and these really tasty fried potatoes that she insisted we call frites when we asked her to bring us more. She played the role of the server and stayed, with Grandma, in the kitchen and breakfast nook during the bulk of the pre-prom meal, entering the dining room only to refill our wine glasses with sparkling grape juice and snap photos of us eating our frites. But she was sort of sweet about the whole thing and obviously genuinely happy to have the four of us there, me behaving like her vision of a typical teenage girl. She bought a big bouquet of roses for the centerpiece and put out silver candlesticks and set the table with what had been my great-grandma Wynton’s lace tablecloth and wedding china—the stuff my mom used to use on the big holidays and sometimes my birthday.

  The food tasted especially good to Jamie and me because we’d smoked quality pot in my room before Coley and Brett had arrived and dinner was served. This had been one of Jamie’s conditions for attending prom: “We need to be fucked up for the whole thing,” he’d told me after saying yes. “And I’m wearing a black tux with a black shirt and tie. All black, like a Bond villain or something, because that’s dope as shit. And my Chuck Taylors.”

  That night he’d come over early wearing just that ensemble, his head freshly shaven. He came early ostensibly to bring me the wrist corsage—tiny pink roses and baby’s breath—that he said his mom had picked out. Ruth was wary about me having him in my room, which was weird since he’d been up there so many times before, but she told him how dashing he looked and then called up the stairs to warn me that he was headed my way. I was still in sweat pants and a T-shirt, the too-short (I thought) black dress that Coley had picked out for me hanging safely in my closet, away, I hoped, from any pervasive smell of marijuana. Jamie took off his jacket and put it in there too.

  We’d smoked together twice before with the same group of guys as always, me still the only chick allowed, and both times in the key room at Holy Rosary. Because of those occasions I’d decided that pot was a poor substitute for booze and didn’t like the way it scorched my throat and down into my lungs, left them raw even the next day. I also didn’t like how it made me paranoid; I wasn’t sure if that was because it really did make me paranoid or because I’d heard that pot was supposed to make you paranoid; but both times I had been absolutely convinced that we were going to be caught in the hospital and kicked off the track team—so much so that I’d kept crouching behind file cabinets and hushing the group of giggling guys and making everyone listen to the weird, echoey sounds of the hospital for minutes on end.

  “We can’t be obviously fucked up, Jamie,” I said as he packed a little blue glass pipe that I’d not seen him with before. “We have dinner and Grand March to get through.”

  “This is better stuff than you’ve smoked before,” Jamie assured me. He pulled out a yellow Bic and lit the pot, took the first hit. I had to wait for him to go on, which he did in starts and stops as he held the smoke and released it.

  “Travis Burrel’s brother got me this shit.”

  I waited.

  “He’s in college at MSU-Bozeman with Nate.”

  I waited.

  “This is the real deal—the stuff those East Coast granola ski-bum fuckers come to Montana to partake of. All part of a real Montanan collegiate experience.” He craned his neck to exhale the sweet smoke out the open window, finally done, and passed the pipe to me.

  “Because we grow it better here?”

  “Fuck no, we grow ditch weed here, chica. This shit’s from Canada, comes right over the border. Hydroponic all the way.”

  “What does that even mean?” I asked, the glass pipe warm in my hand.

  “They grow it without soil, just minerals and shit. But all you need to know is that it fucks you up with more class.” Jamie smiled his big-toothed Jamie smile, a fleck of ash on his stretched top lip, which he nabbed with the tip of his tongue.

  I rolled my eyes but took my first hit and thought maybe it did seem less harsh than what we’d done before. “Let’s do half of it now, see what the deal is, and maybe sneak the other half before we leave for the school,” I said after exhaling. I was thinking mostly of Coley and not wanting to disappoint her. I’d seen her drink beer at a couple of keggers that ranch kids had out on their parents’ land, but pot was something I felt like Coley Taylor would not approve of, would think was lame and strictly for the Dungeons & Dragons/Magic set and the granolas.

  “What’s happened to you, JJK?” Jamie asked, shaking his head and crossing his arms as if he was the guidance counselor asking me about slipping grades or truancy. “First you make me take you to prom, now you’re fucking pussying out on the best pot you’ve ever smoked? I was afraid this might happen.”

  I took the bait. “What might happen?”

  He toked and held it for an overly long time, making me wait yet again. And then he said, blowing the smoke right at me, “My little girl is becoming a woman.”

  “Fuck off,” I said while he laughed and laughed. I took the pipe and took my turn, took another, and was going to prove my point with three when the pot hit me in that rolling rush that it always hits in, and I considered the weight of my tongue, the feeling of shifting sand behind my eyes, and the way the strained left hamstring that had been bothering me all season was already feeling loose and slippery; I decided that maybe I’d proved my point enough.

  And then time passed the way it does when you’re high, and Jamie took maybe one more hit, maybe three, and we talked about the dollhouse and Jamie suggested that there should be a tiny grow room in the back of the house, with replica heat lamps and marijuana plants made of actual marijuana buds, and I countered that it would cost like a hundred bucks to have enough tiny “plants” and what a waste just to glue them all to a table in a dollhouse, and Jamie said the whole point would be how cool the authenticity of such an endeavor was and if we ever got desperate for a high we could just set a fire in that room, and then I told him that was arson and the dollhouse police wouldn’t stand for it, or something like all of that, or maybe nothing like any of that, and then Coley and Brett were there, and Ruth was calling up the stairs for us, and prom night had officially arrived with me high in my sweats and T-shirt.

  “Just a sec,” I yelled through the door as Jamie emptied nearly an entire can of Cinnamon Freshness room spray in a sticky-sweet aerosol mist that clogged the air and made it smell like cinnamon-flavored pot.

  Coley did not wait just a sec and was up the stairs and knocking while Jamie giggled in the corner with the can held out in front of him in both hands, like a g
un. “Show her in,” he kept saying, then giggling more, then trying to stop it. “Do show her in.”

  I didn’t have to because Coley knocked again and then just opened the door, singsonging, “I hope you’re behaving yourselves in here.”

  And there she was, just as perfect as always but more so, in a pale-yellow dress with teeny-tiny straps and tiny daisies woven in her hair and not too much prom makeup but perfect and glowing and fresh and dewy and all the adjectives they used in the “How to Apply Prom Makeup Like a Pro” articles I knew that Coley had clipped and read and made happen, though she didn’t need to, as lovely as she was without the beauty advice and the makeup.

  We were standing very close, Coley still at the top of the stairs and me just inside the door. I felt myself staring and it felt like a long time and neither of us had said anything and I didn’t want to turn around to see if Jamie was still pointing the can.

  “Just how high are the two of you?” Coley asked me, shutting the door even though that meant Brett was left alone downstairs with Ruth and Grandma, which was hardly fair.

  “We don’t know what the devil you’re referring to, madam,” Jamie said, having done something with the can. (The something, I found out very early the next morning when I finally made it home, was stuffing it under my pillow like a gift from the Weed Fairy.) He walked to Coley in a straight-spined, Rex Harrison–in–My Fair Lady sort of way, took her hand, bowed deeply, and kissed her knuckles. “If you’ll excuse me, lovely ladies, I must freshen up before dinner and have a chat with that Brett, the old scallywag.” He took his jacket from my closet and did the stiff-spine down the stairs. I still hadn’t moved.

  “I’m actually glad that you’re not dressed, because your hair will be easier to do this way,” Coley said. She opened a bag I hadn’t noticed her carrying and took out a curling iron and a hair dryer and various plastic tubes and tubs of makeup and laid them all on my bed.

  “What first?” I asked, hoping that maybe we would just stick to the task at hand and skip over any more talk about how high I might or might not be. “Always hair,” she said, putting a hand on each of my shoulders and pushing me back and down until I was seated on the edge of the bed.