The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  “If you don’t know for sure, then what’s the big thing about trying stuff out?” Jamie said, not looking at me but looking out at that statue, just like Hennitz.

  I still didn’t have any of the right words. “It’s more like maybe I do know and I’m still confused too, at the same time. Does that make sense? I mean, it’s like how you noticed this thing about me tonight, you saw it, or you already knew it—it’s there. But that doesn’t mean it’s not confusing or whatever.”

  “Yeah, but I don’t know anything about you for sure.” He turned to look at me again. “That’s what I’m saying. Sometimes when I hang out with you, you’re like more guy than I am. But other times I want to . . .” He finished by doing this overdone thrusting movement with his hips, grinning like a perv. Which was stupid but felt much better than wherever we had been a second before.

  “That’s just because you’re a disgusting teenage boy,” I said, hitting him hard in the arm to get him to stop his gyrations. “That doesn’t really have anything to do with me.”

  “Well, if I like girls and you like girls, that makes you a disgusting teenage boy, too,” he said, hitting me back, and not that gently, either.

  “Never,” I said, and thought that maybe we had cleared something big, left it behind us, but then Jamie leaned over and kissed me. I could have turned my head away, I had time to duck or move or push his face, and I didn’t. I let him do it. And I kissed him back, sort of. His lips were dry and his chin a little bit rough and he tasted like sour smoke and too-sugary sherbet punch, but there was something charged about kissing him, some sort of thrill because it was so unexpected.

  Jamie’s mouth was too busy, but he wasn’t exactly a bad kisser. We kept at it long enough for the smoking section to give us a hoot and a whistle, and then I pulled back, not because it wasn’t interesting kissing Jamie—it was, sort of like a fucked-up science experiment, and it was kind of nice, even, somehow—but because there we were on the school steps at prom and I liked to do my experimenting behind closed doors, and now Jamie’s hands were behind me, one on my back, one on my head, and he was gaining momentum and I wasn’t.

  “Oh! Mission aborted! Advanced move denied!” It was Steve Bishop, one of the smokers, yelling from his perch on the rail, the rest of them laughing along.

  “Only for now, Bishop,” Jamie yelled back. “And only because I’m a gentleman.”

  “That’s not how it looked from over here, big guy!” Steve kept on, but Jamie smiled and gave him the two-handed flip-off and kept his attention on me.

  “So that was the shit, right? You see what I’m saying?” He fixed his jacket because it had slid to the back of my shoulders.

  “No. What are you saying?”

  “That we should do more of that,” he said. “Duh, JJK. The obvious choice.”

  “Maybe,” I said, which is exactly what I meant without knowing at all what I meant. “Let’s go do the last dance.”

  Which we did, Coley and Brett wrapped up tight right next to us. Jamie kissed me twice more during that dance (to “Wild Horses”) and I let him, and after the second time I noticed that Coley had noticed our kiss and she winked at me over Brett’s shoulder and wrinkled her nose and I blushed and blushed, and she noticed that too and winked again, which made me blush harder and hide myself in Jamie’s shoulder, which I’m sure she noticed as well, and which Jamie noticed and was of course reconvinced by, pulling me tighter to him, and there I was sending the wrong signals to the right people in the wrong ways. Again, again, again.

  Chapter Nine

  Since decades before I was born, summer in Miles City was trotted down a banner- and flag-lined Main Street and officially welcomed in by one event, always held the third full weekend in May: the World Famous Miles City Bucking Horse Sale. Ostensibly a series of showcases during which salty rodeo contractors came to bid on the finest in debuted bronc stock, it was the four days of debauchery in the form of street dances, tractor pulls, and authentic cowboy shenanigans that lured in city folk from both coasts and boosted the town’s economy until the next go-round. Bucking Horse Sale (BHS) put Miles City in the Guinness book of world records as the event that boasted “the most alcohol consumed within a two-block radius, per capita, in the United States.” Pretty impressive if you consider Mardi Gras in New Orleans or any major collegiate football game. And we did consider them. Lots. And there was a strange kind of local pride in our accomplishment, the town motto for the weekend being: “If you can’t get laid during Bucking Horse, you can’t get laid.”

  My parents and I had always gone to the parade Saturday morning, lawn chairs and a thermos of sun tea, me trolling the gutters of Main Street for pieces of saltwater taffy or Jolly Ranchers that the already-tipsy-at-ten-a.m. float riders had flung off course. Next it was lunch at City Park, a barbecue-beef sandwich greasing my fingers and making it hard to handle my sweaty cup of lemonade, and then my mom would have tours to give at the museum, and so maybe I’d meet up with Irene and we’d go to the rodeo together, liking best the shade under the grandstands where we collected the tossed-aside fifty-fifty tickets in big Styrofoam cups and tried to avoid the arcs of sunflower seeds and, worse, chew that plummeted around us like the heavy but staggered drops at the beginning of a thunderstorm.

  Since my parents had died, Grandma had become a big fan of the DAR (in Miles City that stood for Daughters of the American Range, not Revolution) Cake Walk, a kind of tacked-on event. Bucking Horse Sale had lots of those. After the parade we’d head over to the library, come home with one German chocolate with coconut icing and a half dozen of Myrna Sykes’s cinnamon rolls. But soon after prom night Grandma started feeling crappy, and the doctor told her she wasn’t “quite managing” her diabetes with her diet alone. So when, a few weeks later, they put the Bucking Horse schedule of events in the paper and I asked her about our plans, Grandma, her Humulin vial in hand, told me she wasn’t “fooling with the damn parade this year.” Which was just fine by me, because with Ruth and Ray already signed up to staff about a zillion Gates of Praise–related BHS activities (a day care, an early-morning prayer meeting, a picnic lunch), as well as Ruth’s Sally-Q booth at the fairgrounds, that left me with four days of authentic cowboy debauchery to spend as I saw fit; and it turns out that four days was more than enough.

  Jamie, Coley, Brett, and I pregamed at Jamie’s with beer and pot and then went to the opening street dance Thursday night. We got there early, before they roped off the area in front of the Range Riders Bar, and we should have been kicked out soon after, because the MCPD was out in much fuller force than typical and we were clearly underage, which was less of a big deal at later Bucking Horse Sale events, but the first night warranted extra vigilance. We should have been kicked out, but Coley’s brother, Ty, was big shit that weekend, rodeoing for the exhibitions, but more important, he was one of the local, authentic, good-looking, and good-for-tourism twentysomething cowboys. And he had a word with someone or other working the little gate they’d set up, and all of a sudden the four of us couldn’t be touched.

  “But you’re on your own for booze,” Ty announced, swaggering over to us, working his way around a smattering of two-stepping couples, weirdly elegant in his dress Wranglers and vest. His hat would have looked cartoon-big if he hadn’t worn it so well. “Don’t let me catchya with a drink in your hand,” he said to Coley, yanking on her ear. “I don’t need to see none of that shit.”

  “Any of that shit,” Coley said, thunking him on the chest. “Why would we even stay down here if we can’t drink?”

  “I didn’t say you couldn’t drink,” he said, taking a theatrical swallow from his can of Miller. “I said I don’t want to see you drinking. Out of sight, out of mind, your royal highness.”

  “I’m not royalty yet,” Coley said. “You don’t have to bow before me until tomorrow.”

  “So long as you name me court jester,” Jamie said, doing this leprechaun sort of heel click he was fond of.

  Coley had bee
n nominated as queen of Bucking Horse Sale, which was a citywide competition, though usually an FFA girl from the Custer senior class ended up with the crown. Coley was the youngest girl to be nominated in something like thirty years, much to the annoyance of several of those seniors. She’d asked about retracting the nomination, but had offended the mustachioed guy at the head of the Montana Cattlemen’s Association, which ran the election, so she’d decided to see it through, royal obligations and all.

  “I won’t win,” Coley said. “They’ll give it to Rainy Oschen. They should. She’s been living for that crown.” Then she took a couple of steps, and in a move that solidified yet again why I felt the way that I did about Coley Taylor, she did a perfect imitation of Jamie’s heel click, and upon landing said, “But you’ll always be court jester to me.”

  The band, some group out of Colorado, started up a foot stomper, and Ty nodded at a tiny but big-haired brunette across the street and motioned toward the dancing couples. He considered the four of us for a moment, actually shifting his gaze from one face to another, like he was looking at a police lineup. Then he put one hand on each of my shoulders, which was awkward, with that cold beer can crushing hard against my clavicle, pinned there by his giant, freckled thumb, which had a mostly dead fingernail, asphalt black and plum.

  “Cameron, I’m putting you on Coley patrol for the next four days,” he said, his beer breath hot and thick in my face. He wasn’t wearing even a hint of a grin. “I can’t trust the jester or the boyfriend, for obvious reasons. It has to be you—you have to keep her in line.”

  “‘Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope,’” Coley said, clutching my arm, laughing.

  I laughed too, but Ty still didn’t let go.

  “I’m serious,” he said, his celery-green eyes hard on mine. “Don’t let my sister ruin the good family name.”

  “No, that’s your job,” Coley said, shoving him toward the crowd. “Go dance with your cowgirl, hot stuff. I promise we’ll behave.”

  “You need to use duct tape to stick to her, you do it,” he said, walking backward, still hawking me. “Don’t let me down, Cameron.”

  I laughed and said, “Sure thing, sir.” But something about Ty made me nervous, something I couldn’t quite pin down.

  “Your brother’s gonna be fighting them off all weekend,” Jamie said as the four of us watched Ty claim his lady and twirl her into the center of the street.

  “That’s hardly a stud qualifier,” Coley said. “I mean, if you can’t get laid during Bucking Horse, Jamie . . .”

  “Ouch,” Brett said, taking her hand. “No need to crush a growing boy’s dreams. Let’s dance before Cameron has to defend her man’s honor.”

  “Don’t worry,” I said as they headed out into the middle of the street. “He doesn’t have any.”

  There had been lots of little jokes like this since prom night. Just teasing, mostly coming from Brett and Coley, since Jamie and I weren’t really talking much about what was said on the school steps. What we were since prom was a good question, and not one I necessarily wanted an answer to. We’d twice taken the kissing to a shirts-off kind of place, both times in my bedroom, both times to a Lindsey mix tape; and one of the times Ruth had been fully aware of Jamie’s arrival, the closing of my bedroom door, and Jamie’s eventual departure. And she had said nothing.

  It wasn’t bad, the making out; it didn’t make me feel wrong or even as weird as I thought that it might, but the whole thing did feel mechanical, or like a rehearsal, maybe, is the right way to put it: And I put in a tape, and I push PLAY, and the Cranberries serenade us, and I take off my shirt as Jamie takes off his, and we roll around on my comforter that smells like Downy, and Jamie has a weird indentation in his back, and his hands are so big and I can feel his calluses, and I can feel his heartbeat in my stomach, and he does this thing to the back of my neck that produces waves of goose bumps, and he hasn’t yet pushed for the pants-off part the way the swell in his own pants worries me he might.

  “I love how the so-called dorky prom, this thing you resisted, brought you two kids together,” Coley had told me our first Monday back to school after our PDA in the glitter-star-filled gymnasium.

  “We’re not together,” I said.

  “Well, then what are you?”

  “We’re friends who are figuring shit out,” I said, which at that point was the most honest and direct thing I’d said to Coley about me and my feelings, well, ever.

  The Friday of Bucking Horse practically all the FFA kids, which was like forty percent of the school to begin with, were given excused absences, and then probably another twenty percent had parents who let them miss class, and the unfortunate rest of us who weren’t goody-goodies or entirely uninterested, skipped. Jamie and I spent the morning at Holy Rosary with a couple of track teamers, rationing our pot allowances because Jamie couldn’t get any more until later that evening and supplies were low. We used a couple of wobbly pushcarts for hallway races and eventually hallway crashes. We finally broke through the barricade at the top of the metal ladder on the ninth floor to climb through the hatch to the flat-topped, gooey-tarred roof, where we spray painted CLASS OF ’95 on anything not moving and also a pigeon, which was moving, and so Jamie managed only a silver streak down one wing. We broke windows. We did handstands. We threw things into the empty, weedy parking lot. We did nothing that made any real kind of sense.

  It was summer-hot on that roof, Jamie’s shirt off soon after we got up there, the other guys’ too, and me with my own T-shirt pulled up and tied around my middle, my belly button showing, my sleeves rolled and tucked in so that my arms were completely bare. At some point it became just me and Jamie, and then my pulled-up shirt came off altogether and we found a corner shaded by a huge duct with my back squished into that melty tar, sun-hot skin on skin. I remembered the feel of Lindsey, and I imagined what this might be like with Coley. For a few minutes I went with it, both in the moment and not at all, trying to match Jamie’s intensity while pretending I wasn’t with him. But I couldn’t keep it up, and a police siren went by, and the clouds shifted, and Jamie’s increased breathing pulled me back to that roof, and I had to get out of there.

  I sat up, pushing Jamie off without giving him warning. “I’m starving,” I said, reaching for my shirt. “Let’s go to the fairgrounds and make Ruth buy us lunch.”

  “Give a guy a second, Post—fuck,” Jamie said. “We’re kind of already doing something.”

  I stood up, did some quick lunges like my legs needed stretching, which they didn’t. “I know, I’m sorry, but I’m seriously hungry,” I said, not looking at him. “I skipped my Wheaties this morning.”

  “Completely fucking lame,” he said, leaning back on his elbows and squinting up at me. “We can’t even go to the Sale until after school’s out—Ruth thinks you’re in chemistry right now.”

  I pulled on my shirt, reached down so as to help Jamie up, and babbled. “So we’ll tell her it was a half day. Or we’ll just tell her we left early; she’ll get over it. Maybe we won’t even see her; it’s packed out there. We can find Coley, score a hamburger.”

  Jamie ignored my hand and pushed himself up, turned away from me. “Yeah, let’s fucking go find Coley. Should’ve known.” He jerked open the lift for the hatch.

  “C’mon,” I said, tugging on the T-shirt he hadn’t put on but had tucked into the waistband of his shorts. “I’m just really hungry.”

  “Whatever,” he said. “What I don’t get—” He shook his head, said Fuck it under his breath.

  “What?” I asked, without wanting him to answer.

  He sneered. “For like two minutes I was like, Holy shit, here we go—Cameron’s actually into this for once. And now we’re off to find Coley.” He started down the ladder into the darkness below.

  “Then let’s not find her,” I said, following after. “Let’s do Taco John’s. Whatever.” This was a desperate sort of suggestion and Jamie knew it. Probably his greatest temptation aft
er pot were the Super Potato Olés at Taco John’s, which went well with the pot. We ate there with such frequency that I usually put up a fight for someplace else.

  “I have an idea,” Jamie said from below me. “Why don’t I drop you off with Pastor Crawford and you can ask him to pray for your perverse disease.” I heard him jump from the last rung, his sneakers slap the cement floor.

  “You’re being such an asshole,” I said, my foot searching for another rung and finding only air. I jumped too.

  “You’re being such a dyke,” he said, not waiting for me, taking off down the hallway.

  We didn’t talk in Jamie’s Geo. He blasted Guns N’ Roses and I pretended to be really interested in the same out-of-the-passenger-side-window scenery I’d been staring at my whole entire life. He drove us to the fairgrounds and paid the three bucks to park. He put on his T-shirt. We walked the packed dirt path, clots of dust kicking up behind us like behind Yosemite Sam in the cartoons—that dirt as soft and dry as flour. We walked side by side but not really together. The grounds smelled like manure and spring, the prairie wind lifting the scent of new sand reed and the just-blooming lilacs that edged the paint-chipped Expo Hall. What was left of my high was mostly worn off, but there was enough there for me to appreciate being outdoors in spring in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

  Inside the expo building we didn’t see Ruth but found Coley right away, staffing a booth with the five other Queen of the Bucking Horse Sale nominees. They were raffling off a quilt and a dozen steaks to benefit the Cattlemen’s Association, and the glass jar in front of Coley had the most tickets. She wasn’t only the youngest; from where I stood she was by far the prettiest in her tight black tank top with one of her brother’s stiff, white pearl-buttoned shirts tied over it and a sort of beat-up straw cowboy hat, her perfect hair ponytailed for once, two of them, actually. She was sipping a Coke through a red-and-white straw and smiling her big smile at some cowboy stopped at the table. He had his thumb hooked in his belt buckle and was wearing a google-eyed look like a guy shot by Cupid on a crappy drugstore valentine. I knew that look. I’d worn that look.