The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  We found the rest of the herd grazing in a patch of new grass maybe a half mile away. I finished pouring the feed. Both of us drank more. With some effort, Coley drove us up the rocky but slippery side of a partly pink sandstone hill they called the Strawberry, and after spinning the wheels in a marsh of mud near the crest, she parked. We lined the bed of the truck with the empty cake bags and spread the flannel blanket from the bench seat over them. Coley left the stereo on, turned up the volume even louder. We lay flat on our backs, our feet planted and our knees in the air, the just-setting sun coloring the remaining clouds in plum and navy with Pepto Bismol–pink underbellies and the sky behind them every candy-colored shade of orange, from circus peanut to sugared jelly slice. I could feel something happening between us, something even beyond my buzz from the liquor, something that had started with the wrestling on the couch, before that, too, if I was to be honest. I closed my eyes and willed it just to finally happen.

  “Why don’t you still talk to Irene Klauson?” Coley asked. It wasn’t any more of a surprise than anything else she might have asked me right then.

  “She’s too cool for me now,” I said. “I didn’t even know that you knew her.”

  “Of course. The dinosaur heiress? Are you kidding?”

  “But did you know her before that?”

  “Yeah, especially when we were little,” Coley said, twisting the bottle cap with just the smallest of fizzing noise escaping from what was left of the carbonation. “I didn’t know you, but I’d see you two together at everything.”

  “At what?”

  “At everything—the fair, at Forsyth’s field days.”

  “We were together as much as we weren’t,” I said.

  “I know,” Coley said, handing me the bottle. “That’s why I asked why you don’t still talk to her.”

  “She went away. I stayed here.”

  “That doesn’t quite add up.” Coley let her right knee fall out to the side so that it collided with my left knee and stayed propped there.

  “Her parents found dinosaurs and my parents died. Does that add up?” I didn’t say it to sound mean, exactly; I was actually hoping that answer made sense.

  “Maybe,” she said, letting her other knee fall so now she was turned completely on her right side, facing me, both of her legs propped by mine, her elbow down and her right hand holding her head. “I guess some of my friends changed after my dad died.”

  I didn’t have anything to say to that. We listened to Tom Petty telling us about free falling. Coley put her left hand on my stomach, just above where my belly button was. She pressed it there kind of hard.

  “Did you sleep with Jamie?” she asked. Just like that.

  “Nope,” I said. “I’m not planning to, either.”

  Coley laughed. “Because you’re a prude?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “All prude, all the time.” Then I waited a little and added, “You have with Brett, though, right?”

  “That’s what you think?”

  “I guess so.”

  “Not yet,” she said. “Brett’s too nice a guy to pressure me.”

  “He is a nice guy,” I said, trying to read what was happening and to be sure about it, but I couldn’t.

  “Sometimes I think I should wait, anyway. It used to be really important to me to wait, at least until college. Doesn’t it seem like there’s all this room to figure things out in college?”

  “I guess,” I said. She still hadn’t moved her hand.

  “What do you think Irene Klauson is doing at this very moment?” Coley’s words were Southern Comforty and wet and warm at the side of my face, deep into my ear.

  This was it, I decided, and so I said, “Making out with her boyfriend, the polo player.” And then I added before I lost my nerve, “Pretending to like it.” Those words just hung out there for a moment, out in the all-color sky, with the sound of raindrops flitting from pine boughs when the breeze hit them right.

  She gave it a second, then asked, “Why pretending?”

  I got scared. “What?”

  “Why doesn’t she like it?” Coley moved the fingers of the hand on my stomach, one at a time; she pressed in the pinky, then released, the ring finger, release, the middle finger, release, again and again she cycled through them.

  “Just a guess,” I said. I could just turn my head to hers, right now, I thought, and that would be that. I didn’t.

  “I don’t think that’s what it is,” she said. She took her hand away from my stomach, sat up, scooched to the end of the truck bed, the tailgate, let her legs dangle over the edge.

  It was somehow easier with her down there, her back to me. Easier, but still not easy. I breathed in and out, in and out. Then I did it again. Then, before the moment was too far gone, I said to her sweatshirt hood, “She’s pretending because she’d rather be kissing a girl.”

  Now Coley got scared. “What?”

  “You heard me,” I said, though it took effort to make the words steady.

  “How do you know that?”

  “How do you think?”

  Coley didn’t answer me. We listened to the pine boughs shake free more rain. It was growing darker with every word I wasted.

  She turned to look at me, that colored sky all stretched out behind her, her face a shadow. “Come sit with me.”

  I did. I sat as close to her as possible. Our shoulders and legs touching. She was swinging her feet back and forth like a kid on a swing set. We sat like that for a while. The swing of her legs made the tailgate squeak, but only every so often.

  Finally Coley said, each word spaced out, “There have been a whole bunch of times I thought you were gonna try to kiss me. Yesterday at the rodeo, even.”

  We waited some more. The tailgate squeaked twice.

  She said, “But you never have.”

  “I can’t,” I said, just barely letting the words out. “I never can do it.” I watched Coley’s boots swing out and back over the ground, the heel of one of them just grazing a clump of sagebrush, flicking water from it.

  “I’m not like that, Cam. You should already know that I’m not.”

  “Okay,” I said. “I didn’t think that you were.”

  “I’m not,” she said, and breathed in big. “But then what’s weird is that sometimes I think if you kissed me, I wouldn’t stop you.”

  “Oh,” I said. I actually said “Oh.” It was a clear, solid little word and it felt like a stupid thing to say because it was.

  “I don’t know what that means,” she said.

  “Does it have to mean something?”

  “Yes,” Coley said, looking at me. I could feel her looking at me, but I kept on staring at her swinging feet. “It does have to mean something.”

  I hopped down, right into the mud. I leaned up against the tailgate, trying to make out the slope of each hill as the twilight worked to make the range one stretch of shadows. “Sorry,” I said, because I thought I should say something. I wondered if I could maybe walk all the way back to Miles City. I knew it would take me over an hour just to reach the highway, but in that moment it seemed like maybe the safer option.

  But then Coley put her hand on my shoulder, just barely there, the feel and weight of her palm through Ty’s thick cotton sweatshirt. That was all I needed. I turned around and found her face, and her mouth was already waiting like a question. I’m not gonna make it out to be something that it wasn’t: It was perfect—Coley’s soft lips against the bite of the liquor and sugary Coke still on our tongues. She did more than just not stop me. She kissed me back. She pulled me in with her arms, her ankles latching behind my thighs, and we stayed like that until I could feel my boots sinking so far into the rain-softened clay-thick mud beneath me that I wasn’t sure I’d get them out. Coley noticed too, me now several inches lower than when we’d started.

  “Holy fuck,” she said when I pulled away.

  “I know,” I said. “Trust me, I know.” I tried to lift up my boots and found that I
couldn’t, so I stayed planted there. “I’m stuck,” I said. It was embarrassing.

  “Oh my God, Cam. Oh my God.” Coley had her hands over her face, which was right in front of me, I mean, right in front, inches away, but I couldn’t move back any.

  “Seriously, Coley—I’m stuck,” I said. I put my hands on her thighs and was planning to grip her jeans while I attempted to jerk one foot free, but my touch freaked her out even more and she did a kind of Elizabeth Taylor gasp and jumped down from the tailgate and there was no room for us both in that small space, no way for me to move my feet, so I fell backward, literally in slow motion, Ty’s boots still stuck in that thick mud-clay but the momentum pushing the rest of me back, back until there wasn’t any farther to go.

  I hit a clump of sagebrush but it couldn’t hold my weight, and my back squashed down hard on its leathery leaves and stiff stems until my head was in the mud and my legs were in the mud and my fucking feet were still locked in those boots. I had cold mud squelched in my ears but I could hear Coley laughing, hard, big, for real, a whooping kind of laughing, and so I closed my eyes and shoved my sage-scraped hands into my jeans pockets and joined in, right there on the ground.

  And when I opened my eyes again, Coley was standing over me, one foot on either side of my hips, but because of the diminished light and her angle, the way she was bent over me some, her hair falling toward me, I couldn’t read her face.

  “And we called her Grace,” Coley said. Even without seeing her expression, I could tell she was smiling.

  “You’re very clever,” I said.

  “What just happened?”

  “I fell on my ass. Big-time.” I was stalling.

  Coley knew it. “Before.”

  “I’m not sure,” I said.

  “Yes you are,” she said, and then in a move I never could have guessed, she sat down on my hips, me pinned beneath her like when we were wrestling, but this was something much bigger. “You finally kissed me,” she said.

  “I thought you wanted me to.”

  Coley didn’t say anything to that. I waited for her to, but she didn’t.

  “It doesn’t have to be a big deal,” I said. “It can just be one more stupid thing the two of us tried together.”

  Coley kept on sitting where my hip bones jutted out, all of her weight on me, and having her there was maddening; I wanted to pull her down on top of me. But she still didn’t say anything. So I waited, and I panicked, and I listened to Tom Petty singing from the cab of the truck, and I thought about Lindsey and how she had warned me about this exact stupid thing, and how I just couldn’t help myself.

  I tried again. “C’mon, Coley. We don’t even have to talk about it. It’s no big deal.”

  “It is too,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “For lots of reasons.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I didn’t really think I’d like it and I did.” She said it like ammunition.

  “So did I,” I said.

  “And that doesn’t seem like a big deal to you?”

  “It doesn’t have to be,” I lied. “It’s not like I’m thinking you’re gonna ask me to go steady.”

  “Okay, it’s into the ether,” she said, standing up. “But I want to stop now.”

  “Yeah,” I said, hoping she couldn’t see my face any better than I could see hers. “Me too.”

  I didn’t spend the night. After we got back to her house and cleaned off, the two of us didn’t even know how to sit on the couch and watch TV without what had happened sitting down between us, and eventually Coley said that she thought maybe she did want to go downtown after all, so we ended up at the hospital cafeteria having the too-much-gravied chicken-fried steak with a pleasantly surprised Mrs. Taylor, and then we found our way to another street dance and joined a group of FFA kids. When everybody decided to head out to the McGinns’ ranch for a kegger, I told Coley that I was tired and was just gonna go home if that was cool, and she looked relieved about that. At least that’s how I read it.

  Aunt Ruth and Ray weren’t home yet, and it was kind of embarrassing to come in before them, but Grandma was at the kitchen table eating sugar-free cherry Jell-O with mandarin oranges and cottage cheese. She was wearing the same purple housecoat she wore the night she told me about Mom and Dad. She’d worn it plenty of times since, but something about seeing her alone at the table in it was like putting bare feet in a snowbank.

  “You want some, Spunky?” she asked me, offering her spoon and pushing the bowl across the table a few inches. “It’s no German chocolate cake.”

  “No thanks,” I said, but sat down with her anyway.

  “Your Jamie called twice tonight,” she said.

  “He’s not my Jamie, Grandma.”

  “Well, he’s sure as hell not mine. Whose is he if he’s not yours?” She worked an orange slice onto the spoon she’d already loaded with Jell-O.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s his own.”

  “You’re too young yet to be fooling with serious boyfriends, anyway.”

  I liked watching how she made sure that every bite had some of each of the dish’s three components in it.

  She swallowed and said, “I made your grandfather chase after me for purt-near forever, to hear him tell it. That was the fun of it.”

  “So how did you decide to let him catch you?”

  “Because it was time to.” She used her spoon to do a long swipe of the inside of the bowl, the metal against the ceramic making an uncomfortable noise. “That’s something you figure out when you do.”

  “Is that what it was like for Mom and Dad?”

  “Most likely. In its way.” She let the spoon rest against the rim of the bowl. “We’re coming up on three years, kiddo.”

  I nodded, focused on that spoon and not her face.

  “You wanna talk on that any?”

  I shook my head no but then decided I owed her an actual answer for making the attempt. “Not tonight,” I said.

  “We’re doing pretty good, huh?” She patted her soft, old hand on top of mine just a few times and then got up from the table, which was a labored process, and took her bowl, the spoon rattling against it, into the kitchen.

  “I’m not doing so good, Grandma,” I said, and I didn’t whisper it, but she was already rinsing her dish in the sink, the water from the faucet whooshing against the metal basin, and there was no way she could hear me.

  In my room I put on The Hotel New Hampshire, mostly just to again watch the half-second kiss between Jodie Foster and Nastassja Kinski. It was only a little before eleven and I thought about calling Lindsey, since it was even an hour earlier in Seattle, but I wasn’t sure I wanted the lecture that I knew what I was gonna get, or her list of non-straight-girl conquests that would follow it.

  Earlier in the week I’d finished decoupaging these poseable wooden mom and dad dolls with words from the newspaper articles about my parents’ accident and also from their obituaries. I’d nicked those dolls from Ben Franklin’s craft aisle, had stuck them inside my track sweatshirt in the silk flower section, which was in the front corner of the store and completely overgrown with plastic vines and garish birds of paradise, a perfect place to hide loot. But for some reason, even though I could have easily stolen it, I decided to pay for the daughter doll I’d found. It was $4.95. That night I started on her, using words cut out of a “Dealing with Loss: Responses to Life Crises” pamphlet I’d had hanging around since Nancy Huntley’s therapy sessions. Numb and numbness were in that twelve-page booklet seventeen times, so I set about making a numb shirt.

  I’d been at it for a little while before I noticed the sheet of paper folded in the secret-note method (all the ends tucked together into a neat little square, perfect for palming in a class and passing across an aisle). Jamie had taught me how to fold it. The note was leaned up against the dollhouse-size picnic table I’d made by preserving some of Grandma’s sugar wafers in clear enamel. The table had those too-pink strawb
erry wafer legs and a chocolate-and-white sugar wafer top, and it was drying on a couple of sheets of newspaper on the wide shelf above my desk. I wiped my sticky fingers on my jeans and peeled the note from the wafers; the top portion had stuck just a little.

  Chapter Ten

  If you didn’t just work on your parents’ ranch or have an affinity for burger flipping, the two best summer jobs available to a high schooler in Miles City in 1992 were Scanlan Lake lifeguard and flagger (usually flag girl) for the Montana Highway Department. Getting either of those jobs meant that you had to know somebody in charge or have a special set of skills, like being a strong swimmer. But both of those jobs also meant good money, lots of hours, and that the whole thing happened outside. The downside of lifeguarding was teaching swimming lessons in the mornings: sobbing toddlers, anxious mothers in culottes, the difficulty of producing a lasting back float from a skin-and-bone, blue-lipped, and shivering six-year-old. The downside of being a flag girl was hour after hour spent standing on a stretch of black highway in the hazy heat of an eastern Montana summer. That and the constant danger of becoming the roadkill of some minivanned family speeding their way to Yellowstone. I got lifeguard; Coley got flag girl; Jamie was a brand-new black-and-purple-polo-shirted employee of Taco John’s; and Brett, who had apparently impressed with his ball handling in that game he’d played during Bucking Horse, was selected as the Montana representative for this big-deal national soccer camp, which meant that he would spend part of June and all of July in California trying to maybe earn himself a college scholarship.

  Jamie and I were pretty much back to our pre-prom friendship, but Coley and I had been expectedly weird together since Bucking Horse, so I worked hard to be extra amusing and also to offer up lots of private Brett-and-Coley opportunities to both of them, and the weirdness at least got back-burnered with the excitement of summer.

  “So you kissed her, she rocked your world, leave it be,” Lindsey told me when I phone-spilled most of the details, including my stuck-boot fall. “It’s like one of many, many such kisses in your future, but for her it’s the thing she’ll obsess over after she gets the two point five kids and the mortgage. She’ll ask herself as she’s trying to sleep at night: Why didn’t I make it with that chick when I had the chance?”