The Miseducation of Cameron Post

  THE

  MISEDUCATION

  OF

  CAMERON POST

  emily m. danforth

  Dedication

  For my parents, Duane and Sylvia Danforth,

  who filled our home with books and stories

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Part One: Summer 1989

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Part Two: High School 1991-1992

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Part Three: God’s Promise 1992-1993

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-one

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Part One

  Summer 1989

  Chapter One

  The afternoon my parents died, I was out shoplifting with Irene Klauson.

  Mom and Dad had left for their annual summer camping trip to Quake Lake the day before, and Grandma Post was down from Billings minding me, so it only took a little convincing to get her to let me have Irene spend the night. “It’s too hot for shenanigans, Cameron,” Grandma had told me, right after she said yes. “But we gals can still have us a time.”

  Miles City had been cooking in the high nineties for days, and it was only the end of June, hot even for eastern Montana. It was the kind of heat where a breeze feels like someone’s venting a dryer out over the town, whipping dust and making the cottonseeds from the big cottonwoods float across a wide blue sky and collect in soft tufts on neighborhood lawns. Irene and I called it summer snow, and sometimes we’d squint into the dry glare and try to catch cotton on our tongues.

  My bedroom was the converted attic of our house on Wibaux Street, with peaking rafters and weird angles, and it just baked during the summer. I had a grimy window fan, but all it did was blow in wave after wave of hot air and dust and, every once in a while, early in the morning, the smell of fresh-cut grass.

  Irene’s parents had a big cattle ranch out toward Broadus, and even all the way out there—once you turned off MT 59 and it was rutted roads through clumps of gray sagebrush and pink sandstone hills that sizzled and crisped in the sun—the Klausons had central air. Mr. Klauson was that big of a cattle guy. When I stayed at Irene’s house, I woke with the tip of my nose cold to the touch. And they had an ice maker in the door of their fridge, so we had crushed ice in our orange juice and ginger ale, a drink we mixed up all the time and called “cocktail hour.”

  My solution to the lack of air conditioning at my own house was to run our T-shirts under the cold, cold tap water in the bathroom sink. Then wring them out. Then soak the shirts again before Irene and I shivered into them, like putting on a new layer of icy, wet skin before we got into bed. Our sleep shirts crusted over during the night, drying and hardening with the hot air and dust like they had been lightly starched, the way Grandma did the collars of my dad’s dress shirts.

  By seven that morning it was already in the eighties, and our bangs stuck to our foreheads, our faces red and dented with pillow marks, gray crud in the corners of our eyes. Grandma Post let us have leftover peanut-butter pie for breakfast while she played solitaire, occasionally looking up through her thick glasses at the Perry Mason rerun she had on, the volume blasting. Grandma Post loved her detective stories. A little before eleven she drove us to Scanlan Lake in her maroon Chevy Bel Air. Usually I rode my bike to swim team, but Irene didn’t have one in town. We’d left the windows down, but the Bel Air was still all filled up with the kind of heat that can only trap itself in a car. Irene and I fought over shotgun when my mom was driving, or her mom was driving, but when we were riding in the Bel Air, we sat in the backseat and pretended to be in the Grey Poupon commercials, with Grandma as our chauffeur, her tenaciously black hair in a newly set permanent just visible to us over the seat back.

  The ride took maybe a minute and a half down Main Street (including the stop sign and two stop lights): past Kip’s Minute Market, which had Wilcoxin’s hardpack ice cream and served scoops almost too big for the cones; past the funeral homes, which stood kitty-corner from one another; through the underpass beneath the train tracks; past the banks where they gave us Dum-Dum Pops when our parents deposited paychecks, the library, the movie theater, a strip of bars, a park—these places the stuff of all small towns, I guess, but they were our places, and back then I liked knowing that.

  “Now you come home right after you’re done,” Grandma said, pulling up in front of the blocky cement lifeguard shack and changing rooms that everybody called the bathhouse. “I don’t want you two monkeying around downtown. I’m cuttin’ up a watermelon, and we can have Ritz and cheddar for lunch.”

  She toot-tooted at us as she rolled away toward Ben Franklin, where she was planning to buy even more yarn for her ever-expanding crocheting projects. I remember her honking like that, a little pep-in-her-step, she would have said, because it was the last time for a long time that I saw her in just that sort of mood.

  “Your grandma is crazy,” Irene told me, extending the word crazy and rolling her heavy brown eyes.

  “How’s she crazy?” I asked, but I didn’t let her answer. “You don’t seem to mind her when she’s giving you pie for breakfast. Two pieces.”

  “That still doesn’t mean she’s not a nutter,” Irene said, yanking hard on one end of the beach towel I had snaked over my shoulders. It slapped against my bare legs before thwacking the concrete.

  “Two pieces,” I said again, gripping the towel, Irene laughing. “Second-helping Sally.”

  Irene kept on giggling, dancing away from my reach. “She’s completely crazy, totally, totally nuts—mental-patient nuts.”

  This is how things usually went with Irene and me. It was best friends or sworn enemies with no filler in between. We tied for top grades in first through sixth. On the Presidential Fitness Tests she beat me at chin-ups and the long jump and I killed her on push-ups, sit-ups, and the fifty-yard dash. She’d win the spelling bee. I’d win the science fair.

  Irene once dared me to dive from the old Milwaukee Railroad bridge. I did, and split my head against a car engine sunk into the black mud of the river. Fourteen stitches—the big ones. I dared her to saw down the yield sign on Strevell Avenue, one of the last street signs in town with a wooden base. She did. Then she had to let me keep it, because there was no way of getting it back to her ranch.

  “My grandma’s just old,” I said, circling my wrist and lassoing the towel down by my feet. I was trying to twist it thick enough to use it as a whip, but Irene had that figured out.

  She jumped backward, away from me, colliding with a just-finished swim-lesson kid still wearing his goggles. She partially lost a flip-flop in the process. It slid forward and hung from a couple of toes. “Sorry,” she said, not looking at the dripping kid or his mom but kicking the flip-flop ahead of her so she could stay out of my reach.

  “You girls need to watch out for these little guys,” the mom told me, because I was closest to her and I had a towel-whip dangling, and because it was always me who got the talking-to when it came to Irene and me. Then the mom grabbed the go
ggle boy’s hand as though he was seriously hurt. “You shouldn’t be playing around in the parking lot anyway,” she said, and pulled her son away, walking faster than his little sandaled feet could quite keep up.

  I put the towel back around my shoulders and Irene came over to me, both of us watching the mom load swim-lesson kid into their minivan. “She’s nasty,” Irene said. “You should run over and pretend to get hit by her car when she backs up.”

  “But do you dare me to?” I asked her, and Irene, for once, didn’t have anything to say. And even though I was the one who said it, once the words were out there, between us, I was embarrassed too, unsure of what I should say next, both of us remembering what we’d done the day before, right after my parents had left for Quake Lake, this thing that had been buzzing between us all morning, neither of us saying a word about it.

  Irene had dared me to kiss her. We were out at the ranch, up in the hayloft, sweaty from helping Mr. Klauson mend a fence, and we were sharing a bottle of root beer. We’d spent the better part of the day trying to one-up each other: Irene spit farther than I could, so I jumped from the loft into the hay below, so she did a flip off a stack of crates, so I did a forty-five-second handstand with my T-shirt all bunched down over my face and shoulders and the top half of me naked. My roller-rink necklace—both of us wore them, half of a heart each, with our initials—dangled across my face, a cheap-metal itch. Those necklaces left green marks around our necks where they rubbed, but our tans mostly covered them up.

  My handstand would have lasted longer if Irene hadn’t poked at my belly button, hard.

  “Knock it off,” I managed, before crumpling over on top of her.

  She laughed. “You’re all pasty white where your swimsuit covers you up,” she said, her head close to mine and her mouth huge and hollow, and begging for me to stuff hay into it, so I did.

  Irene coughed and spit for a good thirty seconds, always dramatic. She had to pluck a couple of pieces out of her braces, which had new purple and pink bands on them. Then she sat up straight, all business. “Show me your swimsuit lines again,” she said.

  “Why?” I asked, even though I was already stretching my shirt to show her the bright stripe of white that fell between the dark skin on my neck and my shoulder.

  “It looks like a bra strap,” she said, and slowly ran her pointer finger along the stripe. It made my arms and legs goose-bump. Irene looked at me and grinned. “Are you gonna wear a bra this year?”

  “Probably,” I told her, even though she had just seen firsthand how little need I had for one. “Are you?”

  “Yeah,” she said, retracing the line, “it’s junior high.”

  “It’s not like they check you at the door,” I said, liking the feel of that finger but afraid of what it meant. I grabbed another handful of hay and stuffed this one down the front of her T-shirt, a purple one from Jump Rope for Life. She shrieked and attempted retaliation, which lasted only a few minutes, both of us sweating and weakened by the thick heat that filled the loft.

  We leaned up against the crates and passed the now-warm root beer back and forth. “But we are supposed to be older,” Irene said. “I mean, to act older. It is junior high school.” Then she took a long swallow, her seriousness reminding me of an after-school special.

  “Why do you keep saying that?” I asked.

  “Just ’cause we’ll both turn thirteen and that means we’ll be teenagers,” she said, trailing off, pushing her foot around in the hay. Then she muttered into the pop bottle, “You’re gonna be a teenager and you won’t even know how to kiss anybody.” She fake giggled as she sipped, the root beer fizzing out of her mouth a little.

  “You neither, Irene,” I said. “You think you’re such a Sexy-Lexy?” I meant this as an insult. When we played Clue, which we did often, Irene and I refused to even take the Miss Scarlet marker from the box. We had the edition where the cover featured photographs of people in weird old outfits, posed in a room with antiques, each of them supposedly one of the characters. On that version the busty Miss Scarlet lounged on a fainting couch like a panther in a red dress, smoking a cigarette from a long black holder. We nicknamed her Sexy-Lexy and made up stories about her inappropriate relationships with the paunchy Mr. Green and nerdy Colonel Mustard.

  “You don’t have to be a Lexy to kiss someone, dorkus,” Irene said.

  “Who’s there to kiss, anyway?” I asked, knowing exactly how she could respond, and holding my breath a little, waiting for her answer. She didn’t say anything. Instead she finished the root beer in one swallow and set the bottle on its side, then gently pushed it, sending it rolling away from us. We both watched it move toward the opening over the hay pile, the steady noise of glass over and over and over soft barn wood, a hollow sort of noise. The floor of the loft had a slight downward slope. The bottle reached the edge and slipped from our view, made an almost inaudible swish as it hit the hay below.

  I looked at Irene. “Your dad’s gonna be pissed when he finds that.”

  She looked back at me, dead on, our faces close again. “I bet you wouldn’t try to kiss me,” she said, not moving her stare for a second.

  “Is that a real dare?” I asked.

  She put on her “duh” face and nodded.

  So I did it right then, before we had to talk about it anymore or Irene’s mom called out to us to get ourselves washed up for dinner. There’s nothing to know about a kiss like that before you do it. It was all action and reaction, the way her lips were salty and she tasted like root beer. The way I felt sort of dizzy the whole time. If it had been that one kiss, then it would have been just the dare, and that would have been no different than anything we’d done before. But after that kiss, as we leaned against the crates, a yellow jacket swooping and arcing over some spilled pop, Irene kissed me again. And I hadn’t dared her to do it, but I was glad that she did.

  And then her mom did call us in for dinner, and we were shy with each other while we washed at the big sink on the back porch, and after hot dogs from the grill the way we liked them (burned and doused in ketchup) and two helpings of strawberry pretzel salad, her dad drove us into town, the three of us sharing the bench seat of his truck, the ride quiet save for KATL, the AM radio station, staticky all the way to Cemetery Road at the far edge of Miles City.

  At my house we watched a little Matlock with Grandma Post and then made our way to the backyard and the still-damp-from-the-sprinklers grass beneath the catalpa tree, which was heavy with white bell-shaped blooms that sweetened the hot air with a thick fog of scent. We watched the Big Sky do twilight proud: deep pinks and bright purples giving way to the inky blue-black of night.

  The first stars flickered on like the lights over the movie marquee downtown. Irene asked me, “Do you think we’d get in trouble if anyone found out?”

  “Yeah,” I said right away, because even though no one had ever told me, specifically, not to kiss a girl before, nobody had to. It was guys and girls who kissed—in our grade, on TV, in the movies, in the world; and that’s how it worked: guys and girls. Anything else was something weird. And even though I’d seen girls our age hold hands or walk arm in arm, and probably some of those girls had practiced kissing on each other, I knew that what we had done in the barn was something different. Something more serious, grown-up, like Irene had said. We hadn’t kissed each other just to practice. Not really. At least I didn’t think so. But I didn’t tell any of that to Irene. She knew it too.

  “We’re good at secrets,” I finally said. “It’s not like we ever have to tell anybody.” Irene didn’t answer, and in the dark I couldn’t quite make out what face she had on. Everything hung there in that hot, sweet smell while I waited for her to say something back.

  “Okay. But—” Irene started when the back porch light flicked on, Grandma Post’s squat frame silhouetted in the screen door.

  “About time to come in, gals,” she told us. “We can have ice cream before bed.”

  We watched that silhouette mo
ve from the door, back toward the kitchen.

  “But what, Irene?” I whispered, though I knew Grandma probably couldn’t have heard me even if she was standing in the backyard.

  Irene took in a breath. I heard it. Just a little. “But do you think we can do it again, though, Cam?”

  “If we’re careful,” I said. I’m guessing she could see me blush even in that much darkness, but it’s not like Irene needed to see it anyway: She knew. She always knew.

  Scanlan Lake was a man-made sort of lake-pond that was Miles City’s best stab at a municipal pool. It had two wooden docks set fifty yards apart, which was a regulation distance according to federation swim rules. Half of Scanlan was bordered by a gravelly beach of brown sand, and they used that same hard sand to coat the bottom, at least part of the way out, so our feet didn’t sink in pond muck. Every May the city released a flow tube and filled the then-empty lakebed with diverted water from the Yellowstone River—water and whatever else might fit through the metal grate: baby catfish, flukes, minnows, snakes, and tiny, iridescent snails that fed on duck poop and caused the red rash of bumps known as swimmer’s itch, the rash that covered the backs of my legs and burned, especially in the soft skin behind my knees.

  Irene watched me practice from up on the beach. Right after our moment in the parking lot, Coach Ted had arrived, and there was no time for any more shenanigans, and maybe we were both a little glad about that. While we were doing our warm-ups, I kept hanging on the docks to scan for her. Irene wasn’t a swimmer. Not at all. She could barely thrash her way through a few strokes, forget passing the deepwater test necessary to go off the diving boards that towered at the end of the right dock. While I was learning to swim, Irene had spent her summers building fences, moving cattle, branding, and helping the neighbors who bordered her parents’ ranch, and their neighbors. But because everything with us was a challenge, and so often there was no clear winner, I clung to my title as the better swimmer, always showing off when we were at Scanlan together, proving my superiority again and again by launching into a lap of butterfly or jack-knifing off the high dive.