The Miseducation of Cameron Post Read online

  “Figures,” I said, lolling my head around because it felt good to do that but also trying to be a real sport about it. Coley and I had been halfheartedly arguing about the need for me to have “prom hair” since I’d agreed to go.

  “Brett’s going to be genuinely heartbroken if you two are too baked to share the bottle of Jim Beam he has. He’s been saving it for a special occasion for months. Seriously. Months.” She was busy undoing my ubiquitous ponytail.

  “We’re not that high even,” I said, liking the feel of her fingers in my hair and also feeling a little bit throw-uppy and twitchy having her so close to me, leaning over me.

  “I hope not,” she said, spritzing hair spray and brushing and using the curling iron, and doing other things too, things that I didn’t ever take the time to do. “Because the night, my dear, is young.”

  “I thought you’d be mad at me if you found out we smoked,” I said, which was not the kind of thing I’d have ever admitted to Coley without the pot egging me on.

  “I already knew that—of course. It’s Jamie’s thing, right?”

  “But Jamie’s not me,” I said.

  “Close enough sometimes,” she said, yanking on something.

  “No,” I said. “Not close enough.”

  “Okay, whatever,” she said. “I am sort of surprised you didn’t wait for us.”

  “Since when do you smoke?” I was somehow offended by the idea of Coley having a habit of recreational drug use without my being aware of it.

  “I don’t,” she said, leaning down to grin at me, her face huge and bright and so, so close to mine. “But I just told you, the night is young.”

  Here is how the young night grew older:

  After dinner and pictures and pictures and pictures, Brett and Coley making most of the necessary conversation with Aunt Ruth so that Jamie and I could avoid doing so, the four of us loaded into Grandma Post’s Chevy Bel Air, which seemed a markedly cooler car than it had not so many years before. Brett played chauffeur and Ruth took even more pictures of us loading up, rolling down the driveway, pulling into the street, until finally we were around the corner and free from the flash of her newish pink Sally-Q camera—at least until Grand March. We’d told her we were leaving a little early to drag a couple of Mains (drive the Main Street loop) and to stop for pictures at Brett’s aunt’s house. Instead, Brett pulled into a space by the community college track, the parking lot empty, the lone jog-walker in a teal running suit puffing through a lap, and the coast as clear as it was gonna get. We took turns with the Jim Beam until Jamie said he didn’t want to drink as much of that shit as he was going to need to get through prom, produced his pipe, and after watching him pack it, Coley spoke for the group when she said she’d “give it a whirl,” but only if we did it outside, because she was “not showing up to prom reeking of marijuana.”

  We borrowed scratchy stadium blankets from the trunk and Jamie and Brett took off their jackets. The puffing jog-walker did a perfect comic double take as the four of us—Coley and I wrapped in wool cocoons with bare legs and strappy shoes, Jamie and Brett mostly in their tuxes—crossed the parking lot to the thin cluster of juniper bushes and cottonwoods, found cover next to one of the picnic tables, and lit up. Coley coughed and coughed. Brett coughed and coughed. Jamie jogged to the Coke machine just outside the doors to the recreation center and bought a Sprite to cool their throats, jogged it back, and proceeded to pop open the too-jostled can and spray himself in sticky lemon-lime.

  “Shit balls,” he said, shaking drips of pop from his fingers and handing what was left in the can to Coley. “Are you guys feeling it, at least?”

  “Can’t tell,” Brett said. “My lips feel like beehives. Does that mean I’m high?”

  “As a spaceship,” Jamie told him, reaching for the pipe. “But maybe one more for the road.”

  “No more for the road,” Coley said, grabbing my arms and attempting to make me spin with her, which I didn’t do. “I feel peaceful. And also like the world is made of pudding. This is nice. This is enough for now; we should go.”

  And after spritzing ourselves with almost the entire contents of the tiny bottle of Red Door perfume that Coley had in her clutch, and liberally sampling the PepOMints Grandma kept in the glove compartment, we did.

  We had to line up for Grand March behind a partition arranged at one end of the gym. Vice Principal Hennitz was taking tickets and supposedly checking breath for booze, but Brett’s winning grin and tremendous soccer season earned him only a vigorous nod and a smile, and then the four of us were in the door, at prom. It was too much hair spray and eyeliner back there, everybody a little bit sweaty and the whole thing already feeling deflated. When our names were announced we had to climb separate risers perched on either side of some platform, done up in glitter paint and apparently intended by the prom committee to look like a lunar surface. Once up the stairs we were to then meet in the middle, join hands, smile for one photo, and exit together. They had video cameras hooked up, so all this was playing on a screen hanging from the retracted basketball hoop. The bleachers at the opposite end of the gym were filled with all manner of doting relatives and with fellow high schoolers in various degrees of fuckup-ed-ness, some of them cheering for their favorite couples but most of them mocking the whole production—which isn’t to say that some of us in line weren’t doing the same.

  I had to concentrate to walk in the heels Coley had picked for me, not that they were particularly tall, but certainly more so than my sneakers. Because of that concentration, and the pot, I didn’t much hear the bleacher section until I was already in the middle with Jamie, hands together, the spotlight on us, and in the distance the rapid flashing of a couple of cameras—Ruth’s, certainly, and probably Jamie’s mom’s. Jamie, unable to resist his moment on the big screen, put one arm around my back and dipped me low like a tango dancer. More cameras snapped. People clapped and whistled. Somebody booed.

  During Coley and Brett’s five seconds in the spotlight Brett gave Coley what was described by two junior girls in nearly identical purple dresses as “just an adorable” peck on the cheek, and Coley filled up the screen with her fucking amazingly sweet smile, and the bleacher contingent, even the bitter and scorned girls in the back row, awwwwed like people do when a precocious puppy takes a bubble bath in a Disney movie. But this wasn’t the prom moment that got me.

  Other moments that didn’t get me include the first dance, which they let the parents and onlookers stay for, and which in this case was to Mr. Big’s “To Be with You.” Coley and Brett didn’t have much time for intimacy with Coley’s mom stopping them every two seconds to smile and pose, but when I did catch a look at the two of them, they seemed very happy in a completely stoned sort of way. Jamie and I were getting the same camera treatment from Ruth and his mom, but Jamie kept bobbing and weaving us around other dancers to keep us safe from their lenses, so much so that Jamie’s mother eventually walked right through the couples into the middle of the floor and pulled at Jamie’s jacket, asking why the two of us couldn’t just dance like normal people so we can get a picture, damn it.

  After that the parents left, and then it was a bunch of faster songs, and Jamie actually had some moves, most of them comic, all of them big but impressively rhythmic, somehow. And then it was two quick pipe hits each in the third stall of the girls’ bathroom in the senior hallway, which the four of us escaped to fairly easily but had a hell of a time getting back from. The classrooms and hallways beyond the gymnasium were “officially closed,” supposedly to prevent just the kinds of activities we were partaking of. But there were only so many chaperones, and the punch fountain needed constant surveillance.

  While Jamie made the most of his all-black ensemble, slinking the length of the hallway and stairwell to ensure the coast was clear, Coley and Brett took some advantage of their high and did more kissing in that bathroom than they’d ever done in my presence before. And still that wasn’t the moment that got me.

  An
d it wasn’t the next couple of slow songs. And it wasn’t watching Coley dance sweetly with, and not at all to ridicule, this weedy FFA kid who had it bad for her and wore just how bad on his blushing face. And it wasn’t even when Coley asked me to dance. Brett and Jamie were off posing for one of those photos small-town professional photographers always like to take and then hang in their store windows—a black-and-white with a bunch of the high school jocks, jackets slung over their shoulders, arms crossed, all of them refusing to smile and instead glowering at the camera.

  Other girls had been dancing together all night, in groups and couples, but “November Rain” was a little bit slower and a little bit mushier a song than typical girl-girl dancing fare; and even still, with the cardboard stars overhead and way-too-high Coley holding me tight, our dance felt strangely meaningless and hardly romantic and not at all like anything I’d ever privately wished for when I thought about her. I was conscious of the couples around us who might be watching, and I was glad when it was over.

  The moment that did get me was maybe five songs before the DJ thanked us for coming and they turned on the overhead lights and we all squinted and looked at each other in harsh fluorescent and noticed how squashed so-and-so’s hair was and how the food table was all used up and dirty and rumpled and how some of us maybe looked a little like that too. Before that, Jamie and I were sitting one out in the bleachers and Coley and Brett were twisted up together on that gummy floor, all the couples around them members of Custer’s Most Committed Relationship Club—not the couples who just got together for prom, the real deals. I was staring at Coley. I was. Her head on Brett’s shoulder and her eyes closed and several of the daisies now gone from her hair. She had taken off her shoes, we all had, and so she was tiptoeing it through this dance, the bottoms of her perfect feet black, but it didn’t look like she could feel the floor anyway. Not from where I was sitting. I was still high enough to have a very bright kind of daydream where I was the one dancing with her that way, at our prom, with everyone knowing that we were together and girls in purple dresses whispering about how sweet and adorable it was when I kissed her. And I thought I was having a private moment, there from the dark of the bleachers, just watching Coley. But I felt the kind of prickle you get at the back of your neck when someone is watching you and you’re about to get caught, and I turned my head and Jamie wasn’t looking at the dance floor anymore; he was looking at me.

  “Jesus, Cam,” he said, not that quietly. “Try to keep it in your pants.”

  In my chest it felt like I’d just done the 200 IM. “You want my attentions all to yourself, huh?” I asked, trying lamely to smile and play him off like an idiot.

  “Okay, sure,” he said. “Whatever.” He stood up. “I don’t want to talk about fucked-up shit like this anyway. I’m gonna go see if I can find Trenton and score a cigarette.” He was already two rows down, jacket slung over his shoulder and his face angry for real, not for the camera.

  I stood up, followed him without knowing what I was supposed to say but unable to let whatever had just happened hang over me there in the bleacher section. My brain felt all linty like I’d been keeping it in the hatch in the dryer, and I couldn’t get a handle on how best to make this go away fast.

  When I’d caught his step and was just behind him, I leaned in over his shoulder and tried: “I don’t have a thing for Brett, if that’s what you meant. Jealous much?” I had intended to say this in my best sneer, but I didn’t sneer all that well to begin with, and here I was high, and also it was hard for me to even make it sound plausible in my own head.

  We were in the big lobby just outside the gym where the concession booths and trophy cases were. There were plenty of promgoers out there, milling around in their now-drooping finery, the heavy entrance doors propped open and the night air drifting in cool enough to be cold. Jamie answered me louder than I expected. “Yeah, I know that. You wouldn’t have the problem you have if that were the case, huh?”

  A knot of speech and drama kids who had dressed in Renaissance-style attire mostly borrowed from the school’s prop room turned and looked at us. Despite the very nonperiod glasses and haircuts and braces that some of them sported, I felt in that moment like they were the chorus in my unfolding tragedy. I actually took Jamie’s elbow and pulled him through the entrance doors, and he let me do it; but Hennitz was standing just outside, hands clasped behind his back, looking out at the school lawn and the ground-lit metal sculpture of Custer some alum had donated the year before.

  “It’s two of Custer’s fastest,” he said, turning to us and smiling in that vice-principalish way. “Did you make the most of your big night?”

  “Sure,” Jamie said, linking his arm to mine. “It’s been a gay old time.”

  Hennitz chuckled. “You’re not all really saying that again, are you?” he asked, seeming genuinely bemused. “I can’t ever keep up with the lingo.” He turned to go in, turned back. “Now remember, if you leave the steps you’ve left the premises and I can’t let you back inside.” He left us there on the wide cement stoop.

  “Sure thing, dickhead,” Jamie said to the space where Hennitz had been. In one graceful movement he perched himself on the top rung of the metal handrail.

  A couple of kids I didn’t know were on the far end of the stoop, lounging, the girls wearing their dates’ jackets over their bare shoulders. It was chilly out there, worse yet when a breeze lifted the hem of my dress and left me with a series of shivers, one after the next. I bit back on my molars and clenched my shoulder blades together. I didn’t have any of the right words to convince Jamie of anything. I looked at my still-bare feet, which were already stinging from the cold of the concrete. I willed myself not to fucking start crying.

  “You want my jacket?” Jamie asked, his voice softer.

  I shook my head no without looking at him.

  He hopped down and put it over my twitching shoulders anyway.

  “God, don’t cry, Cameron,” he said, his voice softer still, and he never, ever called me Cameron. “I really didn’t mean to make you cry.”

  “I’m not,” I said, which was just barely the truth. It was now or never. “When did you first know?” I asked him, still watching my feet. My toes had gone all white at the tips.

  “What do I know?”

  “About me.”

  “What about you?” His voice was only sort of teasing.

  “Why do you have to be such an asshole about this?”

  “Because what do I know, really? I know that you and that girl Lindsey are still pretty fuckin’ chummy and she had the look about her. So that I know.”

  “What look?” I asked, finding his face.

  “The dyke look. Fuck.” He shook his head and snorted, banged the heel of his hand against the rail hard enough for it to hum a clangy, hollow sound the lounging couples noticed. “You want me to just call you a dyke? Is that like your party prize or something?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I want,” I said, crying for sure now, and mad at myself for it and mad at Jamie, too. “Maybe you could spray paint it on my locker, just to be safe. So I won’t forget.”

  I turned to go but Jamie pulled me back to him, and even though I’d seen that happen in like four hundred movies, nobody had ever done it to me and I didn’t know that it could work just like that. One second I was full-force out of there and then I was crying hard against his chest, which was embarrassing and made me feel weak and was still something I let happen for a little while, anyway.

  “Does everybody know?” I asked when I pulled myself away and used Jamie’s jacket sleeve to wipe up the mess I’d made of the dewy look Coley had worked so hard on.

  “A couple of the guys on the team have talked shit,” he said. “But it’s not an everyday thing.”

  I made a face that said Oh really? It involved raising my eyebrows and sort of pushing out my lips and cocking my head, and I could feel how stupid it looked even as I did it.

  “It’s not,” Jamie said. “The
y like you, so it’s like, She’s just a jock, or whatever.”

  “But that’s not what you said in the bleachers—”

  “Because it’s bad fucking practice.” His voice was up again. “Jesus—you think people are saying shit now? Why don’t you keep on with the Coley Taylor thing awhile longer and see what happens?”

  I couldn’t stop the way I was blushing, just like I never could. “We’re friends,” I said. “Seriously. I’ve never even . . .” I didn’t know how to end that.

  “You and me are friends too,” he said. “For way longer. It’s like, how do you even know?”

  “Who said I know anything? Or anything for sure.”

  Jamie shook his head. “Well, when you’re around Coley, you sure act like you do. At least sometimes you do.” He paused a second, seemed to work on his next words. “So if what you’re telling me now is that you don’t know for sure, then that’s stupid. It is. You could give a guy a chance, find out.”

  And even though probably there were dozens of times I should have noticed before, it wasn’t until right in that moment that I knew Jamie had a thing for me. Or that he thought he had a thing for me. And everything we had been talking about or around those last few minutes became suddenly more complicated and more uncomfortable, and it was now the exact kind of scene that I fast-forwarded through in movies—too much tension, too little air, nothing to undercut it all.

  Some kids we both knew came outside just then, all of them laughing and loud, sweaty with sticky bangs and flushed faces. “One more song before last dance,” one of them told us. Then they all seemed, at once, to notice that they’d interrupted some prom-night drama: Jamie’s tense stance, my messy face.

  They offered us shoulder shrugs and apologetic smiles, waved their packs of cigarettes at us, mumbled things about not wanting to smoke on top of us, and made their way down a couple of steps and over to the other handrail.