The Miseducation of Cameron Post Page 9

  The meet ended by three and that meant maybe six good hours of daylight left, six and a half if we counted twilight, which seemed far darker from inside the hospital. We rushed through taco pizza at the Pizza Pit, Ruth telling me to slow down, to chew like a lady, to stop popping my knuckles and gnawing on my straw. Lindsey rolled her eyes and made faces every time Ruth looked away, and that was enough to get me through the meal. We were scooched together in one of those red vinyl booths and were both in shorts, the seats icy on our sun-hot legs. Our bare arms touched as we ate, our thighs, and it felt like heat lighting, it felt like a quick brush against the electric fence at Klauson’s Ranch, like the promise of something more.

  “We’re gonna go meet Dave at his stand and get some ice cream and then go to the six-thirty show,” I told Ruth as soon as she had the last bite of her second piece in her mouth. I surprised myself by grabbing Lindsey’s hand and pulling her from the booth. I think I surprised Lindsey, too.

  “What’s playing? It has to be PG. Those PG-13 movies might as well be R-rated, and I don’t want you girls seeing that junk.” Ruth was dabbing at her mouth with her paper napkin, ever dainty, ever refined, even as the slot machines clanged and beeped one room over.

  “It is PG,” I lied, knowing that Ruth could (and in fact did) check the marquee as she drove past the theater on her way home. But by then she’d think we were already inside and watching the very R-rated Thelma & Louise, and would talk with me about that lie later, which was a talk I deserved, I suppose, because even though Lindsey and I didn’t go to see Thelma & Louise that night, it was a movie I rented and rented and rented once it came out.

  Dave and Jamie met us in the hospital courtyard with a backpack full of smoke bombs and sparklers. Dave eyed Lindsey for a long time, like he knew her type, or like he wanted to. I thought his skull earring looked stupid with the beaded rattail he had cultivated—like he was trying too hard to be a pirate or something.

  They were already drinking from a thermos, the one Dave said his father had carried in Vietnam. It was half full of a mixture of Sunny Delight and Beefeater gin. It tasted the way children’s medicine tastes when they try to give it orange flavoring.

  I had in my backpack some tools that had been my dad’s— a handsaw and a little ax—and for a while we slashed at the rotted wood frame of a basement window before eventually giving up and just bashing it in, each of us dropping down inside after the shattered glass. Lindsey cut the top of her shoulder on the way down, and it bled through her white T-shirt, formed a little map of some unknown continent.

  “You gonna be okay?” I asked her, worried that this could make the whole thing seem too dangerous to continue with, worried that she’d want to just go to the movie we were supposed to be at, or worse, back to my house and Aunt Ruth undoubtedly waiting with popcorn and board games.

  But that wouldn’t have been like Lindsey at all. “Yeah. It’s just a stupid cut,” she said, but she pulled back the hand that was pressing it and her fingertips were sticky red. She put them in her mouth and I blushed in the dark of the hallway, embarrassed even as I did so.

  “Pour some of the gin on it. That’ll clean it out.” Dave wedged himself between the two of us, offering up the thermos.

  “Don’t be an asshole,” she said, taking it from him. “I’m not gonna waste our liquor supply on my arm.” She swallowed hard and passed it to me, and I did the same, thinking as I did that her lips were just pressed to the same place, and wondering if she was thinking that too.

  We spent maybe thirty minutes just fucking around in the 1800s section, trying to impress our guests, which wasn’t hard. Back when it was first shut down, and they moved the patients—at least the serious ICU types—it was in a real hurry. That was in the Miles City Star, how they went about the transports and everything. It’s serious procedural stuff, moving sick people across town. But what remained in those rooms, what was left behind, made no sense to teenagers who weren’t supposed to be seeing any of it.

  On the top floor, in what we guessed was originally the nuns’ quarters, we found a trunk full of dolls, old, old dolls, with leathery skin that was broken and creased from wear or age. The stuffing in one doll was something like black sand, spilling out as we lifted it. Each doll had a tag carefully sewn to it, and on it was the name of a child in elegant black script, old names—Vivienne and Lillianne and Marjorie, Eunice—and the child’s illness. On most it was something simple, like fever or influenza, and the final line on each tag had a date and then read: Met her Father in Heaven.

  “This is insane,” Lindsey said, reaching for one, half of it collapsing as she gripped it. The doll’s torso burst open, a pile of the black sand stuff left in Lindsey’s hand. “Fuck!” She dropped the whole thing; its head came off in the box.

  “You scared?” Dave asked, gripping her shoulder and sort of leering, but he sounded a little creeped out himself.

  “Whatever,” she said, shaking him off. “I want to see something else.” She took my hand, pulled me to her. “Show me the new part, the room with the keys.”

  The 1800s section and the 1950s high-rise were connected by sort of a tunnel, maybe six yards wide and probably half a football field in length, or it seemed that way. It was all cement and linoleum, walls and ceiling and floors, and it echoed just like you’d guess it would. When we reached the opposite end, Jamie and Dave announced that they were gonna shoot rockets back down the tunnel—rockets Dave had conveniently forgotten to show us outside in the courtyard.

  “It’ll be too loud, Dave,” I said. “The police are driving by here like ten times an hour now.”

  “They’re not gonna be able to hear us from outside,” he said, removing the thin fireworks, yellow tubes with red heads and red writing, Moonstrikers and A-11s. He studied them and then handed one to Jamie, who was saying something to Linds, something she did a half smile back at.

  “They don’t always just stay outside,” I said. “Let’s just leave if you want to fucking shoot fireworks. We can do that somewhere not in a building.”

  “The whole point is to do it in a building,” he said. “You guys should stay here, just in case we do have to run. We shouldn’t split up.” He said it like he was somehow the authority and I was the one trying to crash the party. He held out a rocket toward Lindsey like it was settled. “You want this one?”

  “No,” she said. “I want Cam to show me the room with the keys. We’ll meet you back here.”

  “It’s a dumb fuck of an idea to split up,” Dave said again.

  But Lindsey took my hand again, pulled me away even though she had no idea where she was going. And I let her. And I was glad when she didn’t drop my hand, even when the boys were six floors beneath us, the muffled sound of rockets as they glanced off cement echoing up to the key room like it had been piped in for us, the stuff of mushy movies when the main characters first kiss—rockets and starbursts.

  We’d found this room before, Jamie and I—the key room. It had boxes and boxes and boxes stacked in sloppy, leaning, sometimes crashing towers, and in all of those boxes were keys, some on rings thick like a janitor’s, the keys threaded together tightly, little pointy clumps of metal that hurt when Jamie winged them at you. There were so many keys, like maybe it could have been every key, ever, to the building, the keys somebody had made all the doctors and nurses and staff people turn in before they left. And there they were in damp cardboard boxes all strewn around some random room on the sixth floor.

  “This is it,” I said when we got there. “It’s crazy, right?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It is.”

  We were still holding hands, but it felt like the moment could slip away at any time if we didn’t just go for it, just finally do it.

  Lindsey did. “I want to kiss you now,” she said.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  So that, and the gin, and the dark, were enough for us to act on what had been there all summer. Lindsey was the expert, and I let her lead me, her mouth
hot and her lips frosted with sparkly orange-flavored lip gloss. She pulled off my tank top in a couple of jerky moves and took off her own T-shirt even faster. Her skin was warm and smooth on mine. Her hands pulling me into her until there was no space between us at all. She had me pressed up against the wall, a light switch indenting my back, her wet mouth everywhere, when she pulled away.

  “I’ve never really done anything more than this,” she said.

  “What?” I was breathing hard, my body wanting in a way that it never had before, in a way that I didn’t know it could.

  “I mean, I’ve done this lying down or whatever, but this is it,” she said.

  “Okay,” I said, reaching out to pull her back.

  “Is that okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” I told her, because it was. It was plenty.

  Chapter Six

  If I’d learned anything from repeated viewings of Grease, besides the obvious—that wholesome and beskirted, pretransformation Olivia Newton-John is ten times hotter than posttransformation, permed and leather-panted Olivia Newton-John—it was that the start of the school year can effectively end even the most passionate of summer relationships. Especially if the other half of said relationship went to school just shy of a thousand miles away from me in a city on the Pacific Ocean that she painted as chock-full of flannel-clad, Doc Martens–wearing, out and proud lesbians.

  The seven-hour car ride across Montana to the state swim meet in Cut Bank—Ruth playing one oldies tape after another, the two of us eating Red Vines, watching for out-of-state license plates—gave me plenty of time to think about Lindsey and me. This meet was our big good-bye, and also the end of my last summer before high school, and all that had made me prematurely nostalgic.

  What had seemed at first a revelation to me was that despite our ever-expanding make-out repertoire—hands up each other’s shirts while hidden within the blue tunnel slide on the playground next to Malta’s pool; Lindsey’s tongue in my mouth behind the Snack Shack not five minutes after I won the Scobey meet’s Intermediate Girls High Point; pressed together, our swimsuit tops pulled down and the straps dangling from our waists like slack suspenders while we were supposed to be drying off and staying warm in Lindsey’s dad’s camper during a thunderstorm that stalled the divisional meet at Glasgow for the better part of an hour—I hadn’t really fallen in love with Lindsey, and she hadn’t with me; but we were okay with that, and liked each other maybe more for it.

  What I’d been doing with Lindsey all summer somehow didn’t seem as intense as whatever Irene and I had shared, even though we had been younger. With Irene nothing we were doing or feeling was named as part of anything bigger than just the two of us. With Lindsey, everything was. She started me in on the language of gay; she sometimes talked about how liking girls is political and revolutionary and counter-cultural, all these names and terms that I didn’t even know that I was supposed to know, and a bunch of other things I didn’t really understand and I’m not sure that she did then, either—though she’d never have let on. I hadn’t ever really thought about any of that stuff. I just liked girls because I couldn’t help not to. I’d certainly never considered that someday my feelings might grant me access to a community of like-minded women. If anything, weekly services at Gates of Praise had assured me of exactly the opposite. How could I possibly believe Lindsey when she told me that two women could live together like man and wife, and even be accepted, when Pastor Crawford spoke with such authority about the wicked perversion of homosexuality? Not that he ever really said the word sex, even when it was burritoed inside another word; it came out more like “homo-sesh-oo-ality” and even more often simply as “sickness” and “sin.”

  “God is very clear about this,” he would tell us some Sunday morning when something happening with gay rights, something undoubtedly happening on one of the coasts, had worked its way to the Billings Gazette. “Don’t be fooled by what you might see on television, the kinds of sick movements happening in parts of this country. Time and again, in Leviticus, in Romans, the Bible is exact and unwavering about homo-sesh-oo-al acts as clear abominations upon the Lord.” He would then go on to explain that people lured into this sort of unhealthy lifestyle were those in most desperate need of Christ’s love: junkies, prostitutes, the mentally ill, and teenage runaways like the kind actors portrayed in tattered denim jackets and with dirty-looking hair in those Boys Town National Hotline commercials they played during late-night TV. Why not throw orphans into the mix?

  During these sermons I would try to melt into the gray seat cushions of our wooden pew. Ruth would be next to me, her Sunday shiniest, somehow pious but also sexy in that Ruth way, her delicate cross necklace glinting from the freckled patch of skin showing at her neck, her perfect manicure, her smart little church suits in navy or plum. I would hope and hope that she wouldn’t look at me during those moments, my face hot and my skin itchy, not turn to nod at me or even offer me one of the Brach’s Ice Blue mints she kept in a baggie in her purse.

  A couple of times, because I was already there in church and it seemed like I should at least be attempting to save myself, even if it was halfhearted, I tried to imagine Lindsey as the pervert who had corrupted the otherwise innocent me. But even though it did make me feel less guilty, for just a moment, not entirely to blame, I knew that I wasn’t hiding anything from God, if there was one. How could I pretend to be a victim when I was so willing to sin?

  After our butterfly final Lindsey and I made out hard behind a dirty curtain in a changing stall at the Cut Bank municipal pool, a thick steam of chlorine and fruity shampoos clogging up the air. When we were finished, she wrote my address in the front cover of her journal in sparkly purple pen.

  “You gotta get the fuck out of eastern Montana,” she said, sitting on the little wooden bench in there and pulling me toward her as she lifted up my tank top and used that pen to start a sparkly purple heart on my stomach. “Seattle’s boss for girls who like girls.”

  “I know, you’ve said that like sixty-two times—you wanna take me with you?” I asked, not totally kidding.

  “I wish. I’ll write you all the time, though.” She was now coloring in the heart, which tickled in a way I liked.

  “Just don’t send postcards if you don’t want Ruth reading them,” I said as she finished my new and thankfully temporary tattoo, signed her name just below it.

  Lindsey pulled out this camera her dad had given her and held it in front of the two of us, judging how best to fit us both in the frame. She took a couple with me looking straight on as she kissed my cheek, like in the old-timey photo-booth strips, but then she said, “Are you gonna kiss me back or what?”

  So I did, and the flash lit up our stall and now there was photographic evidence of me with a girl. Lindsey packed the camera in her duffel while I contemplated the film inside it, how it was pregnant with our secret, its birth inevitable.

  “How are you gonna feel when you go to get your pictures at the store?” I asked her. I tried to imagine me getting those prints, facing bearded Jim Fishman at Fishman’s Photo-Hut, him behind the desk, handing me my envelope, making change, his big forehead all pink, trying to pretend like he hadn’t just seen me kissing a girl on a four-by-six in his quivering hand.

  “Are you cereal? There’s like a dozen photo places I could go to where they’d probably give me a round of applause. Tell me ‘Way to go, baby dyke.’” Lindsey was back to doing the big-talking lesbo act she had maybe convinced me of at the start of the summer, but I knew all the little cracks in it now. (She’d also been replacing serious with cereal for a while, which was totally stupid but weirdly infectious.)

  When we came out of the stall, a cluster of girls in the Senior Division were standing by the sinks, watching us, arms folded, a few still in their dripping swimsuits. None were from my team, but a couple were from Lindsey’s. Their faces were masks of disapproval, sneering mouths and squinty eyes. My first reaction was to try to believe that they must have been
looking beyond us, or were going to fill us in as to just what was so disgusting. Linds and I were high pointers, top-scoring swimmers, and that had always afforded us some status. It only took one glance behind me to realize my mistake.

  “It’s not like I’m gonna change out of my suit now,” one of Lindsey’s teammates, squawky MaryAnne Something-or-other, said to the group. “Like I want to be eye-raped again this summer.”

  The others sniffed in agreement and looked away, as if they couldn’t bear to take us in any longer, whispering loud enough for us to make out dykes and sick.

  Lindsey stepped toward them and said something that began with Yeah right, bitch, but I couldn’t tell you how it ended, because I headed straight out the door and onto the pool deck, my flip-flops slapping the wet concrete as I went. The sun was white-bright outside after the dark cloister of those cement changing rooms, and while I tried to make sense of the hazy outlines in front of me, I squinted back a kind of shame—I hadn’t ever felt quite that way before. Before that moment it had somehow been sort of easy for me to pretend like nobody else had noticed anything about me, about us. That if we just didn’t say anything out loud about us to anyone but each other, then that would be enough to keep what we were hidden from everyone but us and God and maybe, depending on the day and how I was thinking of them, my all-seeing parents.

  It was probably only twenty seconds later that Lindsey was out on the pool deck too. She tried to grab my arm, but I jerked it away and looked around to see who might have noticed. No one. The deck was in the rush of the usual postmeet cleanup. Oily lifeguards were winding up the lane ropes for open swim and a gaggle of coaches crowded around the awards table, sorting nine colors of ribbons into thick manila envelopes. Nine colors because just that summer the federation had added ribbons for seventh, eighth, and ninth place: Pearly Pink, Royal Purple, and, as we swimmers called it, Shit Brown, respectively.