The Miseducation of Cameron Post (12 page)

“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

I
f 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.

Coach Ted saw me standing there and he waved me over. Lindsey walked just behind me, her voice low.

“It’s not worth being all pissed. They’re stupid bitches, anyway.”

“It’s pretty easy to say that when you’re getting on a plane tomorrow, huh?” I was trying to be mean and feeling bad about it all at once.

“Oh, like Seattle doesn’t have homophobes?”

“Not the way you talk about it.”

“Grow up,” she said. “It’s not like it’s San Francisco; it’s just better than here.”

“Exactly,” I said under my breath, just as we reached the table. In that moment I was as jealous of her getting to leave Montana as I’d ever been of anything or anyone in my life.

Ted was grinning his winning grin, his mirrored lifeguard sunglasses reflecting tousled-hair, butterfly-finals-and-make-out-session me back to me. He did the heavy, hairy arm around each of us, pulled us into an embrace that smelled of sweat and beer, which he was coolly drinking from a big plastic cup, despite the
NO ALCOHOLIC BEVERAGES
signs posted every ten feet. “None of these brown ones for you girls, huh?’

“Nope,” we said exactly together.

“You almost caught her, Seattle,” Ted said, jostling Linds back and forth a little under that arm. “She only pulled out of your reach on the last turn. It was all that practice racing mud puppies back at the lake.”

“Yeah, I guess,” Linds said, sort of shrugging out from under his embrace some without seeming too obvious about it.

“Lindsey would kick my butt if we swam a fifty, not a hundred,” I said, trying it out as something like an
I’m sorry
.

Ted shrugged. “Probably. Good thing you don’t.”

Lindsey’s coach asked Ted something about relay tabulations and I stood there under the heavy, hot weight of his arm, feeling a strange kind of protection, like I was safe from whatever those girls might have said, might still be saying, so long as Ted had hold of me. I was also stalling because I didn’t want to go off again alone with Lindsey, because that would just mean it was time to say good-bye.

I could see Aunt Ruth on the grass on the other side of the chain link, under our blue team tarp. She had all my swim team shit—the towels, my backpack, our blanket and lawn chairs—packed up neat and tight, and was sitting atop the pink Sally-Q cooler, waiting for me, patient, sipping on a lemonade from the concession stand. My mom was never, as I remembered her, patient. Just the opposite, really. Seeing Ruth there, alone under the tarp, waiting, just sort of staring out at the bustle on the deck, made me feel really sad for her. How she’d taken me to all these meets, every weekend, all summer long, and how I had nothing much to say to her, ever, and when I did it was never the truth.

“You coming back next summer, Seattle?” Ted asked Lindsey as a now-dressed MaryAnne and another of the girls from the changing room walked up to the table.

“Probably. My dad might spend next summer in Alaska, though, so I don’t know,” Lindsey said, eyeing MaryAnne as she pretended that she had something to say to her coach, some reason for coming over.

“Alaska?” Ted said, shaking his head. “You have to dodge icebergs if you’re gonna swim in Alaska.”

MaryAnne turned to us at this, as if she had been part of the conversation all along. “Are you serious, Lindsey? That would really suck for you and Cameron. I mean, you two are best, best friends, right?”