The Miseducation of Cameron Post (2 page)

“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 move 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.

But this practice I wasn’t just showing off. I kept looking for Irene on the beach, relieved, somehow, to see her there, her face shaded by a white baseball cap, her hands busy building something in the thick sand. A couple of times she noticed me hanging on the dock, and she waved, and I waved back, and it was this secret between us that thrilled me.

Coach Ted noticed the waving. He was in a mood, pacing back and forth, up onto the low dive, around the guard chair, chewing on a liverwurst-and-onion sandwich, whacking our butts with a hard yellow kickboard if we weren’t off the starting blocks fast enough after the whistle. He was home from the University of Montana for the summer, all tan and oiled up and smelling like vanilla extract and onion. The Scanlan lifeguards doused themselves in pure vanilla to keep the gnats at bay.

Most of the girls on my team had a crush on Ted. I wanted to be like him, to drink icy beers after meets and to pull myself into the guard stand without using the ladder, to own a Jeep without a roll-bar and be the gap-toothed ringleader of all the lifeguards.

“You bring a friend to practice and you forget what you’re doing here?” Ted asked me after we swam a hundred-yard free and he didn’t like the time staring back at him on his stopwatch. “I don’t know what you wanna call what you just did off the walls, but they sure as shit weren’t flip turns. Use your dolphin kick to whip your legs over your head, and I want at least three strokes before you breathe. Three.”

I’d been swim teaming it since I was seven, but I’d come into my own the summer before. I finally put together the breathing—how to blow out all my air while under the surface, just how much to roll my head—and I’d stopped slapping the water with every stroke
.
I’d found my rhythm, Ted said. I’d placed at state in all my events, and now Ted was expecting something from me, and that was sort of a scary place to be: in the scope of his expectation. He walked me off the dock and up the beach after practice. His arm was hot and heavy around my lake-cold body, and my bare shoulder wedged up into his armpit hair, which felt gross, like animal fur. Irene and I laughed about that later.

“Tomorrow no friends, right?” he said loud enough for Irene to hear. “For two hours a day it’s just about swimming.”

“Okay,” I told him, embarrassed that Irene saw me get a talking-to, even a small one.

He grinned a Coach Ted grin, small and sly, like a cartoon fox on a cereal box. Then he rattled me back and forth a little with that heavy arm. “Okay what?”

“Tomorrow will be all about swimming,” I said.

“Good girl,” he told me, squeezing me in a bit, a coach’s hug, then swaggering off toward the bathhouse.

It had seemed such an easy promise to make at the time, to spend a couple hours the following summer day focused on swimming—on flip turns and pull-outs and tucking my chin during the butterfly. Piece of cake.

Grandma put on a
Murder, She Wrote
rerun after lunch, but she always dozed during those, and Irene and I had already seen it, so we quietly left her asleep in the recliner. She made tiny whistling noises as she breathed, like the last seconds of a Screaming Jenny firecracker.

Outside we climbed the cottonwood next to the garage and then swung over to its roof, something my parents had told me again and again not to do. The surface was black tar and it was sticky and melted; our flip-flops sank in as we stepped. At one point Irene couldn’t pull her foot out and she fell forward, the melted roof burning her hands.

Back on the ground, the soles of our flip-flops gummy with tar, we prowled the yard, the alley, stopping to examine a wasp nest, to jump from the top porch step to the sidewalk below, to drink well water from the hose. Anything at all, so long as it didn’t involve talking about what we had done the day before in the barn, what we both knew we wanted to do again. I was waiting for Irene to say something, to make a move. And I knew that she was waiting for the same thing. We were good at this game: We could make it go on for days.

“Tell me your mom’s Quake Lake story again,” Irene said, plopping herself into a lawn chair and letting her long legs hang limp over the plastic arm, those tarry flip-flops heavy and dangling from her toes.

I was attempting to sit Indian style in front of her, the brick patio hot, hot from the sun, burning my bare legs enough for me to change positions and pull my knees into my chest, wrap my arms around them. I had to squint up at Irene to see her, and even then it was just a hazy-dark outline of Irene, the sun a white gob of glare behind her head. “My mom should have died in 1959, in an earthquake,” I said, putting my hand flat on the brick, right in the path of a black ant carrying something.

“That’s not how you start it,” Irene said, letting one of her dangling flip-flops fall to the patio. Then she let the other flip-flop go, which startled the ant, causing it to try a different route entirely.

“Then you tell it,” I said, trying to make the ant climb onto just one of my fingers. It kept stopping. Freezing in place. And then eventually going around.

“C’mon,” she said. “Don’t be such an ass-head. Just tell it like you usually do.”

“It was August, and my mom was camping with my grandma and grandpa Wynton, and my aunt Ruth,” I said, making my voice as monotonous as I could, dragging out each word like Mr. Oben, a much-despised fifth-grade teacher.

“Forget it if you’re gonna suck.” Irene tried to scoop her toe along the patio and hook one of her flip-flops.

I pushed them both out of the way so she couldn’t. “Okay, big baby, I’ll tell you, I’ll tell you. They’d been camping sort of by Yellowstone for a week and were supposed to set up at Rock Creek. They even pulled in there that afternoon.”

“What afternoon?” Irene asked.

“In August,” I said. “I should remember which day but I don’t. My grandma Wynton was setting out lunch, and Mom and Aunt Ruth were helping, and my grandpa was getting his stuff ready to fish.”

“Tell the part about the pole,” Irene said.

“I’m going to if you let me,” I said. “The way my mom always tells it is that if Grandpa had even just dipped his fishing pole into the water, they would have stayed. They never would have gotten him to leave. Even if he’d just made one cast, that would have been that.”

“That part still gives me goose bumps,” she said, offering her arm as proof, but when I grabbed her hand to look, we both felt a little current of electricity between us, remembering what it was we weren’t talking about, and I dropped it fast.

“Yeah, but before my grandpa could get down to the creek, these people they knew from Billings pulled in. My mom was really good friends with the daughter, Margot. They’re still friends. She’s cool. And then everybody decided to eat lunch together, and then Margot’s parents convinced my grandma and grandpa that it would be worth it to drive up to Virginia City and camp up there for a night so they could see the variety show at the old-timey theater up there, because they had just come from there.”

“And to eat at that buffet thing,” Irene said.

“A smorgasbord. Yeah, my mom says what really convinced my grandpa was when he heard about the smorgasbord, all the pies and Swedish meatballs and stuff. ’Cause Grandpa Wynton had a
helluva sweet tooth
, is what my dad says.”