The Miseducation of Cameron Post (24 page)

After a few more minutes Grandma needed to
get out of the sun
and so we all went to Dairy Queen and Coley and I had cherry Dilly Bars and Grandma first had just onion rings and complained about how much she wanted ice cream, and so then she had most of a Hawaiian Blizzard even though she shouldn’t have, and we had to rush her home to shoot her insulin pretty soon afterward.

While Grandma napped, Coley sat on the edge of my bed and I sat in my desk chair. We had on
Adventures in Babysitting
, which Coley had never seen, but I don’t think either of us was much watching Elisabeth Shue and her perfect blond curls hitch a ride from a hook-handed big rig driver, sing in a Chicago blues bar, and fight off the mob, all in one night.

I had taken a bunch of wrapped alcohol pads during CPR training, little squares of soft white paper with blue writing, like tiny pillows. I was planning to use them to make a padded cell in one of the dollhouse bedrooms, but right then they were just arranged in neat stacks in front of me—stacks I kept undoing and redoing. Coley got up, took the Quake Lake picture of my mom down from the TV, and studied it close, though she’d asked about it before and I’d told her the story.

“Your mom looked a lot like you,” she said.

“When she was little,” I said. “Not as much if you see her pictures from high school.”

“What did she look like then?”

“She was really pretty. Miles of style.”

“You’re pretty,” Coley said, like she hadn’t just said that at all.

“No, you’re pretty, Coley,” I said. “That’s not my area.”

“Then what’s your area?”

“Dollhouse interior design,” I said, getting up and crossing in front of her to my swim bag, flung on the floor the previous night. I had a pack of gum in there, its waxy paper packaging damp from a week of wet towels.

Coley stood up and put back the picture, and when I tried to go to my desk chair she was still standing there, in that tiny walkway between the dresser and my bed, and I couldn’t get past her.

“You want?” I asked her, holding out the orange Bubblicious.

“Nope,” she said. And then we were kissing. That’s exactly how it happened. I had a sugar-crystally lump of not yet really chewed gum lodged in my molars and Coley’s mouth was all over mine and the door to my room was wide open and there was no going back and so we didn’t go back. We went onto my bed, me on top of Coley, because she pulled me there, and we kept all our clothes on and made out to
Adventures in Babysitting
and Coley didn’t seem nervous and she didn’t seem unsure and we didn’t stop until Grandma was calling up the stairs and asking about what we wanted to do for supper.

“We’ll be right down,” I yelled, turning my head toward the door but still very much on top of Coley.

“I’m still with Brett,” Coley said to me then, as if that settled anything at all.

I think Coley got pretty good at convincing herself that what the two of us were doing with each other night after night after hot, still, big-sky Montana night was just some bound-to-happen-in-college-experimentation thing come early. And I tried hard not to let on that I knew otherwise, or at least desperately hoped for otherwise.

Our new thing was to go to the movies. Coley would come get me at Scanlan, take me home, and I’d shower fast while she chatted with Grandma. Then we’d head off to see whatever was showing. The only problem being that the Montana Theatre kept the same two movies, a seven o’clock and a nine o’clock, for a week at a go. And we never were in time to make the seven o’clock. So that summer we saw
A League of Their Own
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
,
Batman Returns
, and
Death Becomes Her
three to four times each. On the big screen, feet and feet of Michelle Pfeiffer as Cat Woman, Bruce Willis as a dorky plastic surgeon and not an action hero, Madonna in a vintage peach baseball uniform and a falser-with-every-screening Brooklyn accent. Though it was a theater built for hundreds, at the Tuesday- and Wednesday-night showings it was sometimes Coley, me, and fewer than ten other people in the entire place. Which is how we liked it.

“You girls are going to the show again?” Ruth asked us on more than one occasion when she happened to be home while I was changing. “The same movie? It must be pretty fantastic.” But Ruth was with Ray, and always busy with Sally-Q and GOP, and by then we’d learned pretty well how to stay out of each other’s way, especially because Ruth so loved Coley and thought she was
good for me
.

The old guy who had been taking tickets at the Montana for as long as I could remember always dressed in brown pants and a brown sweater vest over a collared white shirt and brown tie. He was flagpole thin, and the AC in there was arctic; we eventually took to bringing Grandma’s stadium blanket with us. Ticket Guy had a messy nest of thin red hair and called us the
terrible twosome
and every once in a while would wave us through without making us pay, but whenever we guessed it would be one of those nights, we were wrong. When he did come through, though, we would spend big money on popcorn and a graveyard soda, sometimes Milk Duds.

We’d go to the very last row, up against the wall, the projection booth above our heads, center if we could get it, but if it was taken there were these cool, old-fashioned booth things on either wing of the aisles, though sometimes there’d be a creepy guy flying solo in one of them. My dad had told me that the theater hadn’t changed much since he was a kid, and it sure hadn’t changed any since my first memories of it: burgundy carpeting, big orange and pink light sconces that I knew were art deco because my mom liked to go on about them, and behind the snack bar and down just a couple of stairs, a lounge area with stained velvet couches and the entrances to these amazing pink-and-green-tiled bathrooms, one on either side. The doors to the bathrooms said
GENTS
and
DAMES
in thin gold letters.

After a few weeks the whole place, from the heavy smell of the popcorn to the cold darkness and hush of the theater, felt like some semiprivate cave we had discovered and laid claim to. We held hands. We wound our legs together. When we could, we made out. Even there in the dark and the last row it was completely risky, and while that was only part of the thrill for me, it might have been most of the thrill for Coley. I couldn’t say for sure.

The movie itself was basically two hours of carefully maneuvered foreplay, so we’d leave the theater anxious and buzzing and wanting to be all over each other in the lobby, on the sidewalks as we walked to Coley’s truck, even within the truck itself, parked downtown on one of the mostly empty side streets; but we couldn’t do so much as hold hands without scandal and made ourselves walk a couple of feet apart, wouldn’t even let our arms brush, which just made it worse. Maybe you can’t really call what we were doing foreplay because it didn’t lead to anything more.

After we left the theater, we might drag a few Mains, talk to the cluster of kids parked at the Conoco station, and then Coley would drive me home and that would be that. It wasn’t as if the two of us could go anywhere that was a typical make-out destination, Spotted Eagle, or out behind the fairgrounds, or the long-abandoned drive-in, or Carbon Hill: We couldn’t possibly pull up and park next to our partially naked classmates at any of those places. And after that first afternoon in my bedroom we seemed to have outlawed our respective houses without actually saying as much.

And what made it all the worse was that we didn’t really discuss this thing we were doing, not in any detail. We just went to the movies and did what we could when we could, and then I tried my best to leave it all there, in the theater, gone with the roll of the credits, until we could do it again the next night. But while I was muddling through my days and waiting for those nights to come, a bunch of big things happened in rapid succession, or maybe they seemed small at first but turned out otherwise.

Big Thing No. 1: Ruth and Ray went to Minneapolis for a Bible weekend and an exclusive preview of the soon-to-be-open Mall of America—a preview that Ruth had somehow won via her Sally-Q sales—and they came back wearing matching blue
I SURVIVED THE MALL TO END THEM ALL
T-shirts and also engaged. Ray had asked me about his intended proposal beforehand, not really for my blessing, exactly, but something like that. I told him the truth: that I thought it was a great idea. I liked Ray. And more important, I liked Ruth with Ray. He gave her a monstrous gold ring with glinty diamonds all around, one that must have taken hundreds and hundreds of boxes of Schwan’s flash-frozen crab legs to buy, and for days afterward Ruth played “Going to the Chapel” on the downstairs record player while she sorted her Sally-Q shit. They didn’t see any point in waiting, and Ruth loved Montana in September, so they checked the church calendar and settled on Saturday, September 26, 1992.

People told them they were
movin’ in an awful hurry
. At least one old rancher said exactly that during coffee communion after Pastor Crawford announced their engagement during the Sunday-morning announcements.

“How will you get everything done?” another woman asked Ruth. More women nodded, made big-eyed faces of disbelief.

“I’ve been mentally planning my wedding for years,” Ruth said. “This’ll be a piece of cake. Piece of cake.”

Grandma said, just to me, later, “I tell you what, it’s going to be one helluva ceremony. I can already see it.”

Big Thing No. 2: Mona Harris caught me totally off guard. She and I got put on copper sulfate duty one Saturday night at closing. To distribute the copper sulfate, you had to unhook this really crappy metal rowboat from where it was chained to the fence and haul it down the beach and wedge it out into the cattails. Then one of you would get in and hold the boat against the side of the dock while the other loaded up awkward, thirty-pound sacks of the chemical, grabbed the oars, and got in as well. Then one person rowed and one flung the copper sulfate, which was in a bright-blue crystal form and looked both like tumbled beach glass and oversize fish tank rocks. It was only activated with water, but parts of you were always wet in that leaky boat, and at the bottom of the bags the sulfate was mostly crushed and powdery and our scooping and flinging cup inadequate, and some of it always landed on your legs or your arms, rewarding you with a bunch of little red chemical burns.

We just made it a verb, called it copper sulfating, and we had to do it on Saturday nights because the lake didn’t open until noon on Sundays. That gave the chemical enough time to kill some lake weed, a bunch of those swimmers’ itch snails, and a myriad of additional lake life, mud puppies and small fish, things we’d find floating on the surface the next day; but also by then it was supposed to have stopped its dangerous toxicity so that human swimmers could again enter the water.

I rowed, Mona flung, and we were mostly silent. The sulfate spattered across the water like hard rain and left a ferocious storm of bubbles at the surface before sinking slowly, dissolving all the way down.

We’d finished one bag and were on to the next when Mona asked, “Have you thought about college at all yet? Like where you maybe want to go?”

“Not really,” I said, which was both true and not. I’d entertained daydreams of just following Coley to wherever.

“Bozeman’s a pretty cool town,” she said. “I’ve met all kinds of superchill people there.”

“I’ll keep that in mind,” I said.

“The world’s really big outside of Miles City.”

I thought she sounded sort of like Irene and her ideas about the whole big wide world.

Mona went on, flinging a scoop, trying for nonchalance. “You probably already heard that I dated a girl for a while this year. Not that it’s a big deal or anything. I don’t mean to like make it an announcement or whatever.”

I was glad I had my sunglasses on and hoped she couldn’t read anything on my face. “I hadn’t heard,” I said. “Why would I have?”

“Don’t freak,” she said. “I figured Eric or somebody would have managed to share that with everyone by now. I was just trying to give you an example of the kind of things that can happen once you get out of Miles City.”

I had bottomed us up against one of the banks of jungle-thick cattails and had to stick my oar into the muck to dislodge the boat. I pretended like this took all of my concentration so that I could avoid where we were in the conversation.

When we were moving smoothly on the water again, Mona said, “You don’t have to get weird. I wasn’t trying to stir shit up.”

“You didn’t,” I said. “It’s cool.”

“I just have a few years’ life experience on you.”

“Well, my parents died,” I said. “And tragedy makes you age in cat years. So I’m technically older than you.”

“You’re funny,” she said without laughing or even smiling, really.

We were riding along the edge of something I wasn’t ready to talk about in a rowboat with a girl whose motivations I didn’t understand. So instead I asked Mona about her major and she humored me by telling me all about biofilm engineering, letting the other topic dissolve out there beneath the lakebed with the chemicals.

Big Thing No. 3: Gates of Praise welcomed Rick Roneous to lead a Sunday sermon and also as a guest speaker at a hastily planned Firepower. Firepower didn’t meet regularly in the summer save a weekend camping thing that happened in August, a big kickoff to a school year of spirituality, so this reconvening was billed as truly a special something.

Reverend Rick
was a big-deal Montana Christian made good: He had written a couple of books about practicing Christianity in a “changing world,” and had recently returned to the state
he so loved
to launch a full-time school and wellness center for teenagers crippled by
sexual brokenness
. Also, he had Elvis-blue eyes and very hip shoulder-length brown hair (like so many pictures of Jesus and also rock star Eddie Vedder); and since Rick was youngish, only in his midthirties, and could play the guitar, he pulled off the Christian-as-cool thing pretty well.