The Miseducation of Cameron Post (51 page)

“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. I hadn’t, and it worried me that maybe she was right, even though I’d never been into the cottage-cheese containers the way I’d been into working on the dollhouse.

“In fact,” she said, a rare and genuine Lydia smile on her face, “I think it’s time for you to throw them away. Today. First thing.”

“I will,” I said. And I did, as soon as I got back to my room. Just after I took off my fucking sweater.

Since Jane’s mandate there had been no smoking sessions with what was left of the nonconfiscated pot, no trail running with Adam, and the three of us weren’t even sitting together during meals anymore unless there were other people at the table with us. Lydia told me that this was a very good thing, because she’d noticed that there had been
negative bonding
among the three of us for too long.

We continued to communicate mostly through notes and shared moments in a hallway, as we loaded into the van, wherever we could grab them. Explaining the necessity of visiting Quake Lake as a condition of our escape route was difficult this way, but after a series of much-longer-than-usual notes passed back and forth, Jane and Adam were willing to let my everyday miracle run its miraculous course. I snuck the pull-out map from my Bethany book to Jane during our second visit to the Bozeman library, and while there I looked up and even photocopied “for my independent study” more recent maps of hiking trails around the Quake Lake area. I did this with the help of a dykey librarian: spiky hair, multiple piercings all the way up her earlobe, Birkenstock clogs. I think she thought I was just gonna go camping there with my friends or something. I guess I kind of was. I looked up a couple of articles about my parents’ accident, too. It was difficult to gauge just where their car had broken through the guardrail based on summary reporting and a map of the lake, but I had a general idea.

I managed to slip the photocopies to Jane as we shared the far backseat in the van on the drive to Promise. She was our Meriwether Lewis, after all. She slipped me a note about the supplies she wanted me to gather and be in charge of: three candles from the box of extras in the chapel; a book of matches, also from that box; the crappy can opener from the kitchen—there were several, but one was rusted and wouldn’t be missed like the others; various nonperishable food items, the storage of which would prove tricky given Lydia’s apparent love of room inspections. Adam had a list as well. Gathering these things in secret and hiding them (in my most Boo Radley of moves, I ended up using the rotted-out portion of a tree trunk that wasn’t too far off the path to the lake) made me feel important and useful and just really good. It was kind of incredible, the little thrill I’d get from stuffing something else into the plastic bag I’d wedged into that tree trunk. Those small acts made our escape seem real in a way that it hadn’t before.

The days ticked closer to June. I was allowed to call Grandma and Ruth again, just before exams. They were back in Miles City. Ruth’s radiation was complete, but it had badly burned her skin and she had to have that area washed and bandaged twice a day, so she wasn’t able to return to work, “At least not yet,” she told me in that fake-bright voice she was still using to cover how very tired she must have been. “But it’s nice to have a break.”

“She’s got places on her body that look like raw chuck steak,” Grandma said when she got on the line. “I know it’s more painful than she’s lettin’ on.” Her voice was hushed, especially for Grandma, and I could tell she had stretched the long kitchen phone cord, the one usually tangled in chunky knots, so that she could walk somewhere away from Ruth, somewhere she could tell it like it was. “They’re not even sure the radiation did what it was supposed to do. They don’t know yet, they keep telling us. ‘We just don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.’”

“I bet Aunt Ruth’s glad that you’re there, Grandma,” I said.

“Oh, it’s Ray who’s been waiting on her hand and foot. I just keep her company and feed her candy. You know, I still can’t quite get used to the idea of summer vacation without you.”

“Me neither,” I said.

Then we talked a little about how all of them, she and Ruth and even Ray, were planning to come and visit me at Promise (it had been cleared), over the weekend of July Fourth, partly because it was so close to the day Mom and Dad had died.

“So long as Ruth feels up to it,” Grandma said. “But even if she doesn’t, I might just take the Greyhound over myself and see what’s what out there at your school.”

I didn’t trust myself to manage whatever lie I might have responded with, so I said, “Mmm-hmmm.”

Grandma sort of coughed into the receiver. “Now I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, Spunky, and you’ve got time to think on it, but Ruth and I were talking about maybe all of us driving over to Quake Lake and having a picnic. She said it’s practically right there and it’s supposed to be a pretty spot, all things considered.”

“It is really close to here,” I said.

“You think you might want to do something like that? You and me won’t be able to go to the cemetery together this summer.”

“Will you still go for me?” I asked. “And bring flowers, but not lilies.”

“I will surely do that,” Grandma said. “You go on and think on the other thing I asked. You have all kinds of time to make up your mind before we get there.”

After we’d said I love you and good-bye, I listened to Grandma jostling the phone as she walked back into the kitchen to hang it up. She said something, to Ruth, probably, something that I couldn’t make out, something like
she sounds fine
or
everything’s fine
or
it’ll be fine
. I wondered when I’d get to call her again, and from just where I’d be doing it. And what I would say.

The week of final exams I had some version of the same dream almost every night. In it, Bethany Kimbles-Erickson and I eventually wind up alone in the study room and she’s showing me some new book she’s
miraculously
found that’s also all about Quake Lake. And she sort of leans down next to me to fan the pages and her hair brushes alongside my face and our heads are so, so close, bent together over this drawing of the mountain tumbling, damming the rush of the water. And when she turns to ask me something, her mouth is so close to the side of my face that her words steam my cheek and how can we not kiss, which we do, and then Bethany takes the lead and pulls me up out of my chair and pushes me onto my back on top of the study table, and we’re wound together on top of the book, it’s pressing hard into my back, and I don’t care, we don’t care, and we can’t stop. . . .

Every night I managed to wake myself at that point. I thought that I was doing so by sheer force of will, and I’d open my eyes to the dark, sweaty and gripping my sheet and wanting not to have woken up, my body buzzing and alive and all of me working to fight it just to see if I could, if Lydia was right, if I could just withstand these sinful urges until they passed. I would lie there still, keeping my muscles tense and my hands above the covers and concentrating every bit of me to keep from falling right back into that dream, from letting it pick up where it had left off. And it would work. She was right. When I fell back to sleep, it would be to a different dream, or none at all. But in the morning I wouldn’t feel like I’d overcome sin, like I was closer to God or whatever, I would just feel inwardly proud of the discipline I’d shown, sort of in the same way that I felt proud and disciplined when I pushed myself running or swimming. I could see how you might let yourself get addicted to that kind of discipline, or denial; how it might seem like, if you kept doing it, over and over, that you were somehow living more cleanly or more
righteously
than other people. It was the same thing as following all those rules Lydia stuck to, and when that got old, making up even more rules to follow and then justifying them with some passage from the Bible.

I didn’t tell Lydia about the dreams. I thought the first night would be the only night, and when it came back the next night, it seemed like I should have already told her about the night before, and then I decided that I could do this on my own; it was just a dream and I could handle it, and my feelings about it, without her.

But then came the night that I didn’t wake up until dream-Bethany was just working her hand beneath my flannel skirt, and I’m not sure that I would have even woken then, but I heard my name, in nondream form, and then I heard it again.

“Cameron?”

When I opened my eyes the Viking Erin was right there, her face next to mine, hazy in the dark but her wide eyes so close to my own that I yelped a startled yelp and she whispered, “Shhh-shhh, no, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just me.”

“What the fuck?” I said, my voice sounding too loud and bright so soon after sleep, in the darkness of the room. Erin was kneeling on the floor next to my bed, and because I’d just woken from that world of X-rated Bethany, her closeness felt like more than just an intrusion of my personal space; it felt somehow like she’d seen the dream, too.

“You were making lots of noise,” she said, sort of petting my chest, over the blanket. “I tried to wake you up from my bed but you wouldn’t stop.”

“What?” I know I blushed, even in the dark, even still half asleep and unable to get over how she was right there, inches from me. I could smell the Scope she’d gargled with before bed, the pink Johnson & Johnson baby lotion she put on her feet and elbows every night.

“Last night and before—you were dreaming and I woke you up. I said your name.”

“I didn’t know you had,” I said, turning away from her, toward the wall, but not all the way. “I’m fine now.” I wasn’t fine: I was buzzing and turned on and this conversation was getting in the way of the concentration it took to make that go away.

“What was it about?” she asked, not moving, not going back to her bed, following the rules, pretending to be perfect, but staying right where she was, not even moving her hand from on top of me, though she stopped petting me with it and let it rest.

“I don’t remember,” I said to the wall, to my iceberg. “It was scary.”

For a little while she didn’t say anything, but then she said, quietly but with purpose, “No it wasn’t.”

“Yes it was,” I said, wanting her just to leave, to go back to her own twin mattress. “Were you dreaming it with me?”

“I was listening to you dream it,” she said. “And those weren’t scared noises.”

“Oh my God,” I said, turning onto my stomach in an angry flop, one that I hoped showed my annoyance. I mashed my face into my pillow and from there said, “Go back to bed. You’re not the dream police. Seriously.”

She didn’t move. Instead she said, “I heard you say Bethany—I heard it more than once.”

“I don’t care,” I said, my words still smooshed by the pillow.

“You said it like—”

“I don’t care,” I said, turning back toward her and talking right in her face, and also more loudly than was wise for that time of night. “I don’t care. I don’t care. Just stop.”

“No,” she said. And then she leaned in and kissed me. She didn’t have to go far, there in the dark—our faces were close already—but it was still a big move, a grand gesture, and awkward because of it: She half missed my mouth, got some of my lower lip and the hollow before my chin. I didn’t kiss her back right away; it was too startling. I flinched and turned my face some. But God bless the Viking Erin, that didn’t stop her. She put her hand on my cheek, her thick, soft fingers, the scent of pink baby lotion even stronger, and turned my head back to her, my lips to her lips, and tried again, and this time was much better, partly because she found my mouth right away, but also because I knew that it was coming. We let that kiss turn into another one, and then one where she maneuvered herself up from her crouch and on top of me.

She wasn’t a Coley Taylor; she’d done this before, with a girl, I could tell. I had on an old Firepower T-shirt and flannel sleep pants. The T-shirt was huge, one of the leftover XXLs, and it was stuck around me like a sack I’d climbed into, but she got it off in a couple of tugs. When she had her hand at the drawstring of my pants, I lifted the hem of her own T-shirt and she kind of pushed my hand away, just a small nudge.

I tried again, pulled her shirt up her back, to the middle, but she reached around, actually took my hand and put it alongside me, pinned it there with hers, and said, “Don’t. Just let me do this.”

I did let her. Her fingers were both soft enough and hard enough, and after the dream foreplay with Bethany Kimbles-Erickson, it didn’t take much.

The Viking Erin and I had been rooming together for nearly a year. We had seen each other in various states of undress countless times, and I knew well her pillowy shoulders, freckled and often pinkish, her surprisingly muscled, if thick, legs, her round, pale belly, her small (size six) feet, the twine color of her hair when wet and smelling of Pert Plus shampoo, and its half-gone-to-seed-dandelion color when dry. But in all this knowing I hadn’t considered what it might be like to be with her, she was so, I don’t know, so the Viking Erin, my roommate. Now, in the dark, in the aftermath of my dream, the Erin in my bed, her hand in me, was somehow a different Erin entirely.

After my muscles loosened and my breath came back to normal, my body filled up with that satisfied and dense kind of feeling. She let me kiss her, maneuver myself out from under to on top; but when I moved my hand below her stomach she stopped it, just like before with her shirt, and said, “No, it’s okay. I’m good.”

“Let me,” I said, trying to work my hand away from hers, but she held it firm.

“I already did,” she said.

“Did what?”

“While you were dreaming—” She stopped, turned her head to the side. “I don’t want to say it, it’s embarrassing.”

“No, it’s awesome,” I said.

She laughed. “No it’s not.”

“It is,” I said. “It’s completely awesome.” I meant it. I tried to kiss the part of her neck she had turned toward me, but she pulled it away.

I moved against her in little circles and I could feel her give beneath me, press back with her own small moves, but then she said, “Stop. Get off.”