The Miseducation of Cameron Post (11 page)

“I can think of a few things,” I said.

Lindsey let that sit there for a little while, but then she asked again, and with complete seriousness, “But you’d go to Pride with me, wouldn’t you? You’d want to go to it. Just say yes.”

I knew that my answer meant more than just the words I was saying, but I nodded and said, “Yeah, I’d go. I’d go with you.”

She smiled big but didn’t ask anything more. They called her heat pretty soon after that, and I was just left there on the bench, waiting to be called up too.

We only ever had two days to get reacquainted, prelims Saturday and finals on Sunday, and then there was the matter of being there to compete. I had to be caught up fast. Lindsey had kissed five girls before, and had done other, mysterious,
serious stuff
with three of those. Lindsey’s mom knew a guy, Chuck, who was a drag queen, Chastity St. Claire, and Lindsey had seen him perform at a charity thing. Lindsey was gonna join the GLBU group at her high school.
U
stood for
undecided
. I hadn’t known, before Lindsey, that it was an actual category.

“Personal Best
is good, but you need to rent
Desert Hearts
,” she told me.

“I’m pretty sure they won’t have that at Video ’n’ Go,” I told her back after she explained the plot.

When Coach Ted passed out sign-up slips to house swimmers for our own meet, I didn’t even put the paper in my bag but rode my bike home with it pressed against my handlebars. Even though Ruth said we could sleep four comfortably if we used the pullout couch, I returned the little white slip to Ted with an X in the box next to:
We can provide lodging and dinner for 1 swimmer
. Lindsey sometimes got housed at meets and sometimes her dad came with his camper. I had a fifty-fifty shot. I tried to ask her about it casually, at the heat benches the next weekend, but it felt somehow like a big step.

“You’re coming to our meet, right?” I kept pulling at the straps on my goggles. I’d already spit in them twice, rubbed it around with my pointer finger, but I did it again.

“Yeah, why wouldn’t I?” she asked, noticing my busy hands, my obvious need to be doing something other than looking at her and having this conversation.

“I don’t know,” I said, still fiddling. “Because the lake is gross and nobody ever comes to our meets.” The heat co-ordinator moved us to the next bench forward and I stubbed my bare toe, hard, on the edge of the cement lip of the pool deck, watched a blood blister form almost instantly under the nail.

Lindsey saw me wince and touched the top of my knee, left her hand there for a second longer than it took to ask if I was okay. “I like your lake,” she said. “It’s something different than all the other meets.”

“Yeah,” I said, and then didn’t know where to go from there, or why this was so hard, exactly. Then Lindsey started messing with her goggles, and we both sat like that, silent, on the benches some idiot had painted a glossy blue, the kind of paint that heats up like a car hood, toasts the back of your thighs the minute you sit on it in your swimsuit.

I waited until the walk to the starting blocks—when Ted said we should be visualizing the race ahead, focusing on our stroke length, our kick rhythms, picturing turns and pull-outs over and over in our minds—to finish asking her. “Your dad isn’t coming, is he?”

She had already put on her thick silicone cap, and she pulled one side out and away from her ear, looked at me like she was glad I had said something, even if she wasn’t sure what it was.

“I mean, to Miles City,” I said. “Is he coming to the meet? Do you need to stay somewhere?”

“I’m staying with you, right?” She said it so easily that I felt like I’d walked into a trap, into something I wouldn’t be able to handle once it arrived. It was “Swimmers take your marks” maybe fifteen seconds after that, and it was the worst race I swam all season.

Dave Hammond was back from his mom’s in Texas, and he was even crazier than Jamie—up for anything. In the summer he lived in a camper out behind his dad’s fruit stand, and for the last week of June and first week of July, he got to man the red, white, and blue booth they set up next to the long tables of watermelon and corn—Dave’s Fireworks. You can’t be much more popular the first week of July than to be the fourteen-year-old with access to an entire stand of cheap shit made specifically for blowing up. And the best part was that even after the Fourth, when it was illegal to continue selling them, the Hammonds kept the remainder of their stock in a storage shed over by the Dairy Queen. So it was a Butterfinger Blizzard and then a stop at the shed for bottle rockets, for roman candles, for Black Cat crackers and cherry bombs. I smelled like sulfur smoke and sunscreen for days on end.

I wanted to share this summer world with Lindsey when she came, all of what was best about Miles City in July spread out before us like a picnic table heaped with pies. The meet seemed like a formality, and no home meet had ever felt that way before. In our prelim heats, on Saturday, I beat Lindsey’s time in every event, even the freestyle. Other teams weren’t used to the thickness of the water, the feeling of lake weed tickling their legs, their toes slipping off the algae coating on our homemade turn boards, costing them precious seconds. Most embarrassing, but probably effective at giving us an advantage, were our starting blocks. We stored them in the musty shed across the parking lot from Scanlan, stacked atop one another from September through May, nesting grounds for spiders and the occasional rat or garter snake. They were heavy constructions of plywood, a sanded dowel for backstroke starts, puke-green carpet torn from somebody’s basement stapled into the sloping tops for traction, and lane numbers spray-painted in orange on the backs. Team dads had made them for us one summer, mine included.

Before the free relay, Ruth brought Lindsey and me plates of lime and orange Jell-O cut with a star-shaped cookie cutter. It was cold and sweet and we both agreed it was the best Jell-O either of us had ever tasted, so when Lindsey dropped hers in the sand, I gave her the rest of mine, but as usual, I blushed as I did so. Lindsey didn’t blush at all.

Grandma was there too, in a big weird sunhat and those dark plastic inserts you wear behind your glasses if you’re a certain kind of old lady and want to block the sun. She sat in a lawn chair under the team tarp and ate her sugar wafer cookies and read her detective stories magazine until it was time for my races, and then she walked down to the edge of the dock and watched me. She gave me a big hug when I got out of the water even though it soaked her.

“Your grandma’s a trip,” Lindsey told me after Grandma said something about my having mermaid blood, or at least guppy blood. Lindsey saying that reminded me again of Irene, always Irene, and I got even more nervous than I already was about what might happen, what felt like it just had to happen.

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.