The Miseducation of Cameron Post (19 page)

“A couple of the guys on the team have talked shit,” he said. “But it’s not an everyday thing.”

I made a face that said
Oh really?
It involved raising my eyebrows and sort of pushing out my lips and cocking my head, and I could feel how stupid it looked even as I did it.

“It’s not,” Jamie said. “They like you, so it’s like,
She’s just a jock
, or whatever.”

“But that’s not what you said in the bleachers—”

“Because it’s bad fucking practice.” His voice was up again. “Jesus—you think people are saying shit now? Why don’t you keep on with the Coley Taylor thing awhile longer and see what happens?”

I couldn’t stop the way I was blushing, just like I never could. “We’re friends,” I said. “Seriously. I’ve never even . . .” I didn’t know how to end that.

“You and me are friends too,” he said. “For way longer. It’s like, how do you even know?”

“Who said I know anything? Or anything for sure.”

Jamie shook his head. “Well, when you’re around Coley, you sure act like you do. At least sometimes you do.” He paused a second, seemed to work on his next words. “So if what you’re telling me now is that you don’t know for sure, then that’s stupid. It is. You could give a guy a chance, find out.”

And even though probably there were dozens of times I should have noticed before, it wasn’t until right in that moment that I knew Jamie had a thing for me. Or that he thought he had a thing for me. And everything we had been talking about or around those last few minutes became suddenly more complicated and more uncomfortable, and it was now the exact kind of scene that I fast-forwarded through in movies—too much tension, too little air, nothing to undercut it all.

Some kids we both knew came outside just then, all of them laughing and loud, sweaty with sticky bangs and flushed faces. “One more song before last dance,” one of them told us. Then they all seemed, at once, to notice that they’d interrupted some prom-night drama: Jamie’s tense stance, my messy face.

They offered us shoulder shrugs and apologetic smiles, waved their packs of cigarettes at us, mumbled things about not wanting to smoke on top of us, and made their way down a couple of steps and over to the other handrail.

“If you don’t know for sure, then what’s the big thing about trying stuff out?” Jamie said, not looking at me but looking out at that statue, just like Hennitz.

I still didn’t have any of the right words. “It’s more like maybe I do know and I’m still confused too, at the same time. Does that make sense? I mean, it’s like how you noticed this thing about me tonight, you saw it, or you already knew it—it’s there. But that doesn’t mean it’s not confusing or whatever.”

“Yeah, but I don’t know anything about you for sure.” He turned to look at me again. “That’s what I’m saying. Sometimes when I hang out with you, you’re like more guy than I am. But other times I want to . . .” He finished by doing this overdone thrusting movement with his hips, grinning like a perv. Which was stupid but felt much better than wherever we had been a second before.

“That’s just because you’re a disgusting teenage boy,” I said, hitting him hard in the arm to get him to stop his gyrations. “That doesn’t really have anything to do with me.”

“Well, if I like girls and you like girls, that makes you a disgusting teenage boy, too,” he said, hitting me back, and not that gently, either.

“Never,” I said, and thought that maybe we had cleared something big, left it behind us, but then Jamie leaned over and kissed me. I could have turned my head away, I had time to duck or move or push his face, and I didn’t. I let him do it. And I kissed him back, sort of. His lips were dry and his chin a little bit rough and he tasted like sour smoke and too-sugary sherbet punch, but there was something charged about kissing him, some sort of thrill because it was so unexpected.

Jamie’s mouth was too busy, but he wasn’t exactly a bad kisser. We kept at it long enough for the smoking section to give us a hoot and a whistle, and then I pulled back, not because it wasn’t interesting kissing Jamie—it was, sort of like a fucked-up science experiment, and it was kind of nice, even, somehow—but because there we were on the school steps at prom and I liked to do my experimenting behind closed doors, and now Jamie’s hands were behind me, one on my back, one on my head, and he was gaining momentum and I wasn’t.

“Oh! Mission aborted! Advanced move denied!” It was Steve Bishop, one of the smokers, yelling from his perch on the rail, the rest of them laughing along.

“Only for now, Bishop,” Jamie yelled back. “And only because I’m a gentleman.”

“That’s not how it looked from over here, big guy!” Steve kept on, but Jamie smiled and gave him the two-handed flip-off and kept his attention on me.

“So that was the shit, right? You see what I’m saying?” He fixed his jacket because it had slid to the back of my shoulders.

“No. What are you saying?”

“That we should do more of that,” he said. “Duh, JJK. The obvious choice.”

“Maybe,” I said, which is exactly what I meant without knowing at all what I meant. “Let’s go do the last dance.”

Which we did, Coley and Brett wrapped up tight right next to us. Jamie kissed me twice more during that dance (to “Wild Horses”) and I let him, and after the second time I noticed that Coley had noticed our kiss and she winked at me over Brett’s shoulder and wrinkled her nose and I blushed and blushed, and she noticed that too and winked again, which made me blush harder and hide myself in Jamie’s shoulder, which I’m sure she noticed as well, and which Jamie noticed and was of course reconvinced by, pulling me tighter to him, and there I was sending the wrong signals to the right people in the wrong ways. Again, again, again.

Chapter Nine

S
ince decades before I was born, summer in Miles City was trotted down a banner- and flag-lined Main Street and officially welcomed in by one event, always held the third full weekend in May: the World Famous Miles City Bucking Horse Sale
.
Ostensibly a series of showcases during which salty rodeo contractors came to bid on the finest in debuted bronc stock, it was the four days of debauchery in the form of street dances, tractor pulls, and
authentic
cowboy shenanigans that lured in city folk from both coasts and boosted the town’s economy until the next go-round. Bucking Horse Sale (BHS) put Miles City in the Guinness book of world records as the event that boasted “the most alcohol consumed within a two-block radius, per capita, in the United States.” Pretty impressive if you consider Mardi Gras in New Orleans or any major collegiate football game. And we did consider them. Lots. And there was a strange kind of local pride in our accomplishment, the town motto for the weekend being: “If you can’t get laid during Bucking Horse, you can’t get laid.”

My parents and I had always gone to the parade Saturday morning, lawn chairs and a thermos of sun tea, me trolling the gutters of Main Street for pieces of saltwater taffy or Jolly Ranchers that the already-tipsy-at-ten-a.m. float riders had flung off course. Next it was lunch at City Park, a barbecue-beef sandwich greasing my fingers and making it hard to handle my sweaty cup of lemonade, and then my mom would have tours to give at the museum, and so maybe I’d meet up with Irene and we’d go to the rodeo together, liking best the shade under the grandstands where we collected the tossed-aside fifty-fifty tickets in big Styrofoam cups and tried to avoid the arcs of sunflower seeds and, worse, chew that plummeted around us like the heavy but staggered drops at the beginning of a thunderstorm.

Since my parents had died, Grandma had become a big fan of the DAR (in Miles City that stood for Daughters of the American Range, not Revolution) Cake Walk, a kind of tacked-on event. Bucking Horse Sale had lots of those. After the parade we’d head over to the library, come home with one German chocolate with coconut icing and a half dozen of Myrna Sykes’s cinnamon rolls. But soon after prom night Grandma started feeling crappy, and the doctor told her she wasn’t “quite managing” her diabetes with her diet alone. So when, a few weeks later, they put the Bucking Horse schedule of events in the paper and I asked her about our plans, Grandma, her Humulin vial in hand, told me she wasn’t “fooling with the damn parade this year.” Which was just fine by me, because with Ruth and Ray already signed up to staff about a zillion Gates of Praise–related BHS activities (a day care, an early-morning prayer meeting, a picnic lunch), as well as Ruth’s Sally-Q booth at the fairgrounds, that left me with four days of authentic cowboy debauchery to spend as I saw fit; and it turns out that four days was more than enough.

Jamie, Coley, Brett, and I pregamed at Jamie’s with beer and pot and then went to the opening street dance Thursday night. We got there early, before they roped off the area in front of the Range Riders Bar, and we should have been kicked out soon after, because the MCPD was out in much fuller force than typical and we were clearly underage, which was less of a big deal at later Bucking Horse Sale events, but the first night warranted extra vigilance. We
should
have been kicked out, but Coley’s brother, Ty, was big shit that weekend, rodeoing for the exhibitions, but more important, he was one of the local, authentic, good-looking, and good-for-tourism twentysomething cowboys. And he had a word with someone or other working the little gate they’d set up, and all of a sudden the four of us couldn’t be touched.

“But you’re on your own for booze,” Ty announced, swaggering over to us, working his way around a smattering of two-stepping couples, weirdly elegant in his dress Wranglers and vest. His hat would have looked cartoon-big if he hadn’t worn it so well. “Don’t let me catchya with a drink in your hand,” he said to Coley, yanking on her ear. “I don’t need to see none of that shit.”

“
Any
of that shit,” Coley said, thunking him on the chest. “Why would we even stay down here if we can’t drink?”

“I didn’t say you couldn’t drink,” he said, taking a theatrical swallow from his can of Miller. “I said I don’t want to
see
you drinking. Out of sight, out of mind, your royal highness.”

“I’m not royalty yet,” Coley said. “You don’t have to bow before me until tomorrow.”

“So long as you name me court jester,” Jamie said, doing this leprechaun sort of heel click he was fond of.

Coley had been nominated as queen of Bucking Horse Sale, which was a citywide competition, though usually an FFA girl from the Custer senior class ended up with the crown. Coley was the youngest girl to be nominated in something like thirty years, much to the annoyance of several of those seniors. She’d asked about retracting the nomination, but had offended the mustachioed guy at the head of the Montana Cattlemen’s Association, which ran the election, so she’d decided to see it through, royal obligations and all.

“I won’t win,” Coley said. “They’ll give it to Rainy Oschen. They should. She’s been living for that crown.” Then she took a couple of steps, and in a move that solidified yet again why I felt the way that I did about Coley Taylor, she did a perfect imitation of Jamie’s heel click, and upon landing said, “But you’ll always be court jester to me.”

The band, some group out of Colorado, started up a foot stomper, and Ty nodded at a tiny but big-haired brunette across the street and motioned toward the dancing couples. He considered the four of us for a moment, actually shifting his gaze from one face to another, like he was looking at a police lineup. Then he put one hand on each of my shoulders, which was awkward, with that cold beer can crushing hard against my clavicle, pinned there by his giant, freckled thumb, which had a mostly dead fingernail, asphalt black and plum.

“Cameron, I’m putting you on Coley patrol for the next four days,” he said, his beer breath hot and thick in my face. He wasn’t wearing even a hint of a grin. “I can’t trust the jester or the boyfriend, for obvious reasons. It has to be you—you have to keep her in line.”

“‘Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope,’” Coley said, clutching my arm, laughing.

I laughed too, but Ty still didn’t let go.

“I’m serious,” he said, his celery-green eyes hard on mine. “Don’t let my sister ruin the good family name.”

“No, that’s your job,” Coley said, shoving him toward the crowd. “Go dance with your cowgirl, hot stuff. I promise we’ll behave.”

“You need to use duct tape to stick to her, you do it,” he said, walking backward, still hawking me. “Don’t let me down, Cameron.”

I laughed and said, “Sure thing, sir.” But something about Ty made me nervous, something I couldn’t quite pin down.

“Your brother’s gonna be fighting them off all weekend,” Jamie said as the four of us watched Ty claim his lady and twirl her into the center of the street.

“That’s hardly a stud qualifier,” Coley said. “I mean, if you can’t get laid during Bucking Horse, Jamie . . .”

“Ouch,” Brett said, taking her hand. “No need to crush a growing boy’s dreams. Let’s dance before Cameron has to defend her man’s honor.”

“Don’t worry,” I said as they headed out into the middle of the street. “He doesn’t have any.”

There had been lots of little jokes like this since prom night. Just teasing, mostly coming from Brett and Coley, since Jamie and I weren’t really talking much about what was said on the school steps. What we were since prom was a good question, and not one I necessarily wanted an answer to. We’d twice taken the kissing to a shirts-off kind of place, both times in my bedroom, both times to a Lindsey mix tape; and one of the times Ruth had been fully aware of Jamie’s arrival, the closing of my bedroom door, and Jamie’s eventual departure. And she had said nothing.

It wasn’t bad, the making out; it didn’t make me feel wrong or even as weird as I thought that it might, but the whole thing did feel mechanical, or like a rehearsal, maybe, is the right way to put it: And I put in a tape, and I push
PLAY
, and the Cranberries serenade us, and I take off my shirt as Jamie takes off his, and we roll around on my comforter that smells like Downy, and Jamie has a weird indentation in his back, and his hands are so big and I can feel his calluses, and I can feel his heartbeat in my stomach, and he does this thing to the back of my neck that produces waves of goose bumps, and he hasn’t yet pushed for the pants-off part the way the swell in his own pants worries me he might.