The Miseducation of Cameron Post (21 page)

“How are you being so cool about this?” She turned to look at me, our faces so, so close. “Is that what happened this morning before I saw you—you broke up? Is that it?”

“I’ve told you twenty times. There wasn’t anything to break up.”

“I know, but I thought that was just you being you.”

“I don’t even know what that means,” I said. But I did know, and she was right; I had been totally arch about Jamie and me, just not in the way she was reading it. “Jamie and I are just better as friends,” I said, trying again.

She started to say something and then didn’t. We watched Jamie and his Glendive girl kiss, and then watched Ruth make faces at those kisses, shake her head for an audience of Ray, which made us both laugh.

“The good thing about it happening tonight is that it’s Bucking Horse,” Coley said, taking my arm and walking us out of there. “We can find you a cowboy in no time. Or two cowboys. Twelve cowboys.”

And I wanted so much to say “Or how about a cowgirl?” Just say it, right then, in the moment, put it out there and let it stay and make Coley deal with it. But of course I didn’t. No way.

After Coley’s stint as runner-up on a crepe papered flatbed float in Saturday’s parade, the two of us decided that we were officially tired of Bucking Horse. Brett was off to play in his big soccer match, Jamie was still dodging me in favor of a girl who might actually put out, and a bunch of thunderheads rolled in by noon, the way they always do at least once during the festivities, making everything gray and soggy and more than a little deflated.

Coley drove us out to her ranch and we spent the afternoon frocked in Ty’s gigantic sweatshirts, drinking sugary mugs of Constant Comment (Coley’s favorite) and watching MTV, hiding out from the social obligations of Bucking Horse. It was only the second or third time I’d been out at her house without Brett, and I was predictably anxious about that. Coley’s mom made us grilled cheese with tomato soup before she headed into town to work her twelve-hour shift as an ER nurse. She’d told me to call her Terry probably half a dozen times, but I couldn’t stop with the “Mrs. Taylor.”

“Coley, honey, wouldya be sure and feed before it gets too late?” Mrs. Taylor said, standing by the front door in maroon scrubs, an umbrella in hand, an older, more worn version of Coley but still really pretty. “I have no idea when Ty will show his face.” She kept checking her reflection in a mirror above their coat hooks, flicking the side of her hair a few times. “It’s chicken-fried-steak night at the cafeteria. You girls want to come in and eat with me before you go out?”

“We’re not going out,” Coley said, and then she turned to me. “What is it you said about Bucking Horse, Cam?”

“That it’s a bitter mistress,” I said.

“Yeah,” Coley said, laughing, though her mom was not. “We’ve decided that Bucking Horse is a bitter mistress and we’d rather eat ice cream and avoid it.”

“That doesn’t sound a bit like you,” Mrs. Taylor said, looking from Coley to me, not necessarily unkindly but not kindly, either. “I thought you’d be downtown in the thick of things for sure.”

“We’re just gonna stay in and do nothing,” Coley said, checking her own reflection in the coat-hook mirror and then pulling the hood of her sweatshirt over her head and backing up until she fell over the arm of the couch and sprawled with her head and trunk on the cushions and her legs in the air.

“Call me at work if you change your mind and head in,” Mrs. Taylor said. And then from the stoop she added, “And tell Ty to call me too—if you see him.”

We did see Ty not half an hour later, a dirty and busted-up version with a big cut under one eye and, as he put it, a “hitch in his giddy-up.”

“I didn’t think you were supposed to ride until tonight,” Coley said, helping him off with his jean jacket.

“I’m not,” he told us, putting on a big grin. “This is from one ornery son of a bitch named Thad. I shit you not. The fucker’s named Thad. Now
he
’s the one looks like he got trampled by a bull.”

“Nice, Ty,” Coley said, inspecting the dried blood on the jacket’s collar. “I thought we were trying to preserve the family name.”

“That’s exactly what I was doing, kiddo,” he said, his head buried in the freezer. He emerged with a bag of frozen broccoli as his ice pack.

He drove off again after a shower, a serving of scrambled eggs and toast, and a clothing change: stiff jeans, a different hat, a fresh cigarette behind his ear. Coley was asleep next to me on the couch. The rain had mostly stopped and there were sunbeams spotlighting through the remaining clouds and lighting up sections of the hills outside their big living-room window. Next to that window was a framed family picture taken before Mr. Taylor had died. They were out somewhere on the prairie. Coley was maybe nine, in pigtails, all of them wearing soft denim shirts tucked into jeans. The picture had sort of faded somehow in the processing, almost a black-and- white but just tinged with color. Mr. Taylor, his mustache hiding part of his smile, had his arms around Mrs. Taylor and Ty, Coley was sort of perched in the middle, and Ty had his thumb hooked in his belt. They looked happy, which is the point in those kinds of photos, I know. But they did.

I tried to get up from the couch to look at it closer without waking Coley, moving only an inch or two and then waiting, trying not to shift the cushions, but I hadn’t even put all my weight on my feet before she said, “Did it stop raining?”

“Yeah,” I said, feeling like I’d been caught doing something when I hadn’t, really.

“We should go feed, then,” she said in a yawn, stretching wide her arms.

I grinned at her. “You think I’m gonna help you do your chores? You play the cowgirl, not me.”

“Only because you could never hack it as a cowgirl, townie,” Coley said, sitting up fast and gripping the hem of my sweatshirt, pulling me back onto the couch, which I didn’t fight at all. She threw the fleece blanket she’d been wrapped in over my head and put a couch cushion on top of that, climbing atop the pile and staying there. I struggled halfheartedly, Coley resisted, I struggled more, the two of us eventually on the carpet between the couch and coffee table, the blanket still covering most of me and so it was between our bodies; but when a corner of it got pinned beneath my knee and pulled away and I could see how those too-big sweatshirts had twisted around us, leaving my stomach and Coley’s back bare, I stopped pretending to struggle and actually pulled away from her, stood up, shook out my legs as if I was Rocky at the top of the stairs in Philadelphia.

“Retreat means defeat,” Coley said, pulling her hair out of her face and lifting her arms for me to help her up, so I did but then backed off again.

“I didn’t want to hurt you with my advanced physical prowess,” I said, all jangly energy.

“Of course not. Wanna see if Ty has any booze in his room as payment for our labor?”

He did. Half a bottle of Southern Comfort, which we mixed with what was left of two liters of semiflat Coca-Cola stored in the door of the fridge. We drank some. We changed into jeans. I borrowed a pair of Ty’s also-too-big boots, which reminded me of trips to the Klausons’. Outside it was muddy and smelled like grass and wild flowering crabapple trees and just-after-rain, the smell that laundry detergents and soap try to imitate with their “spring meadow” varieties but can never pull off. We loaded heavy bags of range cake into the slippery bed of the truck. Coley found a pocketknife and cut each bag open at the top. She ran back into the house and emerged with a cassette, which she put into the truck’s player, hit Rewind. The tape was a Tom Petty mix, also once belonging to Ty. I’d sent a similar mix of Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers tunes to Lindsey as a kind of thank-you for all the artists she’d mixed up for me, but when I’d asked her what she thought of it during one of our phone conversations, she’d told me that Tom Petty was a male chauvinist and that his role as an Alice-eating Mad Hatter in the video for “Don’t Come Around Here No More” was just additional fuel to a fire already started by what Lindsey claimed were lyrics showcasing his “limited abilities as a songwriter and his prurient interest in teenage girls.”

I didn’t share any of this with Coley, and it didn’t change Petty’s appeal for me, either. That afternoon in the truck Coley turned the volume up loud. We rolled down the windows, manual, not electric. We drank from our big plastic bottle. She’d rewound to the first song on side B, “The Waiting,” which was our mutual favorite. She sang one line.

Oh baby don’t it feel like heaven right now?

I sang the next.

Don’t it feel like something from a dream?

Coley bounced us over the hills, down rutted roads of crumbly sandstone and shale, through trenches of fresh mud as thick and oily as modeling clay, and then cross-country, crunching wet sagebrush when it was in our path, which it often was.

In between verses we passed the bottle, noticed the purple crocuses that dotted some of the hillsides, their petals so thin they were nearly transparent, the sunlight cast through them, and those hillsides greener than they’d be for the rest of the summer. We listened to a few more tracks and then Coley rewound and it was “The Waiting” again, and then again, each time louder, each time better.

We found most of the herd through gate seven, down in a grove of juniper, one of those beams of sunlight warming their wet and tangled hides. The Taylors raised Red Angus. They were due to calve in a couple of weeks, and several of the way-pregnant heifers looked like hairy boxcars on legs. Their calves, I knew, would be velvety red-brown teddy bears with big, soft eyes: completely adorable. I moved to the bed of the truck and poured cake while Coley drove us in a zigzagging line, trying to spread out the cows for their meal.

We found the rest of the herd grazing in a patch of new grass maybe a half mile away. I finished pouring the feed. Both of us drank more. With some effort, Coley drove us up the rocky but slippery side of a partly pink sandstone hill they called the Strawberry, and after spinning the wheels in a marsh of mud near the crest, she parked. We lined the bed of the truck with the empty cake bags and spread the flannel blanket from the bench seat over them. Coley left the stereo on, turned up the volume even louder. We lay flat on our backs, our feet planted and our knees in the air, the just-setting sun coloring the remaining clouds in plum and navy with Pepto Bismol–pink underbellies and the sky behind them every candy-colored shade of orange, from circus peanut to sugared jelly slice. I could feel something happening between us, something even beyond my buzz from the liquor, something that had started with the wrestling on the couch, before that, too, if I was to be honest. I closed my eyes and willed it just to finally happen.

“Why don’t you still talk to Irene Klauson?” Coley asked. It wasn’t any more of a surprise than anything else she might have asked me right then.

“She’s too cool for me now,” I said. “I didn’t even know that you knew her.”

“Of course. The dinosaur heiress? Are you kidding?”

“But did you know her before that?”

“Yeah, especially when we were little,” Coley said, twisting the bottle cap with just the smallest of fizzing noise escaping from what was left of the carbonation. “I didn’t know you, but I’d see you two together at everything.”

“At what?”

“At everything—the fair, at Forsyth’s field days.”

“We were together as much as we weren’t,” I said.

“I know,” Coley said, handing me the bottle. “That’s why I asked why you don’t still talk to her.”

“She went away. I stayed here.”

“That doesn’t quite add up.” Coley let her right knee fall out to the side so that it collided with my left knee and stayed propped there.

“Her parents found dinosaurs and my parents died. Does that add up?” I didn’t say it to sound mean, exactly; I was actually hoping that answer made sense.

“Maybe,” she said, letting her other knee fall so now she was turned completely on her right side, facing me, both of her legs propped by mine, her elbow down and her right hand holding her head. “I guess some of my friends changed after my dad died.”

I didn’t have anything to say to that. We listened to Tom Petty telling us about
free falling
. Coley put her left hand on my stomach, just above where my belly button was. She pressed it there kind of hard.

“Did you sleep with Jamie?” she asked. Just like that.

“Nope,” I said. “I’m not planning to, either.”

Coley laughed. “Because you’re a prude?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “All prude, all the time.” Then I waited a little and added, “You have with Brett, though, right?”

“That’s what you think?”

“I guess so.”

“Not yet,” she said. “Brett’s too nice a guy to pressure me.”

“He is a nice guy,” I said, trying to read what was happening and to be sure about it, but I couldn’t.

“Sometimes I think I should wait, anyway. It used to be really important to me to wait, at least until college. Doesn’t it seem like there’s all this room to figure things out in college?”

“I guess,” I said. She still hadn’t moved her hand.

“What do you think Irene Klauson is doing at this very moment?” Coley’s words were Southern Comforty and wet and warm at the side of my face, deep into my ear.

This was it, I decided, and so I said, “Making out with her boyfriend, the polo player.” And then I added before I lost my nerve, “Pretending to like it.” Those words just hung out there for a moment, out in the all-color sky, with the sound of raindrops flitting from pine boughs when the breeze hit them right.

She gave it a second, then asked, “Why pretending?”

I got scared. “What?”

“Why doesn’t she like it?” Coley moved the fingers of the hand on my stomach, one at a time; she pressed in the pinky, then released, the ring finger, release, the middle finger, release, again and again she cycled through them.

“Just a guess,” I said.
I could just turn my head to hers, right now,
I thought,
and that would be that.
I didn’t.

“I don’t think that’s what it is,” she said. She took her hand away from my stomach, sat up, scooched to the end of the truck bed, the tailgate, let her legs dangle over the edge.