The Miseducation of Cameron Post (28 page)

“You said that I should feel it,” I said.

“Now here, ladies, is a drink,” Barry said, turning around in the kitchen’s doorway, a glass with a newly mixed brown beverage in hand.

“Rum and Coke?” Coley asked, taking it from him without waiting for a confirmation, downing a big swallow.

“What’s left of my rum,” Ty shouted. “You two are a gypsy band of thieves.”

“A duo of thieves, not a band,” Barry said. “Where the fuck did you learn to count?” He grabbed the glass back from Coley, put his mouth over the same place she had, drank half of it in one gulp.

I thought I might pass out. My body felt jangly and sharp and uncontrollable, like chunks of glass were floating all around inside my limbs. I couldn’t be in that apartment with them for one more second.

“You want some of this?” Barry was shaking the drink at me.

“Nah, I’ve got to go,” I said, not looking at him or any of them. I walked to the door, slid my feet over my flip-flops, wedged the plastic divider between my big toe and its neighbor. I could hear Barry repeating to Ty and Taller Guy that I was leaving, and they all seemed very confused by this news.

I had the door open when Ty pushed through the jam-up in the kitchen and came toward me. “Not because of us, right? We didn’t mean to drive you off.”

I couldn’t look at his face. I couldn’t look behind him at Coley, even though she had followed him. “No,” I said to the apartment’s ugly carpeting. “I got too much sun today or something. I’m supertired all of a sudden.”

“But you’re okay other than being tired?” Ty asked, his hand on the top of the door, keeping it open, his arm sort of blocking my way out. “You seem upset.”

“Just tired,” I said.

“How are you getting home?”

I had driven the Bel Air. I didn’t even know where I had left—

“Here’s your keys,” Coley said, handing them over like she’d just conjured them up, a magic trick.

“You sure you’re good to drive?” Ty asked, still blocking me.

“She’s better than you, Ty,” Coley said. “Let her go home and go to bed.”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’m perfect.”

“You call us when you get there,” Ty said, and then he slid his arm away and let me pass.

I could tell somebody was watching me from the doorway as I walked down the hallway, as I started down the first flight of stairs, but I didn’t look up to see who, mostly because I needed to believe that it was Coley, but I knew better that it was probably just Ty.

Chapter Twelve

T
he next day Coley didn’t come to pick me up at Scanlan after work, and even though it made me even angrier, and sadder, I wasn’t that surprised about it. I rode my bike out to Taco John’s, and as I pulled up, I could see Jamie through the glass door, working a big mop in front of the beverage station.

“Power Trip Troy just stopped by to check time cards and he gave us a bunch of shit to do,” Jamie said when I walked in. The place was empty. “And Brian’s already baked, so he’s annoying as fuck.”

Brian, who had recently dyed his hair Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Green, was behind the counter, two stairs up on a step stool and doing a bad job of pouring a pillow-size plastic bag of tortilla chips into the warming machine. He had the bag lined up wrong, with the opening to the machine, and chips kept falling, two and three at a time, landing like crispy autumn leaves on the fake Spanish tile–style floor.

“I have my dinner break in twenty minutes,” Jamie said, pony-riding the mop handle until he was back behind the counter. “You want I should fix you a supernacho?”

“No, I’m fine,” I said. I waited for him on the wooden bench of an empty booth with my beach towel wrapped over my legs because it was way too cold in there to immediately follow the nine hours I’d just spent in the sun. There was ballpoint pen and marker graffiti all over the cream-and-brown-striped wallpaper next to the booth. Minuscule graffiti, most lines punctuated with at least one exclamation point:

I love Tori!
yer mom luvs tori! Go Cowboys!!!
tori who?
Tori Spelling? 90210 sucks dick!!!

I thought about asking the guys for a pen and adding my own, but I wasn’t sure what to write:
I love Coley Taylor. I’m pissed at Coley Taylor. I fucked Coley Taylor. Coley Taylor fucked with my head.

I didn’t ask for a pen. A couple of truckers came in and took me in, my towel-wrap, my swimsuit top. I waited some more while Jamie made them enchilada platters and then nodded at me from behind the counter that it was break time, that he could meet me outside.

He had already lit up by the time I got to the concrete pad at the back of the building. The bright-orange Taco John’s Dumpster had wasps swirling all around it, and there was a giant plastic bucket filled with brown grease slop just outside the workers’ entrance, but the night was calm and the sky was starting to turn that summertime purple it turned every once in a while, and the painted cinder block wall of the restaurant felt warm and smooth against the bare skin of my arms and shoulders as I leaned against it and accepted the joint from Jamie’s thin fingers.

“Where’s Coley at?” he asked.

He had to wait until I had released the sweet smoke in my lungs before I answered. “Fuck if I know,” I said, trying to sound cool and mean and not hurt.

“My poor lass.” Jamie gripped my shoulder and made a big, fake, pained face. “Has the young suitor Brett returneth to claim his bride?”

“Tomorrow,” I said, taking the joint from him even though he hadn’t yet offered it back, hadn’t even had the opportunity to hit again himself.

“So don’t you want to try any last-chance moves on your woman on this, your final night of alone time?”

“It’s all really messed up,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said, smacking a wasp to the ground with his work visor and then smearing it on the concrete with his sneaker. “I told you it was fucked up from the start.”

“Well, it’s even worse now, Captain Foresight,” I said, afraid that I might cry and not even sure quite where it was coming from and mad about it, about always, always crying in front of Jamie.

“How come?” he asked, getting the last of the wasp off the sole of his shoe, one thin wing still twitching. He took the joint back from me.

“It just is. And there isn’t any going back from it, either. There’s no undoing or whatever.”

“Did you ladies actually consummate your nonrelationship?” Jamie had tried for his usual smart-ass tone, but I could tell he meant his question.

I didn’t answer him. The joint—it was small to begin with—was mostly caked, but there was enough left for one solid hit. “You wanna shotgun this?” I asked.

He knew how to read my nonanswer. “Niiiiice, JJK,” he said, doing a man punch to my upper arm. “This
is
fucked up. You’re now like officially the other woman. You’re a lesbian home wrecker.”

I took in as much smoke as I could and flicked the butt out into the alley, and after a few seconds Jamie leaned over and opened wide and I sealed my lips to his dry mouth as best I could and exhaled, waited, and then pulled away. And then I did start crying like a giant, beach towel–wrapped baby, and Jamie put one arm around me and then both arms around me and we stood in a hug out there on that hot cement stoop and didn’t let go until a truck crammed with high schoolers, kids in the cab and bed, pulled into the drive-through lane and Brian opened the heavy door to the workers’ entrance and hollered for backup.

“It’s gonna be cool,” Jamie said while I pulled off my towel wrap and draped it over my shoulders, used one end to wipe at my face. “It’ll be better with Brett back, anyway. Now the pressure’s off. We just gotta find you a slutty Glendive girl. Somebody out of the city limits.”

“That’s the answer,” I said. “When in doubt, it’s always a slutty Glendive girl.”

“It’s always a slutty girl,” Jamie said situating his wasp-killing visor on his head at the jaunty angle he favored. “But there’s no rule says she has to be from Glendive.”

After he went in, I thought about riding my bike to the Montana Theatre, just to see if maybe Coley would be up in the last row, just to see if maybe. But even though I went a couple blocks past my house in that direction, I turned around well before I got there and rode home. Grandma was on the front porch, sitting in the half dark, eating a thick wedge of sugar-free banana pudding pie with graham cracker crust.

“No picture show tonight, huh?”

“Not tonight,” I said. “Did anybody call for me?”

“Anybody who?”

“Just anybody, Grandma,” I said.

“No anybodies I know, cranky,” she said. “Sounds to me like you have a somebody in mind, though.”

Ruth and Ray were on the couch watching something on TV that I didn’t even pause long enough at the doorway to distinguish.

“I put a couple of catalogs in your room for you, honey,” Ruth called after me as I started up the stairs. “I circled the ones I like best. You only have two months to pick—two months!”

I showered with the cordless phone on the sink so I could hear it. It didn’t ring. I played this game where I convinced myself that if I stayed in the shower Coley would call and if I got out she wouldn’t and so I just let the hot water run and run and run until it was cold and that was fine too because it was so hot in the bathroom anyway, and I stayed in even with the water growing colder and colder and she still didn’t call.

In my room I didn’t put on a movie. I didn’t work on the dollhouse, either. Ruth had left the bridal-wear catalogs on my desk. I flipped through them, Ruth’s blue marker circles on page after page. The maid of honor dresses she’d picked all looked nice, and surprisingly plain, like she was really trying to think of me and what I’d want to wear, but I still couldn’t imagine myself in any of them. Coley had said she’d help me find something in Billings for the wedding, that we’d make a weekend of it.

I tried to turn off my lamp and sleep, on top of the covers, my shirt and hair wet, the fan on, the phone lying on the bed next to me, but it was still early and I wasn’t tired. I played one of the new mixes from Lindsey, a bunch of bands and singers I’d not yet heard of, but it felt like too much work to try to
really
listen to new songs sung by new voices, too much thinking, somehow, so I changed to Tom Petty and felt sorry for myself and then mad at myself for feeling like that and then sorry for myself again. And Coley didn’t ever call.

Mona Harris and I had a rotation in the bathhouse together the next afternoon. I’d been a shitty lifeguard for the past several hours, looking at the lake but not actively scanning the water at all, instead imagining Coley and Brett’s reunion night in the greatest possible detail, playing out one scenario after another just to torture myself. I came up with a lot of scenarios that did the trick.

“Will you slather me up?” Mona asked as I walked in from the beach, removing my sunglasses, letting my eyes adjust to the cool dark.

She already had her swimsuit straps peeled off and hanging at the sides of her arms, a white bottle of Coppertone SPF 30 in one of her hands.

I nodded. She handed it to me.

“It’s the end of summer and yet watch me burn,” she said as I squirted a little pool of the thick, white cream into the center of my palm. “If I forget to lotion even once, I’m a lobster.”

I coated her warm back, the skin pinky white and freckled all over, but definitely not tan like the rest of us lifeguards.

I finished and Mona pulled her straps back and I set the lotion on this shelf that was like a community graveyard of half-used bottles of every sun lotion or oil or stick ever invented.

We sat at the check-in table without talking, the crappy, scratchy radio on behind us. Mona was flipping through a water-wrinkled
People
magazine that had been in the bathhouse since June, and I was using the metal handle of the fly swatter to work on a skull and crossbones that someone else had already started carving into the tabletop. Then a couple of lake rats ran in from the boys’ locker room and told us that some of the other lake rats had tossed their clothing and towels up onto the roof of the bathhouse, which happened at least a dozen times a summer because the locker rooms were open air with just cement partitions for stalls and kids would stand on the wooden benches and hoist stuff up onto the bathhouse roof just to be assholes.

“You going up or me?” Mona asked, but I was already out of the metal folding chair and on my way to get the ladder so I could retrieve the T-shirts and the sneakers and the stretched-out, grimy tube socks with a couple of dollar bills shoved down into the toe.

The boys waited on the ground as I tossed things down to them and told them to put their shit in baskets next time, but once the roof was clear, a part of me wanted to stay up there, hide out. It was just a flat, square expanse of hot tar, sort of like the Holy Rosary roof only much, much smaller and much, much closer to the ground. Granola Eric waved at me from left chair, obviously not doing a particularly good job of keeping his eyes on the water either. I waved back. I caught the glint of the sun off the lake and everything in front of me, beneath me, glowed white and hot; and as my vision readjusted, the beach and the street and the Conoco across the way went from ghost outlines to fuzzy color to finally their normal, solid selves. Then I climbed down.

I slammed the side of the ladder against the doorway trying to bring it back into the bathhouse and I jammed my thumb behind it and it hurt and I swore a bunch before I actually got it put away, Mona watching me the whole time, laughing some.

“You having a rough go of it?” she asked as I sat down.

“Whatever,” I said.

“I’ll take that as a yes,” Mona said, and then she reached over and flicked my arm with her thumb and pointer finger, hard, just above my wrist.

“Fuck!” I said. “That hurt.” It did.

“No it didn’t,” she said, smiling.

“Yes it did,” I said, but it made me smile too, for some reason. “That’s workplace abuse and I don’t have to stand for it.”

“Write me up,” she said. “I’ll find you the necessary form.”