The Miseducation of Cameron Post (29 page)

“Too much effort.” I tried to flick her back but I only managed a weak one near her elbow because she kept moving her arms all around.

Then whatever it was we were doing ended, the moment all used up in the way that sometimes happens and the mood just shifts, and you’re both aware of it, and that’s all there is to it. I went back to working on the skull, Mona the magazine.

But not very many minutes later she said, “She’s gorgeous, right?” She turned the magazine toward me so I could see this two-page spread of Michelle Pfeiffer photos: Michelle Pfeiffer on the beach and walking her dog and cutting veggies for what looked to be an enormous, all-color salad in her fancy, big-windowed kitchen.

“Yeah, she’s pretty,” I said.

“She’s at her hottest in
Grease 2
,” Mona said, sliding the magazine back.

“That movie sucks.”

“I didn’t say the movie was good. I said she’s hot in it.”

“I don’t think I noticed her looks because the movie she was showcasing them in sucked so badly,” I said.

Mona smiled a slow smile at me. “So you just didn’t notice her at all? It was like she was invisible in every scene?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Exactly like that.”

“Wow,” Mona said, taking her whistle from the table, putting it back around her neck. “That’s an incredible talent you have.”

I waited. Then I said, “She’s hotter in
Scarface
, anyway.”

“Hmmmm,” she said. “I’ll have to think about that.”

I looked at the clock. We had to rotate out in a couple of minutes. I stood up, got my bottle of Gatorade from the big community cooler that Hazel brought ice for every morning.

“Can I have a drink?” Mona asked, already standing behind me, assuming my yes.

I passed her the bottle. She drank a lot before handing it back.

“You’re kind of shy, huh?” she said, getting her towel from the hook. “Like little-kid shy.”

“No,” I said. “Not at all.”

“It’s okay,” she said. “It’s not an insult.”

“But it’s not true.”

“See, you sound like a little kid right now, even,” she said, laughing, leaving the bathhouse to relieve the right rover.

It wasn’t that I didn’t still think about Coley, and Coley and Brett, and Coley and me, for my next several hours outside; it was just that I punctuated all those thoughts with new thoughts about Mona, and Mona’s possible motivations, and a couple of times I even just plain stared at her while pretending to scan my area, a whole lake between us and my sunglasses covering the exact direction of my gaze.

Of course Coley didn’t show up after work, not with Brett newly back in town. A few of the other highway department guys did though, and they had a case of beer with them.

I wasn’t gonna stay, but as I was hanging my whistle on my designated hook, Mona came into the bathhouse and grabbed my towel where it was wrapped around my waist, her fingers sliding between towel fold and swimsuit at my hip. She held on while she said, “You’re staying, right?” And then I was.

While she covered me from the curiosity of the last departing lake rats, I poured a can and a half of Coors into my empty Gatorade bottle. We hid as many additional cans as possible in towels and sand pails, locked the main doors, and joined the highway guys in the trek down the beach toward the docks and the deep end.

One of those guys, Randy, said to me, after snapping my left suit strap, “We figured you’d have played hooky today, too.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“Coley called in sick this morning,” he said. He did air quotes with his fingers around
sick
.

“Nah, Ty did it for her,” one of the other guys said, coming up alongside us.

“Same dif,” Randy said. “We all guessed that you two gals had made for Billings or somewheres. Maybe she’s actually sick.”

We stopped at right guard stand to unload our bundles. I could feel Mona looking at me.

“Her boyfriend just got back into town,” I said. “That’s the kind of sick she is.”

“Ohhhhh,” Randy said, doing a slapstick kind of elbow jab in my direction. “Lovesick, huh? That’s the good kind.”

“That’s what they tell me,” I said, taking a big drink from my bottle and then twisting on the cap and chucking it into the lake and following its trajectory with the arc of my own racing dive.

We chicken fought for a while, me and Mona on broad, slippery shoulders, wrenching and pulling at one another, laughing when we toppled into the water’s dark surface, again and again. We later rated each other’s jackknives and cannonballs, but only Mona and I managed flips off the high dive. When the two of us wound up together beneath center dock, it felt inevitable and not weighty at all. The highway crew was tooling around in the shallow end, chasing a mud puppy, and even though Mona said something like “I can’t believe I’m one of those college girls who go after high schoolers” three or four times, that didn’t stop us from making out down there in the slits of light that colored the water around us chartreuse. And that’s all it was. Maybe ten minutes of making out. Mona and her thick lips, her nearly translucent eyelashes. But I rode my bike home with a buzz from both the beer and the kissing, an older woman, a college woman, and
Take that, Coley Taylor, take that
, and I felt good for twelve blocks before I felt bad. Really bad. All of it thunking on me at once, feeling like I’d cheated on her, or weirdly, on us.

On the last streets before my house I decided that I would write Coley a letter. I would write her a really long letter and tell her that even if this thing between us was big and scary, we could figure it out because we had to, because it was love and that’s what you do when you’re in love. Even in my head it sounded like the lyrics to a Whitesnake song, but that didn’t matter. I would write it all down. All of it. All the stuff that made me feel weird and mushy and stupid and scared when I went to say it, and sometimes even when I thought about it.

Pastor Crawford’s car was in the driveway and I didn’t consider that fact for a second. He was over all the time, Ruth and her committees. I put my bike in the garage, grabbed the newspaper from the porch, didn’t really wonder why nobody else had yet done so, opened the door, threw the paper on the entryway table, and was already three stairs up toward my room when Ruth said, “We need you to come in here please, Cameron.”

It was her saying Cameron and not Cammie that made the first little knot twist right at the base of my throat. And then when I was at the doorway to the living room, Ruth and Crawford on the couch, Ray in the big club chair, and Grandma nowhere, the knot got bigger, twisted harder, and it was my parents all over again but this time with Grandma. I was sure of it.

“Why don’t you go ahead and sit here?” Pastor Crawford said, standing, motioning to the spot on the couch he had vacated for me.

“What happened to Grandma?” I stayed in the doorway.

“She’s downstairs, resting,” Ruth said. She wasn’t really looking at me. Or at least she wasn’t holding her eyes on me for very long.

“Because she’s sick?” I asked.

“This isn’t about your grandma, Cameron,” Pastor Crawford said. He took the couple of steps over to me and put his hand on my shoulder. “We’d like you to have a seat so we can chat with you about some things.”

Chat
was a counseling-center word, a word that, when somebody said it like Crawford just had, never really meant chat at all. It meant a big conversation about the kinds of things you would never just chat with someone about, never.

“What’d I do now?” I asked, shrugging out from under his heavy hand and crossing my arms over my chest, leaning against the doorframe in a way that I hoped suggested that I couldn’t care less, whatever. But I was running over sins in my mind as fast as I could call them up.
Was it the missing beer from the fridge? Was it Holy Rosary? Was it an intercepted package from Lindsey? Was it pot with Jamie? Check here for all of the above.

The four of us traded glances. I could see Crawford making the face he made when he was searching for power-ful words during a sermon, but before he could get them out, Ruth made a freaky, strangled sobbing noise from the couch and muffled it fast with her hand. Ray got up to go to her, and when he did, a pamphlet slid off his lap and onto the floor. It was just one thin trifold, nothing I’d have noticed from across the room, but I sure did once it lay against the rug, its logo unmistakable:
God’s Promise
—those pamphlets that cool Reverend Rick had stacked at the end of the snacks table. The pamphlet that Coley had taken, put in her purse.

After feeling for so long like I could get away with anything,
anything
—like I could just keep sliding free in the nick of time like Indiana Jones rolling out from under the impossibly fast slam of a metal gate, narrowly escaping a series of steel spikes, a gigantic rolling ball of stone in a closed-in tunnel, near misses, just close enough to give you a jolt—I felt the choke of being caught, and knowing it, and the kind of shame that sidecars that choke.

“I know you can see how difficult this is for all of us,” Pastor Crawford said. “And we know that this is going to be very difficult for you as well.” He reached out like he was gonna do the hand on my shoulder again, but then recon-sidered and instead motioned me toward the club chair.

I went, thinking in those few moments that this all must have something to do with Lindsey, her packages and letters, maybe even those locker-room photos we’d taken, all of it evidence against me. I can’t quite explain why I focused on Lindsey and only Lindsey, but that’s what happened: I was convinced, sitting in that club chair, pulling my knees up into my chest, looking at no one, that this
chat
absolutely had to do with all that mail between us.

And so I was already working on the ways that I’d blame all this on Lindsey, her influence, her wicked, big-city abominations, when Crawford said, “Coley Taylor and her mother came to my house last night,” and his words crashed through me like someone smashing cymbals together over my head. Ruth leaned into Ray, letting his blue-work-shirted chest do a better job than her hand of muffling her even bigger sobs.

From there on I had a hard time following Crawford’s narrative. I tuned in and out, in and out, like a fucked-up set of earphones with a wire loose. I heard all of his words, I mean, I was right there and he was talking to me, but it was like he was telling some complicated, embarrassing story about somebody else. He told me about how Ty and the drunken cowboys had wrangled a story, “the truth,” out of Coley after I had left her apartment two nights before, and in that story, “the truth,” I was the pursuer and Coley the innocent friend, and a very angry Ty had convinced her to go to Mrs. Taylor the following morning, and Coley had then told her mother about Lindsey’s corruption of me and my attempted corruption of her, my sick infatuation, and how she felt sorry for me, and how I needed help: God’s help. Then Pastor Crawford told me about how he had had to deal with this news, how he had visited Ruth that morning, before she got in the Fetus Mobile for her sales trip to Broadus, me at Scanlan teaching my Level Threes the elementary backstroke—
chicken, airplane, soldier, repeat, repeat
—he and Ruth on the couch staring down the details of my ugly, sinful behavior. Once Ruth could pull herself together enough to stand, and that took hours, the two of them had searched my room, and there it all was: the mail I had wrongly thought of as the cause, not the cause at all but instead the corroborating proof to Coley’s accusations, the letters and the videos and the note from Jamie, the photos, the mix tapes, the fucking stack of movie tickets I’d rubber-banded together and had been saving for the dollhouse, the dollhouse itself. But who could make any sense of that?

Pastor Crawford kept on in his steady, practiced, too-calm voice, talking about how it wasn’t at all too late for me, about Christ’s ability to cure these impure thoughts and actions, to rid me of these sinful impulses, to heal me, to make me whole, while I thought, over and over:
Coley told, Coley told, Coley told
. And then:
They know, they know, they know
. Just those two thoughts on repeat, steady like a drum rhythm. And it actually wasn’t so much anger that I felt right then. Nor was it betrayal, even. Instead I felt tired, and I felt caught, and weak; and I somehow felt ready for my punishment, whatever it might be, just bring it on.

Pastor Crawford paused several times during his living-room sermon, for me to add something, or to question, I guess, but I didn’t.

At some point he said, “I think we can agree that Miles City isn’t the best place for you right now, spiritually or otherwise.”

And I just couldn’t help myself. “What does Miles City have to do with anything?” I asked the floor.

“There are too many unhealthy influences here,” he answered. “We all think that it will be healing for you to have a change of scenery for a while.”

I finally looked up. “Who all?”

“
All
of us,” Ruth said, meeting my eyes, her own puffed up and mottled with mascara, the return of Sad Clown Ruth.

“What about Grandma?”

Ruth’s face wadded up and she had to cover her mouth again, and Crawford jumped in quick and said, “Your grandmother wants what’s best for you, just like the rest of us. This isn’t about punishment, Cameron. I hope you understand how much bigger than that this is.”

I said, fast and mumbled, “I want to talk to Grandma myself,” and I stood up to leave, to go downstairs.

But Ruth stood up too and she said, loud and sharp like a thumbtack, close to my face, “She doesn’t want to talk about this! She is just sick about this, she’s
sick
about it! We all are.”

She might as well have slapped me. Ray and Crawford were both doing these O’s with their mouths as if she had. I sat back down and
we
continued on with
our
chat
and
we
had everything decided within the hour. Ruth would drive me to the God’s Promise Christian Discipleship Program the following Friday. I would be staying for at least the entire school year, two semesters—with breaks at Christmas and Easter.
We’d
see how things had progressed after that.