The Miseducation of Cameron Post (31 page)

For miles and miles I just let Ruth drone. I let her words crumble away between us, drop like those thistles into dusty bits on the seats and the console. All the while I smelled Coley, and thought Coley, and wondered when I would start hating Coley Taylor, just how long it would take for that to happen, because I wasn’t anywhere near that place yet, but I thought that maybe I should be. Or that maybe I would be one day. Eventually Ruth stopped talking to me and twisted the dial until she found Paul Harvey and laughed like she was drunk and had never heard mild radio humor before.

Those whole six hours, the only other snips of dialogue between us, other than the Pringles incident, were:

Only a few miles before the turnoff to Promise we passed the sign for Quake Lake. It was battered and the metal was crunched in the middle, as though it had fallen down and been driven over by a semi and then put back up. I think Ruth and I noticed it at right the same time, and she turned to me, actually took her eyes from the road to look at me, for just a few seconds. But Ruth somehow managed not to say anything. And I didn’t say anything. And then we turned a corner and it was just trees and road in the rearview and that sign wasn’t some big signifier at all, but just one more place marker we’d driven by on our way. At least that’s what we both pretended right then.

The girl who met us in the Promise parking lot had an orange clipboard, a Polaroid camera, and a prosthetic right leg (from the knee down). She seemed about my age, high school for sure, and she waved that clipboard while walking toward the FM with surprising speed. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: She was wearing running shorts.

Ruth didn’t even have the chance to say something like “Oh, lookit this poor thing” before the poor thing herself was at Ruth’s door, throwing it open and flashing a picture, all in what seemed to me the same moment.

Ruth made a gaspy-squeaky sort of noise and shook her head back and forth and blinked her eyes the way one of the
Looney Tunes
did after smacking into a brick wall.

“Sorry about the shock. I like to get one right away,” the girl told us, letting the big black camera hang around her neck, pulling her head down some. The photo slid forward like a tongue, but she didn’t pull it free. “Just as soon as folks get here I snap one. It has to be the very first moment; it’s the best.”

“Why’s it the best?” I asked her, walking around the Fetus Mobile to see that leg up close. Her real one was bony and pasty white, but the fake one had some girth, some plasticky definition, and was Beach Barbie tanned.

“You can’t use words to describe it—that’s why the photos. I think it’s because it’s the purest moment. The most undiluted.”

Ruth did a weird kind of chuckle after she’d said that. I could tell she was uncomfortable with this girl as our greeter.

The girl finally plucked free the picture and held it up so only she and I could see it. The shot was mostly Ruth’s head too close to the lens and her mouth a line of displeasure, with me seeming far behind her, almost smiling.

“I’m Cameron,” I said. I knew that if I didn’t speak, Ruth would, and for some reason I wanted this girl to like me right away. Maybe because whoever it was I had been expecting to meet us, this girl wasn’t her.

“I know. We’ve all been talking about you coming. I’m Jane Fonda.” She was smiling and rocking a little on that leg. It squeaked like a bath toy.

“Serious? Jane Fonda?” I smiled back.

“I’m always serious,” she said. “Ask anybody. So the deal is that Rick’s in Bozeman at Sam’s Club buying food and stuff. I’ll give you the grand tour and then he’ll be back before too long.” She leaned toward me. “Sam’s Club and Walmart give us a big discount, and free food, sometimes. Mostly chicken breasts and bananas. He does a decent barbecue chicken, but he gets the cheap toilet paper—the scratchy kind you have to double up on.”

“There are worse things,” Ruth said. “Shall we bring the luggage now?”

“Indubitably,” Jane said.

“I can’t believe your name is actually Jane Fonda,” I said. “That’s crazy.”

She tapped her clipboard against her leg two times and it sounded sorta like when I was little and would tap my plastic drumsticks against my Mr. Potato Head. “Talk about the tip of the iceberg,” she said. “We swim in crazy here.”

The grounds at Promise had a little of everything that western Montana is famous for, things that the state tourism board makes sure show up on postcards and in guidebooks: golden-green fields for archery or horseback riding, densely wooded trails dotted with Indian paintbrush and lupine, two streams that, according to Jane, were just
aching with trout
, and a so-blue-it-looked-fake mountain lake only a mile and a half’s hike away from the main building. Both sides of the campus (the compound) were bordered by the grazing land of cattle ranchers sympathetic to the holy cause of saving our souls from a lifetime of sexual deviance. Even that hot August afternoon, the wind down from the mountains was crisp, and on it rode the sweet scent of hay, the good spice of pine and cedar.

Jane Fonda took us cross-country, that squeaky leg surprisingly springy, and Ruth determined not to lose step with a cripple, even if not losing step meant bouncing the battered, green, Winner’s-Airlines-issued wheelie suitcase now packed with my stuff over prairie-dog holes and sagebrush. I lugged a pink Sally-Q case, one that Ruth had told me she would be taking back with her, but I could keep the Winner’s one. Out with the old, in with the new.

Jane sort of motioned to the chicken coop (eggs were collected each morning by students on a rotating schedule); to an empty horse stable (they were planning to get some horses, though); to a cluster of metal-roofed cabins used only during the summer, for camp; to two small cabins where Reverend Rick and the school’s assistant director, Lydia March, lived. But Jane wasn’t so much a tour guide as someone we might have happened upon in a foreign town, someone who felt obligated to show us around a little. As we walked, I stared at the back of her T-shirt. On it was a black-and-white print of a female athlete, maybe a volleyball player, judging by her shorts and tank top, stretching after an exhausting match—her ponytail limp, her brow dewy. Next to the image were the purple words
SEEK GOD IN ALL THAT YOU DO
.

The main building was built, I think, to resemble an aspen lodge, with log siding and a grand entrance; but once we were inside, it felt just like Gates of Praise back in Miles City, but bigger, and with dorm rooms. The floors were all that industrial laminate poorly imitating hardwood. The windows were too few, fluorescent lighting everywhere. Someone had made an attempt with the main room—a fireplace, cheap Navajo-style woven rugs, a moose head over the mantel—but even that room smelled like disinfectant and floor cleaner.

“Where is everybody?” I asked, and was first answered by a cavernous echo of my own voice.

“Most everybody’s in Bozeman with Pastor Rick. Lydia’s somewhere in England—that’s where she’s from. She visits a couple times a year. But I think some disciples are at the lake, maybe. Summer camp just ended last week, so this is like transition time before the regular school session starts. Freedom time.” She flicked on a light switch and started down a hallway.

“So you kids just do whatever you want this week?” Aunt Ruth trot-trotted a little to catch her, the suitcase wheels spinning sprays of dirt and grass on those shiny floors.

“I mean not really. We just don’t have as many group activities, but we still do our Bible study and one-on-one sessions.” She stopped at a closed door, which had two things taped to it: a poster of the Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline and a Xerox copy of the Serenity Prayer, the purple ink so faded and the paper so yellowed and curled that it somehow had gained an air of history, almost of authenticity.

Jane tapped the door with her clipboard. “This is you. And Erin. She’s in Bozeman with Rick.”

Aunt Ruth
tsk-tsked
her head some. She still hadn’t come to terms with the roommate thing. Who could blame her? I hadn’t either. I’d been given her name earlier in the week and I’d been regularly picturing my new roommate, Erin, as a bespectacled, chubby girl with unruly curls and a smattering of acne across her perpetually flushed cheeks. Erin would be a pleaser. I just knew it. She would be working hard, asking God to help her so that the grungy but holy men in that poster on our door might actually do it for her—goose bumps on her neck, a prickle across her chest. Praying to Jesus to help her want them the way she had that girl from her study hall, from her science lab.
He’s a tall drink of water
she would tell me about some male movie star, some action hero, and then she would giggle. Erin would most definitely be a giggler.

We were still waiting outside the door. Jane nodded at the handle. “You can go in,” she said. “We don’t lock anything here. The doors aren’t usually even shut, but since no one’s in there, it’s fine, I guess.” She must’ve seen my face because she added, “You’ll get used to it.”

I couldn’t quite believe her.

Erin’s half of the room was done up in lots of yellows and purples: a yellow bedspread with purple pillows, a purple lamp with a yellow shade, a massive bulletin board with a yellow-and-purple-striped frame, the whole thing collaged with snapshots and Christian concert tickets and handwritten Bible quotes.

“Erin’s from Minnesota. Big Vikings fan,” Jane said. “Plus she’s a second year, and she’s earned some privileges you don’t have, I mean with the posters and whatever.” She looked at me, shrugged her shoulders. “Yet. You’ll get them eventually. Probably, anyway.”

My half of the room was sterile and blank, and I hadn’t really brought much to change that. We put my bags on the new-looking twin mattress. I wasn’t sure if I was supposed to unpack right then, so I just pulled out a few random items and set them on my desk hutch: a stack of brand-new notebooks and a box of pens, purchased by Ruth; Kleenex; a picture of Mom and Dad and me one Christmas; Mom’s pre–Quake Lake picture; the picture of Margot and Mom, which Ruth had looked at sort of funny while inspecting my luggage but had let me keep.
Make an effort,
I thought. I added my
Extreme Teen Bible.

Ruth was examining that big bulletin board. She seemed to be noticing my lack of color in the face of all that was the Viking Erin. Maybe it made her a little sad for me. She reminded me to grab the reading lamp and alarm clock from the Fetus Mobile before she left with them.

“I think you’re going to do really well here, Cammie. I mean it.” She reached out to put an arm around me and I stepped away from her, pretending that I had a sudden and compulsive interest in looking out the window I’d be looking out all year. The view was unbelievable, so there was that, anyway.

Thank God Jane got us out of there. “Would you like to stop by the dining hall? Rick thought you might be hungry. There’s sandwich stuff.”

“Sounds good,” Ruth said, already out the door.

Jane squeaked fast behind her. I paused at the bulletin board. There was one girl repeated in every photo. Had to be Erin. I was right about everything but the acne. Her skin was as clear as those girls in Noxzema ads, maybe due to her prayers before lights out.
God grant me flawless pores. God grant me a healthy glow.

We were only just finished with egg salad on white when a big blue van pulled up outside, and the sliding door with the silver God’s Promise logo slid open, and my fellow diseased poured out like a rush of holy water to pass over me and cleanse me and envelop me into their stream.

It was
Hi, I’m Helen. We’re just so glad that you’re here
. And
I’m Steve. We just bought tons of Cap’n Crunch. Are you into Cap’n Crunch? So good.
And Mark and Dane said they’d show me the lake, and Adam said he’d heard that I was a runner, and that he ran in the mornings and had seen tons of elk and deer and even a moose once or twice.
And those things are freakin’ huge
. And it was these tight little embraces, and touching my arm, and these shiny, shiny eyes, and everyone smiling at me like we were all plastic characters out of some board game like Candy Land or Hi Ho! Cherry-O. And the thing I kept thinking was:
Is it really okay to be doing all this touching
?

I looked at Jane, who seemed just as royally awkward, that camera still hanging from her neck, and I checked to make sure, in all this goodness and light, that her fake leg hadn’t suddenly healed itself, sprouted anew and perfect and pure. It hadn’t. That was something.

The Viking Erin was the last off the van. She stepped from it like it was a carriage once sprung from a pumpkin, all these bright-eyed well-wishers her subjects, her court, and me the new lady-in-waiting. She was confident in her denim overalls and sandals, her curls shiny and healthy; everything about her—even her roundness, her softness—made her seem somehow healthy. Maybe I was totally wrong about this girl. Maybe she was their leader?