The Miseducation of Cameron Post (38 page)

“No,” she said. “No way. You were gonna steal them if I hadn’t seen you. You had the sin in your heart, and that’s what counts. You need to talk to Rick about it, or Lydia, because I don’t want to tattle on you, but you need help with this.” She was teary by the end of her little lecture, and I could tell that it had taken something out of her to confront me the way she just had.

I tried to talk like I thought Reverend Rick might, kindly but with authority. “Erin, do you really think I need to talk to someone about a pack of markers that I’m not even gonna take? They’re back on the shelf.”

Erin shook her head, her curls bouncing softly, her cheeks red. “I wouldn’t be much of a friend to you if I turned a blind eye to your sin. It says in Ephesians, ‘Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labor, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to those in need.’”

“Seems like they’re talking about a dude,” I said, trying a smile.

Erin did not smile. She stood there blocking me from moving forward, her arms crossed in front of her chest, right over the picture of a bearded, muscle-bound Jesus bearing a cross that read:
THE SIN OF THE WORLD
. (She wore this shirt a lot. I had memorized the back of it too: in big, red letters, in the exact font used to market Gold’s Gyms, was
GOD’S GYM—OPEN 24/7
.) It was hard for me to look at her shiny face as she stood there making what I knew she thought of as an absolutely necessary stand against evil for my salvation, so I looked at her folded arms instead.

A couple of college students in baggy flannel shirts with chunky, matted white-kid dreadlocks came down the aisle, brushing past us on their way to the oil paints, both of them noticing Erin’s shirt, too.

“It’s the Christian campus invasion,” the shaggier of the two said to his buddy.

“Like the Crusades without the good times of murder and pillage,” the buddy said back.

“And shit-fuck music.”

At this last comment, clearly said with the express purpose of our overhearing it, Erin looked like she might begin to really cry, like breakdown cry.

I sighed and shook my head. “I’ll go tell Rick,” I said. “Not Lydia. But I’ll tell Rick.”

She nodded at me, then leaned in for a big Viking hug, and I could feel her damp cheek against my neck, smell her perfumey deodorant doing its job.

“It’s the right choice,” she said while still locked in the hug.

I didn’t just do it because she was crying. I did it because I knew that if I didn’t, she would have been compelled by her guilt, her need to get me
support
, whatever, to tell on me anyway, but that decision for her would have been unnecessarily cruel. Also, Erin and I had settled into a mostly comfortable routine as roommates. She talked on and on about anything, about everything, about all the time; but I got used to that and sometimes really liked having her there, a steady stream of one-sided conversation that I got very good at tuning in and out of. Erin wasn’t a Mark Turner, at least she didn’t seem so to me. Her faith was showy, a performance for herself as much as the rest of us. I didn’t understand it, and I definitely didn’t want to emulate it, but I appreciated all the ways she thought she was working the program, that pink highlighter squeaking across one passage after another, hoping the very next one might do the trick, convince her once and for all that she wasn’t this wrong thing anymore. I wasn’t yet ready to have her write me off as a lost cause. I liked her thinking we were somehow in this together.

Telling Rick was as painless as I had expected it would be: He thanked me for coming forth, hugged me, we prayed together. But he told Lydia, too, said that they had to put a star next to shoplifting in my file as a “problem area for sin manifestation.” And Lydia didn’t just pray it away, but instead informed me that this sin of stealing was symptomatic of some of those below-surface issues I still wasn’t really dealing with, and now, in addition to my one-on-ones with Rick, I had to meet with her once a week, too. On top of that, my three-month probation period was due to be up in a matter of days, but this infraction cost me an “indeterminate additional amount of time” without mail or decoration privileges, and without calling home. Apparently I had a care package from Grandma and a letter from Ruth and a letter from Coley, of all people (opened, read, and approved by staff), waiting for me in the locked mail closet in the main office, but they would have to sit there awhile longer. Also, Aunt Ruth was notified of these developments, though that news actually pleased me a little.

While both Rick and Lydia did ask me why I felt the need to steal markers when Promise had a couple of bins of art supplies in the study rooms, they accepted my answer of “wanting them for my very own and coveting their expense and quality.” The truth was, while I missed watching movies and I missed listening to music and I missed the hospital and Scanlan and Grandma and Jamie, and Coley, of course her, I really pined for my dollhouse. Or not the dollhouse itself, maybe, but whatever it was I’d been doing to it for so long. Even as she’d boxed and bagged all the remnants of my perversion, Ruth hadn’t touched the dollhouse, and I hoped (needed) for that to still be true in my absence: for that fucked-up dollhouse to be there waiting for me. I had been planning to use the markers I never got to steal as part of a substitute kind of dollhouse project, this one inside a couple of half-gallon plastic cottage-cheese tubs cleaned and now hidden beneath my bed. The cottage cheese was sold to Promise at cost by a family who went to the Word of Life church and who very much supported the mission of our conversion. This family ran a local dairy that sold everything from those tubs to pounds and pounds of butter and ice cream and other cheeses of the noncottage variety, all under the product line Holy Cow Creamery. Their packaging had a picture of a cow with a halo over its head and fat, somehow cowish wings growing from its sides. We were supposed to collect the empty tubs in stacks in the kitchen for the dairy to restock with more product, but I’d nicked two of them the last time I was on cooking duty, and I’d planned to take more. They were no dollhouse, but they were something. I’d already stolen some decoupage adhesive and Krazy Glue from Walmart during a visit, and sometimes I’d take scissors or paints from the study rooms and return them before anybody noticed; but I had been attempting to build a stockpile of my own supplies, and the markers were key, and then Erin had come along.

Filling those tubs with stolen bits and secrets and then hiding them beneath my bed, mere feet from nosy Erin, our door always open,
come on in
, was risky and stupid and I just couldn’t help myself. I guess I didn’t want to. I couldn’t really make sense of what they meant as objects, though I did feel like there was plenty of meaning in the act of working on them; but I knew that someone like Lydia would think that she could decipher
me
through those tubs, that they were maybe physical representations of the below-water iceberg bullshit. And that was trouble. That was reason enough not to work on them, not to have them at all. But I did.

We did a big Thanksgiving meal, hosted the neighboring ranches, some people from Bozeman. Adam and I volunteered to do the potatoes the morning of, bags and bags of them to scrub and peel and cube and boil before mashing them with Holy Cow butter and cream. We smoked half a joint with Jane beforehand, and then sectioned off a little corner of the kitchen to ourselves. For an hour or so it was nutty in there, loud and hot and smelling (for everyone but Reverend Rick) like all the good holiday-food spices, like cinnamon and nutmeg, sage and thyme. It was fun too, actually, everybody with their tasks: a couple of people working on the turkeys and stuffing, Viking Erin making the requisite green bean and French-fried onion casserole, but quadruple the size most people would make. Rick had on this mix tape he liked with all these contemporary Christian bands, but some really cool old gospel songs too: Mahalia Jackson, the Edwin Hawkins Singers. I’d heard that tape enough times by then to sing along, despite myself. (We’d all heard it enough times.)

At one point Rick noticed me doing the chorus to “Oh Happy Day,” which is just a hard song not to join in on. He was singing it too. He backed over to me, doing a kind of butt-wiggle jazz shuffle, his hands all gooped-up with sticky, precooked stuffing. He held them out in front of him like mitts or casts, like he was letting them dry there, and he leaned his head in toward mine so that we could harmonize, I guess, or maybe just imagine a microphone in front of us, we two some famous singing duo: Sonny and Cher or Ike and Tina, maybe Captain & Tennille.

Adam reached over, his potato peeler in hand. He stuck it in front of our mouths so we didn’t have to pretend the microphone. Everybody else in the kitchen was clapping along with the choir on the tape and watching us. I took the potato peeler from Adam, gripped it in my best Mahalia impersonation, and closed my eyes, fuck it, belted like a pro. We finished out the song like that, increasingly louder, reckless, goofy as all get-out. My excuse was the marijuana, but Rick didn’t have one other than being Rick.

Helen Showalter whistled hard when it ended. Told us to “Go on, you guys—sing another one.” She sounded like an old trail boss as she said it (Helen was always sort of gruff when she was having a good time, a little hard and scratchy), and we weren’t supposed to use
guys
when referring to any group with women in it, but Rick didn’t correct her.

The song playing now, though, was some sappy Michael W. Smith track with too much synthesizer, and there was Lydia, walking into the kitchen with a big box full of dinner rolls and two pies from the bakery in town, and the moment was over.

“I don’t do encores,” I said.

“Encores of what?” Lydia asked.

“Nothing,” I said.

“You missed it,” Viking Erin said. “Reverend Rick and Cameron were performing.”

“I am sorry I missed that,” Lydia said, unpacking the box. Then she added, fairly quietly, mostly to the big sack of rolls in her hand, “Though I’d say Miss Cameron is almost always performing.”

Rick kind of gave her a look, just a small one, like
lay off
or whatever, but I don’t think she noticed. “No excuses, next time we do karaoke,” he said, smearing a swipe of stuffing along my cheek like an older brother or a youngish uncle might. Rick was big on karaoke nights. Promise had its own machine. Maybe it was Rick’s personal machine. I’d never sung when we’d had them before.

The kitchen cleared out pretty soon after that, but Adam and I weren’t done. You never have too many mashed potatoes come Thanksgiving. We were mostly silent, sort of entranced by the monotony of peeling and chopping.

At some point Adam asked sleepily, “So how come you never talk about the girl?”

“Who?” I asked.

“Oh, don’t do the thing where you pretend to be confused. The girl. Your downfall.”

“Who says there was just one?” I said, doing a corn dog wink at him.

“It’s always just one,” he said. “The one—the big one. The one who changes everything.”

“You first,” I said, but I was stalling and he knew it.

“This tedious modesty of yours,” Adam said. “You’ve already heard all about Mr. Andrew Texier and his fondness for my outstanding oral abilities. A fondness diminished only by his fear of his father. And my father. And the entire Fort Peck football team.”

“He didn’t deserve you,” I said.

“Few do,” he said. “Very, very few. C’mon, spill it.” He whacked me on the ass with his peeler. “It’s not polite to keep a lady waiting.”

“What do you want me to talk about? She’s there and I’m here.”

“Yes, but she sent you here. That’s a story.”

He’d been reading my iceberg. “You’ve been reading my iceberg,” I said.

“Of course,” he said. “But you said something once too.” He rolled a couple of just-peeled potatoes across the counter to me.

“I don’t remember that.”

“Too much ganja,” he said.

He had me there. “She didn’t send me here so much as it was a fucked-up situation and she panicked and I got sent here,” I said.

He raised his eyebrows. “So where’d they send her?”

I swallowed, then said, “Nowhere.”

“That is a fucked-up situation.”

I didn’t say anything to that. We were done with the peeling, finally. Adam rinsed off his peeler, moved the trash can over to just beneath the counter, and used his hands to wipe the slippery skin pieces into it, where they fell in delicate swishes and heavy, wet clumps, rattling the plastic trash bag as they went.

“Was this mystery girl the fairest in all the land?” he asked.

“Sort of,” I said, chucking potato chunks into the big pot, letting some water splash up over the top. “She’s definitely pretty.”

“Our nameless Snow White,” he said, gesturing out to the empty room. “Lover of ladies.”

“Snow White,” I said back. “Mistress of movie night.”

“And breaker of hearts,” he said, rubbing me on the shoulder, for effect, not for comfort.

“She didn’t break my heart,” I said.

Adam made the twisted-up face of visible doubt.

I tried to mimic the face back while I shook my head no. “I just told you, it was a fucked-up situation right from the beginning.”

“That doesn’t mean anything where hearts and breaking are concerned.”

Right then Rick came back into the kitchen, hands washed, shirt changed into a holiday button-down. He hung his
REAL MEN PRAY
apron (a gift from Bethany Kimbles-Erickson) back on its hook, just behind where Adam and I stood.

“Come with me a second, Cam, will you?” he asked, touching my elbow. To Adam he said, “She’ll be right back. I won’t leave you alone on spud service for long.”

“We’re almost done anyway,” Adam said. “It’s just boiling and mashing from here on out.”

Rick and I walked in silence down the hallway to the main office. There he pulled a set of keys from his pocket and opened the mysterious mail closet. He gave me the box from Grandma, a little crushed and dented on one side, but there it was. He also gave me a stack of rubber-banded letters. The one from Coley I’d known about; the two from Grandma I could have guessed at; the other four, from Ruth, I hadn’t either known about or guessed at.