The Miseducation of Cameron Post (10 page)

We were four of the stars of the junior-high track team, but we moved through that basement a few timid steps at a time. Even with all that pizza to sop it up, the liquor seeped its way through my arms, my legs, everything heightened and muffled at once. My mind kept replaying clips from all those slasher flicks I’d rented.

Paul was our mutterer. “I don’t like nuns,” he said. “Never liked ’em. Nuns are fuckin’ creepy as shit. They’re creepy. Married to God? What is that? That’s fuckin’ psycho.” Maybe he was talking to us, but nobody answered him.

Every so often my hand swiped in front of me for Jamie, almost an involuntary move, like my palm had Tourette’s, me gripping a handful of the damp cotton T-shirt and twisting it, pulling it tighter and tighter, stretching the fabric taut across his skin, same as I did to my own pant leg when I rode the Tilt-A-Whirl at a parking-lot carnival. Jamie didn’t say a thing about it, and he didn’t laugh but instead let me cling to him like that as we fumbled and tripped our way to the door leading the hell out of there.

Though the old stairs sagged beneath us, the stairwell was draped in a filmy light from the open doorway to the floor above. Jamie “Fuck-yeahed!” as he reached the top and Paul and Murphy echoed something similar, all of us wrapped in the giddy elation that comes with escape.

It was still soon enough after the shutdown that some electricity remained on in the building (upstairs, anyway), and even though it seemed too modern for its surroundings, the fact that, at the end of the hallway, an
EXIT
sign glowed its appropriate Christmas-light red, gave me comfort, somehow, a sense of normalcy. Because nothing else about that hospital was normal.

That day we only had time for the old wing, and that was plenty. It was all tall archways and gold foil wallpaper, too decadent to resemble the stark hospital rooms we knew from our checkups. There were green couches, definitely antiques, and in one corner there was even a piano, a baby grand. As soon as he saw it, Murphy charged the bench and clanked out a pause-filled “Heart and Soul” while Jamie and Paul tackled each other the way boys do when they’re pumped up with excitement and thrown together in a place where you’re supposed to behave—or at least were once supposed to behave. Above us, stern nuns in crisp whites watched our intrusion from the strokes of a massive oil painting housed in a gilt frame.

When Jamie proposed a toast to the “broads of God,” I raised the bottle to the painting and drank a swig, same as the guys. This time the schnapps burned hard all across the roof of my mouth, the back of my throat, and I coughed some of it out, embarrassed.

Then the wrestling started up again, this time with Murphy included, and I watched from the arm of one of the couches and wondered what it was I should be feeling. It wasn’t a performance for my benefit, like the way male tigers show off for the female, courting her with manly prowess and antics, though I had seen these guys do that shit before around Andrea Harris, around Sue Knox. What they were doing was what they did all the time when we were together. It was some sort of freedom guys allowed themselves around each other, and I envied every moment of it. It was something louder, and harder, than anything I’d ever been part of with a group of girls. Not that I was really a part of it with these guys. It all seemed to come so easily to them, and I could only get so close to any of that.

“Hey Camster,” Jamie shouted at me from the bottom of a dog pile, “come rescue me.”

“Fuck off,” I yelled back.

“You said you wanna jerk me off?”

“Yep. You heard me exactly right.”

Jamie’s mom went to Gates of Praise. His dad didn’t come along. Jamie only got out of it once in a while. We’d started hanging around the year before, during track practice warm-ups and cooldowns. I’d seen even more movies than Jamie had, which made me some sort of authority to him. The other guys just followed along.

“C’mon, Cameron,” Jamie tried again, untangling himself from the pile and jogging over to the baby grand. “Let’s act out the piano scene from
Pretty Woman
.”

Murphy and Paul laughed pretty hard at this.

“Okay,” I said. “You want Paul to play Julia, or Murphy? ’Cause he’s got the red hair.”

The light from outside was cut into strange strips, weird angles, by the cheap lumber somebody had used to do a half-assed board-up job of the windows. Those strips of light illuminated the thick dust that the boys had stirred in their play, and its slow descent back to the ground, like glitter, like snowflakes, made everything just a little dreamy and unreal. And the schnapps helped. It felt like we’d entered a world that wasn’t supposed to be found this way. I liked it.

That summer Lindsey Lloyd and I traded off for high point in the Intermediate Girls Division at each of the Eastern Montana Federation swim meets. She would beat me by half a stroke on the hundred free, I’d out-touch her on the IM, and then it would come down to the timers comparing their stopwatches each and every hundred butterfly we swam. Lindsey spent her summers with her father—he was working some construction thing near Roundup—and the school year with her mother and stepfather in Seattle. We’d been each other’s competition since even before my parents had died, with Lindsey always at an advantage, because her school in Seattle had an indoor pool and I had only June, July, and August at Scanlan Lake.

We’d always been friendly—we made small talk while sitting on the heat benches and sometimes stood in line together at the concession stand, waiting for our haystacks, a swim meet favorite of seasoned hamburger, cheese, sour cream, tomatoes, and olives all served with a personal-size bag of Fritos corn chips, the fork sticking out of the top. Lindsey loved those things. She ate them maybe twenty minutes before a race and could still win, a kind of “fuck you” to the stupid
wait two hours before you swim
rule.

Lindsey Lloyd had just always been there, part of the summer swim team experience. I remember that my first meet back after my parents’ funeral, she didn’t try for one of the weird hugs some of the other girls I competed against went for. Instead, she mouthed “I’m sorry” when we caught eyes during the crackly “Star-Spangled Banner” that they insisted on playing over the PA before every meet—all of us still dripping from warm-ups and gathered around the pool deck, hands on our hearts, nobody quite sure where the flag was hanging at this particular pool. That “I’m sorry” seemed the right way to handle things.

But this summer Lindsey had come back a lot taller, and she’d changed other things, too. She’d chopped off the ponytail that she used to tuck up into her swim cap and she’d bleached what was left of her hair a bright white. She soaked it in conditioner before meets to keep the chlorine from turning it green. She also had an eyebrow ring, a little silver thing that the stroke judges made her remove before she could compete. Coach Ted said she had a butterflier’s shoulders, and that there was nothing I could do about my own non-butterflier shoulders but train harder.

Between races Linds and I sat together on beach towels, playing Uno and eating icy red grapes from the bottom of a pink Sally-Q cooler Aunt Ruth had already been awarded for her commitment to the company. Lindsey told stories about Seattle, where everything sounded edgy and cool, stories about the concerts and parties she had been to, all the crazy friends she said she had. I told her about the hospital, the secret world we’d discovered by breaking in. From our beach towels in eastern Montana we listened to mix tapes of bands I’d never heard of, our heads close together, each of us with one ear pressed to one side of Lindsey’s black headphones.

A couple of weekends in we were at the Roundup meet, Lindsey’s home water for the summer, and I was rubbing suntan lotion on her back, those butterflier shoulders—her skin soft and warm from the sun. She used the oily stuff that smelled like coconuts, like Coach Ted, even though she didn’t need it, as tan as all of us were;
little natives
, Grandma liked to say. All of us practiced for hours a day in summer sun, and there wasn’t anything all that special about putting lotion on each other, but there was when I did it to Lindsey. It made me jittery, anxious, but I couldn’t wait for her to ask me, each and every meet.

My hands were all gooped up with stuff and I was trying to do under the straps of her suit when she said, “If I was back in Seattle, I would be at Pride this weekend. Now that’s supposed to be a fucking blast. Not that I would know.” She tried to sound all nonchalant while she was saying this, but I noticed her trying.

Lindsey was always talking about these Seattle events and concerts that I’d never heard of before, so not knowing what kind of Pride she was talking about didn’t necessarily mean anything to me right at that moment.

I kept on rubbing, working that soft area at her lower back, where the required team racing suit just allowed for a window of skin, a couple of knobs of vertebrae. “What do you mean
not that you’d know
?” I asked.

“Because June is always Pride month, and I’m always in Montana in June,” she said, moving her shoulder straps so I could reach better. “It’s not like Roundup-fucking-Montana has a Pride.”

“Yeah, no kidding,” I said, still working the lotion.

She shifted herself around at this so she could look at me, trying, not very well, to keep the smirk on her face from stretching wider. “You don’t know what I’m talking about, do you? Like at all.”

I could tell by her face, her tone, that I had somehow missed something important in what she’d said, and had again revealed myself as the small-town hick I often felt like around her. My answer to this was to feign indifference. “I’m not an idiot. You’re talking about some festival you miss every year.”

“Yeah, but what kind?” She leaned closer, her face so close to mine.

“I don’t know,” I said, but then, even as I said it, I think part of me did know, sort of, like it washed over me and I knew. I could even feel my stupid blush, my body’s way of telling me that I knew. But there was no way I was gonna say it out loud. So what I said was “German Pride?”

“You’re adorable, Cam,” she said, her face still close enough for me to smell the Fruit Punch Gatorade on her breath.

I didn’t want to be adorable the way she meant it. “You don’t always have to work so hard to convince me how cool you are,” I said, standing up, grabbing my goggles and cap. “I get it. You’re very, very cool. You’re the coolest girl I’ve ever met.”

A couple of my teammates walked by and told us that they’d just called the hundred free. I started after them, not waiting for Lindsey, even though this was her event too, like always.

She caught up with me over behind the concession stand, where they’d set out the gallon jugs they used to make sun tea—a neat row of fifteen or so, the water inside now various shades of brown. We stepped over them together and she grabbed my arm, just above the elbow, and pulled me to her, her mouth at my ear.

“Don’t be mad at me,” she said, her voice quiet and much less Lindsey than usual. “It’s Gay Pride. That’s what it is.”

It felt like a declaration when it wasn’t. At least not completely. “I kind of got that,” I said. “I mean, I figured it out.” We were weaving through groups of parents, of swimmers, the lawns crowded and loud; and even though we had a kind of anonymity in that, I worried about where this was going, what she’d say next, what I might say if I wasn’t careful.

“If I could take you to Pride, like in a perfect world, if I could private-plane us to Seattle, would you want to go with me?” Lindsey asked, still holding my arm tight.

“Well, is there cotton candy?” I asked, because we were there, the heat benches, and it felt like the right time for a nonanswer.

But that’s not what Lindsey wanted. “Whatever,” she said, taking her card from the lady who was always in charge of time cards at the Roundup meet, the one with red hair in two ponytails and a white safari hat she kept on for the entire day. “Forget it.”

The heat benches were clumped up with nervous swimmers, some stretching, others pulling their tight silicone caps over a heap of hair, leaving a tumorlike protrusion encased in neon purple or metallic silver at the back or top of their heads. A group of girls waved us over, girls we’d been competing against for years, forever. Lindsey was in the heat ahead of mine, but we still had maybe five heats before that.

We found a place at a back bench, close together like you always had to sit on those benches. When our bare knees touched, the way they had to in order to even fit back there, I couldn’t help but remember Irene and the Ferris wheel, just like an allergic reaction. I jerked away, let my other knee collide, instead, with that of the girl on the other side of me.

Lindsey couldn’t not notice this. “God—I didn’t mean to upset you so much,” she said, too loud for me, for where we were.

“I’m not upset. I just don’t want to talk about this two minutes before we have to swim.” I had lowered my voice and was looking around, though there was really no need. Everyone was in their own conversation or prerace zone.

“But you do want to talk about this sometime later?” she asked, sticking her face right up close to mine again, another blast of Gatorade and something else, cinnamon, maybe. Gum.

“You have to spit your gum out before you swim,” I said, thinking again of Irene.

“Ms. Lloyd, did I just hear that you have gum?” Always vigilant, Safari Hat took a couple steps toward us with an outstretched arm, her palm faceup and cupped.

“You want me to spit it in your hand?” Lindsey asked her, though it was obvious that yes, that was exactly what was expected.

“Otherwise I’ll just find it stuck under the heat benches when we put them away. C’mon.” Safari Hat snapped the fingers of her palm before making it a little cup, again. “Whatever you have isn’t going to kill me.”

“Don’t be so sure about that,” I said, right as Lindsey spit.

“I’ll take my chances.” Safari Hat examined the little hunk of chew-marked red before turning to find the trash.

“What exactly is she gonna catch from me?” Lindsey asked me. She tried to look pissed, but I winked at her and she cracked up.