The Miseducation of Cameron Post (20 page)

“I love how the so-called dorky prom, this thing you resisted, brought you two kids together,” Coley had told me our first Monday back to school after our PDA in the glitter-star-filled gymnasium.

“We’re not together,” I said.

“Well, then what are you?”

“We’re friends who are figuring shit out,” I said, which at that point was the most honest and direct thing I’d said to Coley about me and my feelings, well, ever.

The Friday of Bucking Horse practically all the FFA kids, which was like forty percent of the school to begin with, were given excused absences, and then probably another twenty percent had parents who let them miss class, and the unfortunate rest of us who weren’t goody-goodies or entirely uninterested, skipped. Jamie and I spent the morning at Holy Rosary with a couple of track teamers, rationing our pot allowances because Jamie couldn’t get any more until later that evening and supplies were low. We used a couple of wobbly pushcarts for hallway races and eventually hallway crashes. We finally broke through the barricade at the top of the metal ladder on the ninth floor to climb through the hatch to the flat-topped, gooey-tarred roof, where we spray painted
CLASS OF ’95
on anything not moving and also a pigeon, which was moving, and so Jamie managed only a silver streak down one wing. We broke windows. We did handstands. We threw things into the empty, weedy parking lot. We did nothing that made any real kind of sense.

It was summer-hot on that roof, Jamie’s shirt off soon after we got up there, the other guys’ too, and me with my own T-shirt pulled up and tied around my middle, my belly button showing, my sleeves rolled and tucked in so that my arms were completely bare. At some point it became just me and Jamie, and then my pulled-up shirt came off altogether and we found a corner shaded by a huge duct with my back squished into that melty tar, sun-hot skin on skin. I remembered the feel of Lindsey, and I imagined what this might be like with Coley. For a few minutes I went with it, both in the moment and not at all, trying to match Jamie’s intensity while pretending I wasn’t with him. But I couldn’t keep it up, and a police siren went by, and the clouds shifted, and Jamie’s increased breathing pulled me back to that roof, and I had to get out of there.

I sat up, pushing Jamie off without giving him warning. “I’m starving,” I said, reaching for my shirt. “Let’s go to the fairgrounds and make Ruth buy us lunch.”

“Give a guy a second, Post—fuck,” Jamie said. “We’re kind of already doing something.”

I stood up, did some quick lunges like my legs needed stretching, which they didn’t. “I know, I’m sorry, but I’m seriously hungry,” I said, not looking at him. “I skipped my Wheaties this morning.”

“Completely fucking lame,” he said, leaning back on his elbows and squinting up at me. “We can’t even go to the Sale until after school’s out—Ruth thinks you’re in chemistry right now.”

I pulled on my shirt, reached down so as to help Jamie up, and babbled. “So we’ll tell her it was a half day. Or we’ll just tell her we left early; she’ll get over it. Maybe we won’t even see her; it’s packed out there. We can find Coley, score a hamburger.”

Jamie ignored my hand and pushed himself up, turned away from me. “Yeah, let’s fucking go find Coley. Should’ve known.” He jerked open the lift for the hatch.

“C’mon,” I said, tugging on the T-shirt he hadn’t put on but had tucked into the waistband of his shorts. “I’m just really hungry.”

“Whatever,” he said. “What I don’t get—” He shook his head, said
Fuck it
under his breath.

“What?” I asked, without wanting him to answer.

He sneered. “For like two minutes I was like,
Holy shit, here we go—Cameron’s actually into this for once
. And now we’re off to find Coley.” He started down the ladder into the darkness below.

“Then let’s not find her,” I said, following after. “Let’s do Taco John’s. Whatever.” This was a desperate sort of suggestion and Jamie knew it. Probably his greatest temptation after pot were the Super Potato Olés at Taco John’s, which went well with the pot. We ate there with such frequency that I usually put up a fight for someplace else.

“I have an idea,” Jamie said from below me. “Why don’t I drop you off with Pastor Crawford and you can ask him to pray for your perverse disease.” I heard him jump from the last rung, his sneakers slap the cement floor.

“You’re being such an asshole,” I said, my foot searching for another rung and finding only air. I jumped too.

“You’re being such a dyke,” he said, not waiting for me, taking off down the hallway.

We didn’t talk in Jamie’s Geo. He blasted Guns N’ Roses and I pretended to be really interested in the same out-of-the-passenger-side-window scenery I’d been staring at my whole entire life. He drove us to the fairgrounds and paid the three bucks to park. He put on his T-shirt. We walked the packed dirt path, clots of dust kicking up behind us like behind Yosemite Sam in the cartoons—that dirt as soft and dry as flour. We walked side by side but not really together. The grounds smelled like manure and spring, the prairie wind lifting the scent of new sand reed and the just-blooming lilacs that edged the paint-chipped Expo Hall. What was left of my high was mostly worn off, but there was enough there for me to appreciate being outdoors in spring in a way that I wouldn’t have otherwise.

Inside the expo building we didn’t see Ruth but found Coley right away, staffing a booth with the five other Queen of the Bucking Horse Sale nominees. They were raffling off a quilt and a dozen steaks to benefit the Cattlemen’s Association, and the glass jar in front of Coley had the most tickets. She wasn’t only the youngest; from where I stood she was by far the prettiest in her tight black tank top with one of her brother’s stiff, white pearl-buttoned shirts tied over it and a sort of beat-up straw cowboy hat, her perfect hair ponytailed for once, two of them, actually. She was sipping a Coke through a red-and-white straw and smiling her big smile at some cowboy stopped at the table. He had his thumb hooked in his belt buckle and was wearing a google-eyed look like a guy shot by Cupid on a crappy drugstore valentine. I knew that look. I’d worn that look.

Coley jumped up when she saw us, ran around the table, and hugged us both like we hadn’t been together less than twelve hours before. She could pull off that kind of thing, but when someone like Ruth did the same, it didn’t work at all.

“This is a little like torture,” she said in my ear, smelling like Old Spice and cigarette smoke, which must have been left over on Ty’s shirt. She handed me the Coke and I took a long swallow, met Jamie’s stare, offered him the cup, but he turned away.

“How much longer do you have?” I asked.

“Half an hour, forty minutes, something like that,” she said, squeezing my arm. “Wait for me?” Then she considered us both again, went back to my ear. “Are you two high already?”

“Not already,” I said. “Already finished.”

“A big morning, was it?” She smiled, the signature Coley wink.

“Hardly,” Jamie said. “Cameron couldn’t wait to get over here to see you. She’s been thinking about you for hours.”

I jumped in fast. “Jamie’s playing the role of baby right now because I wouldn’t go with him to Taco John’s.”

“Oh, you poor thing,” Coley said, now grabbing Jamie’s arm. “They have pacos at the concession booth. Is that an acceptable stand-in? I’ll treat you. Well, I’ll get my mom to treat you; she’s working over there right now.” Coley had the knack for smoothing things over, making people smile and go along, but I guess it didn’t always work.

“I don’t think so,” Jamie said. “I’m gonna head out. See if I can find Travis.” He still hadn’t looked at me since Coley had offered me her drink.

“You’re coming back, though?” I asked.

“Depends,” he said. “I’m sure you can man up without me.” He walked off into the clatter of the hall.

“What’s the deal?” Coley asked, both of us watching his long stride and black shirt weave through the crowd around the tangles of cowboys, standing out as he went, mostly because of the shorts and his half-bare legs in all those stems of denim.

“Just a bad high,” I said. “He’s been cranky since we smoked.”

“You fool kids and your drugs,” Coley said. “When will you ever learn?”

Coley wasn’t crowned Queen of Bucking Horse Sale 1992. It went to Rainy Oschen, just like Coley claimed it should, though some people seemed scandalized by the election process and there were murmurings that it was fixed, that if ballots had indeed been counted properly, Coley would have landslided it.

“Whatever,” she said after the dusty crowning ceremony held out in the center of the arena, the bull riding just finished, the calf roping up next. (Even the runners-up got crowns, albeit of the smaller, silver variety.) “I’d honestly rather win as a senior, or as a junior. If I even get nominated again.”

“Are you kidding?” Brett said, putting his arm around her. “It’s in the bag.”

We were grouped together at one of the entrances to the grandstands blocking traffic, but we didn’t care. The night was just chilly enough to remind us that it was still technically spring, and the place was packed, everybody too loud and too drunk and high on Bucking Horse fever. I’d been scanning for Jamie for most of the evening and hadn’t found him. And hadn’t necessarily expected to.

“How many more days of this?” Coley asked us, pulling off her crown and sticking it on my head. “It already feels like forever.”

“No way,” Brett said, taking the just-placed crown off my head and putting it back on Coley’s. “You don’t get to tire out on my last night of Bucking Horse.”

Brett had been selected as one of two Miles Citian players to compete in a statewide soccer match to determine the all-stars who would represent Montana in some national high school soccer league taking place in the summer. The match was in Bozeman on Sunday, and so he was heading there with his parents promptly the next morning, right during the parade.

“Don’t remind me,” Coley said, now putting the crown on Brett’s head. “I wish I could skip and go with you.”

“Not a chance,” he said, kissing her hand. “You’re part of the royal brigade.”

We moved outside the arena, where it was less crowded and the smell of grilling burgers was smoking the air. We parked ourselves as near to the beer booth as we thought permissible, hoping to spot someone to buy for us, or at the very least let us sip from their can. A round ended and the beer line swelled into a lake of thirsty patrons waving their tens at the beefy ladies working the booth. Two of those patrons were Ruth and Ray, hand in hand, Ruth wearing a denim skirt and a red scarf with brown boots and hats printed on it.

Ray saw me before Ruth did, and I nodded at him and wondered if that could maybe be that, but he pointed me out to her and she walked right over, gaining some appreciative glances, I noticed, as she went.

“There you are,” she said. “I was starting to think we weren’t going to see you before Monday.”

“Blame my brother,” Coley said, as if letting Ruth in on something, which was exactly the kind of thing Ruth loved. “He appointed Cam my official keeper for the weekend.”

Ray joined us, handing a beer to Ruth, which I sensed wasn’t her first of the evening, and after I cleared spending the next couple of nights at Coley’s (contingent upon mandatory church attendance Sunday morning), and we heard about the Sally-Q booth’s success (
Seventeen new hostesses planning to open up their living rooms for hardware demonstrations!
), Ruth told me she wanted a word in private, so we moved a few feet away from the little knot, found a space wedged in so close to one of the big barbecue grills that my right side was all sizzling heat.

“Honey, this might upset you, but I want you to know that Ray and I saw Jamie tonight,” she said, taking my hand and quieting her voice as much as the crowd would allow. “He’s ahead of us a few rows in the bleachers and he and that Burrel boy are being pretty darned disgusting with a couple of girls they have with them.” When I didn’t say anything, she added, “I don’t think they’re Custer girls. Ray thinks maybe they’re from Glendive.” And when I still didn’t say anything, she said, “I just wanted you to hear from someone who loved you.”

“Okay,” I said, trying to picture what these girls looked like and liking the slightly chunky, bleach blonde with black roots and too much makeup version the best. And even though I was surprised by the little bit of jealousy I felt, there was some relief in it too—as if the pressure was off me.

“Do you want to talk about it?” Ruth asked, even as some dustup disturbed the already-impatient beer line and the shouts of the crowd grew louder around us.

“Not really,” I said. “Jamie can do whatever he wants.” But then I added, “Thanks for telling me, though, Aunt Ruth.” And she gave me a quick hug and a sad-Ruth half smile and went off with Ray.

“Did you get a talking-to?” Coley asked me, drifting over to the grill and leaving Brett with some of our classmates.

“Sort of,” I said. “Jamie’s in the bleachers with his tongue down some Glendive girl’s throat.”

“Ruth said that?”

“In a Ruthian kind of way.”

“That slimy son of a bitch,” Coley said, putting her arm around me. “Let’s get Ty to kick his ass.”

“Not worth it,” I said, and that I meant, even though I knew that Coley didn’t believe me. “Let’s just go get really, really drunk.”

“Don’t you want to see what she looks like?” Coley asked, and I told her that I guessed I did just to humor her. From the closest arena entryway Coley spotted Ruth and Ray climbing the stairs, and when I couldn’t find them in the stands, she actually took her hand and turned my head until it was facing the right direction, both of us tight together against the pull of the crowd, watching as they returned to their seats, and sure enough, there was Jamie just a few rows down. And I suppose we were sort of far away, but even so I could tell these girls were much prettier than the ones I’d put in my head. And Jamie was indeed all over one of them.

“They’re beasty,” Coley said. “Authentically vile. You can tell they’re trampy from here.”

“Can you?” I asked, smelling Coley’s apple-scented shampoo, her soft hair brushing the side of my face. “Are they wearing the scarlet letter?”