The Miseducation of Cameron Post (3 page)

“Didn’t someone in that family they had lunch with die?” Irene asked, her voice one shade quieter than before.

“Margot’s brother did. The rest of them got out,” I said, the whole thing making me shiver a little, the way it always had.

“When did it happen?” Irene swung her legs back over the arm and put her feet on the ground, leaned over her lap toward me.

“Late that night, close to midnight. The whole Rock Creek campground was flooded with water from Hebgen Lake, and then the water couldn’t get back out because this entire mountaintop fell down and dammed it.”

“And made Quake Lake,” Irene finished for me.

I nodded. “All these people got buried at the bottom of it. They’re still down there, plus cars and campers and everything that had been in the campground.”

“That’s so creepy,” Irene said. “It has to be haunted. I don’t know why your parents want to go there every year.”

“They just do. Lots of people still camp around there.” I wasn’t sure why they went, either. But they’d been doing it every summer, for as long as I’d been alive.

“How old was your mom?” Irene asked, toe-nabbing her flip-flops and standing up, stretching her arms far above her so I could just see a thin line of her stomach.

That feeling that being with Irene kept giving me when I least expected it again floated up in me like a hot-air balloon and I looked away. “She was twelve,” I said. “Just like us.”

Eventually we wandered away from my house, no plan, just the two of us meandering through shady neighborhoods. It was late enough in June that the firework stands were open, and already there were kids in their backyards blowing things up,
ka-boom
s and smoke curls from behind tall fences. At a yellow house on Tipperary I stepped on a couple of those white snap-pops that somebody had scattered all over the sidewalk. I had barely shrieked at the tiny explosions beneath my thin soles before a gaggle of boys with skinned-up knees and red Kool-Aid grins charged us from their tree fort.

“We won’t let you pass unless you show us your boobies,” one of them yelled, a tubby one with a plastic pirate patch over one eye. The other boys cheered and laughed, and Irene grabbed my hand, which didn’t feel all awkward in that moment, and we ran with them chasing us, all of us screaming and crazy for maybe two blocks, until eventually the added weight of their plastic guns and the small strides of their eight-year-old legs slowed them down. Even in the heat, that running felt good—hand in hand, all out, a group of shirtless monsters just behind us.

Out of breath and sweaty, we wandered into the cracked lot in front of Kip’s Minute Market, tightroping the cement parking blocks one after another, until Irene said, “I want strawberry Bubblicious.”

“We can get it,” I told her, hopping from one block to another. “My dad gave me a ten before they left and told me not to tell my mom.”

“It’s just a pack of gum,” she said. “Can’t you steal it?”

I’d shoplifted at Kip’s maybe a dozen times, but I’d always had something of a plan. I had always set out to do it, Irene sometimes giving me a list, making it a challenge—like a licorice rope, which was both long and loud, the cellophane on those things a dead giveaway; or a tube of Pringles, which bulged pretty much no matter where you stuffed it. I didn’t do the whole
put it in your backpack
thing. Too obvious. A kid in a candy aisle with a big bag? No way. I crammed things beneath my clothes, usually in my pants. But I hadn’t been in for a while, not since school let out, and I’d been wearing a lot more the last time—a big sweatshirt, jeans. And Irene had never come inside with me. Never once.

“Yeah, but you have to buy something anyway,” I told her. “So you don’t just walk in there and hang around and walk out. And gum’s already cheap.” Usually I bought a couple of Laffy Taffys or a can of pop, the real loot hidden from view.

“Then let’s both steal gum,” Irene said, trying to pass me on a block, our bare legs tangled up while she did it, me perfectly still or we both would have fallen.

“I have money,” I said. “I can just buy us both gum.”

“Buy us a root beer,” she said, finally all the way around me.

“I could buy us ten root beers,” I said, missing the point.

“We shared one yesterday,” she said, and then I got it. The whole thing again fizzling around us both, around our closeness, like a just-lit sparkler, and I didn’t know what to say back. Irene was studying her bare toes, pretending like she hadn’t said anything important.

“We have to be fast,” I said. “My grandma doesn’t even know we left the house.”

After the scorched cement of that parking lot, Kip’s was almost too cold. Angie with the big brown bangs and long nails was behind the counter, sorting packs of cigarettes.

“You girls getting ice cream?” she asked, sliding a stack of Pall Malls into its place on the shelf.

“No,” we answered together.

“Twins, huh?” she said, marking something on a tally sheet.

Irene and I were both in shorts and flip-flops. Me in a tank top, Irene in a T-shirt, not exactly concealing clothing choices. While Irene pretended to study the label of an Idaho Spud candy bar, taking her time, I grabbed two packs of the Bubblicious and tucked them just inside the band of my shorts. The waxy gum wrappers were cold against my skin. Irene put the candy bar back and looked at me.

“Will you get us a root beer, Cam?” she asked, all loud and obvious.

“Yeah,” I said, rolling my eyes at her, mouthing
Just do it
before I headed to the refrigerated section along the back wall.

I could see Angie in one of those big circular mirrors Kip’s had in the far back corners, and she was still stacking and sorting cigarettes, not paying any attention to us at all. As I grabbed the root beer, the door beeped and this guy my parents knew came in. He was dressed in business clothes, a suit and tie, like he was maybe just getting off work, even though it was too early in the afternoon for that.

He
hey
ed Angie and headed straight for the beer section, the big cooler next to where I was standing. I tried to pass him in the chip aisle.

“Hey there, Cameron Post,” he said. “You stayin’ out of trouble this summer?”

“Trying to,” I said. I could feel one of the packs of gum slipping a little. If it slid too far, it would drop right out the bottom of my shorts, maybe bounce off of suit guy’s shoe. I wanted to keep walking but he kept talking, his back now to me, the top half of him behind the glass door to the beer case.

“Your parents are up at Quake Lake, aren’t they?” he asked, grabbing six-packs, the bottles clanging around. The back of his suit was wrinkled from where he’d sat in it all day.

“Yeah, they just left yesterday,” I said as Irene joined me in the aisle, a big grin stretched across her face.

“I got one,” she told me through her teeth, but still kind of loud. Loud enough for this guy to have heard if he’d wanted to. I gave her a face.

“They didn’t take you along, huh? You a style cramper?” The suit guy backed out of the case, turned, and pinched a bag of tortilla chips against one of the six-packs he was carrying. Then he winked at me.

“Yeah, I guess,” I said, faking a smile, wanting him to scoot along, stop talking.

“Well, I’ll tell your mom that I only saw you hitting the root beer and not the hard stuff.” He raised up one of his sixpacks, grinned again, too many teeth, and headed toward the front of the store. We followed behind him, pausing for a few seconds here and there, pretending to consider other possible purchases that we had no intention of making.

The suit guy was putting bills in his wallet when we reached the counter. “That all you two are getting?” he asked, and lifted his chin toward the sweating bottle of root beer tight in my hand.

I nodded.

“Just one for both of you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “We’re sharing.”

“It’s on me,” he told Angie, handing her back one of the dollars she’d just given him as change. “A root beer to celebrate summer vacation. They have no idea how good they have it.”

“No kidding,” Angie said, sort of scowling at us, Irene practically hiding behind me.

The suit guy whistled “Brown Eyed Girl” as he walked out, those six-packs rattling.

“Thanks,” we called after him, a little too late for him to hear, probably.

In the alley behind Kip’s we shoved piece after piece of gum into our mouths and chewed, those first, hard chews, the gum thick with sugar, our jaws aching, trying to thin it and soften it for bubble blowing. The sun felt good after the cold of the store, both of us still hopped up on what we had done.

“I can’t believe that guy bought us the root beer,” Irene said, chewing hard, attempting a bubble; but it was too early, and she barely made one the size of a quarter. “We didn’t pay for anything.”

“That’s because we’ve got it so good,” I told her, trying on his deep voice. We impersonated him all the way home, laughing and blowing bubbles, both of us knowing that he was right. We did have it so good.

Irene and I were wedged down beneath the covers on her big bed, the room cold and dark, the sheets warm, just how I liked it. We were supposed to be sleeping; we were supposed to have been sleeping for maybe an hour, but we weren’t at all. We were recounting the day. We were making up the future. We heard the phone ring, and knew it was kind of late for a call, but this was the Klausons; they were ranchers and it was summer, sometimes the phone rang late.

“It’s probably a fire,” Irene said. “’Member how bad last summer was for fires? The Hempnels lost like forty acres. And Ernest, he was their black Lab.”

I was supposed to be at my own house with Grandma, but when Mrs. Klauson came to pick up Irene that afternoon, after Kip’s and the gum, we met her in the driveway, Irene already asking for me to spend the night before Mrs. Klauson had even finished rolling down her window. And she was so easy that way, Mrs. Klauson, always with a smile, her small hand through her dark curls,
Whatever you want, girls
. She even convinced Grandma Post, who had been planning tuna salad on toast, had already mixed a dessert for the two of us—pistachio pudding. It was chilling in glass sundae cups in the fridge, Cool Whip, half a maraschino cherry, and a few crushed walnuts on top of each serving, just like on the cover of her old
Betty Crocker
Cookbook
.

“I’ll drive Cam in for her swim practice,” Mrs. Klauson had said, standing just inside the front door, me already halfway up the stairs, mentally packing my bag—toothbrush, sleep shirt, some of what was left of our stolen Bubblicious. “It’s no trouble at all. We love having the girls at our place.” I didn’t listen for Grandma’s response. I knew I’d get to go.

It was as perfect a summer night as the one before it. We watched the stars from our place in the barn loft. We blew stolen pink bubbles bigger than our heads. We kissed again. Irene leaned toward me and I knew exactly what she was doing, and we didn’t even have to talk about it. Irene silently daring me to keep going every time I came up for air. I wanted to. The last time it had been just our mouths. This time we remembered that we had hands, though neither of us was sure what to do with them. We came inside for the night, drunk on our day together, our secrets. We were still telling those secrets when we heard Irene’s parents in the kitchen, maybe ten minutes after the phone rang. Mrs. Klauson was crying, her husband saying something over and over in a calm, steady voice. I couldn’t quite catch it.

“Shhhh,” Irene told me, even though I wasn’t making noise beyond the rustle of the covers. “I can’t tell what’s going on.”

And then from the kitchen, Mrs. Klauson, her voice like I’d never heard it, like it was broken, like it wasn’t even hers. I couldn’t hear enough to make any sense. Something about
taking her in the morning. Telling her then.

There were heavy footsteps in the hallway, Mr. Klauson’s boots. This time we both heard him perfectly, his soft reply to his wife. “Her grandmother wants me to bring her home. It’s not up to us, honey.”

“It’s something really bad,” Irene said to me, her voice not even quite a whisper.

I didn’t know what to say back. I didn’t say anything.

We both knew the knock was coming. We heard the footsteps stop outside Irene’s door, but there was empty time between the end of those steps and the heavy rap of his knuckles: ghost time. Mr. Klauson standing there, waiting, maybe holding his breath, just like me. I think about him on the other side of that door all the time, even now. How I still had parents before that knock, and how I didn’t after. Mr. Klauson knew that too; how he had to lift his calloused hand and take them away from me at eleven p.m. one hot night at the end of June—summer vacation, root beer and stolen bubble gum, stolen kisses—the very good life for a twelve-year-old, when I still had mostly everything figured out, and the stuff I didn’t know seemed like it would come easy enough if I could just wait for it, and anyway there’d always be Irene with me, waiting too.

Chapter Two

A
unt Ruth was my mother’s only sibling and my only close relative save Grandma Post. She made her entrance the day after my parents’ car crashed through a guard rail on the skinny road that climbed the ravine over Quake Lake. Grandma and I were sitting in the living room with the shades drawn, with a sweaty pitcher of too-sweet sun tea between us, with a
Cagney & Lacey
rerun filling up our silence in gunshots and sass.

I was in this big leather club chair that my dad usually read the paper in. I had my legs pulled up to my chest and my arms wrapped around in front of them and my head resting on the dark dry skin of my bare knees. I had been in this position for hours, one rerun after another. I used my fingernails to dig half moons into my calves, my thighs, one white indentation for each finger, and when the creases faded away I did ten more.

Grandma jumped when we heard the front door open and shut. She did her fast walk toward the entryway to head off whoever it was. People had been stopping by all day with food, but they had all rung the doorbell, and Grandma had kept them on the front porch, away from me, even if they were classmates’ parents or whatever. I was glad for that. She’d say some version of three or four of the same lines to them—
It’s just been a terrible, terrible shock. Cameron is home safe with me; she’s resting. Joanie’s sister, Ruth, is on her way
.
Well, there are no words. There are no words.