The Miseducation of Cameron Post (6 page)

Irene and I hadn’t seen each other much since our robot-hug at my parents’ funeral in June. Mrs. Klauson kept trying to arrange sleepovers and day trips to the mall in Billings, to a rodeo in Glendive, but I would back out at the last minute.

“We understand, sweetheart,” Mrs. Klauson would tell me over the phone. I guess the “we” she was speaking of included Irene, but maybe she meant Mr. Klauson. “We’re not going to stop trying though, okay, Cam?”

When, in late August, I had finally agreed to go with them to the Custer County Fair, I spent the whole evening wishing that I hadn’t. Irene and I had done up the fair before—we’d done it up big. We’d buy the wristbands that let you ride all the rides you wanted. We’d eat graveyard snow cones—lime, orange, grape, cherry mixed together—and pacos from the Crystal Pistol booth—seasoned beef in a cocoon of hot fry bread, the orange grease squirting and burning the insides of our cheeks. We’d wash everything down with lemonade from that stand with the wasps buzzing all around it. Then we’d make fun of the blue-ribbon craft projects and dance a wild jitterbug to whatever lame-o band they’d brought in. In years before, we thought we owned the fair.

But that August we haunted the midway like ghosts—stopping in front of the Tilt-A-Whirl, then the fishbowl game, watching like we’d already seen everything there was to see but couldn’t quite pull ourselves away. We didn’t talk bout my parents, the accident. We didn’t say much of anything at all. Everything was painted in ringing noises and flashing lights and shouting and screaming, crazy laughter, little kids crying, the smell of popcorn and fry bread and cotton candy thick in the air, but it all just sort of floated around me like smoke. Irene bought us tickets for the Ferris wheel, a ride we’d deemed too boring the year before, but it seemed like we should be doing something.

We sat in that metal car, our bare knees just touching. Even when we’d jerk them apart, they’d wind up magnetized again some moments later. We were closer together than we had been since the night her father knocked on her bedroom door. We were lifted up into the hot embrace of the ever-blackening Montana sky, the lights from the midway sluicing us in their fluorescent glow, a tinny kind of ragtime music plinking out from somewhere deep in the center of the wheel. Up on top we could see the whole of the fair: the tractor pull, the dance pavilion, cowboys in Wranglers leaning cowgirls built like sticks of gum up against pickups out in the parking lot. Up on top the air smelled less like grease and sugar, more like just-baled hay and the muddy waters of the Yellowstone as it lazed its way around the fairgrounds. Up on top it was quiet, everything squashed down below us, the loudest noise the squeak of the bolts as the wind shifted our car just so. Then we had to float back down into all of it, the whole midway pressed up against us, and I held my breath until we were back on top again.

Our third time up there Irene grabbed my hand. We stayed like that for one full rotation, saying nothing, fingers wound together, and for that forty seconds or so I pretended like things were just as they always were: me and Irene at the fair.

When we got back to the top again, Irene was crying, and she said, “I’m really sorry, Cam. I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say.”

Irene’s face was bright against the dark of the sky, her eyes all shimmery wet, pieces of her hair blown free from her ponytail. She was beautiful. Everything in me wanted to kiss her, and at the same time it felt like everything in me was sick. I pulled my hand away from hers and looked out over my side of the car, dizzy with nausea. I closed my eyes to keep from throwing up, and even then I could taste it. I heard Irene next to me saying my name, but she sounded like she was saying it from beneath a pile of sand. They had stopped the ride to let people off and on down below. We shifted in the wind. We started up again, moved a few clicks, stopped. Now I wanted to be back on the midway and in the rush of all that noise. Irene was still crying beside me.

“We can’t be friends like we were before, Irene,” I told her, keeping my eyes fixed on a couple all twined up in the parking lot.

“Why?” she asked.

The ride started up again. Our car jerked and we were lowered a few clicks. We stopped. Now we hovered half in the sky and half in the midway—level with the bright canvas tops of the game booths. I didn’t say anything. I let the music plink. I remembered the feel of her mouth that day in the hayloft, the taste of her gum and the root beer we’d been drinking. The day she dared me to kiss her. And the very next day my parents’ car had veered through the guardrail.

I didn’t say anything. If Irene hadn’t connected those dots herself, then it wasn’t my place to do it for her, to explain that everybody knows how things happen for a reason, and that we had made a reason and bad, bad, unthinkable things had happened.

“Why can’t we just be friends like we were?”

“Because we’re too old for that stuff,” I told her, tasting the lie on my tongue even as I said it, thick as a wad of cotton candy, but not nearly so easy to make shrink into sugar crystals and disappear.

She wouldn’t let me off that easy. “Too old for it how?”

“Just too old,” I said. “Too old for all of that kind of stuff.”

They started the ride again, and since there was no one in the car below us, we were back on the ground just like that. Everything that had just happened left up on top.

Mr. and Mrs. Klauson found us by the Zipper just after that. They fed us thick-crusted pie and corn on the cob and took Polaroids of us with Smokey the Bear, with balloon hats on. The two of us played along pretty well, I thought.

We kept playing along once school started. We sat together in World History. We went down to the Ben Franklin lunch counter sometimes and ordered chocolate milks and grilled cheeses. But whatever we once were we weren’t anymore. Irene started hanging out with Steph Schlett and Amy Fino. I started hanging out even more with my VCR. I watched from the bleachers as Irene kissed Michael “Bozo” Fitz after a wrestling match. I watched Mariel Hemingway kiss Patrice Donnelly in
Personal Best
. I watched them do more than kiss. I rewound that scene and watched it again and again until I was afraid the tape might break, and handing a broken tape of that movie to Nate Bovee, trying to explain it while he smiled his smile, would have been unbearable. He’d already given me shit when I’d checked it out.

“You gettin’ this one today, huh?” he’d asked. “You know what goes on in this movie, sweetie?”

“Yeah, she’s a runner, right?” I wasn’t playing dumb, not really. The tape case read:
When you run into yourself, you run into feelings you never thought you had
. On the back there was a picture of Mariel and Patrice standing close to each other in dim light. The synopsis mentioned
more than friendship
. I had picked it up mainly because it was a story about runners, and I was planning on going out for track. I guess somewhere there was a part of me that had figured out how to read those codes for gay content, but it wasn’t something I could name.

Nate had held on to that tape for a long time before giving it back, just sorta studying the picture of tussled-up Mariel Hemingway on the cover. “You let me know what you think about this one, huh, kiddo? These gals sure can run together.” He’d done a little
hoo-wee
whistle after that, licked his lips.

I took that tape back when the store was closed and put it through the drop box. Nate didn’t say anything about it the next time that I rented, so I was hopeful that he’d forgotten about it. I was hopeful, but I wasn’t stupid enough to try renting it again, even though I wanted to. Sometimes I dreamed that scene from the movie but with Irene and me instead. But I couldn’t ever make that dream happen. It just came on its own, the way dreams do.

Grandma and Ruth didn’t involve me much in the way they settled things between them—things like who would be in charge of me and where I would live and how I would be paid for. I could have asked more questions. I could have asked all of them, the big questions, but if I had then I would have just been reminding everyone, including me, that I needed to be taken care of because I was now an orphan, which made me think about why I was now an orphan, and I didn’t need one more reason to think about that. So I went to school and I stayed in my room and I watched everything, everything, without any discretion—
Little Shop of Horrors
and
9½ Weeks
and
Teen Wolf
and
Reform School Girls
—usually keeping the volume low, the remote control in my hand just in case I had to hit the Stop button fast, Ruth on the stairs; and I let every decision being made at that kitchen table just settle around me like plastic snow in a snow globe and me frozen in there too, just a part of the scene, trying not to get in the way. And for the most part, that seemed to work.

Grandma officially moved out of her apartment in Billings and into our basement, which my dad had put a bathroom in but never got around to completely finishing. So some of the guys who used to work for him did, fast, within a month or so—they put up drywall and made Grandma a bedroom and a living room, soft blue carpet and a new La-Z-Boy recliner, and it was pretty nice down there.

Obviously Ruth couldn’t still be a stewardess for Winner’s Airlines and live in Miles Shitty, Montana. We did have an airport the size of a double-wide trailer, but it only served private planes and Big Sky Airlines—which people called Big Scare because of its reputation for flights so bumpy they practically guaranteed the need for extra puke bags—and Big Sky flights ran only between Miles City and other Montana towns, anyway: tiny planes with few passengers and no need for a lady in a uniform serving ginger ale and bags of peanuts.

“This is a new phase of my life,” Ruth said all the time in those first months after the accident. “I never planned to be a flight attendant forever. This is a new phase in my life.”

This new phase included doing secretarial work for my dad’s contracting company. My mom used to do most of that kind of bookkeeping stuff at night, for free, after she’d gotten home from her job at the Tongue River Museum; but Greg Comstock, who took over Dad’s business but kept the name, made Ruth an official employee of Solid Post Projects—one with a desk and a name plate and a twice-monthly paycheck.

That fall Ruth had to fly back to Florida to sell her condo, pack her belongings, and wrap things up in general to prepare for this
new phase
in her life. She had to have some surgery, too.

“Minor,” she’d told us. “Routine business for my NF. They’ve got to scrape me off, clean me up.”

NF stood for Ruth’s neurofibromatosis. She’d had it since birth, when Grandma and Grandpa Wynton noticed this lump, about the size of a peanut, in the middle of her back, along with a flat, tan mark like a puddle of milky coffee (appropriately and officially called a café au lait spot) on her shoulder, another spill on her thigh. The doctors told them not to worry; but as she got older there were more growths, some of them the size of walnuts, of babies’ fists, some of them in places where a pretty girl like Ruth didn’t want them growing, not during bikini season, not during prom. So they’d had her diagnosed, had the benign tumors removed, save the one on her back, which never changed much. It had done a little growing, then stopped, but the surgeons feared its close proximity to her spinal cord, so they left that one be.

I thought it was weird that she, shiny, perfect, glowy Ruth, was so glib about having a bunch of tumors hacked off her nerves (this batch was on her right thigh, apparently, and also one behind her knee); but she’d had it done enough now that it was just what she did, I guess, every half decade or so: one more piece of the beauty routine with a little more effort involved. With the surgery and everything else, she was gone for over a month, and Grandma and I had the house to ourselves again. It was nice. The big thing that happened while Ruth was away was that my mom’s friend Margot Keenan paid us a visit. Actually, she paid me a visit. Margot Keenan was tall and long limbed and was a semipro tennis player for a while after college before going to work for some big-deal sportswear manufacturer. I remember that the few times she came to visit when my parents were alive, she gave me tennis lessons, letting me use her fancy racket, and once, in the summer, she came to Scanlan to swim with me, and she always brought great presents from Spain, from China, from wherever. My parents stocked gin and tonic for her visits, bought limes just so they could make her drink the way she liked it. She had been friends with my mom since grade school. And more important than that, they had Quake Lake in common. It was Margot’s family who had convinced my grandparents to drive up to Virginia City the day of the earthquake while they stayed behind, and so it was her family who’d lost a son, Margot’s brother.

She was now living in Germany and hadn’t even heard about my parents’ accident until a month after the fact, and then she’d sent a huge bouquet to me. Not to all of us: to me. That thing was gigantic, with flowers that I didn’t even know the names of, and in the card she promised that she’d come to visit as soon as she was back in the States. Some weeks later she’d called while I was at school and talked with Grandma and told her when she’d be arriving and that she’d like to take me to dinner, and Grandma said yes for me, which was what I’d have said anyway.

She pulled up on a Friday evening in a dust-skinned blue rental car from the Billings airport. I watched out the window as she walked up the front steps. She seemed even taller than I remembered, and she was now wearing her shiny black hair short and asymmetrical, with one side tucked behind her ear. Grandma opened the door, but I was right there too, and even though I didn’t really know Margot well, when she leaned down a bit to hug me, I didn’t freeze my shoulders the way I had been doing for months when on the receiving end of such hugs. I hugged her back, and I think it surprised us both. Her perfume, if that’s what it was, smelled like grapefruit and peppermint, fresh and clean.