The Miseducation of Cameron Post (8 page)

Most of the girls around me nodded their heads in agreement, as if they weren’t insulting the next five years of their own education but somebody else’s.

“They looked at my grades and are gonna let me do independent studies in the classes I was taking here, just to finish fall term,” she said, emphasizing
term
, somehow giving a snobby ring to it. It so wasn’t how we said things in Miles City. None of us would have even said
fall term
at all. Well, not before this.

The next weekend Irene had me out to the ranch. She was leaving that coming Monday. It was incredibly warm for Montana in November, even early November—just freezing at night but midsixties during the day. We walked side by side without coats on. I tried to breathe in that ranch smell of pine and earth, but it wasn’t anymore the place it had once been to me. There were white tents set up everywhere, a circus of scientists and also some earthy, dirty, long-haired types picking in giant trenches, treating the dirt as if it was fragile, like it wasn’t the same dirt Irene and I used to kick at, spit on, pee on behind the barn.

Now Irene talked like the movies too. “They’ve never found a hadrosaur in this area before,” she said. “Not one this complete.”

“Wow,” I said. I wanted to tell her that I had thought a lot about that ride on the Ferris wheel. I wanted to tell her that maybe I was wrong about what I had said to her that night. I didn’t do it, though.

“My parents are building a visitors’ center and museum. And a gift shop.” She actually swept her hand out over the land. “Can you believe that? They might even name something after me.”

“The Ireneosaur?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “They’ll make it sound more professional than that. You don’t really understand any of this.”

“My mom ran a museum,” I said. “I get it.”

“It’s not the same thing,” she said. “That’s a local history museum that’s been around forever. This is a brand-new thing. Don’t try to make it the same.” She turned away from me and walked fast in the direction of the barn.

I thought that maybe she would lead me up to the hayloft. And if she had started up that ladder, I would have followed. But she didn’t. She stopped just outside the entrance. There were tables set up there, and they were covered with various clumps of that rust-colored mud so greasy it’s mostly just clay, and poking from some of those clumps were the fossils. Irene pretended to examine them closely, but I could tell that’s all it was—pretending.

“Do you know who your roommate is yet?” I asked.

“Alison Caldwell,” Irene said, her head all leaned down over some specimen. “She’s from Boston,” she added with that new tone of hers.

I tried on my best Henry Higgins. “Oh, the Boston Caldwells. Good show, old girl.”

Irene smiled, and for half a second she seemed to forget how important she was supposed to be now. “I’m just glad I know how to ride. At least I know I can ride as well as any of them.”

“Probably better,” I said. I meant it.

“Different, though—western, not English.” She turned from the fossils completely, grinned right at me. “They have scholarships to Maybrook, you know. You could apply for one for next fall. I bet you’d get it, because of—” Irene let what she was gonna say drop off.

“Because of my dead parents,” I said, a little meaner than I felt.

Irene took a step toward me, put her hand on my arm, a little of that greasy mud smearing my shirt. “Yeah, but not only. Also because you’re smart as hell and you live way out in the middle of nowhere Montana.”

“Way out in the middle of nowhere Montana is where I’m from, Irene. You too.”

“There’s no rule that says you have to stay in the place that you’re born,” she said. “It’s not like it makes you a bad person if you want to try something new.”

“I know that,” I said, and I tried to picture me cropped into one of those glossy brochure photos, me on a green lawn recently covered in an Oriental carpet of fall leaves, me in my pajamas reading one of those leather-bound books in the common room. But all I could see were versions of those pictures with both of us in them, the two of us, Irene and me, together in the boathouse, in the chapel, on a flannel blanket on that thick lawn, as roommates . . .

Irene could read my thinking, just like old times. She moved her hand from my arm, grabbed my hand. “It would be totally awesome, Cam. I would go first and get used to the run of the whole place, and then you’d come next fall.” Her voice had the kind of excitement it got when we used to dare each other, something we hadn’t done in what seemed like forever.

“Maybe,” I said, thinking that it did sound so easy, in that moment, the almost-winter sun hot on the tops of our heads, the clink of the tools from the digging paleontologists, the feel of Irene’s hand in mine.

“Why maybe? Just yes. Let’s go ask my mom to get you an application.” Irene pulled me with her toward the house. Mrs. Klauson smiled at our plan, everything so easy, as always. She said she’d be sure to have someone at Maybrook send me an application. She drove us back to town just after that. She had the top down, of course, and we made wind snakes off the sides, our arms rising and dipping with the rush of air. The weeds alongside the highway were partially gilded in death from the frosts at night—parts of them gold and ochre, dried and curled, but the rest of the weeds still green, hanging on, trying to keep growing. If you squinted your eyes, the wind snakes looked almost like they were swimming through those weeds. We did them for miles, until we were off the highway, back on town streets. And then Mrs. Klauson dropped me off in front of my house. And then Irene was gone.

Chapter Four

M
y parents had been half-lapsed Presbyterians. We were a church-on-Easter-and-Christmas Eve kind of family, with a few years of Sunday school thrown in for good measure. Grandma Post said she was too old for churchgoing and could get to heaven just fine without it. Aunt Ruth was not either of these kinds of Christian. We had been attending services at First Presbyterian practically every Sunday since the funeral, because it had been the “family church,” but Ruth made it clear during the car rides home that the mostly elderly congregation and dry sermons were not to her liking. For my part I liked them well enough. I liked, at least, that I knew the people in the pews around us, and that I knew when to stand and sit, how most of the hymns went. I liked the stained glass in the sanctuary, even though crucified Jesus was really bloody, too bloody for stained glass, I thought, all those red and magenta pieces filtering sunlight. I didn’t feel close to God at the Presbyterian church, but some Sundays I felt really close to my memories of being at church, at this place, with my parents. And I liked that feeling.

Ruth held on through the holidays, but when we were taking down the Christmas tree, she told me that she’d been thinking that the First Presbyterian just wasn’t
quite right for us anymore
. She embedded this deep in another conversation we were having about how just because I didn’t have mandated sessions with gooey Nancy the counselor during the spring semester, that didn’t mean that I wouldn’t need to continue to talk with someone.

“You know, Greg Comstock and his family go to Gates of Praise, and the Martensons, and the Hoffsteaders,” she told me. “And they all seem to just love it. First Presbyterian doesn’t have the kind of fellowship we need right now. There’s not even a youth group.”

“What the heck is a youth group, anyway?” Grandma asked from behind the
Outrageous Detective Stories
magazine she was reading on the couch. “I thought children go to Sunday school until they’re old enough to behave during the service. Can’t you behave yourself, Cameron?”

Ruth laughed the way she did when she wasn’t sure just how much Grandma was teasing and how much she was serious. “Gates of Praise has a group just for teenagers, Eleanor,” she said. “According to Greg Comstock, they do all kinds of community service projects. It might also be nice for Cammie to hang out with some Christian teens.”

As far as I knew, everybody I “hung out with” was a Christian teen, and even if some of them maybe weren’t so convinced, not a one of them was talking about their doubts. I knew what Ruth was getting at, though; she wanted me to hang around with the kids who carried their Bibles class to class. She wanted me to wear the T-shirts of Christian rock bands and to go to the summer camps, the rallies, to talk the talk and walk the walk.

She was kneeling on the hardwood in the living room, plucking pine needles one after another from the tree skirt, an antique lace one that my mother had loved. She was putting each one she retrieved with her right hand into the cup of her left hand, like picking blueberries. Her blond curls—she’d taken to spending a lot of time in the mornings smoothing a special cream into them and then blow-drying them just so—hung in front of her face as she did this, making her look young, cherubic even.

“Why are you doing that?” I asked her. “We always just take the tree skirt outside and shake it.”

Ruth ignored my question and kept plucking. “You must know lots of kids from school who go there, don’t you, Cammie?”

Now I ignored her question. The real, live, bought-from-the-VFW-booth Christmas tree was a concession of Ruth’s. My mother had been a big proponent of live Christmas trees. Every year she’d put up several at the Tongue River Museum, themed, of course, and we always had one at home, too. We used to go get them all in one trip, just the two of us, load them up into the back of my dad’s pickup, and then maybe stop off at Kip’s Minute Mart for ice cream. My mother had also been a big proponent of winter ice-cream cones.

“Well, we don’t have to worry about these melting,” she used to say, holding a cone in her elegant, leather-gloved hand, her breath visible in the air even as she took a bite.

The question of Christmas trees had come up at Thanksgiving. Ruth mentioned that she had been eyeing some very nice synthetic trees in a couple of the advertising inserts in the paper, and I had thrown a little fit at the table, Grandma backing me up the whole time
. It’s her first year without them, Ruth. Let her keep her traditions.
And she
had
let me keep those traditions. She had gone out of her way, in fact, to ask me about the exact recipes I wanted for Christmas dinner, and where to hang certain decorations, and we’d gone together to the downtown Christmas Stroll. She’d baked batch after batch of sugar cookies and peanut-butter blossoms, and Ruth really had done everything that was supposed to be Christmasy even more perfectly than my parents had ever quite managed. And instead of making me feel better, Ruth’s perfect imitation of a Post Family Christmas had just made me feel worse.

I’d been
cranky
, Grandma said, for weeks, and now Ruth’s continued plucking made me grit my teeth. “It’s just gonna spill more needles when we try to take it out of here, Ruth,” I said. Sometime that December I had started dropping the “Aunt” out of her name, mostly because I knew that it annoyed her. “It’s stupid to try to pick them up by hand. That’s what they invented vacuum cleaners for.”

This stopped her. She sat back on her feet and brushed her hair to one side with her non-needled hand. “Maybe that’s what they invented artificial trees for,” she said in that crispy-sweet voice she was so good at. “Which is why we’ll be getting one next year.” It was near impossible to get her to go beyond that hard-edged sweetness, but that didn’t stop me from trying.

“Whatever,” I said, flopping on the couch next to Grandma and purposefully knocking a box of lights and tinsel off the corner of the coffee table with my foot. “Let’s just not get one at all. Why don’t we just skip Christmas altogether?”

Grandma put her hand inside the magazine, marking the page she was reading, and swatted my arm with it, hard, a definite smack—like the one you’d use to kill a big spider. “Cameron, you pick those up,” she said. She turned to Ruth. “I’m not sure this one is yet ready for one of your youth groups. First she’d best learn to act like a teenager and not a two-year-old.”

She was right, for sure, but it made me flinch to have her side with Ruth.

“Sorry,” I said, untangling strands of tinsel and not looking at either of them.

“So I think we’ll try Gates of Praise next Sunday,” Ruth said in that Ruth way, everything better. “Something new. I think it might be fun.”

Gates of Praise (GOP) was one of those industrial-size churches that look more like a giant feed shed than a house of worship. It was a one-story metal building on a hill just outside the city limits, surrounded on three sides by a cement parking lot and on the only remaining side by a very small, very square patch of grass.

After the stained glass and worn mahogany pews of the First Presbyterian, GOP felt something like an office building, or even a factory. And it was, kind of. This was especially true in the main chapel, which was large enough to comfortably hold the congregation of over four hundred, and then some; it was all echoes, with bulky black speakers here and there, fluorescent lighting hanging from high above, and about an acre of blue office-building carpet spread out over the floor.

Services were rarely less than two hours, ten to noon. Aunt Ruth and I went every Sunday. Ruth joined the choir, and then the women’s Bible study. As promised, Ruth had me join Firepower, the teen group.

What I remember from Sunday school at First Presbyterian was kind Mrs. Ness teaching us to sing “Jesus Loves Me,” her silver hair in a bun, a guitar in her lap. I also remember the children’s Bible they gave us, with its bright-colored pictures of pairs of animals boarding the ark, and Moses parting a very red sea, and a long-haired Jesus walking across water, his arms stretched wide, somehow reminding me of Shaggy from
Scooby-Doo
. And I remember that during the services it was just row after row of old people repeating some verses, painful organ music, a lengthy sermon that was hard for me to follow. Right from the start, Gates of Praise was different.