The Miseducation of Cameron Post (15 page)

If it hadn’t been coffee communion, there would have been a whole lot more teenage classmates around, kids who knew Coley better, her crowd. Firepower was then some ninety members strong. But I was made instantly more appealing that morning when stacked up against the under-twenties currently snacking in the hall: a motley crew of shrieking and running elementary-school kids glad to be free of the pews they’d sat in for the last hour and a half; Pastor Crawford’s ever-increasing brood, only one of whom was old enough for high school, and he had skipped out right after the service; and Clay Harbough, the computer genius who, despite being so gifted a programmer that he was allowed to spend his afternoons in the Custer computer lab setting up systems and wowing the librarians, spoke in a rapid monotone to his Nikes and smelled often of black licorice, which I never once saw him eating.

Considering my competition, I wasn’t all that surprised when Coley launched herself toward me, even though the most we’d ever said before was
Are you done with that scalpel?
I was surprised, however, when she didn’t stop at the other side of the long table to talk to me over the platters of foods built for coffee dunking but instead came right around to my side, the server’s side, and stood next to me like she had always been there, every Sunday, helping fan the napkins.

“So what do you think the dissection final’s gonna look like?” she asked, leaning in front of me to grab a packet of orange-spice tea. I flinched at the way her sweater sleeve brushed across my chest, felt my heart twitch around for a second. It was uncomfortable, like an itch buried deep inside my lungs.

“No clue. Probably me with a pair of forceps pulling at intestines while Kyle sings ‘Enter Sandman’ under his breath.” I liked watching her stir her tea with the little red straw, three turns clockwise, then rotate, then repeat.

She laughed. I liked it.

“Yeah, that kid’s a hoot,” she said. Coley Taylor made sipping cheap tea from a chipped yellow
JESUS IS LORD
mug seem cultured and Julie Andrewsish. “You guys are a thing?”

I was both horrified and sort of flattered. Kyle Clark, lab partner, was as rocker-dude as Custer High could offer, and so asking me if I was dating him meant that Coley somehow thought that I was rocker-chick enough to do so, which wasn’t a mistake that anyone made very often.

“No. Definitely not. We’ve just known each other forever. Like everyone else in our class,” I added.

“Not me.” She smiled again, her face just a few inches from mine, and I felt the itch.

I stepped back a little. “Be glad, or you’d already know that Kyle puked SpaghettiOs on me at third-grade field days.” Talking to Coley as she drank tea in her chic outfit, all of her so put together, made me feel like I might as well have still been in third grade, my gangly pose with my stupid arms hanging weirdly at my sides. I busied myself, putting out more of the heavy cake doughnuts even though the plate was already stacked high. With each doughnut some of the glaze and frosting pasted itself in the spaces between my fingers.

“Sorry,” she said. “I guess I shouldn’t assume that everyone’s dating their lab partners.”

“Well, you set a good example, right?” I focused on the now-towering doughnuts, wondering how that sounded to her. Bitchy? Or worse, jealous?

But she laughed and grabbed my arm for just a second, which made me tense up all over. “Yeah. Exactly. I thought you guys must be together because you always seem to be having a better time with your fetal pig than me and Brett.”

“You mean Hambone?”

She smiled into her mug. “You guys named your pig?”

“You guys didn’t? There’s your problem. You could do Porky, but it’s pretty obvious. What do you think of Coulda-Been Bacon? But you have to say Coulda-Been really fast, so it sounds like a name.” I was doing my little stand-up shtick, the one I did for pretty girls, so they’d like me quickly and wouldn’t try too hard to actually get to know me beyond my role as wisecracking Cameron the orphan. Maybe it was a little like flirting, but also a kind of protection:
Don’t get too close; I’m just jokes without substance
. And it seemed to be going over, so I would have kept on if Ruth hadn’t suddenly been there with us too, a cloud of White Diamonds (her new fragrance, compliments of Ray) settling over the table. She took the doughnut box from me, and my weird arms just had to hang there again.

“This is way too many, hon,” she said, plucking this custard filled and that raspberry glazed and reboxing them. “Coley, I just met your mother. We’re so glad to have you here to worship with us.” She finished with the doughnuts, set the box down, and wiped her hands on a napkin before offering her palm to Coley. “I’m Cameron’s aunt Ruth. You’re both freshmen?”

Coley answered right as Pastor Crawford pulled in for a maple bar, “Yeah. We were just talking about dissection.”

“Well, that’s a way to spend a Sunday morning. Good gravy, girls, you’re no fun.” Aunt Ruth grinned her Annette Funicello grin and put her hands on her hips and did some sort of hula-hoop motion, a move that played like the 1950s and a poodle-skirted malt shop.

Pastor Crawford kept hovering, chewing, laughing at Ruth, some of the tan icing flaking onto his collar. “You know,” he said, “I’m having one of those great moments of epiphany.” He paused and chewed more. Pastor Crawford was the king of the drawn-out revelation. Eventually he turned to me. “Cameron, Coley’s going to start coming to Firepower, and I know that Ruth’s been driving you. Why don’t you two gals ride together instead?”

It was a move that I can only assume he meant as gregarious and pastorly, but really he had just forced me into the truck of one of the it girls in my class, since I was the sad sack without her own car whose aunt or grandmother had to pick her up and drop her off.

While I was grinning like a jack-o’-lantern and shrugging, rolling my eyes, trying to play off these meddling adults to Coley, she answered, “Yeah, that’d be good,” and she didn’t hesitate or anything, but there was something so grown-up about her that I thought maybe she was just better at maneuvering these awkward chitchats than I was, and so I didn’t take much comfort in her easy tone.

I also wished that we could have this conversation without the group of adult onlookers planning our playdates. “You know, like half of the school comes here on Wednesdays,” I told her. “And I start track in March, anyway. Don’t feel obligated to pull a
Driving Miss Daisy
.”

“Don’t be stupid,” she said, “I don’t.” Her mom was beckoning her from a table of really old people, and as Coley turned to head over, her face too near mine, a smile flitting across it, she said, “We could just call him Fetal Piggly Wiggly, right, Miss Daisy?”

It probably doesn’t seem like much that she would play off my lame movie reference, mention the grocery store from that scene where Miss Daisy finally accepts a ride from her own chauffeur, but I’d been making movie references just like that for so long that they came out without me even thinking about them, and certainly without me expecting anyone but Jamie to make one back. And definitely not one based on the grocery-store scene from
Driving Miss Daisy
. And most definitely not someone like Coley, who I thought I had already figured out just by sitting behind her in science for a semester.

In the Fetus Mobile on the way home, Ruth gave Grandma the Taylor family rundown. Mr. Taylor had died from lung cancer two years before, but Coley’s older brother, Ty, and her mom were still running the cattle ranch, making it work. Ty was supposed to be some sort of debonair wild card, a real cowboy, and after her husband died Mrs. Taylor had fallen apart some—drinking and staying out and
making bad choices
—but she had recently found her way back to Christ.

“She’s getting things back on track for her family,” Ruth said. “That takes real courage.”

It was Coley, as she understood it, who had been keeping things together in the interim. Coley, according to Ruth, was pretty and smart and just
a real go-getter
, loved by all.

“I’m glad that you two are friendly, Cammie,” Ruth said, eyeing me in the rearview mirror the way she liked to. “She seems like a very put-together young lady, and maybe if you get to know her, you won’t have to spend so much time with Jamie and the boys, you know—”

“Jamie’s my best friend,” I told the mirror, cutting her off. “I don’t even really know Coley. We just have a class together.”

“Well, now you can get to know her,” Ruth said.

“Yeah, whatever,” I said, because it was easier than again trying to explain high school politics to a former head cheerleader. But I just figured Coley would offer me the obligatory ride the following Wednesday, and it would be a little awkward, but she would be sweet about it, and then she’d mention, casually, that she had an errand to run before Firepower the next week and
could I get a ride with my aunt
, and then we’d forget about this arranged friendship altogether. Which would definitely be for the best, I decided that night in bed, when I closed my eyes and saw her drinking tea and opened them and still could see her, and I wanted so much to see more.

Chapter Eight

I
t took until March, the still-crispy days of early-season track practice already under way, for me to stop waiting for Coley to tell me about that errand she had to run. By that point she and Brett had adopted me as some kind of tag-along kid sister, despite our being the same age. The only problem was that the more time I spent with the two of them—in a corner booth at Pizza Hut creating contests that involved shooting straw wrappers at various targets, or in the top row of the Montana Theatre, watching whichever movie was showing that week, a tub of popcorn on Coley’s lap for all of us to share, or boonie bashing at the Honda Trails in Brett’s beat-up Jeep, AC/DC blaring from the stereo—the more I fell in love with Coley Taylor. But the weird thing was that I really liked Brett, too. I would have these moments of jealousy over the tiniest of things—Brett grabbing Coley’s hand as we crossed a street or Coley ruffling the back of his head as he drove us somewhere—but for those first months I was mostly content just to be near her and to make her laugh, which was harder to do than with other girls; I had to try harder, which made it more worth it.

Prom season, with its torrents of confetti and satin gowns and sparkle stars to accompany the Van Gogh
Starry Night
theme, was met with the flannel-cloaked apathy of the late-blooming grunge crowd that made up a very small but riotous portion of the Custer High Senior Class of 1992. Some of the grunginess had trickled its way down to my class, too, a Hacky Sack cluster here, the smell of patchouli there, but it seemed to have mostly infected students nearest to graduation. Those almost-adults, many of them with college acceptance letters already tacked to bulletin boards in their bedrooms at home, were into raging against machines and not washing their hair, and certainly not punch fountains and dyed-to-match pumps and a spotlighted Grand March through their soon-to-be-former high school gymnasium. I could totally sympathize, and I had my share of flannel shirts; I just wasn’t full-blown grunge. However, when the administration announced a mandatory formal dress code (in response to the hallway buzz that several of the senior grunge couples planned to attend Starry Starry Night barefooted and in unisex jumpers made entirely of hemp), most of the senior class sympathized too, and the FFA kids and the jocks and student council geeks united with the grungeheads to begin an outright boycott of the prom.

The promise of low ticket sales, coupled with the poor fundraising efforts of the junior class, whose car washes and bake sales had yielded far less than was needed to throw such an event, resulted in a first-time-in-history scenario for Custer High: freshmen and sophomores would be allowed to attend prom,
in formal attire
, and at the
very fair
price of only ten dollars extra per couple.

“You’re coming, Cam,” Coley told me, appearing next to my locker right after last period and just before I was due at track practice. It seemed like she just appeared, anyway. School was out for the day, it was just barely starting to feel like spring, and everybody streamed through the hallways drunk on 3:15-p.m. freedom, leaving the rush of students headed for the main doors only long enough to pause at their lockers before rejoining it, like all of it was choreographed, every movement rehearsed, every sound and sight a special effect—the slam and rattle of the metal locker doors, the
call me laters
and
fuckin’ chemistry tests
loud and throaty, the thick smell of just-lit cigarettes as soon as you hit the outside steps, the sound of mix tapes blaring from cars as they tore away from the student parking lot, windows down on both sides. I usually liked to soak in all of that for a minute or two, just linger at my locker before heading off to change for practice. But that day there was Coley.

Vice Principal Hennitz had just explained the “new deal” prom scenario during the end-of-day announcements in that pasty voice of his, each word somehow sticky sounding:
Prom is a place for decorum, and in offering you underclassmen this opportunity, the administration and I feel confident that you will treat it as such
.

Because we’d been presented with this opportunity literally minutes before, I knew exactly what Coley was talking about with her
you’re coming,
Cam
, but I pretended not to so she’d have to work even harder to convince me. I liked the feeling I got when she needed something from me.

“What are you talking about?” I asked her, pretending to dig for something in my backpack.

“Only the primary event of the spring fashion season,” Coley said in this highfalutin socialite voice she did really well. Then she switched it off to add, “If you’re gonna double with me and Brett, you need to find a guy to actually make you a double.” She did this thing that she always did with her hair where she put it up in back and held it there with a pencil all in one move and it always got me how incredibly, carelessly sexy she was when she was doing it.