The Miseducation of Cameron Post (16 page)

“I guess I can see if Grandma is free. What night is it again?” I asked, trying to keep that locker door between us. Brett was almost always around when Coley was, and when he wasn’t I sometimes still got all flustery like that first coffee communion at GOP.

“Don’t do the thing where all you do is make a bunch of jokes and it becomes impossible to talk to you about anything,” Coley said. “This will be classic—we’ll never have the chance to crash prom as freshmen again.”

“There’s absolutely nothing in what you’ve just said that makes your argument any more convincing,” I said.

She reached around the locker door and grabbed my arm all dramatic-like. “I’ll call Ruth. I’ll do it. I’ll call her and tell her you’re being a weirdo loner again and won’t come to prom and you know she won’t let off you. She’ll have all sorts of ideas about eligible bachelors.”

“You’re a terrible person and I hate you.”

“So who do you want me to ask? Travis Burrel would totally go with you.” Coley pushed the locker door open wider and stepped around it, helping herself to the pack of Bubblicious I had on the top shelf and, as she was doing it, brushing up against me in a way that she didn’t even notice and in a way that made me notice nothing else.

I backstepped into the hallway a little so that we weren’t wedged into that space so tightly. “Travis Burrel would go to prom with anyone he thought he might be able to dry hump on the dance floor.”

“So you want me to call him first?” The gum coated her words in all-sugar strawberry.

“Yeah. Get right on that. I’m gonna be late,” I said, trying at the same time to push her out of the way with the back of my arm and also grab my backpack, my practice bag. She didn’t move very far and I had to reach around her again, brush up against her again, feel a little shudder roll along my body and end in my stomach, again, just to latch the door, clip shut the padlock.

She stayed right next to me as we wove back into the hallway, walking against the stream toward the women’s locker rooms. “C’mon, just ask Jamie; you know you’re going to anyway.”

Coley and I had to separate to get around a girl who was mostly eclipsed by the size of the poster she was carrying, some sort of project about World War Two—a picture of Hitler doing his mustachioed
Sieg
heil
, a gaunt concentration-camp victim, a couple of American soldiers smoking cigarettes and scowling at the camera, the captions beneath each photo in glitter-bubble letters. If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some sort of poignant music, put us in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the posterboard chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

“Ask Jamie today because I want to buy the tickets tomorrow,” Coley kept on, back at my side again, the full-color atrocities of a war both of our grandfathers had fought in
clip-clopping
away from us, offscreen where they belonged, not staring us down during prom season.

“Jamie isn’t gonna want to fucking go to prom. I don’t want to fucking go to prom. The whole point of the boycott is that nobody in this school wants to fucking go to prom.”

Some shaggy junior in a Pantera T-shirt turned and shouted as we passed him, “I’ll fuck you at prom!” His two equally shaggy buddies high-fived him and giggled the way high school boys and certain cartoon characters giggle—Barney Rubble, for one.

“You’re a troglodyte,” Coley yelled back. We were at the blue metal door that signified the locker room entrance. She grabbed both of my arms at the biceps. “Jamie will go with you if you ask him, even if he doesn’t really want to.”

“Coley,
I
don’t really want to.”

“But I do, and we’re friends, and this is the sort of thing friends do for each other,” she said with a kind of earnestness that maybe would have been laughable if I wasn’t so much in love with her.

“Oh, is this the sort of thing?” I asked, both of us knowing that I would ask Jamie to prom that very afternoon and that he would give me shit about it but would eventually say yes because that’s the kind of guy Jamie Lowry was. “What are the other sorts of things friends do for each other? Do you have a list?”

“No, but I’ll make one,” she said, waving at a group of shiny juniors who were mostly Brett’s friends. They were lolling around the pop machines and called her over. “It’s gonna be so, so good,” she said.

“You so, so owe me,” I said back from partway inside the locker room.

“You know I love you forever.” She was already walking toward the knot of fresh-faced couples on their way to soak up the sunny afternoon, no doubt, like some sort of J.Crew ad, and leaving me to think about that list of “things friends do for each other” the whole time I was changing, the whole time I was jogging over to the track at the community college, the whole time I was doing extra laps after practice because I was just barely late. If Coley ever were to actually write out a list like that, I knew that I’d do each and every single thing on it. I just knew that I would.

I’d mentioned my Coley crush to Lindsey in a few brief paragraphs in one of my letters, but I filled in all the angsty details during a three-hour phone conversation we had the weekend before prom, while Ruth and Ray the Schwan’s man were at a couples’ Bible weekend in Laramie and Grandma was napping in front of the TV, empty cellophane wrappers from those sugar wafers on the coffee table. She was favoring the strawberry variety that month, so she had weirdly pink wafer shards and sugar crumbles in the creases of her shirt, like the fiberglass bits that had sometimes coated my father’s overalls when he was installing insulation.

It was Lindsey who had called me, so it was her mom who would get the phone bill, not Ruth. And when it took her twenty minutes just to tell me about an Ani DiFranco concert she’d been to the night before, I knew this would be a long session, so I grabbed a couple of Ray’s Bud Lights from the fridge (I was pretty sure he knew that I was taking them sometimes, but he wasn’t saying anything to me or to Ruth), and then I took the cordless phone into my room and spent the better part of those three hours decoupaging the floor and ceiling of the guest bedroom of the dollhouse with stamps saved from Lindsey’s letters. Lindsey wrote me a lot, probably four letters to each one of mine, but I still didn’t have nearly enough stamps to do the whole thing. It was just a hopeful start.

While I had been running track, and contemplating Leviticus and Romans, and being the tag-along sister to Custer High’s favorite couple while in private imagining Coley every time I watched any movie with even a hint of lesbianism (Coley as Jodie Foster in
Silence of the Lambs
, Coley as Sharon Stone in
Basic Instinct
—that movie had just, finally, come to Miles City), Lindsey had been getting it on with, to hear her tell it, every lesbian in the Seattle area between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five. Many of them had names, or probably they were nicknames, that sounded frightening to me in a “too cool” sort of way: Mix, Kat, Betty C. (for Betty Crocker? I wondered, but never asked), Brights, Aubrey, Henna, and on and on.

Lindsey was good with details and she was always very specific about which conquest had smelly white-girl dreads, and which girl had totally shaved her head, and which girl wore a leather jacket and rode a Harley, snorted coke, was anorexic and too bony and whose body felt like scaffolding; but there were so many different girls that I couldn’t keep track of any of them once the phone call or letter ended, and I didn’t usually need to, because Lindsey herself would have seemingly forgotten those girls and moved on to a half dozen more by the next time we spoke or she wrote.

“Betty C. has a tongue ring, you know? Well, a stud, actually, but it’s crazy because I heard those make a difference but I had no idea just how much of a difference, you know?” This was typical Lindsey style of conversing, phrasing everything in such a way that it forced me to ask her to explain things to me, keeping her forever in the role of my personal lesbian guru.

“It made such a difference how?” I asked, situating a flag stamp next to a stamp of the State Bird of Maine, the black-capped chickadee.

“Seriously, Cam, grow an imagination—while she was going down on me. It’s like, it’s this tiny piece of metal, you know, but if you know how to use it—and Betty C. does, she totally does—it’s otherworldly.”

“Yeah, I got that part,” I said, because I
had
actually understood that she was talking about oral sex but was still so unsure of the mechanics of it all, the actual process, what it was like on either end, that I had a hard time understanding how the tiny piece of metal made any significant difference. When I daydreamed about Coley and me, it was always a lengthy fantasy lead-up to our first kiss, and then a whole lot more intense kissing, shirts off, maybe, some touching, but never anything else. Ever. It was such foreign territory that my brain couldn’t even imagine the map for it.

“Right, okay,” Lindsey said. “I forgot what a sexual aficionado I was talking to. You and your varied conquests out in cattle country.”

“Whatever,” I said. I took a drink of the beer, which was growing warmer by the minute. I wasn’t such a big fan of drinking alone, but something about these phone calls with Lindsey made the alcohol seem necessary, partly because I liked the idea that while she was filling me in on everything I wasn’t doing (and she was), I could be breaking the rules too, and partly because I needed to be just a little numb to listen to her exploits.

“The point is,” she said, “I’m totally getting one the next time Alice goes out of town.”

Lindsey had recently started referring to her mother only as Alice, and usually with disdain, which annoyed me, because as far as I could tell, Alice, the city-living, former-hippie type with liberal leanings, was a pretty awesome choice in the mom category.

“She lets you do whatever you want, anyway,” I said, with more hostility than was probably warranted. “Why not just get one now if you’re gonna do it?”

“She does not let me do whatever I want,” Lindsey said. “She grounded me, or she tried to, over the goddess fiasco.”

(Lindsey had recently tattooed a Triple Crescent symbol—which, according to Lindsey, represented some Wiccan things and also the three stages of the moon and of a woman’s life—in purple on the upper part of her left shoulder.)

“And it’s like really, Alice? How puritanical can you get? It’s my body. She’s the one out at Planned Parenthood with an
A WOMAN’S BODY, A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO CHOOSE
sign, and she goes postal because I
choose
to put something meaningful on my own shoulder.”

“Did you seriously just say that getting an abortion is like getting a tattoo?” I asked, not because I thought she was necessarily wrong, but because I knew it would piss her off.

“Yeah, that’s what I said if you have a first-grade understanding of logic,” she said. She put on what I thought of as her professor voice. “The point is not the severity of the action done to the body, Cameron; it’s a matter of the ownership of the body in question, and even if I’m fifteen, my body belongs to me.”

I took another drink and put on my best sarcastic-student voice. “So again, I ask you, why wait on the tongue ring?”

“Because they heal like a bitch. Sometimes you have to go a solid four days on just milkshakes, and if you take it out you’re screwed. I’m waiting until Alice’ll be gone for at least that long. And then once it heals, I can take it out, if need be, while I’m around her.”

“Gotcha,” I said, opening the second of the two beers and checking at my door to listen down the stairs, make sure I could still hear
Columbo
, which I could. Not that Grandma was much for climbing the flight up to my room.

Then there was a pause in the conversation, with maybe twenty seconds of quiet between us, and because that almost never happened when we spoke, it felt especially uncomfortable; and when Lindsey didn’t end it, I said, just to say something, because even though lately Lindsey had become a little bit sneering and self-important, she was still my one and only connection to authentic, real-life, not-in-the-movies lesbianism and I wanted to keep her on the phone: “I’m going to prom with Coley Taylor.”

“What the fuck? Why were you sitting on that? Your Cindy Crawford cowgirl crush? You have to be shitting me—you’re not even old enough to go to prom.”

“Well, not
with
her, with her—not as dates. But we’re going together as couples. Coley and Brett and me and Jamie.” I was glad to have kept her from hanging up even if it was embarrassing to admit this. “They changed the rules for this year,” I added, “because not enough upperclassmen bought tickets.”

“Of course they didn’t,” she said. “Prom is an antiquated institution that reinforces outdated gender roles and bourgeois dating rituals. It’s worse than cliché.”

“Thanks for remembering to always make every moment a teaching moment,” I said.

“Well, I’m fucking sorry that I have to, but this is not healthy progress for a dyke in training. Pining after straight girls—straight girls who are, by the way, in happy relationships with good-looking straight boys—when you live in a town filled with angry, Bible-pounding, probably gun-toting cowboys is a total no-win.”

“Who am I supposed to pine after in Miles City?” I asked her. “It’s not like I have a buffet of every lesbian imaginable just hanging around the local tattoo parlor, waiting in line to get their tongues pierced.”