The Miseducation of Cameron Post - by Emily M. Danforth

Chapter Three

The first semester of seventh grade they had me in the counseling center for one period a day—the orphan in residence. On my schedule that period was listed officially as study hall, but Aunt Ruth, my new legal guardian, had spoken with the administrators, and everyone but me had decided that it would be best for me to spend that hour sitting on one of the center’s sea-green vinyl couches, talking with Nancy the counselor about one of her many pamphlets on loss: “Teens and Grief.” “All Alone with My Troubles.” “Understanding Death and Letting Go.”

Mostly I spent my time in the counseling center fiddling at homework or reading a paperback, maybe eating the little thises and thats the secretaries would sneak me from the teachers’ lounge—a couple of brownies folded up in a napkin, a plate of somebody’s seven-layer dip with Triscuits—gifts they’d present to me with kind smiles and soft pats on my shoulder. These small offerings of food, of looking out for the kid, somehow made me feel more alone than when the secretaries didn’t remember to include me at all.

They’d gotten used to me over at Video ’n’ Go, and now that school was back in session, Mrs. Carvell was gone and it was almost always Nate Bovee behind the register, and he let me rent whatever the hell I wanted—no questions, just a wink and a grin creeping from behind that scraggly goatee he was always trying to grow but never quite did. I just had to hide the cases from Ruth, keep the volume semilow.

“Whatcha pickin’ up today, sweetheart?” Nate would ask me, his squinty blue-gray eyes hawking me as I wandered the aisles. I always got a couple of new releases and then kept working my way through the older stuff.

“I don’t know yet,” I’d tell him, trying to stay behind the shelves farthest from the register, which didn’t help much, ’cause he could just watch me in the big shoplifter mirror hung above the door to the back room. When I went in the afternoons, right after school let out, it was usually just the two of us in the store. Video ’n’ Go always smelled too strongly of some carpet cleaner they used, like chemical roses, and I began to associate that smell with Nate—as if it radiated from him.

I tried to like him because he let me rent the R-rated videos and because sometimes he’d offer me a free pop from the cooler up front, but I didn’t like that he knew every movie I took out of that store, watching me, watching me pick them up and bring them back. It felt like in knowing that, he knew more about me than anyone else right then, definitely more than Nancy the counselor, and more than Aunt Ruth, too.

Sometime in late September Irene Klauson came to school with the kind of smile kids wear in peanut-butter commercials. She and her dad had been out building onto their new corral and branding area. Irene said she was the one working the shovel when they first found it. A bone. A fossil. Something big.

“My dad’s already called some professor he knows at Montana State,” she told a few of us who were clustered around her locker. “They’re sending out a whole team.”

Within weeks scientists, “paleontologists,” Irene would remind us, sounding like our fucking science book, had swarmed all over the Klausons’ cattle ranch. The paper called it a hotbed for specimen recovery. A gold mine. A treasure trove.

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.

We all had Cokes in the living room while Margot talked a little about Berlin, about the various business things she was doing while back in the U.S. Then she looked at this nice silver watch she had on, a big watch with a blue face, like a man’s watch, maybe, and she said that we should get a move on if we were to make our reservation at the Cattleman’s. That was kind of funny, because even though it was Miles City’s nicest steakhouse, tucked between the bars, a place with lots of dark wood paneling and stuffed and mounted animals, it still wasn’t a reservations kind of restaurant. But apparently she had made them just the same.

I could tell Margot was nervous when she opened my car door for me and then told me to pick any radio station I wanted for the sixty seconds it would take us to get down Main Street; and when I didn’t make a move for the dial, she did it for me, cycling through the three stations that came in, making a face, and then just turning the radio off entirely. But I was nervous too, and that made me feel like we were on a date, which we sort of were, I guess. The couple of worn-in ranchers who were ponied up to the Cattleman’s bar gave Margot, in her black pants and black boots and her non–Miles City haircut, the once-over as we passed them for our table; but things seemed decidedly calmer once our drinks arrived: the requisite gin and tonic, and for me, a Shirley Temple, double the cherries, light on the ice.

“Well, I’ll go ahead and say that this is strange, isn’t it? Awkward is probably the best word.” Margot took a long swallow from her drink, letting the ice cubes collide with the lime wedge. “But I am very glad we’re doing it.”

I liked how she said we, and made this dinner something the both of us were doing and not something she had done wholly for me. It made me feel like an adult.

“Me too,” I said, drinking from my mocktail, hoping that I looked as sophisticated doing it as Margot looked to me.

She smiled, and I’m sure that I blushed in response.

“I brought pictures,” she said, digging in this nice brown leather bag she had, more like a satchel than a purse. “I don’t know how many of these you’ve seen before, but I want you to have whichever you’d like.” She handed me an envelope.

I wiped my hands on my napkin before removing the photos. I wanted her to notice how seriously I was taking all of this. I hadn’t seen most of the shots before. The first dozen or so were from my parents’ wedding. Aunt Ruth might have been the maid of honor, but Margot was a bridesmaid. I thought she looked pretty but uncomfortable in her gown and long gloves, much how I imagined I might have looked in the same getup.

“Oh, your mother and that peach monstrosity,” she said, reaching across the table and bending the picture in my hand toward her so that she could shake her head at it. “I had every intention of changing into blue jeans before the reception, but she bribed me with champagne.”

“Looks like it worked,” I said, coming across a picture of her drinking straight from a champagne bottle, my grandpa Wynton in the corner of the frame, laughing a big laugh. I showed it to her and she nodded.

“You didn’t get a chance to know your mom’s parents, did you?”

“Except for Grandma Post, none of my grandparents ever even met me,” I said.

“You would have liked your grandpa Wynton. And he would have liked you. He was very much a rapscallion.”

I liked that Margot had decided, reflecting on the small collection of times she had “known” me, that I would have been appealing to my grandfather. My mother had told me that before too, but it was different coming from Margot.

“Do you know what a rapscallion is?” she asked, waving at the waitress to bring her another drink.

“Yeah,” I said. “A trickster.”

“Very nice,” she said, chuckling. “I like that—a trickster.”

The pictures at the back of the stack were older, from my mom’s high school days and before: a picnic, a football game, a Christmas pageant, Margot towering over the girls in each shot, and as she and my mother grew younger, photo by photo, Margot towering over many of the boys as well.

“You were always really tall,” I said, and then was embarrassed about having said it.

“At school they called me MoM for years and years—it stood for Miles of Margot,” she said, looking not at me but at a table of diners who had started their cross-restaurant trek to the salad bar.

“That’s sort of clever,” I said.

She smiled. “I think so too. Well, now I do. Not so much then.”

The waitress came back to take our order and bring Margot her second drink. We hadn’t even looked in the maroon menu folders with their gold tassels, but I knew that I wanted chicken-fried steak and hash browns, and Margot apparently knew that she wanted prime rib, because that’s what she ordered, with a baked potato, as well as another Shirley Temple for me. She ordered it without even asking me if I wanted it. It was nice.

I pulled three photos from the stack—one of my mom and dad dancing at their wedding, one of my mom on the shoulders of some unknown boy with a chipped front tooth, and one of Mom and Margot, maybe nine or ten, in shorts and T-shirts, arms around each other’s waists, handkerchiefs on their heads—that one reminded me of a picture I had of Irene and me. I held up my choices in front of her and shrugged my shoulders.

“So you’ve made your selections, then.” She nodded at the pictures in my hand. “The one with both of us was taken at a Campfire Girls jamboree. I was looking for something the other day and came across my old handbook. I’ll try to remember to send it to you; you’ll get a kick out of it.”

“Okay,” I said.

Then we looked at each other, or the table, or the salt and pepper shakers, for what seemed like a very long time. I concentrated on tying one of my cherry stems into a knot with my tongue.

Margot must have noticed my mouth working, because she said, “My brother, David, used to do that too. He could do two knots on a single stem, which he told us meant that he was a very fine kisser.”

I blushed, as usual. “How old was he?” I asked, without finishing the question with when he died, but Margot understood me all the same.

“He had just turned fourteen the weekend before the earthquake,” she said, stirring her drink. “I don’t think he had actually kissed very many girls before he died. Maybe none except for your mother.”

“Your brother kissed my mom?”

“Absolutely,” she said. “In the pantry of the First Presbyterian Church.”

“So much for romance,” I said.

Margot laughed. “It was very innocent,” she said. She picked up the salt shaker and tapped its glass base against the tablecloth a few times. “I haven’t been back to the Rock Creek area since it happened, but I’m going straight there after I leave Miles City tomorrow. I feel like I need to.”

I didn’t know what to say to that.

“I wanted to go back anyway; I’ve been wanting to for several years,” she said.

“I don’t ever want to go there.”

“I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that.” Margot reached her hand across the table like she was maybe going to take my hand, or just touch it, but I moved it fast to my lap.

She smiled a tight smile at me and said, “I’m going to level with you here, Cameron, because you seem adult enough to handle it. Grief is not my strong suit, but I did want to see you and tell you that if you need anything from me, you can always ask and I’ll do my best.” She seemed like she was done, but then she added, “I loved your mom since I met her.”

Margot wasn’t crying and I couldn’t read on her face the potential for it, but I knew that if I looked at her long enough, I could definitely get all weepy, and maybe even eventually tell her about me and Irene and what we had done, what I had wanted to do and still did want to do. And I knew, somehow, that she would make me feel better about it. I could just tell that Margot would assure me that what I had done hadn’t caused the accident, and that while I wouldn’t believe anybody else telling me that exact same thing, I might actually believe her. But I didn’t want to believe her right then, so I didn’t keep looking at her face but instead drained the rest of my Shirley Temple, which took several swallows; but I finished every last sweet pink-red carbonated drop until the ice clacked against my teeth.

Then I said, “Thanks, Margot. I’m really glad you came.”

“Me too,” she said, and then she put her napkin back on the table and said, “I’m ready for that salad bar. How about you?”

I nodded, and then she asked me if I knew the German word for bathroom and I said no and she said das Bad, and it seemed funny so we both smiled, and then she stood and told me that she was just going to pop into das Bad for a minute before we ate. And while she did that, I took her photos back out of the envelope and found that wedding shot of her drinking straight from the champagne bottle and I slipped it up under my shirt and just inside the waistband of my pants, its surface cool and tacky against my stomach.

After Ruth came back, a moving van followed close behind; we had to make room for some of her stuff. This meant tackling the garage, closets, the storage shed in the backyard. During one of these clearing sessions we unearthed a dollhouse my father had made for my fifth birthday. As dollhouses go, it was amazing. It was a built-to-scale reproduction of some big old Victorian in San Francisco—according to my dad, it was a famous one on a famous street.

The version he built for me was three feet high and a couple of feet wide. It took both Ruth and me, working together, to get it out of the narrow opening of the cluttered storage shed.

“Should we put this in the car, take it to St. Vincent’s?” Ruth asked after we’d made it through the cobwebbed doorway and were standing together on the lawn, both of us sweating. “It would make some little girl awfully happy.”

We’d taken carload after carload to that thrift store. “It’s mine,” I told her, though I wasn’t planning on keeping it until right that minute. “My dad made it for me, and I’m not giving it to some stranger.” I hoisted it up by its peaked roof and took it into the house, up the stairs to my room, and shut the door.

Dad had painted it a blue he called cerulean, and I thought that name was so pretty that I named the first doll to live in the house Sarah Cerulean. The windows had white trim, and real glass panes, and flower boxes with tiny fake flowers in them. There was a fence made to look like ornate wrought iron around the little platform yard, which was done up with synthetic turf scraps left over from the indoor soccer field in Billings. I don’t know how Dad even wound up with those. He’d cut up scraps from real shingles to do the roof. The outside was entirely finished, every detail, but the inside was another story.

The whole dollhouse was hinged, so you could close it and see it from all four sides, or open it and have access to each of the individual rooms, like a diorama. He’d done the framing for all of the rooms, and put in a staircase and a fireplace, but that was it as far as it got, no other decorations or finishes. He’d wanted to have it ready for my birthday, and he’d promised that we could finish it later, together, which we never did. Not that I minded. Even unfinished it was a better dollhouse than any I had ever seen.

My mom and I had picked out a few pieces of furniture for it at the crafts display counter at Ben Franklin. Irene and I used to spend hours with that thing, until sometime after my tenth birthday, when I had decided that I was too old for dolls, and therefore, dollhouses.

While Ruth continued her decluttering, I moved the dollhouse over to the corner of my already cramped room and put it on my desk, which was another thing—a monstrous thing—Dad had built for me, with cubbyholes and all sizes of drawers, a wide top for art projects. But the dollhouse was monstrous, too, and it left me only one small corner of free desktop. Still, I liked having it there, despite its bulk, but for a few weeks that’s all it was: there, hulking and waiting.

The Klausons had hit it big with their dinosaur farm. “Raising dinosaurs beats the hell outta raising cattle,” I heard Mr. Klauson say more than once. Mrs. Klauson bought a slippery teal convertible even though it was fall in Montana. Irene came to school with all kinds of new stuff. By Halloween it was settled: She was off to Maybrook Academy in Connecticut. Boarding school. I had seen the movies. I knew all about it: plaid skirts and rolling green lawns and trips to some seaside town on the weekends.

“Where are all the boys?” Steph Schlett had asked Irene, a bunch of us crammed in a booth at Ben Franklin, some of the girls ooohing and aaaahing over a glossy brochure.

“Maybrook’s a girls’ academy,” Irene said, taking a slow drink from her Perrier. You couldn’t buy Perrier at the Ben Franklin lunch counter, or anywhere else in Miles City; but Mrs. Klauson had taken to buying it in bulk in Billings, and Irene had taken to carrying a bottle with her practically everywhere.

“Bor-ring,” Steph giggled in this high whinny thing she was known for.

“Hardly,” Irene said, careful not to catch my eye. “Our brother school, River Vale, is right across the lake, and we have socials and dances and whatever with them all the time. Almost every other weekend.”

I watched as Steph trailed a french fry through a pool of ketchup, and then into a big plastic vat of the good ranch dressing Ben Franklin made gallons of, before popping the fry into her mouth and starting on another. “But why are you going now?” she asked, the chew of mealy potato thick in her braces. “Why not wait until next fall, or until spring semester at least.”

I had wanted to ask the same thing, but was glad that Steph did it for me. I didn’t want Irene to notice how jealous I was. I could see part of that brochure from where I sat: fresh-faced girls playing lacrosse, or cuddled in thick wool cardigans sipping cocoa in rooms filled with leather-bound books. It really was just like the movies.

Irene took another drink of her Perrier. Then she screwed on the cap really slowly, sort of puzzling her forehead, as though what Steph had asked was just incredibly thought-provoking or something. Finally she said, “My parents think it’s best that I start my education at Maybrook as soon as possible. No offense, you guys,” she said, looking right at me, “but it’s not like Miles City is known for its outstanding school system.”

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.