The Miseducation of Cameron Post by emily m. danforth

Author:emily m. danforth
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: HarperCollins

Part Three

God’s Promise

1992–1993

Chapter Thirteen

It was Jane Fonda who gave Ruth and me our official welcome tour of the God’s Promise Christian School & Center for Healing. We were in the Fetus Mobile for six hours straight before getting there. Six hours straight except for when Ruth pulled into the Git ’n’ Split in Big Timber to get gas and treats and to let me pee. Ruth didn’t even go. She could hold it like a camel.

Back then Big Timber still had the only water park in Montana, and it sat right alongside the interstate. When we passed, I craned to see the strange toothpaste-green looping slides as they towered out of a field housing cement vats of too-blue water. The place was packed.

It was the last good week of August, and even whizzing by like that, I could feel the urgency in the actions of the kids as they swarmed about the place. Everything was heightened the way it always is when summer is slipping away to fall, and you’re younger than eighteen, and all you can do is suck your cherry Icee and let the chlorine sting your nose, all the way up into the pockets behind your eyes, and snap your towel at the pretty girl with the sunburn, and hope to do it all again come June. I turned around in my seat and kept staring until I could just barely make out those green twisting slides. They seemed like tunnels from a science fiction version of the future, with the charcoal and purple Crazy Mountains all stretched out behind them like they didn’t fit at all, like painted scenery at the school play.

At the Git ’n’ Split Ruth bought string cheese and little cartons of chocolate milk and a tube of Pringles. She offered them up in the Fetus Mobile as though she was bearing frankincense and myrrh.

“I hate sour cream and onion Pringles,” I told the dashboard, where I had my feet planted until Ruth pushed them down.

“But you love Pringles.” Ruth actually rattled the canister.

“I hate sour cream and onion anything. All lesbians do.” I blew heaps of bubbles into my milk with the tiny straw that came cellophaned to the carton.

“I want you to stop using that word.” Ruth jammed the lid back onto the can.

“Which word? Sour or cream?” I plastic laughed with my reflection in the passenger-side window.

I had spent the week postintervention moving from numbness to outright, unabashed hostility toward Ruth, while she, on the other hand, became increasingly talkative and positive about my situation. She busied herself with the many arrangements to be made on my behalf: buying me dorm supplies, talking to Hazel about my early retirement from Scanlan, filling out paperwork, scheduling my mandatory physical, helping Ray haul the phone and TV and VCR from my room. That arrangement came first, actually. But the biggest arrangement of all: She canceled the wedding. She postponed it, that is.

“Don’t,” I said. She hadn’t even told me she was doing it, actually.

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