The Miseducation of Cameron Post Read Online Free PDF Page A

. Well, there are no words. There are no words.
    Then she’d thank them for coming by, and bring back to the kitchen another casserole dish of broccoli-and-cheese bake, another strawberry-rhubarb pie, another Tupperware bowl of Cool Whip–rich fruit salad, another something neither of us would eat, even though Grandma kept fixing us both heaping plates of the stuff and letting them pile on the coffee table, fat black houseflies buzzing over them, landing, landing, buzzing again.
    I waited to see what she’d haul to the kitchen this time, but Grandma didn’t seem to be getting rid of whoever was at the door. Their voices in the entryway mixed with the voices on TV—Grandma saying accident , Cagney saying double homicide , the other voice in the entryway saying Where is she —I let them blend, didn’t try to sort them out. It was easier to pretend that it was all from the TV. Cagney was telling some detective that Lacey had “a black belt in karate-mouth” right as Aunt Ruth walked into the room.
    “Oh sweetheart,” she said. “You poor girl.”
    Ruth was a stewardess for Winner’s Airlines. She served on 757s that did daily Orlando-to-Vegas trips for retirees looking to strike it rich. I’d never seen her before in her uniform, but her normal clothes were always so put together, so Ruth. This person crying in the doorway and calling me poor girl looked like a clown made up like Sad Ruth. The skirt and shirt of her uniform—which were the exact same shade of green as the felt of a casino card table—were travel rumpled and creased. She had a brooch on her lapel that looked like a spread of poker chips, with WINNER’S in shiny gold across the arch, but it was pinned crooked. Her blond curls were messy and squashed on one side, her eyes pink and the skin around them puffed up like mascara-stained marshmallows.
    I didn’t really know Aunt Ruth, not like I knew Grandma Post. We saw each other usually just once a year, maybe twice, and it was always fine, nice enough: She’d give me clothes I probably wouldn’t end up wearing; she’d tell us funny stories about unruly passengers. She was just my mom’s sister who lived in Florida and who had fairly recently been born again , something I understood only vaguely as a reference to the particular way she practiced Christianity, and something my parents rolled their eyes at when they spoke of—but not in front of her, of course. She was more a stranger to me than Mrs. Klauson, but we were related, and here she was, and I was glad, I think. I think I was glad to see her. Or at least it felt, just then, like it was the right thing, the correct thing to have happen, for her to walk into the room.
    She wrapped up both me and part of the chair I was in in a tight hug that filled my lungs with Chanel No. 5. Ruth had always, always since I could remember her, smelled like Chanel No. 5. In fact I only knew of that perfume, its name and spicy scent, because of Ruth.
    “I’m so sorry, Cammie,” she whispered, her tears wet on my face and neck.
    I’d always hated when she called me Cammie, but it didn’t feel okay hating her for it right then.
    “You poor thing. You poor, sweet girl. We just have to trust God in this. We have to trust him, Cammie, and ask him to help us make sense. There’s nothing else to do. That’s what we’ll do. That’s all we can do right now.” She told me this over and over and over, and I tried to hug her back, but I couldn’t match her tears, and I couldn’t believe her. Not one word. She had no idea how guilty I was.
    After Mr. Klauson knocked on Irene’s bedroom door and ended my final sleepover with his daughter, telling me, as he scooped up my bag and my pillow, that I needed to go home, and then taking my hand and walking me out of the house, past Mrs. Klauson as she stood crying over the brown kitchen stove, and away from Irene’s unanswered shouts of Why does she have to go? But why, Dad? —I knew that all of this meant