The Miseducation of Cameron Post Read Online Free PDF

something probably more terrible than anything had ever been in my life, ever.
    At first I thought that Grandma had fallen, or that maybe they’d found out about the shoplifting. But then, as he drove me, still in my pajamas, the forty miles back to my house, the whole trip telling me nothing more than that my grandma needed to speak with me and that I needed to be there with her, I convinced myself beyond a doubt that Irene and I were found out.
    It was Mr. Klauson’s silence during that endless trip, silence filled only with the thick roll of tires over cracked highway and his occasional sighs in my direction, plus the way he shook his head to himself, that convinced me: He was disgusted with me, with what he somehow knew that Irene and I had done, and he didn’t want me in his house for one more second. I sat all the way against the hard door of his truck, trying to will myself into something small and distant from him. I wondered what Grandma would say to me, what my parents would say when they got home. Maybe they’d come home early. Some park ranger had tracked them down to tell them about their weirdo daughter. I tried out various scenes in my head, none of them good. It was only a couple of kisses, I would tell them. We were just practicing on each other. We were just goofing around .
    So when Grandma met us on the front steps in her purple housecoat, and hugged a stiff Mr. Klauson beneath the orange glow of the porch light, the millers swooping around their awkward embrace, and then sat me on the couch, and gave me the mug of now lukewarm, too-sweet tea she had been drinking, and wrapped my hands in hers and told me that she was just sitting down to watch TV when the doorbell rang, and it was a state trooper, and there had been an accident, and Mom and Dad, my mom and dad, had died, the first thing I thought, the very first thing, was: She doesn’t know about Irene and me at all. Nobody knows . And even right after she said it, and I guess I knew then that my parents were gone, or at least I had to have heard her, it still didn’t register right. I mean, I had to have known this big thing, this massive news about my whole entire world, but I just kept thinking, Mom and Dad don’t know about us. They don’t know, so we’re safe —even though there was no more Mom and Dad to know about anything.
    I had been bracing myself that whole pickup ride to hear how ashamed Grandma was of me, and instead she was crying, and I’d never seen Grandma Post cry like this, I’d never seen anyone cry like this. And she was making no sense, talking about some far-off car accident, and a news broadcast, and my dead parents, and calling me a brave girl and stroking my hair and hugging me to her soft chest, her talcum powder and Aqua Net smell. I felt a wave of heat prickle across me, and then the nausea, all-consuming, as if I was taking it in with every breath, like my body was reacting since my head wasn’t doing it right. How, if my parents were dead, could there still be some part of me that felt relief at not being found out?
    Grandma clutched me tighter, heaving with sobs, and I had to turn my head away from her sweet smell, the smother of that flannel housecoat, and pull myself out of her reach, run with my hand over my mouth to the bathroom, and even then there was no time to lift the lid on the toilet. I threw up into the sink, onto the counter, and then slid down to the floor, let the blue and white tiles cool my cheeks.
    I didn’t know it then, but the sickness, the prickly flush of heat, and the feeling of swimming in a kind of blackness I couldn’t have ever imagined, all the things I had done since I’d last seen my parents bobbing around me, lit up against the dark—the kisses, the gum, Irene, Irene, Irene—all of that was guilt: real, crushing guilt. From that tile floor I let myself sink down into it, down and down until my lungs burned, like when I was in the deep wells beneath the diving boards at the