The Miseducation of Cameron Post Read Online Free PDF Page B

lake.
    Grandma came to help me to bed and I wouldn’t budge.
    “Oh honey-girl,” she said when she saw the mess in the sink. “You need to get into bed now, sweetheart. You’ll feel better if you do. I’ll get you some water.”
    I wouldn’t answer her back and I stayed completely still, willing her to just leave me alone. She left but came back with a glass of water, which she set on the floor next to me because I wouldn’t take it from her. Then she left again and this time returned with a can of Comet, a rag. After all that had happened Grandma was going to clean the sink, clean up after me, another mess, and it was this moment that somehow made what she had told me take hold. Seeing her there in the doorway with that green can, her pink eyes, the hem of her nightgown peeking from beneath her housecoat, Grandma stooped over with a yellow rag, sprinkling out the cleanser, that chemical-mint smell puffing around us, her son dead and her daughter-in-law dead and her only grandchild a now-orphaned shoplifter, a girl who kissed girls, and she didn’t even know, and now she was cleaning up my vomit, feeling even worse because of me: That’s what made me cry.
    And when she heard me crying, finally saw me with actual tears, she got down on the floor, which was painful for her, I knew, her bad knees, and held my head in her lap and cried with me, stroked my hair, and I was too weak to tell her that I didn’t deserve any of it.
    In the days before the funeral, Irene stopped by the house with her mom, and she called to speak with me a few times after that, and all those times I asked Aunt Ruth to tell Irene that I was napping. People kept sending me all sorts of things, so I knew that even if I ignored her, it was only a matter of time before she sent me something too. It came the same day the swim team sent a big bouquet of sunflowers, a box of cookies, and a card that everyone signed. Coach Ted must have passed it around right after practice, because there were all these water spots where wet swimmers had handled it, smudged the ink. Most of the kids just signed their names. Some wrote I’m sorry . I wondered what I would have signed if I’d just been one of those wet swimmers, practice over, my towel around my waist, chewing on a granola bar and waiting for my turn to sign the card for the teammate who’d lost both of her parents. I decided I’d probably have been one of the ones who just signed her name too.
    Aunt Ruth had been putting everything on the dining-room table, but even with both of the extra leaves in, we were running out of room, and she started just setting stuff anywhere there was free space. The whole of the main floor smelled like a flower shop, and with the heat, the shades drawn on all the windows, that scent of roses and irises and carnations and on and on was almost cloudy, like a gas. It made me hold my breath. I found the bouquet of pink baby roses and an envelope with Cam written on it over on the oak buffet my dad had refinished. I could tell they were from Irene without even opening the card. I just could. So I peeled the card from the vase, took it up to my room. Alone on my bed with the door shut, the thick heat all around me, the card on my lap weighing almost nothing but seeming full of weight, I felt as criminal as I would have had it been Irene herself there with me.
    The card had a night sky on the outside, dozens of stars spread across it, and on the inside something about stars being like memories in the darkness of sorrow . I knew right away that her mom had picked it out. But below that was Irene’s cramped cursive, and she had written:
    Cam, I wish you would have seen me or answered the phone when I called. I wish I could just talk to you and not write in this card. I wish I didn’t even have a reason to send this card at all. I’m sorry and I love you.
    She didn’t sign her name, but I liked that.
    I felt flushed when I read what she’d written, and then I read it again