Read The Miseducation of Cameron Post for Free Online

and again until I was dizzy with it. I traced my finger over and over the ballpoint I love you , and the whole time I felt ashamed, some sicko who just couldn’t stop, even after her parents died. I buried that card deep beneath a pile of already-spoiled death casseroles in the metal trash can in the alley. I burned my thumb just taking the lid off, the whole can oven hot and reeking. That act of burial felt good, like it meant something, but by that point I had memorized every word she had written me anyway.
    Grandma and Ruth were out getting things done that needed to be done, going to the funeral parlor, the church. They’d asked me if I’d wanted to go with them, but I’d said no, though I did spend the rest of that afternoon making my own kinds of funeral arrangements. First I hauled the TV and VCR from my parents’ bedroom, where Ruth had been sleeping, up the steep stairs to my own. I hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to do this. Who was gonna tell me no, or yes, even? It was hard work, moving that TV, more activity than I’d done for days, and I almost dropped the thing once, my sweaty fingers slipping on its film of dust, its sharp edges poking into my stomach, into my hip bones, while I steadied it against myself, staggered up another stair, rested, then did another.
    Once I’d situated the TV and VCR on top of my dresser and got everything wired together, plugged in, I went back to my parents’ bedroom and straight to the bottom drawer of the dresser, where Dad kept neat rows of white cotton briefs and black socks with gold toes. He had a roll of tens and twenties hidden in the back, and I took it; and even though I was alone in the house, I stuck it in the waistband of my shorts, to hide it. And then I took one more thing. An important thing. A photograph housed in a pewter frame and sitting on their dresser top, which was cluttered mostly with snapshots of me.
    In the picture my mother is twelve, her hair a stylish pageboy, her smile wide and toothy, her knees knobby in shorts, and she is surrounded by trees, the sunlight filtered around her just so, lighting her up. I’d known the story of that photo for as long as I’d known that photo. Grandpa Wynton snapped it August 17th of 1959, and in less than twenty-four hours the place where it was taken, Rock Creek Campground, would be torn apart by the worst earthquake in Montana history, and then that place would be flooded by water sloshing over an upriver dam, and it would become Quake Lake.
    I put the picture right on top of the TV, so I couldn’t miss it. Then I put all that cash into the hollowed-out base of the high-point trophy I’d won at the divisional meet the summer before. All that cash except for one ten, which I stuck in the inside band of a sweat-stained Miles City Mavericks cap I’d had forever. Dad and I had liked to go to their ball games together and eat Polish sausages and laugh at the old guys who swore at the umps. That cap in my hand, its rim of crusty salt stain against the dark-blue background, made me almost lose it for a second, but I didn’t let myself. I squashed it down over my dirty hair, and then I was off.
    Save my burial at the trash can, I hadn’t been outside since the night Mr. Klauson had driven me home. The glare of the sun felt good, even while it was almost immediately uncomfortable. I felt like I deserved it. My bike had been leaned up against the garage for days in that sun bake, and the metal scorched my legs when they brushed against it. I pedaled as fast as I could, let the sweat from my forehead sting my eyes, blur my vision for a few seconds. I took the alleys and concentrated on the sound of my tires over the loose gravel, on the whir of the gear chain. I came out onto Haynes Avenue and pulled into the parking lot of the Video ’n’ Go.
    It was July 2, and there was a swarm of cars and bicycles in front of the Golden Dragon fireworks stand in the corner of the lot. The Elks club ran that stand, and