Read The Miseducation of Cameron Post for Free Online Page B

like,” she said. “You come see me. I’ll be here all summer.”
    I couldn’t let her do this thing for me. It made me twist up inside. “I’ll just leave this and then rent more later,” I mumbled, my head down, putting the ten on the counter and walking as quickly as I could, without technically running, to the door.
    “Cameron, this is too much,” she called after me, but then I was out of the store, back on the sidewalk, free from her generosity or pity or kindness, all of it.
    Aunt Ruth was waiting for me in my room, her back to the door, new clothes, funeral wear, hung crisp from cheap hangers, in either hand. She was just standing and staring at my new entertainment center and didn’t turn when I first came in. I shoved the movie into the waistband of my shorts, just above my butt. I blushed even as I did it, a flash of the bubble gum, Irene.
    “I do already own clothes, you know,” I said.
    She turned, did a tired smile. “I didn’t know what to get you, hon, and you didn’t want to come with me. I just brought you a few choices from Penney’s. We can take back whatever you don’t end up wearing. I just hope it all fits—I had to guess.” She put everything on my bed, gently, like laying a baby down to change her diaper.
    “Thanks,” I said, because I knew that I should. “I’ll try them on tonight, when it’s cooler.” I didn’t look at her. I focused, instead, on the navy dress, the black skirt and top, the clothes now on my bed that looked nothing like any clothes that had ever been on my bed before, at least not since I could dress myself.
    “It must have been hard work getting this thing up here,” she said, patting the TV like she sometimes did me. “I would have been happy to help you.”
    “I got it okay,” I said, “but thanks, though.” I kept my back pressed up against the open door.
    “You doing okay, kiddo?” she asked me, stepping closer, the requisite arm around me, her signature hug. “Do you want to pray with me a little, maybe? Or I could read you some passages that I’ve been thinking about a lot. They might give you a little peace.”
    “I just want to be alone right now,” I told her. If I could have, I’d’ve recorded that line on one of those handheld machines with the minitapes and then worn the whole thing on a chain around my neck, just hit Play maybe eight or nine times a day.
    “Okay, sweetie. I can sure help you with that. We’ll talk when you’re ready, whenever you are; it doesn’t matter when—I’ll be here.” She kissed my cheek and was two stairs down when she turned back. “You know you can talk to God best alone anyway. You can just close your eyes and be with him, Cammie—ask him anything you want.”
    I nodded, but only because she seemed to be waiting for me to say something.
    “There’s a whole world beyond this one,” she said. “And sometimes it helps even just to remember that. It helps me a lot.”
    I stayed with my back to the door until she was well down the stairs. I was afraid she’d see the outline of the movie, or that it might slip from my waistband and clatter hard on the wide planks of the floor. I didn’t want to have to explain anything about Beaches to her. I wasn’t sure it made sense even to me.
    I shut the door to my room and put the tape in the VCR and settled back on my bed, right on top of the new clothes. My twelve-year-old mother grinned down at me from another world, one beneath the shady pines and cedars, one where she was giddily unaware that she was just hours away from escaping a tragedy—and a lifetime away from a day that tragedy would find her anyway.
    The navy dress was bunched weird beneath my neck. I shifted, shifted again. I couldn’t get comfortable. I kept hearing Ruth’s advice about talking to God. I didn’t want to hear it but I did. It wasn’t like I’d never prayed before, I had: at the Presbyterian church sometimes, and when my goldfish, four of them, had died—one after