Free The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth

things in Miles City. None of us would have even said fall term at all. Well, not before this.
    The next weekend Irene had me out to the ranch. She was leaving that coming Monday. It was incredibly warm for Montana in November, even early November—just freezing at night but midsixties during the day. We walked side by side without coats on. I tried to breathe in that ranch smell of pine and earth, but it wasn’t anymore the place it had once been to me. There were white tents set up everywhere, a circus of scientists and also some earthy, dirty, long-haired types picking in giant trenches, treating the dirt as if it was fragile, like it wasn’t the same dirt Irene and I used to kick at, spit on, pee on behind the barn.
    Now Irene talked like the movies too. “They’ve never found a hadrosaur in this area before,” she said. “Not one this complete.”
    “Wow,” I said. I wanted to tell her that I had thought a lot about that ride on the Ferris wheel. I wanted to tell her that maybe I was wrong about what I had said to her that night. I didn’t do it, though.
    “My parents are building a visitors’ center and museum. And a gift shop.” She actually swept her hand out over the land. “Can you believe that? They might even name something after me.”
    “The Ireneosaur?” I asked.
    She rolled her eyes. “They’ll make it sound more professional than that. You don’t really understand any of this.”
    “My mom ran a museum,” I said. “I get it.”
    “It’s not the same thing,” she said. “That’s a local history museum that’s been around forever. This is a brand-new thing. Don’t try to make it the same.” She turned away from me and walked fast in the direction of the barn.
    I thought that maybe she would lead me up to the hayloft. And if she had started up that ladder, I would have followed. But she didn’t. She stopped just outside the entrance. There were tables set up there, and they were covered with various clumps of that rust-colored mud so greasy it’s mostly just clay, and poking from some of those clumps were the fossils. Irene pretended to examine them closely, but I could tell that’s all it was—pretending.
    “Do you know who your roommate is yet?” I asked.
    “Alison Caldwell,” Irene said, her head all leaned down over some specimen. “She’s from Boston,” she added with that new tone of hers.
    I tried on my best Henry Higgins. “Oh, the Boston Caldwells. Good show, old girl.”
    Irene smiled, and for half a second she seemed to forget how important she was supposed to be now. “I’m just glad I know how to ride. At least I know I can ride as well as any of them.”
    “Probably better,” I said. I meant it.
    “Different, though—western, not English.” She turned from the fossils completely, grinned right at me. “They have scholarships to Maybrook, you know. You could apply for one for next fall. I bet you’d get it, because of—” Irene let what she was gonna say drop off.
    “Because of my dead parents,” I said, a little meaner than I felt.
    Irene took a step toward me, put her hand on my arm, a little of that greasy mud smearing my shirt. “Yeah, but not only. Also because you’re smart as hell and you live way out in the middle of nowhere Montana.”
    “Way out in the middle of nowhere Montana is where I’m from, Irene. You too.”
    “There’s no rule that says you have to stay in the place that you’re born,” she said. “It’s not like it makes you a bad person if you want to try something new.”
    “I know that,” I said, and I tried to picture me cropped into one of those glossy brochure photos, me on a green lawn recently covered in an Oriental carpet of fall leaves, me in my pajamas reading one of those leather-bound books in the common room. But all I could see were versions of those pictures with both of us in them, the two of us, Irene and me, together in the boathouse, in the chapel, on a flannel blanket on that thick lawn, as