Free The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth Page B

teens.”
    As far as I knew, everybody I “hung out with” was a Christian teen, and even if some of them maybe weren’t so convinced, not a one of them was talking about their doubts. I knew what Ruth was getting at, though; she wanted me to hang around with the kids who carried their Bibles class to class. She wanted me to wear the T-shirts of Christian rock bands and to go to the summer camps, the rallies, to talk the talk and walk the walk.
    She was kneeling on the hardwood in the living room, plucking pine needles one after another from the tree skirt, an antique lace one that my mother had loved. She was putting each one she retrieved with her right hand into the cup of her left hand, like picking blueberries. Her blond curls—she’d taken to spending a lot of time in the mornings smoothing a special cream into them and then blow-drying them just so—hung in front of her face as she did this, making her look young, cherubic even.
    “Why are you doing that?” I asked her. “We always just take the tree skirt outside and shake it.”
    Ruth ignored my question and kept plucking. “You must know lots of kids from school who go there, don’t you, Cammie?”
    Now I ignored her question. The real, live, bought-from-the-VFW-booth Christmas tree was a concession of Ruth’s. My mother had been a big proponent of live Christmas trees. Every year she’d put up several at the Tongue River Museum, themed, of course, and we always had one at home, too. We used to go get them all in one trip, just the two of us, load them up into the back of my dad’s pickup, and then maybe stop off at Kip’s Minute Mart for ice cream. My mother had also been a big proponent of winter ice-cream cones.
    “Well, we don’t have to worry about these melting,” she used to say, holding a cone in her elegant, leather-gloved hand, her breath visible in the air even as she took a bite.
    The question of Christmas trees had come up at Thanksgiving. Ruth mentioned that she had been eyeing some very nice synthetic trees in a couple of the advertising inserts in the paper, and I had thrown a little fit at the table, Grandma backing me up the whole time . It’s her first year without them, Ruth. Let her keep her traditions. And she had let me keep those traditions. She had gone out of her way, in fact, to ask me about the exact recipes I wanted for Christmas dinner, and where to hang certain decorations, and we’d gone together to the downtown Christmas Stroll. She’d baked batch after batch of sugar cookies and peanut-butter blossoms, and Ruth really had done everything that was supposed to be Christmasy even more perfectly than my parents had ever quite managed. And instead of making me feel better, Ruth’s perfect imitation of a Post Family Christmas had just made me feel worse.
    I’d been cranky , Grandma said, for weeks, and now Ruth’s continued plucking made me grit my teeth. “It’s just gonna spill more needles when we try to take it out of here, Ruth,” I said. Sometime that December I had started dropping the “Aunt” out of her name, mostly because I knew that it annoyed her. “It’s stupid to try to pick them up by hand. That’s what they invented vacuum cleaners for.”
    This stopped her. She sat back on her feet and brushed her hair to one side with her non-needled hand. “Maybe that’s what they invented artificial trees for,” she said in that crispy-sweet voice she was so good at. “Which is why we’ll be getting one next year.” It was near impossible to get her to go beyond that hard-edged sweetness, but that didn’t stop me from trying.
    “Whatever,” I said, flopping on the couch next to Grandma and purposefully knocking a box of lights and tinsel off the corner of the coffee table with my foot. “Let’s just not get one at all. Why don’t we just skip Christmas altogether?”
    Grandma put her hand inside the magazine, marking the page she was reading, and swatted my arm with it, hard, a definite