The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

even though no one had ever told me, specifically, not to kiss a girl before, nobody had to. It was guys and girls who kissed—in our grade, on TV, in the movies, in the world; and that’s how it worked: guys and girls. Anything else was something weird.

I felt like I needed something official to show me how all of this should feel, how I should be acting, what I should be saying—

But all those times, no matter what the occasion, it had eventually ended up feeling sort of phony, like I was playing at a relationship with God, just like any little kid playing house or grocery store or anything else, but not like it was real. I knew that this is where the faith part was supposed to come in, and that faith, real faith, that’s what was supposed to keep the whole thing from just being make-believe. But I didn’t have any of that faith, and I didn’t know where to get it, how to get it, or even if I wanted it right then.

Being a true believer meant helping others, lots of others, to believe just like me. To be an agent of God for evangelizing the world. Rather than convincing me of the righteousness of this kind of believing, rather than making me certain of its correctness, it made me question, and doubt, all the more.

I don’t remember our group-discussion concerns from that first meeting—maybe Christian Teens and Anorexia, maybe Christian Teens and TV Watching; but no matter what the topic, from Acne to Dating, our Extreme Teen Bible had it covered.

She could have pulled her leg back after that, but she didn’t, and I pretended like having it there was just a slumber-party, girls-being-girls kind of thing.

Just gals being pals.

Erin would be a pleaser. I just knew it. She would be working hard, asking God to help her so that the grungy but holy men in that poster on our door might actually do it for her—goose bumps on her neck, a prickle across her chest. Praying to Jesus to help her want them the way she had that girl from her study hall, from her science lab.

One final embrace from Adam shrouded me briefly in a sweet, sticky smell that I struggled for a moment to identify, but only because of my surroundings. In the embrace’s release I caught the scent again. Unmistakable. Marijuana. These homos were high as kites.

Lydia sighed big. “Use your words,” she said. “Your big-person words.” I decided I hated her.

Cam, you and me both.

“I mean, it’s interesting to think of it this way. I haven’t ever really, before.” “To think of what?” Lydia asked. “Homosexuality,” I said. “There’s no such thing as homosexuality,” she said. “Homosexuality is a myth perpetuated by the so-called gay rights movement.” She spaced out each word of her next sentence. “There is no gay identity; it does not exist. Instead, there is only the same struggle with sinful desires and behaviors that we, as God’s children, each must contend with.”

“It’s just boiling and mashing from here on out.”

Boil 'em, mash 'em, stick 'em in a stew.

Even though I knew, both at the time and after, that Jane’s garbage-disposal show had been mostly a kind of magic trick, a big, shocking maneuver to keep me from drowning in the wake of Coley’s letter, it had sort of worked. I guess sometimes you can recognize that you’re being manipulated and still appreciate it, even respond to it.

I got a couple looks of flat-out disgust, sneers, people doing those big-movement side-to-side head shakes in my direction to perform their disapproval.

It made me sad when he told me he had to go, said that he missed my gay face.

Jamie being the true VIP and literally the only person in Cameron's corner. Idk how this girl has the strength, seriously.

When I was seven or eight, I was sort of obsessed with those sticky-hand things you could buy for twenty-five cents from the toy dispensers lined up just inside the automatic doors at grocery stores.

Cam being the most relatable.

The worst thing about the sticky hands was their propensity for collecting tiny fibers and hairs, dust, muck, and the difficulty of properly cleaning them after that happened. You couldn’t, really, ever quite get them clean again.

Legit.

The longer I stayed at Promise, the more all the stuff they were throwing at me, at us, started to stick, just like to those sticky hands, in little bits, at first, random pieces, no big deal.

Oh honey, no.

Your visit home at Christmas confirmed my fears that you are still very feminine and weak. I cannot have this weakness in my home.

Wtf.

I knew they were just doing what we always did, making a joke out of everything because it sucked to be here and we didn’t want any part of it and why not just laugh everything off because we obviously knew better than any of the assholes running the place, but this time—I don’t know, maybe because I’d actually been there and had seen Mark, had seen him lose his shit, had seen him sobbing with his face in the floor—the way we were treating what had happened made me even more annoyed, and I guess sort of angry, too.

It’s gonna take him some time to process.” That set me off. I hadn’t felt like I was ticking down to something, at least I didn’t think that’s what I was feeling. I had just felt sort of numb and baffled, but right after he said that thing about it taking Adam “some time to process,” I was like instantly enraged, just so fucking pissed at him, and at this stupid place, God’s Fucking Promise.

Finally!! This is the rage I've expected from Cam since the start of part 3.

“It’s completely fucked. But his dad doesn’t see it that way. He absolutely believes with everything in him that what he’s doing is the only way to save his son from eternal damnation. The fiery pits of hell. He believes that completely.” Adam kept sneering, near a shout now. “Yeah, well what about saving him from right now? What about the hell of thinking it’s best just to fucking chop your balls off than to have your body somehow betray your stupid fucking belief system?” “That’s never what it’s about to those people,” Jane said, still calm. “All that’s the price we’re supposed to pay for salvation. We’re supposed to be glad to pay it.”

“I would say that Rick and Lydia and everybody else associated with Promise think that they’re doing what’s best for us, like spiritually or whatever,” I said. “But just because you think something doesn’t make it true.” “Okaaaaay,” he said. “Can you go on?” “Not really,” I said, but then tried to anyway. “I’m just saying that sometimes you can end up really messing somebody up because the way you’re trying to supposedly help them is really messed up.”

“But isn’t there like emotional abuse?” I asked. “There is,” he said, completely noncommittal. “Do you feel that you’ve been emotionally abused by the staff here?” “Oh my God,” I said, throwing my hands in the air, feeling every bit as dramatic as I was acting. “I just told you all about it—the whole fucking purpose of this place is to make us hate ourselves so that we change. We’re supposed to hate who we are, despise it.”

But the thing was that her near-constant admonitions actually made me like her more. I think because witnessing her administration of ten zillion rules and codes of conduct, all of which she applied to her own life, made her seem fragile and weak, in need of the constant protection of all those rules, instead of the opposite, the way I know that she wanted to be seen, the way I’d seen her when I first arrived: powerful and all knowing.