The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

I think about him on the other side of that door all the time, even now. How I still had parents before that knock, and how I didn’t after. Mr. Klauson knew that too; how he had to lift his calloused hand and take them away from me at eleven p.m. one hot night at the end of June—summer vacation, root beer and stolen bubble gum, stolen kisses—the very good life for a twelve-year-old, when I still had mostly everything figured out, and the stuff I didn’t know seemed like it would come easy enough if I could just wait for it, and anyway there’d always be Irene with me, waiting too.

Seeing her there in the doorway with that green can, her pink eyes, the hem of her nightgown peeking from beneath her housecoat, Grandma stooped over with a yellow rag, sprinkling out the cleanser, that chemical-mint smell puffing around us, her son dead and her daughter-in-law dead and her only grandchild a now-orphaned shoplifter, a girl who kissed girls, and she didn’t even know, and now she was cleaning up my vomit, feeling even worse because of me: That’s what made me cry.

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—even if it was just some dumb movie that wasn’t really official at all.

“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.

A relationship with a higher power is often best practiced alone. For me it was practiced in hour-and-a-half or two-hour increments, and paused when necessary. I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that my religion of choice became VHS rentals, and that its messages came in Technicolor and musical montages and fades and jump cuts and silver-screen legends and B-movie nobodies and villains to root for and good guys to hate. But Ruth was wrong, too. There was more than just one other world beyond ours; there were hundreds and hundreds of them, and at 99 cents apiece I could rent them all.

I tried to like him because he let me rent the R-rated videos and because sometimes he’d offer me a free pop from the cooler up front, but I didn’t like that he knew every movie I took out of that store, watching me, watching me pick them up and bring them back. It felt like in knowing that, he knew more about me than anyone else right then, definitely more than Nancy the counselor, and more than Aunt Ruth, too.

What they were doing was what they did all the time when we were together. It was some sort of freedom guys allowed themselves around each other, and I envied every moment of it. It was something louder, and harder, than anything I’d ever been part of with a group of girls. Not that I was really a part of it with these guys. It all seemed to come so easily to them, and I could only get so close to any of that.

We were scooched together in one of those red vinyl booths and were both in shorts, the seats icy on our sun-hot legs. Our bare arms touched as we ate, our thighs, and it felt like heat lighting, it felt like a quick brush against the electric fence at Klauson’s Ranch, like the promise of something more.

But even though it did make me feel less guilty, for just a moment, not entirely to blame, I knew that I wasn’t hiding anything from God, if there was one. How could I pretend to be a victim when I was so willing to sin?

So I did, and the flash lit up our stall and now there was photographic evidence of me with a girl. Lindsey packed the camera in her duffel while I contemplated the film inside it, how it was pregnant with our secret, its birth inevitable.

My mom was never, as I remembered her, patient. Just the opposite, really. Seeing Ruth there, alone under the tarp, waiting, just sort of staring out at the bustle on the deck, made me feel really sad for her. How she’d taken me to all these meets, every weekend, all summer long, and how I had nothing much to say to her, ever, and when I did it was never the truth.

Irene’s parents used to have a big freezer in their basement stocked full of Schwan’s stuff: pizzas and egg rolls and chicken nuggets, ice-crystaled foods, hard and blue white, frozen in time, waiting for you to unwrap them from their plastic sheaths and toss them into the oven, make them real again.

True to her word, even before midterms Lindsey had already sent me maybe twenty handwritten notebook pages filled with her observations and current love interests, always in sparkly pen, as well as a busted-up copy of Rubyfruit Jungle, a couple of random issues of The Advocate, and maybe a dozen mix tapes with each song written in a different color on the cardboard liner inside. Everything but the tapes I hid under my mattress, which is what I knew that teenage boys, including Jamie, did with their porn-mag stashes. The tapes I wore threadbare on my Walkman during cross-country practices.

but I was just happy to get to run to whatever Lindsey had mixed up for me: sometimes Prince and R.E.M., sometimes 4 Non Blondes and Bikini Kill, sometimes Salt-N-Pepa and A Tribe Called Quest.

Both of them somewhere around five ten, both of them slim but not skinny, and both of them in turtleneck sweaters—Coley’s black, her mom’s red. It was at a time when Cindy Crawford was still cover-modeling and making workout videos and hosting that lame style show on MTV, but that morning in the fellowship hall I would have given Coley the edge over the supermodel with the famous mole. I had moved on to fanning out the paper napkins (which was a joke, because Ruth redid practically every little half-pinwheel that I made) by the time Coley noticed me. Or by the time I noticed her noticing me. She was standing just slightly behind her mom and strobed me a huge smile right before this old ranch-hand bachelor grizzled his way in on her for a kiss on her cheek. When he moved on to her mom and I could just see her face beyond his flanneled reach, she winked at me. A wink coming from anyone else, like that ranch hand or one of the community-college boys who hovered around and took the leftover doughnuts to their dorms, would have been predictable and annoying—something you did to the orphaned tomboy. But the way Coley did it made me feel like we already had some sort of secret between us.

I was doing my little stand-up shtick, the one I did for pretty girls, so they’d like me quickly and wouldn’t try too hard to actually get to know me beyond my role as wisecracking Cameron the orphan. Maybe it was a little like flirting, but also a kind of protection: Don’t get too close; I’m just jokes without substance.

Because we’d been presented with this opportunity literally minutes before, I knew exactly what Coley was talking about with her you’re coming, Cam, but I pretended not to so she’d have to work even harder to convince me. I liked the feeling I got when she needed something from me.

Coley pushed the locker door open wider and stepped around it, helping herself to the pack of Bubblicious I had on the top shelf and, as she was doing it, brushing up against me in a way that she didn’t even notice and in a way that made me notice nothing else.

If this had been the movie version of my life, I knew, somebody who did teenage stuff well, some director, would have lingered on that poster and maybe even have swelled some sort of poignant music, put us in slow motion as the hallway continued on at regular speed around us, backlit the three of us—Coley and the posterboard chick and me—and in doing so tried to make some statement about teenage frivolity and prom season as it stacked up against something authentic and horrible like war. But if renting all those movies had taught me anything more than how to lose myself in them, it was that you only actually have perfectly profound little moments like that in real life if you recognize them yourself, do all the fancy shot work and editing in your head, usually in the very seconds that whatever is happening is happening. And even if you do manage to do so, just about never does anyone else you’re with at the time experience that exact same kind of moment, and it’s impossible to explain it as it’s happening, and then the moment is over.

Jamie’s mouth was too busy, but he wasn’t exactly a bad kisser. We kept at it long enough for the smoking section to give us a hoot and a whistle, and then I pulled back, not because it wasn’t interesting kissing Jamie—it was, sort of like a fucked-up science experiment, and it was kind of nice, even, somehow—but because there we were on the school steps at prom and I liked to do my experimenting behind closed doors, and now Jamie’s hands were behind me, one on my back, one on my head, and he was gaining momentum and I wasn’t.

and there I was sending the wrong signals to the right people in the wrong ways. Again, again, again.

I remembered the feel of Lindsey, and I imagined what this might be like with Coley. For a few minutes I went with it, both in the moment and not at all, trying to match Jamie’s intensity while pretending I wasn’t with him. But I couldn’t keep it up, and a police siren went by, and the clouds shifted, and Jamie’s increased breathing pulled me back to that roof, and I had to get out of there.

She wasn’t only the youngest; from where I stood she was by far the prettiest in her tight black tank top with one of her brother’s stiff, white pearl-buttoned shirts tied over it and a sort of beat-up straw cowboy hat, her perfect hair ponytailed for once, two of them, actually. She was sipping a Coke through a red-and-white straw and smiling her big smile at some cowboy stopped at the table. He had his thumb hooked in his belt buckle and was wearing a google-eyed look like a guy shot by Cupid on a crappy drugstore valentine. I knew that look. I’d worn that look.

“The good thing about it happening tonight is that it’s Bucking Horse,” Coley said, taking my arm and walking us out of there. “We can find you a cowboy in no time. Or two cowboys. Twelve cowboys.” And I wanted so much to say “Or how about a cowgirl?” Just say it, right then, in the moment, put it out there and let it stay and make Coley deal with it. But of course I didn’t. No way.

We drank from our big plastic bottle. She’d rewound to the first song on side B, “The Waiting,” which was our mutual favorite. She sang one line. Oh baby don’t it feel like heaven right now? I sang the next. Don’t it feel like something from a dream?

“Yes you are,” she said, and then in a move I never could have guessed, she sat down on my hips, me pinned beneath her like when we were wrestling, but this was something much bigger. “You finally kissed me,” she said. “I thought you wanted me to.” Coley didn’t say anything to that. I waited for her to, but she didn’t. “It doesn’t have to be a big deal,” I said. “It can just be one more stupid thing the two of us tried together.” Coley kept on sitting where my hip bones jutted out, all of her weight on me, and having her there was maddening; I wanted to pull her down on top of me. But she still didn’t say anything. So I waited, and I panicked, and I listened to Tom Petty singing from the cab of the truck, and I thought about Lindsey and how she had warned me about this exact stupid thing, and how I just couldn’t help myself.

“So you kissed her, she rocked your world, leave it be,” Lindsey told me when I phone-spilled most of the details, including my stuck-boot fall. “It’s like one of many, many such kisses in your future, but for her it’s the thing she’ll obsess over after she gets the two point five kids and the mortgage. She’ll ask herself as she’s trying to sleep at night: Why didn’t I make it with that chick when I had the chance?”

So I told Lindsey that I’d try and make Alaska happen, and then I didn’t try at all. Now I sometimes wonder how things might have turned out differently if I’d not made that decision, but you don’t really get anywhere when you think too much about stuff like that.

For those first Brett-free weeks, Coley and I were careful never to be underneath the dock together without at least one other person along. Even though we’d started hanging out again, just the two of us, the weight of what had happened at Coley’s ranch and the inescapably sexual world below those docks made both of us nervous. After the lake we’d throw my bike in the back of Coley’s truck and head over to Taco John’s to score free Choco Tacos and nachos off of Jamie, or maybe we’d go to my house and take long, separate (of course) showers, eat whatever Ruth had cooked up, watch some TV, though even there we worked hard not to find ourselves alone in my bedroom for any reason, at least not without the door wide open. There was a steady crackle that buzzed between us during those early-summer days, like a radio set between station signals, the volume low, and neither of us said a thing about it. But it was there.

I think Coley got pretty good at convincing herself that what the two of us were doing with each other night after night after hot, still, big-sky Montana night was just some bound-to-happen-in-college-experimentation thing come early. And I tried hard not to let on that I knew otherwise, or at least desperately hoped for otherwise.

We’d go to the very last row, up against the wall, the projection booth above our heads, center if we could get it, but if it was taken there were these cool, old-fashioned booth things on either wing of the aisles, though sometimes there’d be a creepy guy flying solo in one of them. My dad had told me that the theater hadn’t changed much since he was a kid, and it sure hadn’t changed any since my first memories of it: burgundy carpeting, big orange and pink light sconces that I knew were art deco because my mom liked to go on about them, and behind the snack bar and down just a couple of stairs, a lounge area with stained velvet couches and the entrances to these amazing pink-and-green-tiled bathrooms, one on either side. The doors to the bathrooms said GENTS and DAMES in thin gold letters.

And what made it all the worse was that we didn’t really discuss this thing we were doing, not in any detail. We just went to the movies and did what we could when we could, and then I tried my best to leave it all there, in the theater, gone with the roll of the credits, until we could do it again the next night. But while I was muddling through my days and waiting for those nights to come, a bunch of big things happened in rapid succession, or maybe they seemed small at first but turned out otherwise.

Lindsey once tried to explain to me this primordial connection, she said, that all lesbians have with vampire narratives; something to do with the gothic novella Carmilla and the sexual and psychological impotence of men when facing the dark power of lesbian seduction.

And even though it was just some artsy vampire movie with David Bowie and two, to my knowledge, non-lesbian-in-real-life actresses, that single moment, the shoulder touch, the way they met eyes, it seemed completely true to me, and way more powerful or erotic or whatever than the sex itself. Maybe that’s because the first time I watched The Hunger I’d actually had a moment like that, but none of the “sex itself.”

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. I didn’t know what the hell to do with a foot in my lap, anyway. I’d seen a movie with toe sucking, but that seemed entirely out of my range of ability and also fairly unappealing, as nice as Coley’s toes were, not to mention that such a move would be a gargantuan leap from whatever it was we were doing at the moment.

I could have spent hours just tracing my lips over her perfect skin, feeling the way certain bones made ridges and valleys, smelling her tangerine lotion, the small noises she made when I found certain, unexpectedly pleasurable areas: just below her armpit, these tiny soft hairs at the back of her neck, her collar bone, which jutted out like the thin metal rod and spokes of an umbrella’s undercarriage, her heartbeat steady and fast there.

But I didn’t know what to do in the aftermath, where to put my body, what to say. I felt like maybe there were things to be said, the right things, but I didn’t know how to put those words together. Instead, I stayed where I was, rested my head on her stomach: it felt and sounded like her heart had somehow slid down into it, each beat pulsing loud and superfast in my ear.

“It has to have been something like this,” she said. “It wasn’t.” “Why not?” Now I breathed in deep, let it out. “C’mon, Coley,” I said. “You already know why.” “No I don’t.” I said this next part with my face turned into my shoulder, looking away from her. “Because I’ve been in love with you since forever.” “I didn’t know that,” she said. “Yes you did.” “I did not,” she said, turning away from me and onto her side. I couldn’t tell if maybe she was crying or about to cry.

“Sounds about right,” he said, squeezing her again and laughing a big drunken laugh. Coley laughed too, and even though it was her fake laugh, just watching her flirt—flirt in the exact same way that I had seen her do so many times before and had found charming maybe, or cute—so soon after the bedroom, after our nakedness, our quiet intensity, after the feel of her beneath me, on top of me, was pretty much unbearable.

And I thought if I opened my mouth to say something back I might shout at her like a crazy person; just shout or cry or even kiss her, something big and dramatic and something I wouldn’t be able to keep hold of once I’d started doing it. So I said nothing.

Coley slapped my hand away like you would an ant, or something even worse, something that didn’t belong on your skin at all, ever. “What are you doing?” She didn’t even really whisper the words but mouthed them big and ugly so that I couldn’t mistake them.