The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

I felt like it could be that God had made this happen, had killed my parents, because I was living my life so wrong that I had to be punished, that I had to be made to understand how I must change, and that Ruth was right, that I had to change through God.

If Irene hadn’t connected those dots herself, then it wasn’t my place to do it for her, to explain that everybody knows how things happen for a reason, and that we had made a reason and bad, bad, unthinkable things had happened.

at the side of the bed to look at it all there, my plunder. It didn’t add up to much, just small things: an authentic Nixon campaign button from Mr. Hutton’s bulletin board; a thermometer magnet of praying Jesus from the fridge in the kitchen at GOP; a tiny glass frog from counselor Nancy Huntley’s desk; an aluminum ashtray from the bowling alley, the disposable kind, with bowl-n-fun on it in red; a Swiss Army knife keychain a kid in my World History class had hanging from his backpack; a beautiful all-color origami flower one of the Japanese exchange students had made; one of those cut-apart school portraits of a kid I had babysat for once or twice; and also that picture of Champagne Margot I’d grabbed while she was in das Bad; an airplane-size bottle of vodka that I’d found during Mom’s office cleanout; and finally, a pack of Bubblicious that I’d taken from Kip’s Minute Mart just because I was thinking of Irene.

The sun was white-bright outside after the dark cloister of those cement changing rooms, and while I tried to make sense of the hazy outlines in front of me, I squinted back a kind of shame—I hadn’t ever felt quite that way before.

Numb and numbness were in that twelve-page booklet seventeen times, so I set about making a numb shirt.

Somehow, even after what I’d just done, what we’d done, I felt ashamed, the guilty party.

I heard all of his words, I mean, I was right there and he was talking to me, but it was like he was telling some complicated, embarrassing story about somebody else.

It was just the place to hit me to make me feel weak and stupid and guilty, and most of all, afraid, because she was right: I didn’t know much at all about the people my parents had been.

I didn’t understand it, and I definitely didn’t want to emulate it, but I appreciated all the ways she thought she was working the program, that pink highlighter squeaking across one passage after another, hoping the very next one might do the trick, convince her once and for all that she wasn’t this wrong thing anymore.

“You can’t ship me away to get fixed and then show me off as your dressed-up niece starring in the role of Maid of Honor.”

“Nobody ever leaves because they’re all better.

“I just told you all about it—the whole fucking purpose of this place is to make us hate ourselves so that we change.

You’ve so convinced yourself that God was punishing you for your sins with Irene that you’re blind to any other assessment, and because of that your parents are no longer people to you; they’re simply figures that were manipulated by God for his great plan to teach you a lesson.”