The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

And I hadn’t dared her to do it, but I was glad that she did.

“Yeah,” I said right away, because even though no one had ever told me, specifically, not to kiss a girl before, nobody had to.

I knew that what we had done in the barn was something different. Something more serious, grown-up, like Irene had said. We hadn’t kissed each other just to practice. Not really. At least I didn’t think so. But I didn’t tell any of that to Irene. She knew it too.

I’m guessing she could see me blush even in that much darkness, but it’s not like Irene needed to see it anyway: She knew. She always knew.

Most of the girls on my team had a crush on Ted. I wanted to be like him, to drink icy beers after meets and to pull myself into the guard stand without using the ladder, to own a Jeep without a roll-bar and be the gap-toothed ringleader of all the lifeguards.

I’d placed at state in all my events, and now Ted was expecting something from me, and that was sort of a scary place to be: in the scope of his expectation.

I was waiting for Irene to say something, to make a move. And I knew that she was waiting for the same thing. We were good at this game: We could make it go on for days.

The whole Rock Creek campground was flooded with water from Hebgen Lake, and then the water couldn’t get back out because this entire mountaintop fell down and dammed it.”

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.

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.

She was more a stranger to me than Mrs. Klauson, but we were related, and here she was, and I was glad, I think. I think I was glad to see her. Or at least it felt, just then, like it was the right thing, the correct thing to have happen, for her to walk into the room.

I knew that all of this meant something probably more terrible than anything had ever been in my life, ever.

But then, as he drove me, still in my pajamas, the forty miles back to my house, the whole trip telling me nothing more than that my grandma needed to speak with me and that I needed to be there with her, I convinced myself beyond a doubt that Irene and I were found out.

even right after she said it, and I guess I knew then that my parents were gone, or at least I had to have heard her, it still didn’t register right.

How, if my parents were dead, could there still be some part of me that felt relief at not being found out?

all of that was guilt: real, crushing guilt.

And when she heard me crying, finally saw me with actual tears, she got down on the floor, which was painful for her, I knew, her bad knees, and held my head in her lap and cried with me, stroked my hair, and I was too weak to tell her that I didn’t deserve any of it.

Cam, I wish you would have seen me or answered the phone when I called. I wish I could just talk to you and not write in this card. I wish I didn’t even have a reason to send this card at all. I’m sorry and I love you.

I traced my finger over and over the ballpoint I love you, and the whole time I felt ashamed, some sicko who just couldn’t stop, even after her parents died.

I hadn’t asked anyone’s permission to do this. Who was gonna tell me no, or yes, even?

I couldn’t let her do this thing for me. It made me twist up inside.

but then I was out of the store, back on the sidewalk, free from her generosity or pity or kindness, all of it.

Those times I had tried to talk to something greater, something out there in the world bigger than me. But all those times, no matter what the occasion, it had eventually ended up feeling sort of phony,

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.

there was no God, but instead only fate and the chain of events that is, for each of us, predetermined—and that maybe there was some lesson in my mom drowning at Quake Lake thirty years later.

I don’t think it’s overstating it to say that my religion of choice became VHS rentals,

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.

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.

Our third time up there Irene grabbed my hand. We stayed like that for one full rotation, saying nothing, fingers wound together, and for that forty seconds or so I pretended like things were just as they always were: me and Irene at the fair.

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.

Sometimes I dreamed that scene from the movie but with Irene and me instead. But I couldn’t ever make that dream happen. It just came on its own, the way dreams do.

She was now living in Germany and hadn’t even heard about my parents’ accident until a month after the fact, and then she’d sent a huge bouquet to me. Not to all of us: to me.

like a man’s watch, maybe,

I liked how she said we, and made this dinner something the both of us were doing and not something she had done wholly for me. It made me feel like an adult.

I thought she looked pretty but uncomfortable in her gown and long gloves, much how I imagined I might have looked in the same getup.

“I’m going to level with you here, Cameron, because you seem adult enough to handle it. Grief is not my strong suit, but I did want to see you and tell you that if you need anything from me, you can always ask and I’ll do my best.” She seemed like she was done, but then she added, “I loved your mom since I met her.”

“Way out in the middle of nowhere Montana is where I’m from, Irene. You too.”

“It’s not like it makes you a bad person if you want to try something new.”

I didn’t feel close to God at the Presbyterian church, but some Sundays I felt really close to my memories of being at church, at this place, with my parents. And I liked that feeling.

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.

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.

It felt really good to do something that made no sense at all.

She tried to sound all nonchalant while she was saying this, but I noticed her trying.

“I don’t know,” I said, but then, even as I said it, I think part of me did know, sort of, like it washed over me and I knew. I could even feel my stupid blush, my body’s way of telling me that I knew.

I couldn’t help but remember Irene and the Ferris wheel, just like an allergic reaction.

I knew that my answer meant more than just the words I was saying, but I nodded and said, “Yeah, I’d go. I’d go with you.”

She said it so easily that I felt like I’d walked into a trap, into something I wouldn’t be able to handle once it arrived.

We were still holding hands, but it felt like the moment could slip away at any time if we didn’t just go for it, just finally do it.

I hadn’t really fallen in love with Lindsey, and she hadn’t with me; but we were okay with that, and liked each other maybe more for it.

I hadn’t ever really thought about any of that stuff. I just liked girls because I couldn’t help not to.