The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

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?

I squinted back a kind of shame—I hadn’t ever felt quite that way before. Before that moment it had somehow been sort of easy for me to pretend like nobody else had noticed anything about me, about us.

In that moment I was as jealous of her getting to leave Montana as I’d ever been of anything or anyone in my life.

me somehow both in a high school in Miles City and also in some other world entirely.

She tried to pull the mention of boyfriend off as casual, but we had too much history for it to work.

I’d make fun of your boyfriend’s name too, but, you know”—she leaned in a little closer—“there’s not one to mention, is there?”

I could still remember the exact way her boots used to click-clock as she walked; it was something about how she planted her foot, a distinct sound that I always paired with her. But those loafers she was wearing didn’t make any noise at all on the shiny hallway floors. Nothing. Not one sound.

If anything, knowing that Ruth was having sex made her seem more like a real person to me.

I spent the semester watching the summer highlights fade from her hair, which had a little natural curl and which I imagined smelled like peony and sweet grass.

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.

There’s dykes out here who only go for straight girls, or straight-by-day, slut-by-night girls, to try to turn them or whatever; but they never get anywhere beyond one night, and they always end up pissed off and sad when the girl inevitably says something like how she was only experimenting or shit-faced or whatever, and that she’s really into guys, not girls.

You wouldn’t have the problem you have if that were the case, huh?”

“It’s more like maybe I do know and I’m still confused too, at the same time. Does that make sense? I mean, it’s like how you noticed this thing about me tonight, you saw it, or you already knew it—it’s there. But that doesn’t mean it’s not confusing or whatever.”

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

“If you can’t get laid during Bucking Horse, you can’t get laid.”

“We’re friends who are figuring shit out,” I said, which at that point was the most honest and direct thing I’d said to Coley about me and my feelings, well, ever.

“Why don’t I drop you off with Pastor Crawford and you can ask him to pray for your perverse disease.”

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.

And then I added before I lost my nerve, “Pretending to like it.”

“How do you know that?” “How do you think?”

“But then what’s weird is that sometimes I think if you kissed me, I wouldn’t stop you.”

“Because I didn’t really think I’d like it and I did.” She said it like ammunition.

She was wearing the same purple housecoat she wore the night she told me about Mom and Dad. She’d worn it plenty of times since, but something about seeing her alone at the table in it was like putting bare feet in a snowbank.

She swallowed and said, “I made your grandfather chase after me for purt-near forever, to hear him tell it. That was the fun of it.” “So how did you decide to let him catch you?” “Because it was time to.”

“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?”

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.

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.

I felt like maybe there were things to be said, the right things, but I didn’t know how to put those words together.

“It goes against everything,” she said, some of her voice buried in the pillow. “This is like—it’s just supposed to be silly and whatever. I don’t want to be like that.” “Like what?” I asked. Somehow, even after what I’d just done, what we’d done, I felt ashamed, the guilty party. “Like a couple of dykes,” she said.

“Doesn’t this feel really big to you?” she asked. “I mean like too big? It’s like the more time we spend together, the harder it is to turn off.”

almost like Coley was trying to rid herself of this thing, like she could maybe just get it over and done with, forever, if she was aggressive enough, forceful enough.

I felt the choke of being caught, and knowing it, and the kind of shame that sidecars that choke.

I could have snuck out. I could have made secret phone calls. I could have rallied forces on my behalf. I could have. I could have. I didn’t. I didn’t even try.

Maybe I don’t have a heart, teachable or otherwise.

“And to be clear, you don’t know everything there is to know about your mom and dad and what they’d want for you. I knew them both for a much longer time than you did. Can’t you even consider for a minute that this is exactly what they would do in this situation?”

And not understanding bothered me; I didn’t want to be tricked into revealing anything important. I stayed quiet.

What could have possibly happened to me to make me “struggle with same-sex attraction” by the age of six?

It wasn’t that I was lying to Rick, because I wasn’t. It was just that he so believed in what he was doing, what we were doing, whatever it was. And I didn’t.

Finding that book on the shelf surprised the hell out of me. It made me wonder who had made sure that it was there, who had advocated for its inclusion.

But even if the amber could somehow be melted, and it could be freed, physically unharmed, how could it be expected to live in this new world without its past, without everything it knew from the world before, from its place in it, tripping it up again and again?

“That’s a really small way of looking at desire,” Adam said.

I just couldn’t help myself. I guess I didn’t want to. I couldn’t really make sense of what they meant as objects, though I did feel like there was plenty of meaning in the act of working on them; but I knew that someone like Lydia would think that she could decipher me through those tubs, that they were maybe physical representations of the below-water iceberg bullshit. And that was trouble. That was reason enough not to work on them, not to have them at all. But I did.

Now there was no letter,” she said. “That girl exists only as you want to remember her. I’d recommend not remembering her at all. That’s it. There was no letter from a clone who spits out dumbed-down Lydia talk like a stupid parrot.

I guess sometimes you can recognize that you’re being manipulated and still appreciate it, even respond to it.

maybe they were exactly the same girl, but even if that was true, she couldn’t be the girl for me.

I also waited to feel like myself, as if it would land on me all at once, this feeling like I was me again because I was home. And it didn’t come.

It was prairie wind, relentless, building up speed over miles and miles of flat expanse, then hurtling down the small streets of Miles City like hundreds of whistling pinballs loosed and thrashing around corners and curves.

“I don’t know why they think those queer jokes are so damned funny.”

in a way that makes you feel like, instead of bringing the action into your living room, the TV cameras are just reminding you of how much you’re missing, confronting you with it, you in your pajamas, on your couch, a couple of pizza crusts resting in some orange grease on a paper plate in front of you, your glass of soda mostly flat and watery, the ice all melted, and the good stuff happening miles and miles away from where you’re at. At least that’s how it made me feel that year.

“I happened. Just me. Like always. It’s enough for me to just walk in the room the way I am.”