The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

it was sort of nice, too. Maybe not the praying itself so much as treating what had happened with a certain amount of respect. It felt like something better than just making a joke out of it, anyway.

“I don’t know what else to ask you. I guess either you want us to know what happened and to talk about it or you don’t. This all just seems really fake if you’re not gonna tell us everything.”

but I didn’t mean it, because it was precisely because he hadn’t tried to give me any answers, because he’d told me that he didn’t have any, and had started crying and had seemed doubtful, unsure, that I was feeling any better at all.

“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?”

“Nobody ever leaves because they’re all better. You only leave if you can’t pay anymore or you graduate.”

“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.”

I’ve known for what feels like the longest, longest time that I’d have to escape my mother one day, and it seems much easier to do that with this big action, something she can’t ignore—that I’ve completely run away with all these people—than with anything I might say to her. I’ve said and said all the words there are to say about how her way isn’t my way, and as far as I can tell, it’s never made a dent.”

And we sort of liked thinking of ourselves as the bad guys, but the kind who you root for, the ones who you want to make it.

but she was an adult I thought I could trust, someone I believed would help me and stay quiet about it.

Picturing Grandma carrying a tray topped with a couple of bowls of soup, riding an elevator up to Ruth’s floor, made me sadder than picturing Ruth in her hospital bed, even though she was the one who was actually sick.

and then there was Grandma’s voice from some hospital room in Minneapolis, but it was like her voice out of the past too, out of my past, her voice speaking to the me who I wasn’t anymore and never would be again.

if I try to picture my grandma in Ruth’s room, I just see it as abandoned Holy Rosary, all dirty and dark.

But I thought that if I could be honest with Lydia, really honest, and answer all of her questions fully, then maybe I could somehow figure out some things about myself. What the hell? is basically what I was thinking. What the hell?

This switch from imagination to memory happened automatically, young Mom in a car to me in a truck, a sort of reflex, I guess, but one triggered by what? Thinking of the sound of tires rolling over cracked, summer-hot Montana asphalt? Things left unsaid in moving vehicles? Guilt?

I’d told Margot Keenan that night at the Cattleman’s—my double-cherry Shirley Temple so pink there on the table in front of us—that I didn’t think I’d ever want to go to Quake Lake, ever. And she’d told me that was fine. She hadn’t even said that maybe I’d change my mind one day, the way adults always talk about stuff like that. She’d just let it be. But now, mostly because of the book, that photo, I had changed my mind.

You could have had those containers sitting plainly on your desk. You chose to try to imbue them with significance by hiding them.

Gathering these things in secret and hiding them (in my most Boo Radley of moves, I ended up using the rotted-out portion of a tree trunk that wasn’t too far off the path to the lake) made me feel important and useful and just really good. It was kind of incredible, the little thrill I’d get from stuffing something else into the plastic bag I’d wedged into that tree trunk. Those small acts made our escape seem real in a way that it hadn’t before.

But in the morning I wouldn’t feel like I’d overcome sin, like I was closer to God or whatever, I would just feel inwardly proud of the discipline I’d shown, sort of in the same way that I felt proud and disciplined when I pushed myself running or swimming.

I could see how you might let yourself get addicted to that kind of discipline, or denial; how it might seem like, if you kept doing it, over and over, that you were somehow living more cleanly or more righteously than other people.

Now, in the dark, in the aftermath of my dream, the Erin in my bed, her hand in me, was somehow a different Erin entirely.

Now that she was out of the bed, things were awkward, the communion of our closeness undone.

“I don’t care if you believe me or not. It doesn’t make it more true just because you do. It’s true because it’s the way I feel.”

“I kissed Irene Klauson the day before my parents’ accident. I wanted to kiss her again the entire day of their accident, and I did, that night. You think I don’t know the kinds of choices I was making before they died?”

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.”

I studied the skeleton trees, wondered at the strength and depth of their roots to have kept them upright in the lake for all these years.

I got that churned-up-stomach feeling you get when you wonder, upon recognizing one stupid decision you’ve made about something important, if it’s possibly only the first of many, many stupid decisions you’ve made about this important thing, and maybe is just the first clue that the whole thing will crack apart under the weight of all of those stupid decisions once they’ve piled up.

Jane didn’t pretend not to look at me, naked and pale in the dark of that canyon, shivering, my face uplit and flickering with the flame of my candle, as afraid of messing things up as I’d ever been in my life. I loved her for that.

Even if it’s true, I don’t think it’s something I have to spend my life believing.

Then, one on either side, they walked me to the shore, which was black and endless. But there was a fire waiting. And there was a little meal laid out on a blanket. And there was a whole world beyond that shoreline, beyond the forest, beyond the knuckle mountains, beyond, beyond, beyond, not beneath the surface at all, but beyond and waiting.