The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  “And an artist,” I said.

  “Yeah, don’t forget artist,” Adam said.

  “It’s true that I am many things,” Jane said, leaving the plot and heading just into the trees, leaning her back against the tall, thick trunk of a Douglas fir and sliding to the ground, where she rolled up her pants to the knee and unfastened her leg, which (she was right) by then I was used to seeing her do.

  Adam and I settled in beside her while she packed the pipe. It was perfect there on the floor of the forest on an early-fall afternoon, getting high. It was almost possible for me to forget why the three of us were together, the sin we had in common, the reason for our friendship. Jane had a couple of those little green cans of apple juice with her, like from snack time in preschool, and she had a pack of beef jerky too, and we sat and ate our little pioneer-type meal and passed the pipe.

  We were good with smoking and not talking. All of us did so much talking at Promise, even those of us who didn’t really say anything in all that talking. Every so often a breeze would kick up and a few handfuls of those yellow leaves would flutter to the earth, the light passing through them.

  At some point Jane asked, in a lazy sort of way, “So have you started to forget yourself yet? Or is it still too early?”

  I had settled onto my back to consider the almost overwhelming height of the firs and hemlocks as they poked like half-closed green umbrellas into the sky. And when Adam didn’t answer, I sat up partway, leaned back against my elbows, and said, “You’re asking me?”

  “Yeah, you,” Jane said. “Adam did summer camp, so by now he’s all but invisible.”

  “I’m not sure what you mean,” I said.

  “Promise has a way of making you forget yourself,” she said. “Even if you’re resisting the rhetoric of Lydia. You still sort of disappear here.”

  “Yeah,” I said. I hadn’t thought about putting it that way, but I knew what she was getting at. “I guess I’ve forgotten some of me.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” Adam said. “I’m the ghost of my former gay self. Think the Dickensian Christmas Past version but with my face.”

  “I thought you were never a ‘gay self,’” Jane said.

  “You and word choice,” he said. “I wasn’t, technically. I’m still not. I was just using the most handy term available to make a point.”

  I did my best Lydia. “You were promoting the gay image through the use of sarcastic comments and humor,” I said. “I’m probably going to have to report you.”

  “Not the gay image,” Adam said, with more seriousness. “No gay image here. I’m winkte.”

  I’d seen that on his iceberg and had wanted to ask him about it. “What is that?”

  “Two-souls person,” he said, not looking at me, concentrating, instead, on the long pine needles he was braiding. “It’s a Lakota word—well, the shorter version of one. Winyanktehca. But it doesn’t mean gay. It’s something different.”

  “It’s a big deal,” Jane said. “Adam’s too modest. He doesn’t want to tell you that he’s sacred and mysterious.”

  “Don’t fucking do that,” Adam said, throwing some of the nonbraided needles from his pile at her. “I don’t want to be your sacred and mysterious Injun.”

  “Well, you already are,” Jane said. “Put it in your peace pipe and smoke it.”

  “That’s outrageously offensive,” he said, but then he smiled. “It’s the Sacred Calf Pipe, anyway.”

  “So you were like named this or something?” I asked. “How do you say it again?”

  “Wink-tee,” Adam said. “It was seen in a vision on the day of my birth.” He paused. “If you believe my mother, that is. If you believe my father, then my mother concocted this nonsense as an excuse for my faggy nature, and I need to just man up already.”

  “Yeah, I’ll just go with your dad’s version,” I said. “Much simpler.”

  “I told you we’d like her,” Jane said.

  Adam hadn’t laughed, though. “Yeah, you’re right,” he said. “My dad’s version is easier to explain to every single person in the world who doesn’t know Lakota beliefs. I’m not gay. I’m not even a tranny. I’m like pre-gender, or almost like a third gender that’s male and female combined.”

  “That sounds really complicated,” I said.

  Adam snorted. “You think? Winktes are supposed to somehow bridge the divide between genders and be healers and spirit people. We’re not supposed to try to pick the sex our private parts most align with according to some Bible story about Adam and Eve.”

  I didn’t know what to say, so I made a joke, my usual response. “Listen, so long as you remember that it’s Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve, you should be just fine.”

  Nobody said anything. I thought I’d blown it. But then Jane started giggling in that way you do when you’re high.

  And then Adam said, “But I don’t know any girls named Eve.”

  Which made me giggle along with Jane.

  And then he added, “Plus I already let Steve jerk me off in the lake last weekend.”

  “Then clearly you’re the mother of all gay lost causes,” which wasn’t even that funny, really, but the three of us got on one of those hysterical-laughter trains that lasts for so long you can’t even remember why you started laughing in the first place.

  Eventually Jane reattached her leg and went to finish something or other in the patch, and Adam wandered off to somewhere, and I just stayed put. I listened to the small, high-pitched sounds of the tree swallows and the nuthatches, and smelled the smoke and the wet ground, the good, musty scent of mushrooms and always-damp wood, and I felt all the ways in which this world seemed so, so enormous—the height of the trees, the hush and tick of the forest, the shift of the sunlight and shadows—but also so, so removed. I’d felt like this since my arrival, like at Promise I was destined to live in suspended time, somewhere that the me I had been, or the me I thought I was, didn’t even exist. You’d think that dredging up your past during weekly one-on-ones would do just the opposite and make you feel connected to those experiences, to the background that made you you, but it didn’t. Jane had just called it forgetting yourself, and that was a good way of putting it too. All the “support sessions” were designed to make you realize that your past was not the right past, that if you’d had a different one, a better one, the correct version, you wouldn’t have even needed to come to Promise in the first place. I told myself that I didn’t believe any of that shit, but there it was, repeated to me day after day after day. And when you’re surrounded by a bunch of mostly strangers experiencing the same thing, unable to call home, tethered to routine on ranchland miles away from anybody who might have known you before, might have been able to recognize the real you if you told them you couldn’t remember who she was, it’s not really like being real at all. It’s plastic living. It’s living in a diorama. It’s living the life of one of those prehistoric insects encased in amber: suspended, frozen, dead but not, you don’t know for sure. Those things could have a pulse inside that hard world of honey and orange, the ticking of some life force, and I’m not talking about Jurassic Park and dinosaur blood and cloning a T. rex, but just the insect itself, trapped, waiting. 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?

  Chapter Fifteen

  In October, disciple Mark Turner and I were on evangelical detail together in the business office. I spent our first session on the newsletter, written by Lydia and Rick and photocopied onto sky-blue paper, the God’s Promise logo in the corner, four pages of articles about our various outings and community-service projects, a full-page profile on one disciple. That month it was Steve Cromps. What I did for two hours was this: staple, fold, stuff, stamp, repeat, repeat. Mark, however, was sitting in a spinny desk chair calling big donors and doing the spie
l. He did it well, probably the best of any of us, and I could tell that not even five minutes into his first call. He did it well because he believed what he was saying. I still didn’t really know him at this point, but because he was Adam’s roommate, what I did know for sure was that he was completely committed to being at Promise, to being cured. (And also that he wasn’t a tattletale—as far as we knew, and we’d have known by then, he never told anyone about Jane and the joint he caught her with, so despite her wariness, he seemed an okay guy to me.)

  That chair he was in that day seemed too big for his elfin features. He was probably just shy of five one and had dainty everything—hands and arms and legs—and a little face with mahogany eyes and perpetually pink cheeks and pouty little Hummel-figurine lips. He had a black binder full of things to say, answers to give to various questions: Q. Do you really think that you’re getting any better there? A. In my time at Promise I’ve already grown in my relationship with Jesus Christ. I continue to grow every day. And as I learn to walk with him, so too do I learn to walk away from the sin of my sexual brokenness. But he didn’t need the scripted, staff-approved answers to questions, because all of Mark’s answers were naturally staff-approved. I watched him close a call with a donor from Texas, a guy who liked to be called every month, I’d heard, and now Mark was talking Cornhusker football with him, telling a story about the last game he’d been at with his dad and brothers at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln on a perfect October afternoon not all that different from the day we were having, just a twinge of frost in the air, warm cider in their thermoses, the Huskers propelled to victory, of course, by the sea of red in the stands. I really did watch him tell it. I stopped midfold and looked up at him, though he didn’t notice me. He was animated, his eyes bright, the arm not holding the phone gesturing; and as he talked about some fourth-quarter turnover that was “just exactly a rabbit from a hat but on cleats and Astroturf,” I wanted to have been there with him, just like I know the Texas guy on the phone did. But I didn’t even care about college football. That wasn’t it. Mark was selling the dream of an all-American autumn afternoon with the family. And there was nothing fake or gross about it—it wasn’t like a Ford pickup commercial with stars and stripes in the background. It was simpler than that, more genuine. I guess because he believed in it for real. Whatever it was.

  The Texas guy must have thought so too, because he made another donation, right over the phone. I know this because Mark said, “That’s very generous of you, Paul. I can’t wait to tell Reverend Rick. We couldn’t do this without your support. Not just people like you, but you yourself. I want you to know that. What you give means something very real to my salvation. And there are no words of thanks I can offer that are enough for that.”

  I don’t know how you can say stuff like that and not sound at least a little bit like an asshole; I know that I would have, and I’d never say those words anyway. But Mark didn’t ever sound like an asshole. Not to me.

  When he’d finished that call, was scanning for the next number, I asked, “How much is that guy sending now?”

  He didn’t look up from his list. “I don’t know exactly,” he said. “He’s gonna work out the details with Reverend Rick.”

  I could tell that wasn’t all of it, but it wasn’t worth bothering him over. “You’re crazy good at those calls,” I said.

  “Thanks,” he said, now looking up and smiling a little smile. “That’s nice of you.”

  “It’s the truth,” I said. “If you have to be that good, they won’t ever ask me to do it.”

  He smiled again. “I like doing them. It gives me a sense of purpose the other tasks don’t offer.”

  “Well, if you keep pulling in donations, they’ll always have you do it.”

  “That’s not why I like making them,” he said.

  “I know,” I said. “I get it.” But I’m not sure I did.

  “Okay,” he said, and went back to his list, checked the number, and lifted the receiver.

  “Did you mean it?” I asked, leaning forward a little, across the table, wanting him to stop.

  He did. He kept the phone in his hand but pressed the dial-tone button with the other. “Mean what?”

  “That being here is necessary for your salvation?”

  He nodded, then said, “Not just me. It is for yours too.”

  I rolled my eyes.

  He shrugged. “I’m not trying to convince you. That’s not my place. But I hope you do become convinced.”

  “And just how does that happen?” I asked, my voice still a little smug, but I meant the question.

  “You have to start with belief,” he said, letting up the button, punching the numbers. “That’s where everybody has to start.”

  I thought about that while he made his next calls, while I kept on with the newsletters. I thought about it during Sunday service at Word of Life, and during study hours in my room, with the Viking Erin and her squeaky pink highlighter. What it meant to really believe in something—for real. Belief. The big dictionary in the Promise library said it meant something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held conviction or opinion. But even that definition, as short and simple as it was, confused me. True or real: Those were definite words; opinion and conviction just weren’t—opinions wavered and changed and fluctuated with the person, the situation. And most troubling of all was the word accepts. Something one accepts. I was much better at excepting everything than accepting anything, at least anything for certain, for definite. That much I knew. That much I believed.

  But I kept on watching Mark, his calm ways, the sort of peace he seemed to have, even though he was at Promise, just like me, just like the rest of us. I bugged Adam about him all the time, to give me details—what he did when they were in their room together; what he talked about.

  “I think the system is already working,” Adam told me one evening when I’d been asking a heap of Mark-related questions that he couldn’t really answer. We were on dinner shift together. We’d put two tuna-noodle casseroles in the oven, cleaned up the dishes, and snuck out to the hayloft for a quick smoke because we knew Lydia and Rick were both in one-on-ones.

  “What system is that?” I asked, taking the joint from him but dropping it onto my lap as I did. I plucked it up, inhaled.

  “The conversion of your sexuality,” he said, taking the joint back. “I think you’re nearing the proverbial breakthrough.” He had a piece of hay between his lips already, his oral fixation, and he left it there even while he was toking.

  “Why do you say that?” I asked.

  “You haven’t stopped with the Mark Turner questions for days,” he said, smiling. “It’s a tad tiresome from my end, but bravo—I’d say a full-on hetero schoolgirl crush. Any moment now I’m expecting to see you drawing hearts with his initials in your pink Trapper Keeper.”

  I laughed. “My Trapper Keeper’s purple, not pink, loser.”

  “Details, details,” he said, waving his hand. “It’s the passion I’m concerned with. L’amour.”

  I shoved him. “I don’t have it bad for Mark Turner,” I said. “I just want to figure him out.”

  Adam nodded like a counselor, like Lydia, and brought his hands together in a pyramid to his lips while he said, “Mmm-hmm. And to be clear: by figure him out you mean climb onto his erect penis, correct?”

  I laughed. “Yes, that’s it exactly,” I said, but then I couldn’t help myself; I was sort of obsessed with Mark Turner. “You don’t think he’s interesting? His seriousness or whatever? I can’t even imagine him doing anything gay enough to get sent here.”

  Now Adam laughed. “What—because there’s an official gay barometer now? His parents weren’t going to send him, but then they caught him listening to Liza-with-a-Z for the third time that month, and that was it: finally he’d done something gay enough!”

  “Well, that’s how it works, doesn’t it?” I said. “I mean pretty much like that.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess,” h
e said quietly. “If your crime isn’t bigger.”

  “Yeah,” I said. We smoked in silence after that. I was thinking about Coley, of course, of course I was. I don’t know what Adam was thinking about.

  After a while he asked, “Who would it be for you, though, here, if not Mark? I mean to mack on?”

  “God, I don’t know,” I said. “No one. I don’t think anyone.”

  “Come on,” he said. “If you were picking, though. If you were forced to.”

  I waited. I thought. “Bethany Kimbles-Erickson,” I said, laughing, but meaning it.

  He laughed too, his shiny black bangs across his face. “I can see that. It’s the schoolteacher thing. It’s a classic scenario. But of the student body now—who?”

  “You say,” I said. “This is your thing, so you say first.”

  “I’ve already hit it with Steve. A few times.”

  “Right,” I said. “So Steve’s your answer?”

  “Not really,” he said, looking right at me, wearing something akin to Irene Klauson’s old dare face. “Maybe it’s you.”

  My stupid blush, again, again. “Sure,” I said. “Then the system’s working on you, too. Glad to know it’s not just me.”

  He did a face of exasperation. “I’m not gay, Cam. I told you. It doesn’t work like that for me.”

  “It works like that for everyone,” I said.

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

  I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say to that. I studied the gray barn wood, toffee and mint green–colored lichen growing on it in places. I flicked some of it off with my finger.

  “You wanna power-tunnel this?” he asked, holding up what was left of the joint, which wasn’t much.

  “I don’t know what that is,” I said.

  “Yeah you do,” he said. He gestured with the roach. “I flip this, put the lit end in my mouth and blow while you cup your hands around my face and inhale. People call it a shotgun, too.”