The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  But that’s what was mostly on the agenda for the rest of the night. We had the impromptu chapel session where we prayed for Mark and we prayed for his family and for Adam, who I didn’t even get to say anything to in private before the whole thing started. Then we prayed for us. Then everybody who wanted to say something got to say something, and that was almost everybody except for me and Jane. When it was Dane’s turn, he was a lot more calm than he’d been during group, so calm that I wondered if they’d drugged him or something, though the idea of Lydia with some secret stash of sedatives was sort of ridiculous, and also sort of not. Then we had free time, and there were some snacks in the cafeteria but no dinner, because the disciples on dinner duty had been called away before the meal was finished. Reverend Rick went into Ennis to get pizza for us, a real treat courtesy of Mark’s personal tragedy. Somebody, Lydia probably, started The Sound of Music in the activity room. It was one of like three secular films in the Promise video library, but I couldn’t lose myself to it with so many red- and puffy-eyed disciples in there watching together and breathing and shifting around on the couches, the floor. Jane and Adam and I eventually just got up and left, and we knew we were going to smoke. We didn’t even have to talk about it. We got our coats and went to the barn. It was snowing but not very hard, a nice, quiet snow is what Grandma would have called it. Fat flakes coming slowly. There was still quite a bit of snow on the ground too, from our winter’s worth, but it had been melting all day, the early-spring sun on it, and the path was really slippery, water over packed-down ice. A few feet out, I fell, hard, my right hip crashing onto the ground, that section of my khakis instantly soaked. Adam gripped my elbow and pulled me up and said, “You okay, twinkle-toes?”

  That made me smile, and I said, “I’m okay. What about you?”

  And he said, “I’ve been better,” and he linked his arm with mine and we finished the walk like that. It was nice.

  It was cold in the barn and damp, the hayloft stinking and wet. We huddled together in a clump, our legs beneath these blankets we’d hauled out there in the fall. It was dark too, the few electric lights on the main floor doing little to light the mow. I had a headache, and my hip hurt where I’d landed, and my hands were red and cold: I was kind of a mess. We were all kind of a mess.

  For a while we just passed around the joint that Jane had brought, without talking, until it was maybe two hits away from being caked, and then Jane said, “I didn’t even know that Mark shaved.”

  “He doesn’t,” Adam said, taking the joint from Jane and holding it, elegantly, between his thin fingers. “That boy’s all peach fuzz; he doesn’t need to shave. It was my razor from my shower kit. It’s a nice one, it’s not disposable, it’s heavy. My dad gave it to me for my birthday last year. I used to use it sometimes to shave my legs, but not now with Lydia on girly-man patrol.” He toked, then exhaled before he could have gotten much effect and said quickly, “Not that I’m saying I’m ever gonna use it again. I don’t even know where it is. Lydia took it with her last night after she helped me clean up the room.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “Me too,” Jane said.

  Adam nodded. Then he said, “The bleach went everywhere. It must have been a brand-spankin’-new bottle, because it fucking made a lake on the floor. There’s probably still some in there, under the beds or whatever. I heard this noise, and I knew something was weird, and then I could smell the bleach, but it was—you know how it is when you’ve just woken up, nothing was registering right—and then when I put my feet on the floor it was wet, but like soaked-through-my-socks wet.”

  Jane and I just kept nodding. What was there to say?

  Adam passed me the joint for the final hit, which I took, happy to have something to do.

  “Did the bleach soak all of his clothes, too?” Jane asked. “Because he was lying in it?”

  “He was naked,” Adam said. “He was completely bare-ass naked. I pretty much tripped over him getting to the light, and then when I turned it on, I mean, I didn’t know, I just knew it was bad. He was slumped over so I couldn’t see his, you know . . .” He paused, shook his head. “His dick. I should be able to say the word dick. Fuck. I couldn’t see it, so I didn’t know that he’d done what he did. I just knew that he was naked on the floor, there was a fucking lake of bleach, and it took like four more seconds until I saw blood leaking into the bleach and I went for Rick. I thought maybe he’d tried to drink it, or slit his wrists, or something. I thought he was dead, though. I really thought he was dead. That’s what I told Rick. I said, ‘Mark’s dead. He’s dead on the floor.’” He stopped, looked back and forth between the two of us. “That’s really fucked up, right?”

  “It’s not,” I said. “What else would you think?”

  “Not that,” Adam said. “I don’t know.” He pulled at a piece of yarn that had come loose on one section of the blanket, pulled it tighter and tighter around his finger, cutting off the circulation, making the tip swollen and red with bright white indentations. “I talked to his dad today,” he said. “Did they tell you that?”

  We shook our heads no.

  Adam let the string binding around his finger loosen. He took what was now most definitely a caked joint from my hand. I had just been sitting with it. He put it out on the end of his tongue. He always did that. Then he said, “I wanted to go to the hospital, but his dad didn’t want any of us there. He sent Rick back like the minute he got in from the airport. But he called here later to talk to me, and he said, ‘Thank you for what you did for Mark. We’ll remember you in our prayers. You please pray for Mark, too.’ That’s it. That’s what he said, word for word.”

  “But think about the condition his son is in,” Jane said.

  “A condition he helped cause,” Adam said, sneering. He stood up, kicked some clumps of hay. “He sends him here, tells him that he’ll go to hell as a sodomite if he doesn’t fix himself. So the kid tries and he tries and you know what, he can’t, because it can’t fucking be done, so he figures, I’ll just cut off the problem area. Great plan, Pops.”

  “You’re right,” Jane said. “It’s completely fucked. But his dad doesn’t see it that way. He absolutely believes with everything in him that what he’s doing is the only way to save his son from eternal damnation. The fiery pits of hell. He believes that completely.”

  Adam kept sneering, near a shout now. “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?”

  “That’s never what it’s about to those people,” Jane said, still calm. “All that’s the price we’re supposed to pay for salvation. We’re supposed to be glad to pay it.”

  “Thanks, Mother Wisdom,” Adam said. “Your calm insight is so powerful in times like these.”

  This wounded look crumpled Jane’s face, and then she got rid of it quick. But I know Adam saw it too, because he said, “Sorry.”

  “It’s okay,” she said. “I didn’t mean to lecture.”

  “Don’t just give me an automatic dick pass.” He bent and kissed her cheek and said, “I don’t get to be a douche just because my roommate lost his shit.”

  “Yes you do,” Jane said. “You get to be whatever you want right now.”

  “Can I be an astronaut?” he asked, sitting down next to me again and pulling some of my blanket around him.

  “Indubitably,” she said. “You can even be the famed Neil Armstrong.”

  “You just picked him because the name Armstrong sounds sort of native, didn’t you?” he said, barely showing a grin.

  “I’m not staying at Promise,” I said, just like that. I only decided, for sure, pretty much as I was saying it. “I’m not. I’m gonna leave.”

  “You wanna be an astronaut with me?” Adam asked, palming the top of my head and tilting it until my ear rested on his shoulder. “We can open up the first lunar 7-Eleven.” He mimed the o
utline of a billboard with his hands, popped his fingers in and out like blinking lights, and said, “Now serving marijuana Slurpees. For a limited time only. Some restrictions apply.”

  “I’m serious,” I said, and the thing was, the more I said it, the more serious I got. “I’m gonna figure out a way to leave. If I don’t, I know Ruth will keep me here next year. I know she will.”

  “Of course she will,” Jane said. “Nobody ever leaves because they’re all better. You only leave if you can’t pay anymore or you graduate.”

  “Or you’re Mark,” I said.

  “Yes,” Jane said. “Or you’re Mark.”

  “Really?” Adam said. “Nobody’s ever passed the program or whatever? Gotten ex-gay enough to go back to normal high school?”

  “Well, it’s only been open three years,” Jane said. “But nobody’s done it that I know of.”

  “Because it can’t be done,” I said.

  “And because there’s no real test that could prove your transition anyway,” Jane said, putting things back into her leg compartment. It was weird how sometimes I forgot she even had that thing—the leg itself, not the compartment, I could never forget that. “You can change your behavior, but if you don’t have Lydia breathing down your neck, that will only last so long. Besides, it doesn’t mean anything else about you has changed, inside, I mean.”

  “That’s why I’m going,” I said. “That and a million other reasons. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

  “I’m in,” Adam said, whipping the blanket off both of us, my skin goose-bumping immediately. “Let’s do it right now, no more talking. I’ll be Bonnie and you’ll be my Clyde.”

  “I’ll go with you,” Jane said, with total seriousness. She almost had her leg reattached. “But we need to have a comprehensive plan. We need to work out the details.”

  “Just like a couple of lesbos,” Adam said. “Comprehensive plan? Are we building a deck or escaping? Let’s just go. I’ll steal the van keys—seriously. Right now we do it. We could be in Canada by morning, all-you-can eat Canadian bacon. Now there’s a euphemism for you.”

  “They’d stop our stolen vehicle at the border check,” Jane said. “And even if they didn’t, we don’t have our IDs, we don’t have much money, we don’t know anyone in Canada. Or I don’t.”

  I wanted to jump up with Adam and just do it, like he said, take action. But what Jane said was true. They kept our driver’s licenses (those of us that had them) and other identification papers, or copies of those papers, in one of the locked file cabinets in the main office.

  “So we get our IDs right now,” Adam said. “And then we go.”

  “This is why we need a plan,” Jane said. “This is exactly why. So that we don’t get tripped up by all the details we forgot.”

  While she was speaking, there was a kind of low rumbling from far off, and if it hadn’t been snowing when we walked out to the barn, I would have been sure that it was thunder.

  “We won’t ever do it,” Adam said, “if we sit around and think about it forever. We won’t. So let’s just go.”

  “To where?” I asked.

  “Who cares?” he said. “We’ll figure it out on the road.”

  “I want to go too,” Jane said. “But let’s do it right. If we steal a van, they’ll find us and we’ll get sent back here within a couple of days. And then what was the point?”

  Right as she finished, there was a drum roll of what now sounded unmistakably like thunder.

  “Zeus is angry,” Adam said, standing again.

  “Was it thunder?” I asked, and then more thunder rumbled, this closer than the last, the storm moving quickly like they so often do in the mountains.

  “It’s thundersnow,” Jane said as Adam went to the heavy wooden hatch that closed off the hay pitch. It was a bitch to move. We’d done it before, but the hinges were more rust than not, and the gray wood splintered into your skin like a sticker plant every time you got your hands on it. Adam worked at it anyway, though.

  “Is it even still snowing?” I asked as I got up to join him.

  “If it is, it’s thundersnow,” Jane said.

  “I’ve never heard of that,” I said as Adam and I managed to push the hatch out some, those bolts squeaking and screeching at our efforts, tiny splinters of that old wood already barbing my fingers.

  “It’s uncommon,” Jane said, standing up. “It happened once when we lived on the commune. I can’t believe I don’t have my camera.”

  Adam and I kept inching the hatch and it went a bit farther, and then a bit more, until we could see mostly just a black sky and black ground, some sections blacker than others, with white snowflakes coming down much faster than before, blizzard fast, the snow a superwhite blur against all that blackness.

  “It is,” Jane said from behind us. “It’s thundersnow.”

  “Oh my God, we get it,” Adam said. “Stop saying thundersnow.”

  But she was sort of vindicated, because then a blast of thunder crashed loud, the storm closing in around us, the kind of thunder that you feel in the walls, deep inside your body, and then a bolt of lightning made its jagged silver path across the sky, like the trajectory of a failing heart patient’s EKG monitor. And then another, its flash lighting the snow on the ground, reflecting off the millions of crystals, impossibly bright and white, and then the whole area was completely black again, and then another flash, another great cracking noise and spotlight. One of the pines lit up momentarily, its snow-heavy bows, its massive height against the black nothingness, and then it was gone, and then something else got the spotlight, some other section of land that had been blackness just before, and all the while the thunder rumbled behind the spectacle and the snowflakes whirled and flew, heavier and heavier, so thick they seemed almost to clog the air. We three watched and watched together. I think it was probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

  “I can’t believe I don’t have my camera,” Jane said again, her voice almost reverent.

  “You couldn’t ever get this into a picture,” I said. “And you’d miss it while you were trying to.”

  “Rick’s back,” Adam said, and I looked in the direction he was staring and found the headlights he had seen, two faint orange dots coming closer and closer toward Promise, toward us.

  “I want to go with you,” Jane said. She took my hand. “I mean it. I’ll do whatever.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “You two aren’t running off together and leaving me here,” Adam said, wrapping both of his hands around ours. “Even though I can’t quite believe that we’re ever gonna go.”

  “We’re going,” Jane said.

  “I don’t have a plan,” I said. “I know some people who might help us, maybe, if we can even find them. But that’s all I got.” I was thinking of Margot, the money she’d sent me in that Campfire Girls manual; I was thinking of Lindsey and her bad-assness; and Mona Harris, close by in Bozeman, at college. And for some reason I thought of Irene Klauson, too. Though I don’t really know why.

  “Then we’ll find them,” Jane said. I liked how sure she was.

  “I have my staggering good looks to offer,” Adam said. “And my unique and complicated understanding of sex roles. You can call it a mystical understanding, if you must.”

  “I’ve got the weed,” Jane said, and we all laughed the way you laugh when you’re trying to be brave in the face of something that scares you.

  The headlights were bigger, and closer, just beyond the metal-roofed cabins now, the bulky rectangle of the van barely visible through the snow, Reverend Rick and his stack of pizza pies, braving the thundersnow for all of us weary disciples.

  “We’d better go in,” I said. “Before they come looking for us.”

  Chapter Nineteen

  Mark Turner didn’t come back to Promise. Not two weeks later. Not a month later. Never. At least not while I was there. Reverend Rick and Adam had to pack up his stuff and send it to him in Kearney, Nebraska. Adam nev
er did get his fancy razor returned to him, not that he wanted it back, he said, but it disappeared from Promise, just like Mark. Just like the three of us were going to.

  Pretty soon after Mark’s incident, which is what somehow everyone started calling it except for me and Jane and Adam, a guy from the state came out to inspect Promise, the classrooms, the dorms, everything. He worked for one of the licensing departments. Then a couple of other guys came, and a lady. The lady wore a plum-colored pantsuit with a gold-and-plum scarf, and I remember thinking that Aunt Ruth would call the combined effect a smart little look. All the men wore ties and jackets, and everyone who came worked for one state agency or another. Most of these people spent their time in Rick’s office, but one of the guys talked to each disciple for twenty minutes or so. I went in after Erin, but there was no chance to ask her what it was like; we just passed each other in the hallway outside the classroom where he’d set up shop for the day.

  At first I liked this guy because he was so routine, and seemed, I don’t know, professional, or at least he didn’t talk down to me, or act like a counselor, probably because he wasn’t one. He introduced himself but I can’t remember his name, Mr. Blah-Blah from the Child and Family Services Department, I think. He started with a series of mundane questions: How often do you eat meals? How much time do you spend on schoolwork, both in the classroom and otherwise, each day? How much time do you spend completing other activities? What is the level of supervision for these activities? And then he asked a few less mundane questions: Do you feel safe in your dorm rooms at night? Do you feel threatened by any staff members or fellow students? (This guy used the word student, not disciple). Do you trust those in charge here? My answer to that question was the first I’d given that really seemed to interest him.

  “Not really” is what I said.

  He had been taking brief notes on a yellow legal pad, rarely even looking up at me, just reading from his stapled list of questions and then scribbling this or that and moving on. But now he paused and looked right at me, his pen hovered there. “You don’t trust the staff here?”