The Miseducation of Cameron Post

by Emily M. Danforth

  I guess, in answering that way, I had been expecting a reaction from him, but then I was sort of unsure of what to do with it once I got it. “Well, I mean, trust them how?” I asked. “What do you mean by trust?”

  “Trust,” he said, doing one of those this-should-be-obvious-to-you kind of open-mouthed, head-bobbing faces. “Trust: belief in them and their abilities. Do you trust them with your safety and security while you’re living here? Do you believe that they have your best interests in mind?”

  I shrugged. “You’re saying those things like they’re completely simple,” I said. “Or black and white or whatever.”

  “I think they are black and white,” he said. “I’m not trying to trick you with these questions.” I could tell he was losing patience with me, or maybe he just didn’t like me very much. He had very hairy ears, I noticed. It was hard not to look at them once I did, actually, so much hair coming from the inside, and hair on the outside, too.

  “Maybe if you lived here you would feel differently,” I said. Staring at his ears was making me feel like I could start in on uncontrollable giggles, just like Helen at our group session. I concentrated on his tie instead, which was a deeper shade of yellow than his notepad, but not far off. It had cerulean fleurs-de-lis all over it. Cerulean. I still loved that word. It was a nice tie. It was very nice.

  “I like your tie,” I said.

  He bent his neck to look at it, as if he’d forgotten which tie he’d chosen for the day. Maybe he had. “Thanks,” he said. “It’s new. My wife picked it out for me.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. It was nice, sort of. It seemed so normal to have a wife who picked out your yellow ties for you. Whatever that meant: normal. It had to mean not living a life at Promise. It had to at least mean that.

  “Yeah, she’s kind of a clothes horse,” he said. Then he seemed to remember what he was doing there with me. He consulted his notes and asked, “Do you think you can tell me more specifically what you mean when you say that you can’t trust the staff here?”

  That time he did sound like every other counselor who’d ever asked me to elaborate on my feelings. I was surprised at myself for having picked him to open up to. I was surprised even as I was doing it. Maybe I picked him because I thought he would have to take me seriously, whatever I said, he seemed so fastidious and by the book, and he also seemed, precisely because of his position and that fastidiousness, a little nonjudgmental, I guess.

  “I would say that Rick and Lydia and everybody else associated with Promise think that they’re doing what’s best for us, like spiritually or whatever,” I said. “But just because you think something doesn’t make it true.”

  “Okaaaaay,” he said. “Can you go on?”

  “Not really,” I said, but then tried to anyway. “I’m just saying that sometimes you can end up really messing somebody up because the way you’re trying to supposedly help them is really messed up.”

  “So are you saying that their method of treatment is abusive?” he asked me in a tone I didn’t like very much.

  “Look, nobody’s beating us. They’re not even yelling at us. It’s not like that.” I sighed and shook my head. “You asked me if I trusted them, and like, I trust them to drive the vans safely on the highway, and I trust that they’ll buy food for us every week, but I don’t trust that they actually know what’s best for my soul, or how to make me the best person with a guaranteed slot in heaven or whatever.” I could tell I was losing him. Or maybe I’d never had him to begin with, and I was mad at myself for being so inarticulate, for messing up what I felt like I owed to Mark, even if he wouldn’t see it that way, which he probably wouldn’t.

  “Whatever,” I said. “It’s hard to explain. I just don’t trust that a place like Promise is even necessary, or that I need to be here, or that any of us need to be here, and the whole point of being here is that we’re supposed to trust that what they’re doing is going to save us, so how could I answer yes to your question?”

  “I guess you couldn’t,” he said.

  I thought maybe I had an in, so I said, “It’s just that I know you’re here because of what happened to Mark.”

  But before I could continue he said, “What Mr. Turner did to himself.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “You said what happened to him,” he said. “Something didn’t just happen to him. He injured himself. Severely.”

  “Yeah, while under the care of this facility,” I said.

  “Correct,” he said in another unreadable tone. “And that’s why I’m here: to investigate the care that is given by those who run this facility, but not to investigate the mission of the facility, unless that mission includes abuse or neglect.”

  “But isn’t there like emotional abuse?” I asked.

  “There is,” he said, completely noncommittal. “Do you feel that you’ve been emotionally abused by the staff here?”

  “Oh my God,” I said, throwing my hands in the air, feeling every bit as dramatic as I was acting. “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 see,” he said, but I could tell that he didn’t at all. “Is there anything else?”

  “No, I think the hate yourself part about covers it.”

  He looked at me, unsure, searching for what to say, and then he took a breath and said, “Okay. I want you to know that I’ve written down what you’ve said and it will go in the official file. I’ll also share it with my committee.” He had jotted some things down as I was talking, but I definitely didn’t trust that he’d really written down what I had said, not really, at least not the way that I’d said it.

  “Right,” I said. “Well, I’m sure that will be an effective method for change.” Now I hated this guy, and myself a little too—for hoping that I could make something happen just by answering a few questions honestly. For once.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” he said.

  And I believe that he really didn’t understand what I was trying to say; I do. But I also believe that he didn’t really want to, because he probably wasn’t so nonjudgmental after all, and maybe he even believed that people like me, like Mark, absolutely did belong at Promise. Or somewhere worse. And though I knew that I couldn’t explain all of that to him, make what I was feeling fit neatly into words, I tried, more for me and for Mark than for this guy’s understanding.

  “My whole point,” I said, “is that what they teach here, what they believe, if you don’t trust it, if you doubt it at all, then you’re told that you’re going to hell, that not only everyone you know is ashamed of you, but that Jesus himself has given up on your soul. And if you’re like Mark, and you do believe all of this, you really do—you have faith in Jesus and this stupid Promise system, and even still, even with those things, you still can’t make yourself good enough, because what you’re trying to change isn’t changeable, it’s like your height or the shape of your ears, whatever, then it’s like this place does make things happen to you, or at least it’s supposed to convince you that you’re always gonna be a dirty sinner and that it’s completely your fault because you’re not trying hard enough to change yourself. It convinced Mark.”

  “Are you saying that you think the staff should have anticipated that Mark would do something like this?” he asked, jotting again. “Were there warning signs?”

  At that I just gave up completely.

  “Yeah, I’d say his verbatim memorization of the most fucked-up passages in the Bible might have been one,” I said, looking right at him and trying to make my face as blank as his. “But here at Promise that’s seen as a sign of progress. It’s actually surprising that all of us disciples haven’t hacked off our privates with the handiest sharp object. I’ll probably do it when I get back to my room, first chance.”

  That changed his flat face but he controlled it again pretty fast. “I’m sorry that you’re so upset,” he sa
id. He didn’t say I’m sorry that I’ve upset you. He didn’t take the blame; but he was probably right not to. It wasn’t really his fault.

  “I am upset,” I said. “That’s as good a word as any.”

  He had other questions for me then, and he tried a couple more times to get me to give him specifics about this emotional abuse I felt I had suffered, but even the way he said it made it sound so stupid, and me like a whiny kid who didn’t like the appropriate punishment I was receiving on account of my bad, bad behavior. I gave him one- or two-word answers and it didn’t take more than maybe three minutes before he’d recapped his pen and thanked me for coming and asked me to “please send Steve Cromps in next.” So I did.

  I don’t know what any reports that were filed to state agencies about the incident concluded, but I do know that nothing much changed at Promise. Kevin the night monitor was fired, that was one thing. He was replaced by Harvey, a sixtysomething who used to do security for Walmart. Harvey wore squeaky, black, old-man sneakers and did this rapid, three-quick-blows nostril-clearing thing into his hanky every fifteen minutes or so. I felt confident that if he caught me outside of my room at night, Rick and Lydia would most definitely know about it. Also, our parents or guardians were told about the incident; probably that was required by law. Ruth wrote me a long letter about how sorry she was that it had happened. She didn’t write anything about possibly doubting the treatment I was receiving, or blaming it, or worrying that a similar fate might befall me. Other people’s parents reacted similarly. Nobody pulled their kids out of Promise or anything like that. (Well, except for Mark’s parents, of course.) For a few weeks right after, we were an even more exotic band of sinners when we attended off-campus church services at Word of Life. But the luster of us somehow being gruesome by association wore off pretty quickly, and soon we were just run-of-the-mill sexual deviants again.

  I remember that my dad used to say that Montana only has two seasons: winter and road construction. I’ve heard lots of people say it since then, but I still think of it as something my dad said, something I remember him saying from when I was really, really little. I know all the reasons why people say stuff like that, the good-natured kidding about a state you’re actually completely in love with; the folksy way of articulating the suffocating qualities of a seemingly endless Montana winter and the dry heat and annoyances of the summer that so soon follows; the way a saying like that encapsulates just how present the natural world is in Montana, and how aware of it you are—the sky, the land, the weather, all of it. (Variations on the saying include: Montana has only two seasons: winter and forest fires; winter and whatever’s not; hunting season and waiting-for-hunting season.)

  I can tell you for a fact, though, that there was most definitely a springtime in western Montana in 1993. And thank God for that, because our escape plan depended on it. Spring started to trickle in by the middle of March, a little bit here and there, and it had flooded the entire valley where Promise sat before the end of May. At first all our snowpack grew slushy, thawing during the day, refreezing at night, and repeat, and repeat, and then it melted into the ground entirely, leaving every path muddy, some places swampy, which sure didn’t stop Adam and me from resuming our trail runs, even when we had to wear sweatshirts and gloves, even when the second half of the run, back to the dorms, took almost twice as long as the first half, our sneakers so clumped up with thick mud that they might as well have been weights attached to our feet. It didn’t matter whose bedroom you walked past, now everybody had their windows open, letting all the good spring smells float in, the wet earth and new growth and the indescribable scent of icy mountain wind as it rushed from those peaks still covered in snowcaps that wouldn’t ever melt completely and weren’t really all that far outside our windows.

  By the time the first crocuses appeared—there was a huge patch of them behind one of the summer camp cabins, and also these tiny yellow flowers that spread like shag carpet across the most unlikely ground, creeping out of crevices in rocks and alongside the edge of the barn—Jane and Adam and I had settled on a time to escape. We were gonna go at the beginning of June, just after we took our exams at the Lifegate Christian School in Bozeman but before the start of Camp Promise. I’d been working ahead on my classes, and if I passed the exams I’d be in the twelfth grade in terms of course credits, which is where Adam would be. But Jane would be graduating; she’d be finished. It was most important to her to have her transcripts in order.

  We were still working out all of the details of our plan then, the whole thing looming vague and uncertain ahead of us, but from the very start Jane was pushing for us not to go until finals were over. She’d been arguing with Adam about it. He wanted us to leave sooner rather than later, and he definitely saw June as later.

  Jane and I were talking it over quietly one morning while on cleaning duty together, the two of us scrubbing the always mildewy shower stalls, our voices echoey despite our attempts to speak lowly. Those stalls were heavy with the smell of Comet, something I still couldn’t be around without thinking of the terrible night Grandma told me the news. I was glad we had our escape plan for me to focus on instead.

  Jane was in the middle of making yet another point about the benefits of waiting until June when I said, “I’m fine with going after finals, it’s cool. I get it. But then why even bother leaving with us?”

  “What do you mean, ‘why bother’?” She squeezed her yellow scrub sponge into our shared bucket. “For all the same reasons you’re bothering.”

  “I just mean that you’ll be done,” I said. “You can go to college. You don’t have to escape.”

  “Hardly,” she said. “I don’t turn eighteen until August, which will make me a minor with a diploma until then, still technically under my mother’s guardianship, and she’ll want me to stay through summer camp, I can guarantee you that; the less time I’m under her roof, the better.” She dunked her sponge again, it made a squelchy-splashy noise as she twisted it. “Besides, you think I’m actually going to pursue my higher education at Bob Jones University? Or maybe Wayland Baptist in ever-progressive Plainview, Texas?”

  “Just because they made you apply to shit schools doesn’t mean you have to go to those schools,” I said. Bethany kept a file thick with brochures and catalogs for evangelical colleges, and Jane and a couple of the other disciples who would be graduating had spent some time that fall applying to them, which was, according to Jane, a formality, because, she said, those kinds of colleges let in everyone who can pay and is either authentically evangelical or willing to play the part. And indeed, many, many acceptance letters from those colleges had been arriving at Promise all spring, nobody turned away.

  “Of course I don’t have to,” she said. “But they didn’t let me apply anywhere that I might actually want to go, and it’s too late now to try for this fall. Unless maybe I find a community college somewhere.” She had been squatting to dunk her sponge, and as she stood, I could tell her bad leg was bothering her. She kept shifting her hip so that her weight rested on the other leg as she passed her sponge up and down the shower wall. “It’s such a farce. Did I ever tell you that Lydia did her studying at Cambridge? And she looks the other way while they have us apply to the University of Christ on a Cross.”

  “I’ve heard their field hockey team is outstanding,” I said.

  Jane threw her sponge at me. It missed and flew out of the stall into the sink area, where it landed with a gross squelch against the wall. I grinned and moved to get it, but Jane put her hand up, started that way herself.

  “I don’t even know if I want to go to college,” she said. “I think I’d rather be a student of the world for a while.”

  “I guess,” I said. “But if that’s the case, it just seems like you don’t have to go to all the trouble of the running-away part. If you’re not planning to live with your mom while you’re a student of the world, anyway.”

  “Heavens no,” Jane said, returning to the stall. “There’s
nothing for me in her perfect slice of suburban America, sprinkles on top.”

  “Exactly,” I said. “So if you’re not gonna live with her or go to the college she wants you to go to, why not just tell her, and if she freaks and tells you to never come back, it’s like the same thing as running away, anyway. I mean, no doubt Adam and I will be sent back here for another year if we don’t leave. But not you.”

  “Do you not want me to come with you or something?” Jane asked, and she sounded hurt, especially for Jane, who barely ever sounded hurt. “You’re thinking maybe Hopalong might slow you two down?”

  “No—shit, not at all,” I said, and I meant it. “It just seems like you’re taking the hard way when you don’t really have to.”

  She stopped scrubbing then and stood there with her dirty sponge dripping fat drops onto the tiled shower floor. “It’s odd that you see it as the hard way,” she said, “because I see it exactly opposite. 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.”

  “You think this will make a dent?” I asked.

  “The great thing is that I won’t be around to find out one way or another,” she said, smiling a Jane smile. “Besides, this way I get to do it with you and Adam and not just me all on my own. At least when we start out.”

  This was where our plan got muddled, even after we agreed on a go time: where, exactly, it was that we were going, and just how long we would stay together after we got there. At first I think Adam assumed that we’d just move somewhere, all three of us, and I don’t know, set up house or something, and that didn’t sound completely unappealing to me until Jane reminded us that there would be people looking for us, that we were minors, and even worse, that once she turned eighteen and became an official adult, she could maybe be charged with aiding us in our flight or something. We weren’t really sure about any of the actual laws involved, but certainly I’d seen enough movies to know that all the bad guys split up when they were on the run, so that if one was caught, not everybody else got trapped too. 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.