The Miseducation of Cameron Post by Emily M. Danforth
“My grandma and I went outside because we couldn’t figure out the noise. It was cool because they stayed lit while they got tossed around.” I felt like explaining it this way was ruining my memory of that moment, but Lydia kept on with that look of hers. “Ray tacked them down again, though.”
Lydia tapped her pen on the picnic table. “So how did you obtain three of these lights to put in the container that you had needlessly hidden beneath your bed, given that you already had decoration privileges?”
“When he took down all the lights, one strand was dead, and I pulled off three of the bulbs before we threw it away,” I said, and felt stupid enough just saying it aloud without looking at the kind of smirk face Lydia was making.
“So it mightn’t have even been the strand you saw with your grandmother,” she said.
“Yeah, I guess not. I don’t know for sure.”
“And yet you felt compelled to take these three lightbulbs and hide them in your luggage and bring them all the way back to your room here at Promise and then glue them to the inside of a cottage-cheese container?”
“Yeah,” I said. “That’s exactly what I did.”
“I know that’s what you did, Cameron, but that’s simply the chronology. We’re trying to understand why you would do something like that. Why you continually do things just like this.”
“I know,” I said. I had my tan sweater on that day. It was a weekday so I was in uniform, and I was suddenly too hot.
Or maybe I wasn’t suddenly too hot but I had just noticed that I was too hot, with both my sweater and my long-sleeved shirt, so I started to pull off the sweater and had it halfway up my torso, my chin tucked and arms in that weird midpull position with my hands gripping the sweater’s hem and my elbows pointed up by my ears, when Lydia said, “Stop that right now.”
“Huh?” I said, stopping but maintaining the weird position.
“We do not undress ourselves in front of others as if all public spaces are changing rooms,” Lydia said.
“I just got too hot,” I said, pulling the sweater back down. “I have a shirt on under this.” I lifted the sweater again, with just one hand this time, and pointed at my shirt with the other.
“An undershirt, or lack thereof, is not my concern. If you would like to remove an article of clothing, then you ask to be excused so that you may do so in private.”
“Okay,” I said, keeping the sarcasm completely in check because we’d already had several conversations about that, too. “I’d like to remove my sweater because I’m too hot. May I please be excused to do so?”
She checked her watch and said, “I think you can manage your discomfort for the remainder of our session, at which time you’ll be free to return to your room and remove your sweater in private.”
“Okay,” I said.
Lydia was like this all the time. I mean, the more I opened up to her, was a model patient or whatever, the icier she got, correcting pretty much everything out of my mouth and at least half of my silent actions as well. But the thing was that her near-constant admonitions actually made me like her more. I think because witnessing her administration of ten zillion rules and codes of conduct, all of which she applied to her own life, made her seem fragile and weak, in need of the constant protection of all those rules, instead of the opposite, the way I know that she wanted to be seen, the way I’d seen her when I first arrived: powerful and all knowing.
“You’re ready to continue, then?” she asked.
“Yeah.”
“Good,” she said. “Because I don’t want you to avoid this subject by creating a disturbance.”
“I wasn’t doing that at all,” I said.
She ignored me and continued with the pronouncement that it seemed like she’d worked out long before our session had even begun, which happened fairly often. I didn’t always understand what she was even talking about when she made these pronouncements, but I’m not sure that it mattered. “What’s fascinating,” she said, “is that you’ve developed this pattern of stealing these material fragments that, more often than not, remind you of some sin that you’ve committed. The act of stealing these items is a sin in and of itself, of course, but often these are tokens from the various reckless things you’ve done. They’re trophies of your sins.”
“Not the lights,” I said.
And Lydia said, “Please do not interrupt.” And then she was silent for a moment or two, as if I might not be able to resist an additional outburst. Then she took a breath and said, “As I was saying, while not all these items are directly related to your sinful behavior, many of them are, or at the very least, they come from your experiences with individuals with whom you have troubled relationships. First you collect these items, and then you display them as a way of attempting, I think, to control your guilt and discomfort regarding both these relationships and your behavior.” She consulted her notes before continuing, running her hand across the top of her hair again. Her voice was sort of lofty and speechified, as though she was talking into a handheld tape recorder for all of posterity and not to the person sitting across a picnic table from her, the person about whom the claims were being made. “These many sinful experiences are ultimately not sitting well with you, and you’ve been struggling in vain to put them to rest by attempting to glue them to a fixed surface as a means of controlling them, and thereby controlling your guilt. Of course this method is failing, which you already know. Choosing to hide the cottage-cheese containers when you knew that they would be easily found was one thing, but then continuing to hide them even after you had decoration privileges and they were no longer contraband was a blatant cry for help. You could have had those containers sitting plainly on your desk. You chose to try to imbue them with significance by hiding them. I’m not at all surprised that as you’ve made progress in your support sessions, you’ve felt less and less inclined to work on them.”
“I hadn’t thought of that,” I said. I hadn’t, and it worried me that maybe she was right, even though I’d never been into the cottage-cheese containers the way I’d been into working on the dollhouse.
“In fact,” she said, a rare and genuine Lydia smile on her face, “I think it’s time for you to throw them away. Today. First thing.”
“I will,” I said. And I did, as soon as I got back to my room. Just after I took off my fucking sweater.
Since Jane’s mandate there had been no smoking sessions with what was left of the nonconfiscated pot, no trail running with Adam, and the three of us weren’t even sitting together during meals anymore unless there were other people at the table with us. Lydia told me that this was a very good thing, because she’d noticed that there had been negative bonding among the three of us for too long.
We continued to communicate mostly through notes and shared moments in a hallway, as we loaded into the van, wherever we could grab them. Explaining the necessity of visiting Quake Lake as a condition of our escape route was difficult this way, but after a series of much-longer-than-usual notes passed back and forth, Jane and Adam were willing to let my everyday miracle run its miraculous course. I snuck the pull-out map from my Bethany book to Jane during our second visit to the Bozeman library, and while there I looked up and even photocopied “for my independent study” more recent maps of hiking trails around the Quake Lake area. I did this with the help of a dykey librarian: spiky hair, multiple piercings all the way up her earlobe, Birkenstock clogs. I think she thought I was just gonna go camping there with my friends or something. I guess I kind of was. I looked up a couple of articles about my parents’ accident, too. It was difficult to gauge just where their car had broken through the guardrail based on summary reporting and a map of the lake, but I had a general idea.
I managed to slip the photocopies to Jane as we shared the far backseat in the van on the drive to Promise. She was our Meriwether Lewis, after all. She slipped me a note about the supplies she wanted me to gather and be in charge of: three candles from the box of extras in the chapel; a
The days ticked closer to June. I was allowed to call Grandma and Ruth again, just before exams. They were back in Miles City. Ruth’s radiation was complete, but it had badly burned her skin and she had to have that area washed and bandaged twice a day, so she wasn’t able to return to work, “At least not yet,” she told me in that fake-bright voice she was still using to cover how very tired she must have been. “But it’s nice to have a break.”
“She’s got places on her body that look like raw chuck steak,” Grandma said when she got on the line. “I know it’s more painful than she’s lettin’ on.” Her voice was hushed, especially for Grandma, and I could tell she had stretched the long kitchen phone cord, the one usually tangled in chunky knots, so that she could walk somewhere away from Ruth, somewhere she could tell it like it was. “They’re not even sure the radiation did what it was supposed to do. They don’t know yet, they keep telling us. ‘We just don’t know. We’ll have to wait and see.’”
“I bet Aunt Ruth’s glad that you’re there, Grandma,” I said.
“Oh, it’s Ray who’s been waiting on her hand and foot. I just keep her company and feed her candy. You know, I still can’t quite get used to the idea of summer vacation without you.”
“Me neither,” I said.
Then we talked a little about how all of them, she and Ruth and even Ray, were planning to come and visit me at Promise (it had been cleared), over the weekend of July Fourth, partly because it was so close to the day Mom and Dad had died.
“So long as Ruth feels up to it,” Grandma said. “But even if she doesn’t, I might just take the Greyhound over myself and see what’s what out there at your school.”
I didn’t trust myself to manage whatever lie I might have responded with, so I said, “Mmm-hmmm.”
Grandma sort of coughed into the receiver. “Now I don’t know how you’ll feel about this, Spunky, and you’ve got time to think on it, but Ruth and I were talking about maybe all of us driving over to Quake Lake and having a picnic. She said it’s practically right there and it’s supposed to be a pretty spot, all things considered.”
“It is really close to here,” I said.
“You think you might want to do something like that? You and me won’t be able to go to the cemetery together this summer.”
“Will you still go for me?” I asked. “And bring flowers, but not lilies.”
“I will surely do that,” Grandma said. “You go on and think on the other thing I asked. You have all kinds of time to make up your mind before we get there.”
After we’d said I love you and good-bye, I listened to Grandma jostling the phone as she walked back into the kitchen to hang it up. She said something, to Ruth, probably, something that I couldn’t make out, something like she sounds fine or everything’s fine or it’ll be fine. I wondered when I’d get to call her again, and from just where I’d be doing it. And what I would say.
The week of final exams I had some version of the same dream almost every night. In it, Bethany Kimbles-Erickson and I eventually wind up alone in the study room and she’s showing me some new book she’s miraculously found that’s also all about Quake Lake. And she sort of leans down next to me to fan the pages and her hair brushes alongside my face and our heads are so, so close, bent together over this drawing of the mountain tumbling, damming the rush of the water. And when she turns to ask me something, her mouth is so close to the side of my face that her words steam my cheek and how can we not kiss, which we do, and then Bethany takes the lead and pulls me up out of my chair and pushes me onto my back on top of the study table, and we’re wound together on top of the book, it’s pressing hard into my back, and I don’t care, we don’t care, and we can’t stop. . . .
Every night I managed to wake myself at that point. I thought that I was doing so by sheer force of will, and I’d open my eyes to the dark, sweaty and gripping my sheet and wanting not to have woken up, my body buzzing and alive and all of me working to fight it just to see if I could, if Lydia was right, if I could just withstand these sinful urges until they passed. I would lie there still, keeping my muscles tense and my hands above the covers and concentrating every bit of me to keep from falling right back into that dream, from letting it pick up where it had left off. And it would work. She was right. When I fell back to sleep, it would be to a different dream, or none at all. 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. It was the same thing as following all those rules Lydia stuck to, and when that got old, making up even more rules to follow and then justifying them with some passage from the Bible.
I didn’t tell Lydia about the dreams. I thought the first night would be the only night, and when it came back the next night, it seemed like I should have already told her about the night before, and then I decided that I could do this on my own; it was just a dream and I could handle it, and my feelings about it, without her.
But then came the night that I didn’t wake up until dream-Bethany was just working her hand beneath my flannel skirt, and I’m not sure that I would have even woken then, but I heard my name, in nondream form, and then I heard it again.
“Cameron?”
When I opened my eyes the Viking Erin was right there, her face next to mine, hazy in the dark but her wide eyes so close to my own that I yelped a startled yelp and she whispered, “Shhh-shhh, no, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. It’s just me.”
“What the fuck?” I said, my voice sounding too loud and bright so soon after sleep, in the darkness of the room. Erin was kneeling on the floor next to my bed, and because I’d just woken from that world of X-rated Bethany, her closeness felt like more than just an intrusion of my personal space; it felt somehow like she’d seen the dream, too.
“You were making lots of noise,” she said, sort of petting my chest, over the blanket. “I tried to wake you up from my bed but you wouldn’t stop.”
“What?” I know I blushed, even in the dark, even still half asleep and unable to get over how she was right there, inches from me. I could smell the Scope she’d gargled with before bed, the pink Johnson & Johnson baby lotion she put on her feet and elbows every night.
“Last night and before—you were dreaming and I woke you up. I said your name.”
“I didn’t know you had,” I said, turning away from her, toward the wall, but not all the way. “I’m fine now.” I wasn’t fine: I was buzzing and turned on and this conversation was getting in the way of the concentration it took to make that go away.
“What was it about?” she asked, not moving, not going back to her bed, following the rules, pretending to be perfect, but staying right where she was, not even moving her hand from on top of me, though she stopped petting me with it and let it rest.
“I don’t remember,” I said to the wall, to my iceberg. “It was scary.”
For a little while she didn’t say anything, but then she said, quietly but with purpose, “No it wasn’t.”
“Yes it was,” I said, wanting her just to leave, to go back to her own twin mattress. “Were you dreaming it with me?”
“I was listening to you dream it,” she said. “And those weren’t scared noises.”
“Oh my God,” I said, turning onto my stomach in an angry flop, one that I hoped showed my annoyance. I mashed my face into my pillow and from there said, “Go back to bed. You’re not the dream police. Seriously.”
She didn’t move. Instead she said, “I heard you say Bethany—I heard it more than once.”
“I don’t care,” I said, my words still smooshed by the pillow.
“You said it like—”
“I don’t care,” I said, turning back toward her and talking right in her face, and also more loudly than was wise for that time of night. “I don’t care. I don’t care. Just stop.”
“No,” she said. And then she leaned in and kissed me. She didn’t have to go far, there in the dark—our faces were close already—but it was still a big move, a grand gesture, and awkward because of it: She half missed my mouth, got some of my lower lip and the hollow before my chin. I didn’t kiss her back right away; it was too startling. I flinched and turned my face some. But God bless the Viking Erin, that didn’t stop her. She put her hand on my cheek, her thick, soft fingers, the scent of pink baby lotion even stronger, and turned my head back to her, my lips to her lips, and tried again, and this time was much better, partly because she found my mouth right away, but also because I knew that it was coming. We let that kiss turn into another one, and then one where she maneuvered herself up from her crouch and on top of me.
She wasn’t a Coley Taylor; she’d done this before, with a girl, I could tell. I had on an old Firepower T-shirt and flannel sleep pants. The T-shirt was huge, one of the leftover XXLs, and it was stuck around me like a sack I’d climbed into, but she got it off in a couple of tugs. When she had her hand at the drawstring of my pants, I lifted the hem of her own T-shirt and she kind of pushed my hand away, just a small nudge.