The Miseducation of Cameron Post (45 page)

“How the fuck do you work out something like this?” I asked, my voice the kind of shrill it gets when I’m too mad to cry but have that burning in my throat anyway. I hate my voice like that but I just kept on. “I mean, seriously, you wake up to find your roommate with a bloody mess on his penis? What’s the worksheet Lydia’s gonna assign for that? Maybe Adam can fucking put it on his iceberg now.” I was so, so angry, as mad as I’d ever been, ever, in my life. I just started saying stuff, just whatever, anything, stuff like “You guys don’t even know what you’re doing here, do you? You’re just like making it up as you go along and then something like this happens and you’re gonna pretend like you have answers that you don’t even have and it’s completely fucking fake. You don’t know how to fix this. You should just say that: We fucked it up.” I said some other stuff, too. I don’t even know what all I said, but it was loud and angry and I just kept saying it.

Rick didn’t tell me to stop swearing or being such a asshole, not that he would have used that word but that’s sort of what I was being even if what I was saying was true, but he didn’t try to cut me off or jump in and stop me the way that Lydia would have. And that didn’t really surprise me, because Rick was good at being calm. What he did do, and it did surprise me, is start crying himself. He did it quietly, but he didn’t hide his face from me, he just sat in that chair, facing me, and cried. That stopped my tirade. It stopped it pretty fast. And then it was all the more terrible, the whole thing, when he said, still crying, “I don’t know how to answer you right now, Cam. I’m sorry.”

Rick didn’t call me Cam, nobody was supposed to at Promise, because it was, according to Lydia,
an even more masculine adaptation of my already androgynous name
. Sometimes Jane and Adam and Steve might, because it would just come out that way, but they tried not to do it around Rick or Lydia, and Rick had definitely never slipped up before.

He really was a handsome guy, and his face was sort of horribly beautiful right then, maybe because it was so vulnerable, I don’t know, but it was one of those moments that’s just unbearable to be in the middle of, everything raw and open and thick with emotion, and it’s not something I can really explain, even now, but I got up and I gave him a hug, a hug that was even more awkward because he was still sitting and I was leaning over, but I did it, and then, after a few seconds, he stood up and we hugged like that, which was a little bit less awkward.

Eventually he sort of backed a step or two away but still held me by my shoulders and said, “We got this backwards. I came in here to make you feel better.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “I do sort of feel better.”

“You’re right to be upset about this, and to wonder how it might change what we’re doing here. But for now the best thing I can tell you is that we’ll let Christ lead us to our answers. When in doubt He’s the best guy to follow, right?”

“Sure,” I said, 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. All that seemed more honest than anything else he (and Lydia) might eventually invent to deal with this because Christ had
led them to it
. That would just make it worse.

“This means something to me,” he said, and he pulled me back in for another quick squeeze before he let go. “Thank you for letting me have this with you. I know it doesn’t come easy.”

“This isn’t easy for anybody,” I said. “It’s not like it’s worse on me. I didn’t find him on the floor.”

“I’m thanking you for being honest with me. It was brave.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Whatever.” I didn’t want to talk anymore about what had just happened; I hated that about Promise. Why couldn’t a moment just happen, and both of us be aware of it, without having to comment on it forever and ever?

“Anything else you want to ask me?” Rick said.

And out of nowhere, I mean, completely unplanned, I said, “Is Lydia really your aunt?”

He made a face like
What the hell?
and then laughed and said, “I wasn’t expecting that one.” But then he added, “As a matter of fact, she is. Jane must have told you, huh?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Right after I got here. I just wasn’t sure if I should believe her.”

“About that you should,” he said. “Lydia was my mom’s sister.”

“Was,” I said. “Not anymore?”

“My mom died a few years ago.”

I nodded. “Sorry,” I said. I had lots more questions I might have asked him about Lydia, about the two of them, about his dead mom, but it didn’t quite seem like the time to be doing it, and anyway, Erin walked in, before she recognized that Rick was in the room, she just walked in and then said, “Oh, I’m sorry. I’ll come back when you’re done.”

Rick said, “I think we are done, right?”

I nodded.

He walked to the door and said to Erin, “You stay; I’m just on my way to find Steve.” Then he put an arm around her waist and squeezed, quick, and said, “It’s a hard day, isn’t it?”

Erin nodded but kept it together.

“We’re all gonna meet in the chapel in twenty minutes or so,” he said, one hand hanging on the doorframe and one hand looking at his simple watch, the one I liked, with the white face and the tan-and-navy canvas strap.

“We are?” I asked.

“Yeah, Lydia came and told those of us in the kitchen,” Erin said.

I looked at Rick, who nodded, smiled, then patted the doorframe twice and left.

Erin wanted to talk about Mark and I didn’t. I wanted to climb into bed, all my clothes on, and sleep. Better yet: I wanted a VCR and a stack of videos and I wanted to play them one after another after another. Erin hadn’t heard all the details about what had happened—she’d just heard it was a
self-inflicted injury
and that he was stable. I didn’t fill in the gaps for her, because I knew some other disciple would, eventually. I just didn’t want to talk about it anymore.

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 outline 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.”