The Miseducation of Cameron Post (52 page)

“Are you serious?”

“I should go back to my bed,” she said.

“Right now?”

“They could do a pop-in any minute.”

I kept moving against her, working at the hem of her shirt again. “They don’t even do those anymore.”

“Yes they do,” she said, pushing me off her, toward the wall, which I let her do. “Lydia did a pop-in on Tuesday at like one in the morning.” She got both feet on the floor. Then she was standing, pulling and rubbing at her shoulder, like she’d just pitched an inning.

“How do you even know?” I asked. “Don’t you sleep?”

“Not like you do,” she said. She didn’t lean down and kiss me again, or some formal maneuver like that to say good-bye, or thanks, or to give an ending to what had just happened. Now that she was out of the bed, things were awkward, the communion of our closeness undone.

“Well, your dreams probably aren’t as entertaining,” I said. “So you have to stay awake to experience mine secondhand.”

She half laughed, not her Erin giggle but something else. She got into her bed. The strangeness now between us, in the maybe eight feet between our beds, was as deep as the Scanlan diving wells. We lay in that strangeness for minutes and minutes, the furnace kicking on, turning off, kicking on, the way it does in the spring when the temperature is fickle.

At some point Erin said, “You can’t tell anyone, Cam.”

“I won’t,” I said.

“I really do want to get past this,” she said. She said it like she might have been talking to me or just talking to remind herself. “I want a husband and two little girls. I want them for real and not just because I’m supposed to want them.”

“I know,” I said. “I believe you.”

“I don’t care if you believe me or not. It doesn’t make it more true just because you do. It’s true because it’s the way I feel.”

I didn’t say anything.

We were quiet for a while longer. I thought she might have actually fallen asleep until she said, “I knew this would happen at some point.”

“I didn’t,” I said.

“Because you don’t think of me like that,” she said. Her voice was very sad. In less than thirty minutes this thing that we’d just done together had gone from spur-of-the-moment (I thought) and sexy and exactly what I needed to ugly and bulky and very messy.

I thought maybe I could make her laugh, or at least lighten up, so I said, “I’ve been wondering something. Is part of the reason you like the Tandy Campbell videos so much because she’s a turn-on? I think she’s sort of hot.”

“I’m not gonna talk about that,” Erin said. “We shouldn’t encourage each other’s homosexual attractions.”

“Are you kidding?” I asked. I really wasn’t sure.

“I don’t want to talk anymore at all,” she said. “I want to go to sleep.”

“That’s fucked up,” I said. “I
was
sleeping. You woke me up.”

She didn’t say anything. I did a couple of those obnoxious, heavy sighs you do when you want someone to know that you’re pissed at them. She still didn’t say anything. I waited some more and she was still quiet. Eventually I was pretty sure that she really had fallen asleep this time, and I was close, too.

But then she said, just barely loudly enough for me to hear her, “Tandy Campbell’s not even my type.”

And I smiled, but I just let what she’d said hang there, no response from me, so that she couldn’t be sure if I’d heard her or not.

Those of us who had completed independent studies did presentations about our topics for all the disciples. I made a big, dorky collage of photos and maps for the occasion, and I was thorough, I knew my dates and facts. I told a story about seventysomething widow Mrs. Grace Miller who had to be boated to her house postquake because it was now floating in Hebgen Lake, and once there she found her “teeth still on the kitchen counter, right next to the sink.” People chuckled. Lydia, even. I described the way an earthquake that was 7.3 on the Richter scale could slosh a thirty-foot wall of water from Hebgen Lake and then sweep it through Madison Canyon, and just as that water reached Rock Creek Campground, literally half of a mountain—eighty million tons of rock—crashed down into the valley, one hundred miles an hour, and dammed it. There you go, presto, chango: a campground becomes Quake Lake. I knew my stuff. I earned my applause, but I didn’t look at Jane or Adam once the whole presentation.

A couple of days later we took our finals at Lifegate Christian. They were exactly what we’d prepared for, no surprises. Afterward we went for pie at Perkins. I had fresh strawberry with whipped cream. I thought of Grandma. It was midafternoon and the place wasn’t very full, a smattering of old people playing bridge, those ugly brown coffee mugs ubiquitous to these kinds of restaurants sitting in front of each of them; a lone businessman in a booth eating soup, his tie flopped over his shoulder; the mother of a family that looked travel rumpled ordering a grasshopper pie and a cherry pie to go. I had a hard time concentrating on my slice, on what Helen, who sat next to me, was saying. It was Thursday. We planned to leave Saturday morning after breakfast. With finals just finished, there were no study hours scheduled for the weekend, no mandatory group activities at all other than meals, duties, and church at Word of Life on Sunday, which we wouldn’t be around for. Hopefully. None of us had been able to get into the locked file cabinet to claim our IDs, but we didn’t care—we were going.

“If we used them, they’d have an easier time of tracking us down, anyway,” Jane had reasoned. “So we won’t be doing any air travel for a while, who cares?” We’d rounded up all the other supplies Jane had mandated; my Boo Radley hole was stuffed full. We had maps. What’s more, we had a plan. It was time.

Lydia had already approved an excursion for the three of us: a hike and then a picnic at the farthest edge of a neighboring ranch, in a grove of western paper birch where there was a “table” made of part of the trunk of some giant tree, laid lengthwise over two stones, with four more large stones for seats. It was a place Reverend Rick had led several of us to before. Lydia told Jane that her pot-smoking punishment had not been revoked, but that she was granting her a weekend reprieve to celebrate the completion of her finals and the progress she’d been making in her one-on-ones. “Whatever gets us out the door,” Jane had whispered to me that morning on our way into Lifegate Christian. “It’s not like the law of Lydia will affect me for much longer.”

While waiting outside the Perkins ladies’ room for Erin to be finished, I, completely on a whim, scanned through the directory that was hanging from a cable off the pay phone. I was looking for Mona but doing so without expecting to find anything, until I did. There was a Mona Harris listed as living on Willow Way. I thought she’d said something about living in the dorms, but who knew for sure? Maybe she’d moved. I ripped the page with her number from the phonebook. It didn’t make very much noise, the paper itself tissue thin and that hallway also housing the entrance to the kitchen, so the wait staff kept bustling by with trays of starchy foods, with trays of dirty dishes and wadded-up napkins. Nobody noticed. I folded the page into a tiny rectangle and slipped it inside the waistband of my skirt.

When Erin came out of the bathroom, we were weird with each other. She held the door open for me but stared out into the restaurant, avoiding my face, and I just sort of nodded at her as I went in. We hadn’t spoken about what had happened between us. Not one word from either of us. We hadn’t spoken very much at all about anything the past couple of days. We’d both been busy studying, and I’d been working on my presentation; but our silence wasn’t due to our schedules, it was an agreed-upon thing, the easier route to take.

Once in the bathroom I had to soap and rinse twice to get all the cheap black telephone-book ink off my fingers. I noticed that my hands were shaky as I did this, and I wasn’t surprised. I’d been the electrified, all-buzzing-energy version of me the whole week.

On my way back to the table, again passing the pay phone, I thought of Reverend Rick, away on a Free from the Weight speaking engagement. I’d been thinking a lot about the phone call he would be getting sometime Saturday night, wherever he was, Cleveland or Atlanta or Tallahassee. I pictured that moment in a bunch of different ways. Sometimes he was in front of a big group of dressed-up, smiling Exodus International fans in a church or rented meeting room. There he was in his fancy suit, the one he’d worn when he’d come to Gates of Praise and had spoken to our congregation, the suit that made him seem even younger than he was, not older, like a little boy playing dress-up. In that version he was interrupted as he talked in that genuine, Reverend Rick way about coming out of the darkness of sexual sin and into the light of Christ; a woman off to the side of the room would motion to him, or a man wearing shoes that
clicked
and
clacked
would walk right over to him and whisper something behind his hand, or maybe pass a note that Rick would read quickly before making his apologies and explaining that there was an urgent phone call he needed to attend to. His conversation with Lydia, the police, whoever was on the other line, was watched by the church officials who had invited him to come and speak, by some of his fellow Exodus–sanctioned ex-gays, all of them wearing faces of worry, glancing at one another and then studying Rick’s responses to whatever was being said, waiting to hear, from him, after he’d cradled the phone, the complete story of just what had gone wrong out at Promise.

I also imagined him alone in his hotel room when the call came. Sometimes it wasn’t a hotel at all, but instead a seedy motel sandwiched between a truck stop and an all-night diner, something out of the crappy crime movies I’d seen, a place with drug dealers and prostitutes holed up in it, the requisite neon sign blinking in through the dirty curtains at his window, everything dingy, a water stain on the ceiling, rust around the fixtures in the bathroom, the carpet something you wouldn’t want to walk on in bare feet. In this version the phone that rang was that creepy skin color that some phones are, not quite beige but not tan either, and it had a tinny, clangy ring that was too loud for the room, something he couldn’t ignore. I knew that his staying in such a hotel room wasn’t likely. This wasn’t some shoestring operation. Free from the Weight had backers with deep pockets, but sometimes I put him there, in my mind, anyway.

Most frequently I pictured him in a nondescript hotel by the airport, one with a small lobby, a breakfast bar, free newspapers, and maybe a snack when you checked in. He’d have the TV on but the volume low, maybe tuned to something surprising, MTV or HBO, and there’d be an open bottle of water on the nightstand. Maybe he’d already be in his small white boxers and T-shirt when the phone, this time something black and more modern, with a red message light, would ring its quiet electronic ring, undemanding. He’d be ironing his shirt for the next day and he’d take his time, put it back on the hanger, before walking over to pick up the receiver, say his hello. He’d sit down on the edge of the bed as the facts were told to him: Jane Fonda, Adam Red Eagle, and Cameron Post had not returned to Promise from their hike in time for dinner duties. At a little after six, Lydia March and a neighboring rancher had taken a four-wheeler most of the way to the spot where the three were to have been picnicking. The rancher parked about a mile from their destination, the trail too steep and full of obstacles to carry them, so they walked. The disciples were not at the picnic area, and there were no signs of them. The police had been notified by seven thirty p.m. They called the forest service. They also called the families of the disciples, who had yet to be found.

I didn’t imagine an ending to Rick’s phone conversation, nor did I even really fill in his responses to what he was being told. I did imagine his handsome face move from surprise to fear and worry, and that part, especially in the version where he was alone in his hotel room, made me feel sorry for him and what our escape would do to him, would mean for him. But not sorry enough not to do it.

On Friday I had my very last one-on-one with Lydia. It was held in the same cramped meeting room off of Rick’s office where, in August, I had first been introduced to my personal iceberg. The stinky gardenia on the windowsill had been replaced by an unwieldy air fern. Otherwise the room was unchanged.

We’d ended my previous one-on-one talking about my
addiction to the voyeurism of sinful acts through my obsession with rented movies
, another
coping mechanism
I had developed to help me, unsuccessfully,
ignore the trauma of my parents’ death and the guilt that I felt over it
. We picked up there. I tried to be the open book that I’d been for weeks, but I had this strange urge to tell Lydia about the Viking Erin and me, what we’d done, what Erin had done to me. I pushed that confession away and told Lydia what she wanted to know, stuff about all the sex I’d seen in R-rated movies, the way that I’d watched them again and again, losing myself to those images and sounds, one frame after another; the way that I’d educated myself about
perverse homosexual acts
all alone in the quiet of my bedroom. But the urge to share the Erin experience came back:
Tell her, tell her, tell her
. I knew that I couldn’t say anything, that if I did, Lydia would never allow me to go hiking the next day, no fucking way, and then our escape would be postponed, for a long time, maybe so long that we’d never get all the pieces in place again. But knowing the consequences didn’t stop my desire to say it. I wanted to sit there so calmly and say, “You know what—there’s actually something that happened recently that I think I should mention. The Viking Erin, you know, my roommate, she woke me up from this awesome sex dream I was having about Bethany Kimbles-Erickson so that she could climb into my bed and finish the job. I tell you what: She knew what she was doing, that one. Very professional; perfect timing.”

Of course I didn’t. We kept on with the session as usual, but at some point—and I can’t even tell you what line of questioning led to this, exactly—Lydia said, “As we go forward, you’ll need to work harder to acknowledge and uncover the role your parents played in shaping your current sinful identity. You’ve made some progress in exploring the ways in which their death contributed to your confusion about appropriate and Godly gender and sexuality, but that’s simply not enough. Your gender troubles began much earlier than that, at the hands of your parents, and focusing on your most recent sinful behaviors is only part of a complicated picture.”