The Miseducation of Cameron Post (37 page)

Chapter Fifteen

I
n October, disciple Mark Turner and I were on evangelical detail together in the business office. I spent our first session on the newsletter, written by Lydia and Rick and photocopied onto sky-blue paper, the God’s Promise logo in the corner, four pages of articles about our various outings and community-service projects, a full-page profile on one disciple. That month it was Steve Cromps. What I did for two hours was this: staple, fold, stuff, stamp, repeat, repeat. Mark, however, was sitting in a spinny desk chair calling big donors and doing the spiel. He did it well, probably the best of any of us, and I could tell that not even five minutes into his first call. He did it well because he believed what he was saying. I still didn’t really know him at this point, but because he was Adam’s roommate, what I did know for sure was that he was completely committed to being at Promise, to being cured. (And also that he wasn’t a tattletale—as far as we knew, and we’d have known by then, he never told anyone about Jane and the joint he caught her with, so despite her
wariness
, he seemed an okay guy to me.)

That chair he was in that day seemed too big for his elfin features. He was probably just shy of five one and had dainty everything—hands and arms and legs—and a little face with mahogany eyes and perpetually pink cheeks and pouty little Hummel-figurine lips. He had a black binder full of things to say, answers to give to various questions: Q.
Do you really think that you’re getting any better there?
A.
In my time at Promise I’ve already grown in my relationship with Jesus Christ. I continue to grow every day. And as I learn to walk with him, so too do I learn to walk away from the sin of my sexual brokenness
. But he didn’t need the scripted, staff-approved answers to questions, because all of Mark’s answers were naturally staff-approved. I watched him close a call with a donor from Texas, a guy who liked to be called every month, I’d heard, and now Mark was talking Cornhusker football with him, telling a story about the last game he’d been at with his dad and brothers at Memorial Stadium in Lincoln on a perfect October afternoon not all that different from the day we were having, just a twinge of frost in the air, warm cider in their thermoses, the Huskers propelled to victory, of course, by the sea of red in the stands. I really did watch him tell it. I stopped midfold and looked up at him, though he didn’t notice me. He was animated, his eyes bright, the arm not holding the phone gesturing; and as he talked about some fourth-quarter turnover that was “just exactly a rabbit from a hat but on cleats and Astroturf,” I wanted to have been there with him, just like I know the Texas guy on the phone did. But I didn’t even care about college football. That wasn’t it. Mark was selling the dream of an all-American autumn afternoon with the family. And there was nothing fake or gross about it—it wasn’t like a Ford pickup commercial with stars and stripes in the background. It was simpler than that, more genuine. I guess because he believed in it for real. Whatever
it
was.

The Texas guy must have thought so too, because he made another donation, right over the phone. I know this because Mark said, “That’s very generous of you, Paul. I can’t wait to tell Reverend Rick. We couldn’t do this without your support. Not just people like you, but you yourself. I want you to know that. What you give means something very real to my salvation. And there are no words of thanks I can offer that are enough for that.”

I don’t know how you can say stuff like that and not sound at least a little bit like an asshole; I know that I would have, and I’d never say those words anyway. But Mark didn’t ever sound like an asshole. Not to me.

When he’d finished that call, was scanning for the next number, I asked, “How much is that guy sending now?”

He didn’t look up from his list. “I don’t know exactly,” he said. “He’s gonna work out the details with Reverend Rick.”

I could tell that wasn’t all of it, but it wasn’t worth bothering him over. “You’re crazy good at those calls,” I said.

“Thanks,” he said, now looking up and smiling a little smile. “That’s nice of you.”

“It’s the truth,” I said. “If you have to be that good, they won’t ever ask me to do it.”

He smiled again. “I like doing them. It gives me a sense of purpose the other tasks don’t offer.”

“Well, if you keep pulling in donations, they’ll always have you do it.”

“That’s not why I like making them,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I get it.” But I’m not sure I did.

“Okay,” he said, and went back to his list, checked the number, and lifted the receiver.

“Did you mean it?” I asked, leaning forward a little, across the table, wanting him to stop.

He did. He kept the phone in his hand but pressed the dial-tone button with the other. “Mean what?”

“That being here is necessary for your salvation?”

He nodded, then said, “Not just me. It is for yours too.”

I rolled my eyes.

He shrugged. “I’m not trying to convince you. That’s not my place. But I hope you do become convinced.”

“And just how does that happen?” I asked, my voice still a little smug, but I meant the question.

“You have to start with belief,” he said, letting up the button, punching the numbers. “That’s where everybody has to start.”

I thought about that while he made his next calls, while I kept on with the newsletters. I thought about it during Sunday service at Word of Life, and during study hours in my room, with the Viking Erin and her squeaky pink highlighter. What it meant to really believe in something—for real. Belief. The big dictionary in the Promise library said it meant
something one accepts as true or real; a firmly held conviction or opinion
. But even that definition, as short and simple as it was, confused me.
True
or
real
: Those were definite words;
opinion
and
conviction
just weren’t—opinions wavered and changed and fluctuated with the person, the situation. And most troubling of all was the word
accepts
.
Something one accepts
. I was much better at
excepting
everything than accepting anything, at least anything for certain, for definite. That much I knew. That much I believed.

But I kept on watching Mark, his calm ways, the sort of peace he seemed to have, even though he was at Promise, just like me, just like the rest of us. I bugged Adam about him all the time, to give me details—what he did when they were in their room together; what he talked about.

“I think the system is already working,” Adam told me one evening when I’d been asking a heap of Mark-related questions that he couldn’t really answer. We were on dinner shift together. We’d put two tuna-noodle casseroles in the oven, cleaned up the dishes, and snuck out to the hayloft for a quick smoke because we knew Lydia and Rick were both in one-on-ones.

“What system is that?” I asked, taking the joint from him but dropping it onto my lap as I did. I plucked it up, inhaled.

“The conversion of your sexuality,” he said, taking the joint back. “I think you’re nearing the proverbial breakthrough.” He had a piece of hay between his lips already, his
oral fixation
, and he left it there even while he was toking.

“Why do you say that?” I asked.

“You haven’t stopped with the Mark Turner questions for days,” he said, smiling. “It’s a tad tiresome from my end, but bravo—I’d say a full-on hetero schoolgirl crush. Any moment now I’m expecting to see you drawing hearts with his initials in your pink Trapper Keeper.”

I laughed. “My Trapper Keeper’s purple, not pink, loser.”

“Details, details,” he said, waving his hand. “It’s the passion I’m concerned with.
L’amour.
”

I shoved him. “I don’t have it bad for Mark Turner,” I said. “I just want to figure him out.”

Adam nodded like a counselor, like Lydia, and brought his hands together in a pyramid to his lips while he said, “Mmm-hmm. And to be clear: by
figure him out
you mean climb onto his erect penis, correct?”

I laughed. “Yes, that’s it exactly,” I said, but then I couldn’t help myself; I
was
sort of obsessed with Mark Turner. “You don’t think he’s interesting? His seriousness or whatever? I can’t even imagine him doing anything gay enough to get sent here.”

Now Adam laughed. “What—because there’s an official gay barometer now? His parents weren’t going to send him, but then they caught him listening to Liza-with-a-Z for the third time that month, and that was it: finally he’d
done something gay enough
!”

“Well, that’s how it works, doesn’t it?” I said. “I mean pretty much like that.”

He shrugged his shoulders. “I guess,” he said quietly. “If your crime isn’t bigger.”

“Yeah,” I said. We smoked in silence after that. I was thinking about Coley, of course, of course I was. I don’t know what Adam was thinking about.

After a while he asked, “Who would it be for you, though, here, if not Mark? I mean to mack on?”

“God, I don’t know,” I said. “No one. I don’t think anyone.”

“Come on,” he said. “If you were picking, though. If you were forced to.”

I waited. I thought. “Bethany Kimbles-Erickson,” I said, laughing, but meaning it.

He laughed too, his shiny black bangs across his face. “I can see that. It’s the schoolteacher thing. It’s a classic scenario. But of the student body now—who?”

“You say,” I said. “This is your thing, so you say first.”

“I’ve already hit it with Steve. A few times.”

“Right,” I said. “So Steve’s your answer?”

“Not really,” he said, looking right at me, wearing something akin to Irene Klauson’s old dare face. “Maybe it’s you.”

My stupid blush, again, again. “Sure,” I said. “Then the system’s working on you, too. Glad to know it’s not just me.”

He did a face of exasperation. “I’m not gay, Cam. I told you. It doesn’t work like that for me.”

“It works like that for everyone,” I said.

“That’s a really small way of looking at desire,” Adam said.

I shrugged. I didn’t know what to say to that. I studied the gray barn wood, toffee and mint green–colored lichen growing on it in places. I flicked some of it off with my finger.

“You wanna power-tunnel this?” he asked, holding up what was left of the joint, which wasn’t much.

“I don’t know what that is,” I said.

“Yeah you do,” he said. He gestured with the roach. “I flip this, put the lit end in my mouth and blow while you cup your hands around my face and inhale. People call it a shotgun, too.”

“That’s not a shotgun,” I said.

“I beg to differ,” he said.

“You touch lips when you shotgun,” I said, taking the joint from him. “It’s more like kissing. I’m pretty sure you already know that.”

“That’s baked frenching,” Adam said. “That’s something else.”

“Well that’s what I want to do,” I said.

“Are you sure?”

I nodded. Then I inhaled, for as long as I could, and that was for quite a while, thanks always to my swimmer lungs. Then I held it, and then I motioned to Adam and he brought his mouth to mine and we sealed lips and I exhaled. And then we kept on kissing for a while from there, for long enough that we burned the tops of the casseroles.

Kissing Adam wasn’t like kissing Jamie, not exactly: it didn’t feel like rehearsal for the real deal, for something better. But it wasn’t like kissing Coley, either. It was somewhere in between, like kissing Lindsey, I guess, most like that. I liked it. I liked doing it, and I didn’t have to pretend that it wasn’t Adam I was with in order to like it. But I didn’t, I don’t know, I didn’t long for it, either.
Longing
is sort of a gross word. So is
ache
. Or
yearn
. They’re all kind of gross. But that’s how I had felt about touching, kissing, Coley. It’s not how I felt about Adam. And I know it’s not how he felt about me.

Promise had rules, lots of rules, many of which I broke with regularity, and it wasn’t too long before I was caught. It was a fairly minor infraction really, considering that I might have been apprehended smoking pot or making out with Adam (which we’d taken to doing on occasion after our first go at it, up in the hayloft, out in the woods, clothes mostly on), or openly mocking the practices and
support
of Promise in exactly the sarcastic, textbook
gay-image
kind of way that I was supposed to be ridding from my life. But it was none of those things. The Viking Erin caught me shoving a pack of really nice, twelve-color, fine-tipped, professional-grade markers into the back waistband of my pants, up under my shirt and sweatshirt, at the Montana State University bookstore while we disciples were there, waiting to watch a Campus Crusade Christian rock concert out on the main quad.

The thing is, I had plenty of money to pay for the markers, but I couldn’t do that because (1) I wasn’t supposed to have brought that money with me to Promise, and my work-detail money was low because it took forever to earn and I bought a lot of candy with it; and (2) Even if I’d used work-detail money and maybe borrowed against future earnings (which was occasionally allowed), all purchases had to be shown to a staff person, with receipt, before we boarded the vans back to Promise, and I would then almost certainly have to explain what I planned to do with the markers, which was a secret worth stealing for. Only I didn’t know that Erin had wandered into the art supply section to find me so that we could “grab a good spot to watch the show.”

“What did you just do?” she asked me, and before I could answer, she said, so loudly she was almost shouting at me, “You’re stealing! You just stole something. You have to tell. You have to go and tell Rick right now.”

“I haven’t even left the store,” I said, keeping my voice low in the hopes that she might follow suit. “It’s not stealing until you leave the premises. Just let me put them back. Here, I’ll do it right now.”

I pulled free the markers and made a big show of placing them back on the shelf, with the other marker packs of the same variety, but it wasn’t enough.