The Miseducation of Cameron Post (46 page)

“I’m serious,” I said, and the thing was, the more I said it, the more serious I got. “I’m gonna figure out a way to leave. If I don’t, I know Ruth will keep me here next year. I know she will.”

“Of course she will,” Jane said. “Nobody ever leaves because they’re all better. You only leave if you can’t pay anymore or you graduate.”

“Or you’re Mark,” I said.

“Yes,” Jane said. “Or you’re Mark.”

“Really?” Adam said. “Nobody’s ever passed the program or whatever? Gotten ex-gay enough to go back to normal high school?”

“Well, it’s only been open three years,” Jane said. “But nobody’s done it that I know of.”

“Because it can’t be done,” I said.

“And because there’s no real test that could prove your transition anyway,” Jane said, putting things back into her leg compartment. It was weird how sometimes I forgot she even had that thing—the leg itself, not the compartment, I could never forget that. “You can change your behavior, but if you don’t have Lydia breathing down your neck, that will only last so long. Besides, it doesn’t mean anything else about you has changed, inside, I mean.”

“That’s why I’m going,” I said. “That and a million other reasons. I don’t want to be here anymore.”

“I’m in,” Adam said, whipping the blanket off both of us, my skin goose-bumping immediately. “Let’s do it right now, no more talking. I’ll be Bonnie and you’ll be my Clyde.”

“I’ll go with you,” Jane said, with total seriousness. She almost had her leg reattached. “But we need to have a comprehensive plan. We need to work out the details.”

“Just like a couple of lesbos,” Adam said. “Comprehensive plan? Are we building a deck or escaping? Let’s just go. I’ll steal the van keys—seriously. Right now we do it. We could be in Canada by morning, all-you-can eat Canadian bacon. Now there’s a euphemism for you.”

“They’d stop our stolen vehicle at the border check,” Jane said. “And even if they didn’t, we don’t have our IDs, we don’t have much money, we don’t know anyone in Canada. Or I don’t.”

I wanted to jump up with Adam and just do it, like he said, take action. But what Jane said was true. They kept our driver’s licenses (those of us that had them) and other identification papers, or copies of those papers, in one of the locked file cabinets in the main office.

“So we get our IDs right now,” Adam said. “And then we go.”

“This is why we need a plan,” Jane said. “This is exactly why. So that we don’t get tripped up by all the details we forgot.”

While she was speaking, there was a kind of low rumbling from far off, and if it hadn’t been snowing when we walked out to the barn, I would have been sure that it was thunder.

“We won’t ever do it,” Adam said, “if we sit around and think about it forever. We won’t. So let’s just go.”

“To where?” I asked.

“Who cares?” he said. “We’ll figure it out on the road.”

“I want to go too,” Jane said. “But let’s do it right. If we steal a van, they’ll find us and we’ll get sent back here within a couple of days. And then what was the point?”

Right as she finished, there was a drum roll of what now sounded unmistakably like thunder.

“Zeus is angry,” Adam said, standing again.

“Was it thunder?” I asked, and then more thunder rumbled, this closer than the last, the storm moving quickly like they so often do in the mountains.

“It’s thundersnow,” Jane said as Adam went to the heavy wooden hatch that closed off the hay pitch. It was a bitch to move. We’d done it before, but the hinges were more rust than not, and the gray wood splintered into your skin like a sticker plant every time you got your hands on it. Adam worked at it anyway, though.

“Is it even still snowing?” I asked as I got up to join him.

“If it is, it’s thundersnow,” Jane said.

“I’ve never heard of that,” I said as Adam and I managed to push the hatch out some, those bolts squeaking and screeching at our efforts, tiny splinters of that old wood already barbing my fingers.

“It’s uncommon,” Jane said, standing up. “It happened once when we lived on the commune. I can’t believe I don’t have my camera.”

Adam and I kept inching the hatch and it went a bit farther, and then a bit more, until we could see mostly just a black sky and black ground, some sections blacker than others, with white snowflakes coming down much faster than before, blizzard fast, the snow a superwhite blur against all that blackness.

“It is,” Jane said from behind us. “It’s thundersnow.”

“Oh my God, we get it,” Adam said. “Stop saying
thundersnow
.”

But she was sort of vindicated, because then a blast of thunder crashed loud, the storm closing in around us, the kind of thunder that you feel in the walls, deep inside your body, and then a bolt of lightning made its jagged silver path across the sky, like the trajectory of a failing heart patient’s EKG monitor. And then another, its flash lighting the snow on the ground, reflecting off the millions of crystals, impossibly bright and white, and then the whole area was completely black again, and then another flash, another great cracking noise and spotlight. One of the pines lit up momentarily, its snow-heavy bows, its massive height against the black nothingness, and then it was gone, and then something else got the spotlight, some other section of land that had been blackness just before, and all the while the thunder rumbled behind the spectacle and the snowflakes whirled and flew, heavier and heavier, so thick they seemed almost to clog the air. We three watched and watched together. I think it was probably the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.

“I can’t believe I don’t have my camera,” Jane said again, her voice almost reverent.

“You couldn’t ever get this into a picture,” I said. “And you’d miss it while you were trying to.”

“Rick’s back,” Adam said, and I looked in the direction he was staring and found the headlights he had seen, two faint orange dots coming closer and closer toward Promise, toward us.

“I want to go with you,” Jane said. She took my hand. “I mean it. I’ll do whatever.”

“Okay,” I said.

“You two aren’t running off together and leaving me here,” Adam said, wrapping both of his hands around ours. “Even though I can’t quite believe that we’re ever gonna go.”

“We’re going,” Jane said.

“I don’t have a plan,” I said. “I know some people who might help us, maybe, if we can even find them. But that’s all I got.” I was thinking of Margot, the money she’d sent me in that Campfire Girls manual; I was thinking of Lindsey and her bad-assness; and Mona Harris, close by in Bozeman, at college. And for some reason I thought of Irene Klauson, too. Though I don’t really know why.

“Then we’ll find them,” Jane said. I liked how sure she was.

“I have my staggering good looks to offer,” Adam said. “And my unique and complicated understanding of sex roles. You can call it a mystical understanding, if you must.”

“I’ve got the weed,” Jane said, and we all laughed the way you laugh when you’re trying to be brave in the face of something that scares you.

The headlights were bigger, and closer, just beyond the metal-roofed cabins now, the bulky rectangle of the van barely visible through the snow, Reverend Rick and his stack of pizza pies, braving the thundersnow for all of us weary disciples.

“We’d better go in,” I said. “Before they come looking for us.”

Chapter Nineteen

M
ark Turner didn’t come back to Promise. Not two weeks later. Not a month later. Never. At least not while I was there. Reverend Rick and Adam had to pack up his stuff and send it to him in Kearney, Nebraska. Adam never did get his fancy razor returned to him, not that he wanted it back, he said, but it disappeared from Promise, just like Mark. Just like the three of us were going to.

Pretty soon after Mark’s
incident
, which is what somehow everyone started calling it except for me and Jane and Adam, a guy from the state came out to inspect Promise, the classrooms, the dorms, everything. He worked for one of the licensing departments. Then a couple of other guys came, and a lady. The lady wore a plum-colored pantsuit with a gold-and-plum scarf, and I remember thinking that Aunt Ruth would call the combined effect
a smart little look
. All the men wore ties and jackets, and everyone who came worked for one state agency or another. Most of these people spent their time in Rick’s office, but one of the guys talked to each disciple for twenty minutes or so. I went in after Erin, but there was no chance to ask her what it was like; we just passed each other in the hallway outside the classroom where he’d set up shop for the day.

At first I liked this guy because he was so routine, and seemed, I don’t know, professional, or at least he didn’t talk down to me, or act like a counselor, probably because he wasn’t one. He introduced himself but I can’t remember his name, Mr. Blah-Blah from the Child and Family Services Department, I think. He started with a series of mundane questions:
How often do you eat meals? How much time do you spend on schoolwork, both in the classroom and otherwise, each day? How much time do you spend completing other activities? What is the level of supervision for these activities?
And then he asked a few less mundane questions:
Do you feel safe in your dorm rooms at night? Do you feel threatened by any staff members or fellow students?
(This guy used the word
student
, not
disciple
).
Do you trust those in charge here
? My answer to that question was the first I’d given that really seemed to interest him.

“Not really” is what I said.

He had been taking brief notes on a yellow legal pad, rarely even looking up at me, just reading from his stapled list of questions and then scribbling this or that and moving on. But now he paused and looked right at me, his pen hovered there. “You don’t trust the staff here?”

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.”