The Miseducation of Cameron Post

Irene asked me, “Do you think we’d get in trouble if anyone found out?”

“Yeah,” I said right away, because even though no one had ever told me, specifically, not to kiss a girl before, nobody had to. It was guys and girls who kissed—in our grade, on TV, in the movies, in the world; and that’s how it worked: guys and girls. Anything else was something weird. And even though I’d seen girls our age hold hands or walk arm in arm, and probably some of those girls had practiced kissing on each other, I knew that what we had done in the barn was something different.

I couldn’t have told you where the religion part ended and the psychology part picked up

but it was like her voice out of the past too, out of my past, her voice speaking to the me who I wasn’t anymore and never would be again.

Something didn’t just happen to him. He injured himself. Severely.”

And when you’re surrounded by a bunch of mostly strangers experiencing the same thing, unable to call home, tethered to routine on ranchland miles away from anybody who might have known you before, might have been able to recognize the real you if you told them you couldn’t remember who she was, it’s not really like being real at all

Hear, hear is right,” Jane said back. “It’s a boon for you all that my nature is to be a provider.”
“It’s the Christian thing to do,” I said

“She’s impersonating the mother from Carrie as a career choice,” Adam said.

every single time I looked out the windows too long, I felt like I was disappearing. And I looked out those windows for too long all the time

I thought not of Coley but of Irene Klauson, away at boarding school on her first night, hearing these same kinds of sounds, thinking, maybe, of me

In the embrace’s release I caught the scent again. Unmistakable. Marijuana. These homos were high as kites