Little Do We Know(12)

I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been up there, but it looked the same as it always had. There were eight rows of dark mahogany pews, exactly like the ones down in the sanctuary, and along the back wall, a long table draped with a blue silk runner held all the brass offering plates. It was quiet. It always was. No one ever went up there except on Christmas Eve and Easter Sunday, when all the Chreasters took over and there was nowhere else to sit.

The sound booth looked like a room trapped in time. The walls were lined with brown metal shelving units and stocked with old microphones, reel-to-reel tape recorders, and other equipment that looked like it hadn’t been used in decades.

I walked toward the soundproof window and looked down into the sanctuary. I stared at the enormous wooden cross that hung on the wall behind the pulpit.

When I was little, my mom used to work in the office a few days a week. She’d bring me with her, and I’d sneak up to the sound booth to watch my dad preach during Monday Chapel. I remember thinking my dad looked different from that vantage point. More important.

I’d hung on his every word, even back then. Everyone had. If he’d stood on that stage and told us the sky was purple, not blue, we all would have walked outside and seen the sky through entirely new lenses. But over the last few years, that changed, and not only for me. I wasn’t sure if it was because of the drop in enrollment or the novelty of Dad’s contemporary approach had worn off, but there had been a shift that rippled throughout the community. He’d disappointed them. I’d felt it. Dad had felt it, too.

“Here.” Aaron patted the stool next to him. “Have a seat. I want to show you something.”

He angled the computer monitor so I could see it better, and I immediately recognized the SonRise website. Aaron redesigned it right after he arrived. The whole thing was heavy on images, light on words, and looked more like the website of an indie rock band than a Christian a cappella group. Our most recent YouTube videos were embedded in slick-looking frames, along with black-and-white photo stills from our past performances and links to download our music.

“I’ve been working on the promo videos.”

He clicked the mouse and an image filled the screen. In it, the sanctuary was completely packed with kids, all holding hands, lifting them up to the sky. I’d never seen that picture, but it couldn’t have been new; the sanctuary hadn’t been that full in years. The caption read: We will tell the next generation about the glorious deeds of the Lord. —Psalm 78:4.

“This is a lot like the ads Covenant has run in the past,” Aaron said. “It’s designed to attract the typical Christian kid in the Orange County area who’s looking for a great college-prep, Jesus-centered high school.”

Then he opened another window, and a familiar black-and-white photo of SonRise filled his monitor. Logan was looking at the camera, expressionless; Alyssa was half smiling at something outside the frame; and Jack and I were looking at each other. We took these professional shots right after we won the Northern Lights competition my freshman year. I kind of thought we looked like a cheesy early-eighties band, but everyone seemed to love this shot. Unlike the other ad, everything about it looked hipper and less churchy. The text read: Find your voice. Sing your song. There wasn’t a cross to be found.

“This new one is designed to target kids interested in the arts.” He clicked the mouse and a video opened. “I was up all night working on this, so if you don’t like it, lie to me, would you?”

He smiled.

I didn’t want to smile back, but I didn’t know how not to. It was one thing to glare at him from a distance, avoid eye contact while he was directing us, and speak to him in clipped sentences, but it would have been rude to do any of those things when he was sitting right next to me.

“Just kidding. I genuinely want to know what you think.”

The video started with a slow camera pan across the campus. Then it zoomed in on a bunch of kids in classrooms, hanging out in the quad during lunch, and working together in the library. Aaron did the voice-over instead of Dad, and rather than describing the idyllic campus tucked into a hillside where you could hear God’s voice in the trees, he called it a place for quiet reflection and soul-searching.

And then the video moved into new territory I’d never seen before: SonRise performing in competitions, and to a packed house during the Christmas musical. There were still images of the four of us goofing around on the tour bus, and the four of us practicing, and the four of us teaching kids to sing during our summer mission trips. Aaron’s voice faded away and SonRise took over, singing the mainstream songs we always sang. It moved on to footage from the dance and drama department performances, and ended with the date and time of Admissions Night, sprawled in big letters across the screen.

“Wow,” I said. “It’s good. It’s really good.”

“Are you just saying that because I told you to lie? Because you know I was kidding about that, right?”

“No, it’s really good. I mean it.”

He was watching me like he was trying to figure me out. “You look…kinda puzzled.”

I was. I remembered him running around campus shooting that video over the last two weeks, before I’d known the story about how he’d been hired, and thinking how lucky we were to have him. He worked hard for my dad and for our school. As mad as I was about losing my tuition, that part was hard to ignore.