The Lost Saint(11)

“All I want to say is that Jude was troubled and ran away,” Dad had explained to us. “And we’d appreciate everyone’s patience while our family adjusts.”

But Mom wouldn’t allow it. She hated the idea of people judging her parenting, thinking anything ill of our family.

“So what do you want us to do?” Dad had asked her.

“We lie,” she said.

“To the entire town?” I asked.

“Yes.” She rocked back and forth in her chair and stared at the TV set. “He’ll be home soon. We’ll find him. Nobody will know anything was ever wrong.”

So that second Sunday in January, Dad fed the “official” story to Rose Crest—lied to everyone right over the pulpit. According to what my mother wanted him to say, Jude had gone to live with Grandma and Grandpa Kramer in Florida, because they needed help around the house after Grandpa’s back surgery—and Dad would occasionally be flying down to help, too.

But people aren’t stupid. They were bound to notice that Jude had been gone for almost ten months without coming home to visit once. And that his disappearance coincided with a mysterious “dog attack” inside the parish that had put Daniel in the ICU for a week. They were bound to notice that Mom could barely make it through one of Dad’s sermons, with that fake grin plastered on her face and her eyes completely glassed over. They were going to notice that Dad was “flying down to Florida” to help his in-laws more often than he was home some weeks.

Which meant people were also going to talk.

I knew it wasn’t possible to come completely clean about everything that had happened in the last year, but on top of knowing the secrets of the underworld and lying to everyone about my brother’s disappearance, I also had to hide the fact that I could hear what people said about my family and me behind our backs. Another less exciting perk of having superhuman hearing that decides to kick in at the most inconvenient times.

Most people are genuinely nice, you know. But some people were nice only to my face, and I could hear them whisper about my family when they thought I was well out of earshot. They liked to speculate about how Jude must have been on drugs, or how he possibly ran away to join a cult. Or maybe he was at one of those schools out west where they make messed-up kids hike through the desert without enough water.

“I always knew that kid was too perfect to be for real. I bet they were all getting high in the parish that night,” I heard Brett Johnson—one of Jude’s friends—whisper once when I was a good block away from him and his girlfriend.

I knew people called my mom crazy when they thought I couldn’t possibly hear them.

Only slightly less annoying was the stuff people at school would say about me. I’d always been used to people watching me, judging me, because I was the pastor’s daughter. But now I was pretty much the school pariah when my back was turned—which is apparently what happens to you when the captain of the school hockey team gets arrested and then kicked out of school for assaulting you. I mean, seriously, I had no idea HTA was so fanatic about hockey until I got blamed for us losing our chance to win State last year. Never mind the fact that Pete Bradshaw was the one who attacked me.

And I couldn’t even react, because normal people aren’t supposed to hear what others say about them when they’re two rooms away. So I have to admit that when my superhearing decided to act up at school today, I felt only slightly guilty that the masses had a whole new topic of juicy gossip to chew on.

News spread quickly about what happened at Day’s Market, and the speculations about the culprit only heightened when my second-period gym class was cancelled because it was discovered there had been an attempted break-in at the school through one of the gymnasium windows.

And by third period, rumors flew like spit wads across the halls when it was announced that all religion classes were cancelled, too, because Mr. Shumway, the religion teacher, hadn’t shown up for school.

Some people claimed that Mr. Shumway was missing, but as I walked by the main hall I overheard one of the secretaries inside the principal’s office say that Mr. Shumway had up and quit first thing this morning. But that didn’t make any sense at all since Mr. Shumway had been teasing our class with some big surprise for the last two weeks, and he was supposedly going to tell us the details today. I was almost ready to believe the guy about fifty yards down the hall from my locker who said he heard that Mr. Shumway had “seen something” connected with the break-in. And it had freaked him out so bad he refused to come back to the school.

There was so much chatter, in fact, that by the time I got to fourth period all I could do was lay my head on the art table and clamp my hands over my ears.

“That bad?” Daniel asked as he slipped into the seat next to mine.

“Blech. This whole not being able to turn on and off my superhearing whenever I want is getting to be way too nauseating. Oh, and remind me not to walk past the boys’ locker room when my hearing is acting up. For a bunch of Christian guys, they sure have dirty mouths.”

Daniel laughed. The vibration made me want to pound my forehead against the table.

“Sorry,” Daniel whispered. He cleared his throat. “So do you think Jude may have had something to do with the attempted break-in at the gym?” he asked as quietly as possible. “Coach Brown says he thinks whoever did it must have been after the computers in the lab next door. But my guess is that Jude went there after Day’s.”