It hadn’t taken long after Christmas vacation and school starting up again for people in our neighborhood to notice that Jude was gone and that Mom wasn’t exactly acting like her usual Martha-Stewart-meets-Florence-Nightingale self. By the end of the first week of school in January, the whole parish knew that something was off with the Divines, and Dad decided that he should make some sort of statement to his parishioners. He’d wanted to tell the truth. At least the version of it that didn’t involve werewolves—my own mother didn’t even know that much, and considering her fragile mental state, it was probably for the best.
“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.