Guitar seemed like the obvious answer, so it was probably wrong. I tried to picture a young, high school Aaron on a stage. I couldn’t really see him as a front man, but it wasn’t like he was bassist material either. Before I could say anything, Alyssa answered her own question.
“Dude, my boy was a drummer.” She raised an eyebrow. “I mean, that acoustic guitar thing he does now is adorable and all, but a drummer? That’s just hot.”
“I’m pretty sure you’re not supposed to refer to our choir director as hot.”
Logan looked over at us and raised an eyebrow. “You know what else is hot?”
Alyssa put her hands on her hips. “What?”
“Your mic.”
Alyssa blushed and took two giant steps back while the rest of us tried to stifle our laughs.
Aaron’s voice filled the room again. “Well, everything seems to be working. I’ll be right down.”
The three of us totally lost it.
A minute later, Aaron reappeared at the back of the sanctuary carrying the video camera in one hand and a tripod in the other. When he reached the front of the room, he set everything up, ignoring our laughter and Alyssa’s bright red cheeks.
Over the last few weeks he’d been running around campus with that camera in his hands, jumping onto tables during lunch to get shots of people eating together, buzzing around the library getting footage of everyone studying, and popping in on classes to show our teachers in action. At first, I thought it was pretty cool how hard he was working to capture the spirit of our school. Now, I couldn’t help but wonder how much my dad had spent on that brand-new video camera.
“Okay. I’m almost done with the two promo videos, but I don’t have enough SonRise footage, so I’m going to keep this rolling.” He pressed a button on the recorder and stood in front of us in his usual spot. “Pretend the camera’s not there. Let’s start with ‘Brighter.’”
“Brighter Than Sunshine” wasn’t a new song or anything, but it was a fan favorite. We’d been singing it in local competitions for the last four years, so the whole thing came naturally for us, and we hardly had to think about the words and the harmonies anymore, which made it especially fun to perform. It was an easy pick for Admissions Night, one we knew we’d nail.
Aaron took his place in front of the stage. It was impossible not to look at him, so I sucked in a deep breath and pushed down my anger, telling myself to focus on the music and forget about him.
He gestured to Alyssa and she whispered, “Four, three, two, one.”
Then he pointed right at Jack and me, and we sang.
“Mm…bop-bop. Mm…bop-bop.”
All four of us had our eyes fixed on Aaron’s hands, watching them cut through the air, moving back and forth in time with the music. Then he pointed at Logan, who sang in his rich, clear voice, “I never understood before. I never knew what love was for. My heart was broke, my head was sore, what a feeling.”
Aaron’s left hand moved with the tempo, keeping the three of us on the beat while he directed Logan through the verses. And then he pointed at me for the chorus.
“What a feeling in my soul, love burns brighter than sunshine.”
By the middle of the song, we all relaxed into it, looking at each other, turning our palms toward the ceiling or closing our eyes when we felt a special connection to the lyric. We were having fun with it. We sang the last two lines in four-part harmony.
“I’m yours and suddenly you’re mine, and it’s brighter than sunshine.”
Aaron closed his left hand into a fist and brought his right finger to his lips. It was quiet again. The little red light on the camera was still on.
“That was good,” Aaron said. “Logan, you were a bit early on that second verse. You have to watch me. I’ll tell you when to come in, okay? And Hannah, I’d like you to hit those first few words in the chorus a little harder. ‘What a feeling in my soul…’” he sang. “Really deliver that line, okay?”
Normally, I would have thanked him for the feedback. Instead, I grabbed my water bottle off the pulpit and took a huge gulp.
“Awesome. Let’s do it again.”
Alyssa spoke quietly into her mic, “Four, three, two, one.”
Two hours later, after four more takes of “Brighter” and three rounds of “Dare You,” the other song we were planning to perform for Admissions Night, Aaron called it. The four of us let out a collective sigh and practically sprinted to the first pew, reaching for our backpacks before he had a chance to change his mind.
“Hey, Alyssa, can I catch a ride home with you?” I asked. “Dad’s working late again.” It was true, but mostly, I didn’t want to have to sit in the car with him again.
She checked the time on her phone. “I would, but I can’t today. It’s twenty minutes out of the way, and my mom will kill me if I don’t let the dog out.”
I looked over my other shoulder. “Logan?” I asked.
He stuffed his water bottle into the pocket of his backpack. “Can’t. I’m taking Jack home, and he’s clear on the other side of town.”
“Guess I’ll run the track.” But I didn’t want to run the track. The track bored me. I wanted my path. I wanted my rock.
“Sorry,” Alyssa called over her shoulder as she headed for the door. “I’ll text you later.”
I had nothing else to do and I wasn’t in a hurry to run, so once my friends were gone and Aaron had returned to the sound booth, I walked back to the stage and started disconnecting the microphones.
Aaron had demanded a ton of new equipment as a condition of employment, saying he couldn’t build the kind of music program Dad wanted without it. In addition to the velvet-lined microphone box sitting next to me, there was that camera, perched on a professional-quality tripod. And then there was all the stuff in the sound booth, like the 64-channel mixing board and a superfast computer he could use to edit our music and videos.
Aaron had to have known our school was in financial trouble when he’d accepted the job; he’d been hired to help fix it. Staring at all that fancy equipment made me wonder if he had any idea how much my dad sacrificed to hire him. Did he know Dad had picked him over me?
I was still lost in thought when I heard Aaron’s voice behind me. “You know they pay me to do this, right?” he joked, grabbing a cord and winding it around his arm.
“Yeah, straight from my college fund,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing.”
I snapped the buckles on the case and carried it backstage to the music room. I slid it onto the shelf next to all the boom mics and lav mics and other equipment. When I got back to the stage, Aaron was turning a dial on the tripod, disconnecting the video camera.
“Hey, do you have a minute?”
I tried to think of an excuse, but I was drawing a total blank, so I mumbled “I guess.”
“Great!” He sounded a little too excited. “I was hoping you’d be around tonight. I could really use your opinion on something.”
He picked the tripod up in one hand and the camera in the other, and headed for the back of the sanctuary. I followed him through the double doors, and then we took a sharp right and started climbing the narrow staircase that led to the balcony.
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.
“I’m just wondering how you made this so quickly?”
“Well, for one, it’s my job.” He started listing the reasons using his fingers. “Two, your dad, my boss, wants all the videos done by Friday so we can send them around to the local churches and ask them to play them during Sunday services. And three.” He stopped. “Never mind. Three’s not important.”
I gave him a look. “What’s three?”
“You don’t want to know.”
“Well, I didn’t really care much before, but I do now,” I joked.
His mouth turned up at the corners.
“Fine. Three. I have no life. After you guys leave for the day I come up to this pathetic man-cave and spend hours alone up here. If it wasn’t for that mini fridge over there, I might starve or die of thirst. I work until midnight, go home and sleep, and come back and start into it again. How do you think I redesigned the entire SonRise site in, like, four days?”
“Well, I like it. And I’m not just saying that because you don’t have a life and I feel sorry for you.” I looked at him. “It’s good.”
“You think?”
“Yeah,” I said. But he must have heard the inflection in my voice, because his eyebrows pinched together as he looked at me.
“But?” Aaron asked.
“No,” I said. “No but.”
“I thought I heard a but.”
“It’s nothing.” I hesitated to say anything. I knew he was following Dad’s direction, going after the theater and dance kids exactly the way he was supposed to. “Both videos are inspiring and all, but I guess I’m wondering how you’re going to reach everyone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, you’ve got your churchy people and you’ve got your Hollywood wannabes, but that’s a pretty small portion of the students here. Think about what my dad said during chapel today. Most of the kids that came here as freshmen felt…lost in some way. Something was missing from their lives, and the people at Covenant filled the gap. We became the friend group they couldn’t find or the family that splintered apart. Lots of the kids here are the ones who didn’t feel like they had anywhere else to go.”
“And neither one of these videos is reaching out to them.”
“Not really.”
Aaron crossed his arms and studied the screen.
“Sorry,” I said. “I don’t want to be critical. I know how hard you’ve worked.”
He shook his head. “Not at all. This is good.” He grabbed the can of Coke sitting next to his keyboard and took a big sip. “So how do we get to the others?”
“I don’t know.” I rolled my eyes. “That’s why they pay you the big bucks.”
I felt the anger rise into my chest again, and I wanted to kick myself for forgetting I was mad at him. For a minute there, I’d been acting the way I’d always acted around Aaron. But everything with him was different now that I knew what Dad had done. I stood and reached for my backpack.
Aaron set his Coke down and adjusted his cap on his head, his gaze still fixed on the monitor. “I’ll make a third one,” he blurted.
“How? I thought everything had to be done by Friday.”
“No life, remember?” He raised an eyebrow. “The filming and editing aren’t the problem. I just need an idea and script.”
The room got quiet again. Was he was waiting for me to come up with so
mething? Because if that was the case, he was sadly mistaken. In a roundabout way, I’d paid his salary. I wasn’t about to do his job for him, too.
But then one of the photos on the monitor caught my eye. It was a picture of Kaitlyn Caziarti, standing at the pulpit, sharing her testimony.
Kaitlyn had transferred a few months into her junior year after she was the subject of a vicious rumor that spread around her old high school. She didn’t share the details, but she talked about how hard those months had been, when no one believed her side of the story, not even the friends she’d known since elementary school. Her parents kept telling her it would die down, but when it only got worse, they finally agreed to let her change schools.
She talked about how everyone at Covenant had been so kind and inclusive, welcoming her right away, treating her like she belonged there. I remembered cynically thinking that I’d seen plenty of vicious rumors spread across our campus, too, and that she probably shouldn’t let her guard down so completely. But then I’d glanced over at Dad, beaming as if he was proud of the world he’d built for her.
In the car on the way home that day, he’d told me that Kaitlyn, and all the kids like her, were the reason he accepted the job of running Covenant all those years ago. “They need us,” he’d said matter-of-factly. “I’ll do whatever it takes to make sure this school is always around for them.” I’d admired him for that.
Now I felt a pang of guilt for being so angry at him. He was still that same person. Even if I disagreed with his methods, his heart was in the right place. His heart was always in the right place.
“Have you seen a testimonial since you came to Covenant?” I asked Aaron.
“Not yet. Why?”
“People give them during Monday Chapel sometimes. They talk about their lives before they came here. The mistakes they made. The bad things that happened to them. They talk about how Covenant helped them turn their lives around. They always remind me what I love about this place. Maybe you could get a few of them to let you interview them on camera. You could piece the stories together, add in some music. I bet it would be really powerful.”