I glanced down at my boxers and tank top. This was bad. I was running out of time.
“There’s a window in your room.”
The window!
I raced back to my room, locking the door behind me. If she wasn’t going to let me out, this was the next best thing. But by the time I yanked the window open and leaned out, the sidewalk outside the church was empty.
Maybe the confessor hadn’t left yet? I scrambled back to my bed and slid beneath it, ear to the vent, but I only heard silence.
I was too late. They were long gone.
♱♱♱
What are you supposed to do when you find out something horrible? Something so bad, there isn’t an adequate word for it. What are you supposed to do when someone you care for is in the wrong? When he could have done something but chose not to?
I used to think that if a person knew about a crime but didn’t commit it, that was some sort of lesser crime. Now that I’d discovered what my uncle was covering up, I wondered if instead it was way worse. He had the potential to stop it and for whatever reason, he chose not to. More than that, my uncle absolved this person, a person who molested teens. Abuse of power in so many ways.
Something this heinous definitely could be the reason why my parents severed ties with my aunt and uncle if they knew. But if they knew my uncle was enabling a sexual predator, surely they would’ve spoken up.
And if my parents thought Uncle Bryan was dangerous in any way, they would’ve never let me move in in the first place. I was certain of that. They must not know.
Did my aunt know? As twisted as her “God gave me ovarian cancer” story was, I couldn’t believe she would be fucked up enough to make excuses for sexual abuse.
My aunt and uncle couldn’t actually be okay with this. Both parts of me needed to believe that. There had to be another reason Uncle Bryan was keeping this under wraps.
What if my uncle was being blackmailed somehow, forced to keep quiet, like the victims of mobsters in old movies? Hell, maybe he’d deliberately put me in the room next door so I could bring the perps to justice. Maybe he’d even figured out that I was Raziel, the guardian angel looking after his most desperate parishioners. Maybe he actually hoped I’d intervene and do the right thing, seek the justice he was afraid to pursue.
The only problem was that I didn’t know how.
17 Aleks
Wearily, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling, fists clenching and releasing with each breath. I didn’t budge as the sun rose. Or when Aunt Anne Marie knocked on the door and asked was I all right and I said I didn’t feel well. There was no way in hell I was coming down for breakfast or going anywhere near my uncle. I didn’t want to see his mug outside of prison.
Coming here was a mistake. From day one, it all was a mistake. I shouldn’t have run after that anime convention. I should have told someone what happened. I should have told my parents. I shouldn’t have moved here. I shouldn’t have tried hide. I shouldn’t be here.
I wondered if I was the only person besides the two men in the confessional who knew what was going on. I knew there were a couple of other priests working at Saint Martha’s, living in a separate apartment from ours. Were they in on the secret? Sister Bernadette and Deacon Jameson couldn’t be involved, could they? Sister Bernadette said she believed in science. She implied she was pro-choice and had been chill about my identity. And Deacon Jameson—
I paused.
What if the confessor—the sinner—the abuser—was Deacon Jameson?
No. He was in love with Dima, and Dima was eighteen, not thirteen.
Unless Dima wasn’t the only one. Deacon Jameson spent time with that altar boy too, didn’t he?
I heard him confess the first time. My uncle didn’t seem to believe him when he said he hadn’t acted on his attraction. And then I caught him making out with Dima. Dima said he couldn’t even remember how that had started.
Even though it had been Dima pinning Deacon Jameson to the tree, Deacon Jameson was older, and he was an authority figure. Last year, we’d had a substitute for sex education once. He talked about grooming, an older person getting a younger person to trust and idolize them so that their abuse would seem like the victim’s decision and the victim would believe it was real love. The substitute said not all predators were crusty old men. It was just as likely to be dudes in their twenties victimizing young teens.
I’d scoffed at the time. There were age gaps in the cosplay world—and in a lot of anime, fifteen-year-olds got with much older people. It wasn’t a big deal then.
Except I told you it was, the voice in my head said.
So was it remotely possible that Deacon Jameson was a sexual predator and that Dima had been one of his victims? That he’d groomed Dima when Dima was younger, so that Dima would think of their relationship as good and normal? Could I find out? If I asked Dima, would he tell me?
No. Wait. He’d defended Deacon Jameson, said he needed to confess because their kiss was his fault, not Deacon Jameson’s.
Which is exactly what a grooming victim would believe . . .
My stomach roiled. Oh God. This was a nightmare. It had to be Deacon Jameson. The snake in the Garden of Eden.
I pulled out my phone. I flipped through the videos to pull up the one of Deacon Jameson chasing Dima with the Super Soaker. They laughed and yelled.
Was that the voice I heard in the confessional?
I couldn’t tell. The confessor had been whispering.
But he hadn’t gone through a grocery list of saints to pray to for forgiveness, like Deacon Jameson had the previous time I heard him confess. And the tone had been very different.
That didn’t necessarily mean it wasn’t Deacon Jameson, though. He might have been in an especially penitent mood the first time I overheard his confession. Maybe Deacon Jameson didn’t always include every saint he could think of. Maybe sometimes he just got right to the point.
The point being that he was a predator.
With effort, I sat up in bed. Lying around doing nothing wasn’t going to help me. That much was obvious. My penance for eavesdropping would be solving this. Fast.
I pulled out my notebook, tapping my pen against it like that’d help me think of solutions.
The obvious idea would be to wait until another confession happened, record it, and go to the police, turning over my phone as evidence. I didn’t need my phone anyway. It wasn’t like I had friends to talk to anymore.
But there were several huge-ass problems with that plan. One, it meant I’d need to allow abuse to happen again, to let someone get hurt again, before I did anything about it. Two, I wasn’t sure if it was legal to record conversations without someone’s consent. On TV trial shows, the “judge” usually dismissed cases where a person overheard a conversation but didn’t physically see the people involved, as that was hearsay. Wasn’t this the same thing?
And three, I wasn’t one hundred percent sure who the priest was, even though preliminary evidence pointed to Deacon Jameson. If I got the police involved but it turned out that my evidence was inadmissible, that would alert the abuser to the fact that someone was on to them. It might alert the church, including my uncle, who’d absolved the criminal and might help him cover the whole thing up.
I scratched my pen through option one. No, I couldn’t go to the police.