Page 6 of Snake

Silas

I’m heading for my economics class when I spot Nim in the corridor up ahead. She disappears into her classroom without seeing me, but my heart still gives a hard thump at the sight of her.

My body is suddenly tight, my face warm. It takes a hard pull of air into my lungs to dispel the sensation, and even then, I’m struck with a sense of uneasiness. At least until I’m in my seat with my books out in front of me.

I suffer from anxiety sometimes, but it’s been much better since I began boarding at the Academy. That little hovel I used to call a home was a terrible cage for a mind like mine.

Fuck, it would be a torture chamber for anyone. I don’t know how Ma’s done it all these years. Pa drinks—

Pa used to drink.

Jesus, you’d think I’d know to use the past tense by now.

I stare at the blackboard, but my teacher might as well be writing in Sumerian. It’s my first day back at school since Dad died, and Knox and Mason were insistent that I should take a few days—Christ, they said a week—to process, but what the fuck is that going to help? I could curl up in a ball and cry myself to sleep for the next month, and it wouldn’t change anything. So what’s the fucking point?

Plus, and I’m not about to admit this to anyone because they’d definitely write me off as a fucking psychopath, but I don’t actually feel anything.

There’s this pang, sure, when I think about Pa. But God, I have to dig deep to find it. And it takes going back to my earliest memories of him, when he was still rocking a sixties mustache and wearing undershirts around the house that actually hugged muscles.

He used to call them his guns. It was cheesy as fuck, but my brothers and I ate it up. He told us we’d have them when we were big, too, because that’s what working in the mine did. And then Ma would laugh, but there’d be this uneasiness in her eyes, like she pictured that future and didn’t know if she liked it as much as she was pretending.

Chalk screeches on the blackboard, and I’m hauled from my bittersweet reverie by force.

There are eyes on me, and when I shift a little and use my peripheral vision, I see Eliza Jackson in the far back of the class, staring at me. I don’t like it. Not one fucking bit. She’s never even acknowledged I existed in class. She keeps her head down and works. Most of the kids in this class do, because most of them are serious as fuck about their careers.

Like me.

Like, I guess, Eliza.

So why the fuck does she let such petty bullshit affect her?

Huh. I guess I could ask the same of myself.

In the beginning, I’m not even sure why I became friends with Knox and Mason. Back then, I was using them to climb the social ladder. Fuck, who am I kidding? I wasn’t even on the ladder before I met them. But despite everyone calling them savages and snakes and all that shit, they turned out to be decent people.

It was their fierce loyalty that made me stay with them. It’s a quality I value highly, even if I can’t get the grips of it myself. I mean, I’m loyal to my brothers, that’s for sure. Ma? Pa? Not so much. I resent them, I guess. They took every wrong path they could in life—Ma getting knocked up repeatedly when they could barely afford to feed themselves. Pa losing himself in the bottom of a bottle. Absent when he should have been present. Aggressive when he should have been nurturing.

Fuck it, here I go again. Only a miserable fuck like me could enjoy lurking in the past with how dark and depressing it is back there.

I straighten, try to pay attention to the teacher.

When I look again, Jackson’s eyes are on the board.

That’s how it should be. Bullshit out there, the real shit in here. So why the fuck does Nim keep butting in too?

I’m probably just worried about her. The thought of something bad happening to her makes me want to cave people’s faces in with my boot heel.

Could be because I still haven’t fucked her, but that’s too primal, even for a guy like me. If I wanted to get laid, I could. That’s been the furthest thing from my mind lately…unless I’m around Nim.

That’s fucked up. Not that I usually have an overwhelming urge to get laid, but around her it’s constant. It’s got to be because she’s so intertwined in my life. In our lives. She’s a loose cannon. I’m simply confusing vigilance with love.

Love?

Jesus fucking Christ, I am fucked in the head.

My mind’s a mess for the rest of the lesson. Possibly for the first time since I started at the Academy, I’m fucking relieved when the bell rings. I grab up my things and head out of class. I’m halfway down the hall when Jackson calls out my name.

“Miller!”

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