Page 1 of The Snake in the Grass: The Prequel

Chapter 1

My brother died biting his tongue, a bruise the shape of four knuckles shadowing his rib cage.

Some things start with a bang, others with a whimper. This story starts with both. It ends in the tall grass of the late summer sun, the air heavy with humidity, tree branches creaking beneath impossible weight. I remember it all, burned into my retinas and echoing in my mind. There was the croak of cicadas starting up in advance of the coming evening. There was blood dripping onto blood-soaked ground, consecrating a place where no bodies should’ve ever fallen.

All things being equal, there are worse things in the world than the sound of a chair hitting the floor. But not in the house where I grew up. Beneath the rafters Papa Edwin cut and hammered, in the kitchen where Meemaw made pecan pie and sang show tunes, there was one single defining sound that warned of a coming storm. Like the finger of a dark funnel cloud dipping down on the horizon, it made clear that destruction lived above you and was about to come to Earth to tear whole worlds apart.

There ain’t no eye in the middle of a tornado. And there was no calm in the midst of the storm my father’s fists rained down.

“This is unacceptable.” He held the letter in hands that were steady despite the depth of his rage. The chair he pushed over as he surged to his feet was still rocking on the ground behind him from the force of his violent anger. “You were told not to apply to that school. The public high school is more than good enough for you, boy.”

It was always “boy” when he was acting up by trying to survive. Never Silas. The kicked dog doesn’t get a name.

“They don’t teach violin at the public high school.” I remember the way my brother’s eyes lit up. The fight didn’t go out of him until the end; it tookthemto make him whimper instead of snarl. “I’m going to Coleridge. They gave me a full ride scholarship. It’s not like it’ll cost you any money.”

Silence at these words. Mom, looking down like always, because looking up had been trained out of her—or maybe she’d never wanted to fight in the first place. Dad, crumpling the letter in his hand, rage leaking out of him like rusty water from a dripping faucet. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes fixed in front of me, watching it all with my peripheral vision, waiting for the sound of a train hurling down the tracks, a storm’s last warning of its coming fury.

When his fists descended, it was quick but deadly. A smash, a crash, a snarl, a boy no longer small enough to throw getting pushed into the wall. Knuckles to a rib cage, kicks until he went down, one more for good measure. The big man standing back, triumphant and cruel.

Normally Silas curled up on the ground, waiting for it to end, for Dad to slam his bedroom door and retreat. Afterwards Mom would pull off his shirt and tend to what she never stopped from happening. All the while he’d keep a stiff upper lip and a docile look in his eyes. He was well-trained in hiding his anger away.

This time the voice that came out of him didn’t hide anything at all, and it shocked me like the earth trembling beneath my feet.

“Is that it?”

My brother rose up defiantly, sides covered in bruises—but never his face or his arms or anywhere the people in town couldn’t look away from. Daddy always did love to give the good, proper folks of Wayborne plausible deniability.

“I know you’ve got better than that.” Silas sneered at Daddy. “Go on. Break a rib. Bruise a spleen. I’ll still outrun you and leave you behind one day.” His eyes flicked to me. “And I’m takin’ Brenna with me.”

Daddy looked at me all cold and distant. I averted my eyes. And deep down inside, in my very core, I trembled.

Not with fear.

But with rage.

In the middle of the summer nights, when the stars were out and the air smelled heavy with coming rain, my brother and I—who shared a birthday and a middle name—used to lay out in the heavy grass staring up into the endless sky. One night, when he laid down groaning on the ground and got up with his middle curled around pain, I wondered aloud why Daddy hit him and not me.

“Is it because you’re a boy?” I asked him, poking at the sore spot as if it were a missing tooth. “It’s not like he loves me any more than you.”

Silas leaned down and cupped the top of my head with a curved, soft palm. “It’s because he knows if he hit you, you’d hit him right back twice as hard. You have a fire inside you, Brenna, and you’d burn the whole house down if he ever prodded at it.”

That day, the day Silas stood up instead of staying down, the day he told Daddy he was going away to that wretched school, I felt the flames within me crackle. It was like the cold coals of a bonfire getting stoked back to life by a skilled hand, a bit of fresh tinder, and some warm breath.

Once fed, a fire rarely goes out on its own without leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

The anger within me has the same all-consuming nature.

But Daddy barely looked at me when Silas said my name. He sneered in contempt and turned back to his one and only son, hands loose at his sides but ready, as always, to curl into fists. “You and your sister share nothing but a birth date. You came out wrong the day you were born, and you’ll die just as wrong one day. Try to goad me all you want.” He talked down to Silas like he wasn’t the one who’d smacked him around only seconds before. “We both know you ain’t got what it takes to walk into that fancy school and come out alive.”

For once in his life, Daddy was right.

Just not in the way he thought.

Chapter 2

Ididn’t sleep that night. Couldn’t, with the thunder booming in the distance and the flashes of lightning throwing my room in sharp relief. It reminded me too much of the tornadoes of ‘04, when we came so close to losing everything but made it out without a scratch.

After the season of destruction was over, my father, in the middle of changing the lightbulbs in the kitchen, reached up and ran his finger across the initials carved in one of the wooden beams: E.W.

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