Page 10 of The Snake in the Grass: The Prequel

Silas threw his plate down and glared at the church girls. “Shut the fuck up and mind your own goddamned business.”

There were gasps up and down the picnic table. He’d gone too far now, cursed too openly and sacrilegiously. All eyes were on him with disapproval.

Even Mom’s eyes. “Silas Taylor Wilder. There arechildrenhere.”

One of the church girls grabbed the cross necklace brushing her clavicle and started murmuring a prayer beneath her breath, no doubt for attention as much as anything.

But all I could do was stare at Silas. “What are they talking about?”

Bridget made a faux sad face. “Someone should tell her. I guess I’ll bite the bullet.” Silas was looking at me with wide grey eyes, shaking his head back and forth, frozen like he was in some kind of nightmare that he just couldn’t stop. The church girl said, “Some poor girl up in Connecticut who’s too good for hick trash turned your brother down, but he didn’t take no for an answer. Now he’s got his very own hashtag. Every high schooler in the country is talking about it... except, I guess, you.” She batted her eyes in faux sympathy as my whole world ground to a halt. “I’ll pray for you. Silas should pray too—for forgiveness. Thatpoorgirl.”

Everything inside me was cold all over. I didn’t know if it was anger or shock; I couldn’t tell what I was feeling at all. All I knew was that there was a look on my brother’s face that I’d never seen before.

It was the same expression I saw on our father just before his hands turned into fists.

All my life I’d thought that face was rage. The twist of his lips, the narrowing of his eyes, the way his thick brows drew down; I saw it and knew what was coming next.

And maybe it was anger, in part. But it was also hurt; I knew that once I saw it on my brother’s face, the face I’d been studying every day of my life. Beneath the anger and hurt, though, was a shameful humiliation, the kind of guilt that refuses to come to the surface and be dealt with.

Horrified, I asked Silas, “Is it true?”

He looked at me. And just like I knew his face, he knew mine; he saw on my expression that there was a part of me that believed what they said about him.

Hurt, anger, guilt, all of it turned to betrayal as he glanced back and forth between me and the church girls. Then, with a contemptuous sneer that chilled me to my bones, he reached out and knocked Abigail and Bridget’s cups of lemonade over. They shrieked as their thighs were drenched, ice cubes slipping off the edge of the table to bounce off their skin.

“Fuck you,” Silas declared, his useless anger turning his hands into fists that clenched and released over and over again. He backed away from the table, wild-eyed as the adults grabbed their kids and looked to my mother to get her son in order. “Fuck all of you.”

Then he turned and ran, out towards the hills, the deep grass and untamed ground between pollen-coated oak trees. We watched him go; a murmur rose in the crowd, which had been temporarily lulled to complacency from sheer shock.

I heard a deep voice behind me, and realized that my father had woken from his nap. “You see, Gretchen?” He grabbed my mom’s arm, to comfort her or to hold her back; I couldn’t tell. “That boy came out wrong the day he was born. It’s for the best that he leaves us. Good riddance, I say.”

I looked back, over my shoulder, and saw tears in her eyes. But when my mom met my gaze, I saw in an instant that she wasn’t going to say a single thing to correct him.

She wasn’t going to go after Silas, either.

So I did.

“Brenna!” Jade snatched my sleeve as I got up, pulling me back towards the long table. I looked at her, frozen in a moment in time. “Be careful. There’s a storm coming.”

Glancing up, I saw the wall of clouds, an inexorable dark force on the horizon. Then I looked back at my best friend, whose face reflected my own fear and confusion. “I’ll be back before a single drop falls.”

“Promise?”

“Promise,” I lied.

I banged my knees on the bench as I threw my legs over it. Running towards the trees, I drowned out the sound of the church girls praying condescendingly, my father shouting my name, the good old families of Wayborne muttering about “those Wilders” in voices loud enough to be heard.

All I could think of was that look in his eyes, the curl in his fists, and how I’d betrayed him.

I should’ve said,“I know you’d never do anything like that. Ignore those stupid girls.”

Or,“Explain to me what happened. Tell me the truth—that can’t be it.”

Instead I doubted him. Me, his twin, the first person to know him and love him, to hold him close and watch him go far away. He told Daddy he would take me far from Wayborne when he left, and I know that he meant it. To Silas, I was the sun that rose in the sky each morning and burned his shadow away. We were two pieces that fit together, in the way of things that are made whole and carved into mirrored halves.

I am nothing without him now.

But I ran towards him, as the stars chase each other around in the sky, wheeling forever, spinning on their axis. Minutes passed before I felt the first rain drop make its way down through the thick oak branches to splatter on my sun-warmed skin. More followed it; the sky darkened suddenly, and the leaves above my head fell as the wind trembled through the woods.

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