Page 7 of The Snake in the Grass: The Prequel

“Silas!” He looked beaten down, worn by the long drive and coated in rest stop dust, but as he climbed out onto the ground he gave me a thin smile. I threw my arms around him, heedless of the duffel bag he held in front of him, hugging it as well. “I thought for a second there you and Wally got lost or something. Or maybe decided it wasn’t worth coming home at all.”

“And leave you all alone? Never.” His voice was rough, but his arms were strong, and he smelled the same familiar grass-and-rain scent as always. “We had a little... delay getting out of Coleridge. But we got here.”

Wally got out of the car, strangely silent, his dirty blond hair pushed back from his head. As I stepped out of Silas’s embrace his eyes flicked back and forth between us again and again. He seemed uncomfortable for some reason, based on the way he kept fidgeting.

I stared at Silas. “What was that phone call about? You never called back.”

“It was nothing. I shouldn’t have worried you in the first place.”

He paced to the bed of Wally’s truck and pulled his travel suitcase out of the back, not looking at me. I frowned at Wally, hoping he’d tell me what was going on, but he was staring at the dirty toes of his tennis shoes like they fascinated him.

“Long trip?” I asked, trying to pry something out of him.

“It was pretty much the same in both directions.”

“What was the campus like? Did you get to see it?”

Wally’s eyes wandered away from his shoes and towards the horizon. “For a bit.”

“I saw on the website that there’s a wolf enclosure on campus.” Silas was watching me oddly as he pulled out the handle of his suitcase and tilted it forward onto its wheels. “Well?” I looked back and forth between them, frowning. “What were the wolves like? Did you see them? There are four, according to ColeridgeAcademy.com.”

“The enclosure is big.” I watched my brother hike his duffel bag strap further up his shoulder and studiously not-look at Wally, who was also not-looking at him. “The wolves were barely visible while we were there. And the dorm building they put me in was on the other side of campus.”

“Oh.” I deflated. Talking about the wolves was the only neutral topic I came up with, and it hadn’t dissipated any of the tension in the air. “I just thought it was cool. I mean, wild animals on a school campus? Wayborne High’s mascot is a bird.”

Wally piped up just to correct me. “A peregrine falcon.”

“Yeah, whatever.” I cleared my throat. “See you next weekend, Wally? At Mom’s Fourth of July picnic.”

He looked over at Silas and opened his mouth like he was going to say something, then paused. “Yeah, sure. See you in a week, Brenna.”

Climbing back into his truck, Wally coaxed the old engine to life and released the clutch, giving it enough gas to send it rolling down the road. I watched the pickup’s dusty silhouette disappear into the darkness between street lamps, then turned and eyed my brother, searching for a sign of what happened.

Some part of me thought it might be written on his body, like every bruise Daddy ever gave him, or the defiant look that lit up his eyes when he declared he was going to Coleridge. What I didn’t know then—what Idoknow now—is that the worst wounds are on the inside, where you can’t see them.

“Let’s go inside,” Silas said, ignoring my scrutiny in favor of galloping up the front steps two at a time, his beaten-up suitcase banging behind him. “I’m hungry. Got any leftovers for me?”

I followed him, my own stomach grumbling, the mystery of the missing week temporarily forgotten. We sat across the kitchen table that evening, eating reheated chicken pot pie. Mom came in to kiss Silas on the head and murmur mom-like words at him; Dad stayed ensconced in the master bedroom, the tinny sounds of sports talk filtering in through the crack beneath the door, thoroughly ignoring his one and only son.

For a moment, there was something not quite like peace in the house.

Call it a ceasefire: a retreat from engagement on the battlefield.

Like most cessations from war, it was doomed from the start.

Chapter 6

That evening, Silas closed his door when he said his prayers—or didn’t say them, for all I knew—and it felt like he was shutting me out of his life as well.

He hadn’t talked about Coleridge over dinner, except to make vaguely positive assurances to Mom that he had a good time and made friends. When I tried to probe him on details, he acted like it had all happened so long ago that he could barely remember.

It all seemed fishy. Silas was never one to talk, but I knew this was supposed to be different. He was going to a new school in a different state, traveling all the way from our little town in Virginia to Great Falls, Connecticut, just a train ticket away from New York City. Even if the school was stuffy and the kids were impossibly rich, there had to be things to talk about.

If nothing else I thought he’d at least discuss the violin.

But he was closed-mouth and distant-eyed. The only thing of substance he told Mom was that he broke his cell phone; eyeing Dad’s closed door, she told him she’d take him to get a new one on Monday. Implied beneath her words was that we wouldn’t tell Daddy. They’d go shopping while he was at work and buy the new phone in the cash Mom collected every grocery trip, withdrawing cash back from the debit card to avoid too many questions about what she was buying and why she needed it.

I always thought she was a coward, but she protected us in her little ways. There was the money she slipped us every birthday, the trips to the store each Christmas, and Thanksgiving at Aunt Cheryl’s house, where we got extra toys and the brief pleasure of seeing her smile. She did what she could bear to do, and nothing more.

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