Page 8 of The Snake in the Grass: The Prequel

She’s all I have left now.

Mom didn’t pry too far into Silas’s troubled eyes or ask questions about what happened to his cell phone. She took what he said at face value and demanded no more of him, just as she expected us to demand no more of her than what she could give. But I wasn’t satisfied. I always had to poke at bruises and pick at scabs, and this was no different.

Silas shut his door.

So I got up in the middle of the night, when the house was still and I was sure Daddy was in bed, to slip across the hallway and turn the doorknob. It was unlocked; we didn’t get the benefit of fully privacy in our rooms, which included locks on the doors. Heart beating too fast, I slipped into his bedroom in the darkness, some part of me afraid of what I would find.

My instincts told me, even then, that something was wrong.

I’ve never believed twins had a special connection; Silas and I were born on the same day, grew in the same ways, but we weren’t psychic or magic. I didn’t feel it when he got hurt, and he didn’t know when I was afraid. But that summer night when he came home with the light gone from his eyes and his joy dimmed, I knew something was wrong, not because I was his twin but just because I loved him.

“Brenna.” He sat up in bed, looking at me, his hair mussed in the light pouring in from the hallway. “Can’t sleep?”

I shook my head, words sticking in my throat. Questions like,How are you? What’s wrong? What really happened this week? Are you going to leave us?There were petulant demands in there too, ones I stomped down, likePlease don’t leave me here with them.

What I said out loud was, “I missed you.”

“I missed you too.” He cleared his throat and flipped back the quilt on the other side of his bed. “C’mon, sit down. We can plan what we’ll make for the Fourth of July picnic. It’s right around the corner.”

Perching on the side of the bed, I studied him. There was no darkness in his eyes, no tremor in his voice, so I relaxed. I told myself that it was all going to be okay.

We can lie sometimes, in the deepest corners of our heart, so thoroughly that we buy our own deceit. I bought mine hook, line, and sinker.

“I was thinking we could do cowboy cookies like year before last. That’sifMom doesn’t hog the oven all day cooking like she did last year. Jade wants us to make pecan pie, though.”

“So you talked to Jade?” He raised his eyebrows, which were standing up in five different directions from sleeping face down on the pillow. “I knew you two couldn’t stay apart for long.”

“Well, I promised I’d do some hours of my own to make up for the community service hours she’s doing. That was as much for Grace as anything. She has me cleaning out the oven and squeezing lemons from the lemon tree out back. I swear I got enough juice in my eye to half blind me, and my hands are all dried out from the steel wool sponges.” I held them out so he could see. “That was just today, mind you. It’ll get worse I’m sure. But if it means she’ll forgive me...”

He smiled, and squeezed my hand. “Grace Smith isn’t the type of woman to make you jump through hoops just for the sake of watching you do it. If she’s got you doing chores up at their house, it’s for a reason.”

“True. And Jade got a hundred community hours, so the least I can do is pick up the slack around the house while she’s out picking up trash on the side of the road. It’s half my fault she’s out there.”

My brother snorted at this. “Less than half, I’d say. Jade has been stretching the limits of the rules since she came out into the world. I still remember that time she tried to convince me to jump off Height’s Cliff into the river below when it wasn’t even deep enough to touch the banks. I swear she wanted to see if my head split open just so she would know if it was safe.”

“Just watch,” I told him, “you’re gonna marry that girl one day.”

It was a joke, but one I’d made many times in our lives. In a small place like Wayborne, most people either married someone they’d known all their lives or got the fuck out of town. It always seemed like my brother and Jade would do one or the other—or both.

Normally he laughed when I said it. But this time Silas’s expression shuttered closed, and he pulled his hand away from mine. “Jade is too good for me.”

I blinked at him. “Well, that’s probably what she’d say, but only as a joke. You two are both going places.”

His mouth thinned, eyes hardening, and for a moment he looked so much like Daddy that my heart did a somersault. “Jade Smith would be better off if she stayed away from this family for the rest of her life.”

“You don’t mean that.”

“Don’t I?” The voice that came from his mouth was one I barely recognized. He’d never been angry with me like this before; irritated, sure, and frustrated, but anger was something Silas avoided. It made him seem too much like the man who left darkness indelibly imprinted on his skin. “If Jade hadn’t gone out with you that day, she wouldn’t be doing community service right now. And if I hadn’t... if she got close to me...” He shook his head, eyes wild. “This family isn’t right. No one good should come near us.”

In that moment, I didn’t hear his pain, didn’t sense the words he refused to say. All I heard was him saying, rightly, that my best friend deserved better than me. It cut me to the quick and made me feel small—so I turned away from him, slid off the edge of his bed and shut myself off from looking any closer into his words.

“If that’s how you feel, maybe it’s best you’re leaving us and going up to Connecticut.” I fiddled with the hem of the old shirt I’d worn to bed, backing slowly towards the door. “I wouldn’t want to poison a future Coleridge grad like you. After all, I’m nothing but Virginia trash, and you’re going places. So I better go sleep in my room before my stink rubs off on your cuff links.”

His voice followed me out into the hallway. “Brenna, wait...”

I ignored him, nursing my hurt and licking my wounds. Flicking off the hall light, I returned to my own bed and curled up in the middle of it, cold despite the summer air and the handmade quilt covering me.

It wasn’t until later that I realized how close he’d come to telling me the truth of things.

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