Page 3 of The Snake in the Grass: The Prequel

“Carpet face it is,” he agreed, using our phrase for what you look like when you wake up after pressing your cheek to the thick fibers for hours.

That night, we watched movies on his little laptop screen until our eyes went dry and our necks ached. We fell asleep stretched out on the ground, blankets covering us, his soft snores the last thing I really heard.

Neither one of us talked about the fight or the fury that followed. We didn’t acknowledge the bruises on his sides or the weariness in his eyes. And of course, we didn’t mention the fact that we both knew once Silas left Wayborne for Coleridge Academy, he was never looking back.

Talking about the hard things wasn’t something we did very often. We swallowed them down instead.

Maybe if wehadtalked, Silas would still be alive.

I wonder now if he swallowed so much rage and pain that he had no choice but to be weighed down by it, until it dragged him six feet under the earth.

Chapter 3

Iwatched him go with a knot of worry in my heart and nausea growing in my stomach. He hung out of the passenger side of his best friend Wally’s beat-up truck, dark hair shining in the late morning sun, waving back at me with a reassuring smile on his face.

“It’s just a week away,” he’d pointed out that morning, when I woke up curled on the floor at the floor of his bed, carpet face firmly imprinted on my left cheek. “Just an orientation so we’re ready for classes in the fall. I’ll be back before you know it. No reason to worry, Brenna.”

But worry was my constant companion from the moment he told Daddy he’d be going to Coleridge, come Hell or high water. I obsessively stalked the academy’s Facebook page, looking for signs that there were any kids like Silas anywhere inside its storied halls. The page was filled with catalog-quality images, diverse as a Benetton ad—and no doubt at least a little faked. Somehow I found it unconvincing that every student group on campus consisted of a girl in a hijab, an East Asian boy, two bland white kids, and one black student with dreads, braids, or a natural afro.

They were all too happy, too used to having the camera trained on them, white-toothed and relaxed on the campus lawn. Similarly, the language on the Facebook page was peppered with faux friendly language and memes meant to appeal to Generation Z. The school even had its own Snapchat filters and PR-created hashtags.

I searched and searched for any sign of scandal but found none. Where were the posts apologizing for a controversial event, or a Dean’s letter responding to a protest? You couldn’t spit far enough to escape an on-campus brouhaha these days, and yet Coleridge seemed to be above the fray, full of rich kids yet diverse, situated a short commute south of New York City but somehow reflecting none of its cultural touchstones.

Unlike the white-toothed kids depicted on its cover image or the polite comments littering every post, I wasn’t buying a single whitewashed second of it. Even my public school had a day of walkouts, an election-related protest, and public statements following the Stoneman Douglas High School shooting. If Wayborne High School was big enough to feel those sort of reverberations, then much-bigger Coleridge Academy had to feel them too.

Whatever the school administration was ignoring, it was big enough that they dared not acknowledge its existence.

So though I waved goodbye to Silas and pasted a smile on my face like nothing was wrong, in my heart I only knew worry.

My brother knew what it felt like to fold in the middle under an onslaught of fists, but he had no idea what games the rich play when they’re bored of getting everything they want.

He was a gazelle walking into the lion’s den, and he’d left me, his only other pride member, behind.

* * *

The call came in the dead of night, breaking through my cell phone’s sleep rules and waking me in the middle of a dream. My fingers fumbled across my nightstand for the phone, and I pressed my thumb down on the web of cracks across the finicky touch screen.

“Hello?” My voice came out warped with sleep; bleary-eyed, I stared at the red numbers of my digital clock. 2:13 AM. The caller wasn’t a number saved in my phone, but somehow I knew. “Silas?”

“Yeah.” He sounded frightened, but not in an immediate way, as if he’d just run panting from a tiger and was calling me from the top of a tree, staring down at its claws and teeth. “I’m calling you from the school’s landline. My cell’s broke. It kinda fell in a toilet bowl.”

“I keep telling you not to put it in your back pocket when you’re going to the bathroom.”

“It wasn’t my fault,” he responded, sounding indignant. “That’s not why I called, though. There’s... something else.”

Silence on the other end of the line. I waited for him to finish the sentence, mind too full of sleep to figure out what to say to draw him out. Sitting there in my bed, hair mussed from sleep, I enjoyed just hearing him breathing for the first time in days.

“It’s bad here, Brenna.” He sounded choked, like he was talking around a pit lodged in his throat. “I didn’t... I knew it would be tough, but not likethis.”

I didn’t say “I told you so,” to my credit, because it wouldn’t have helped. Instead I asked, “What happened?”

More silence from him. Silas had never been the most talkative brother, but when it was just the two of us I could always depend on him to at least respond to my questions. The worry lodged in my middle bloomed into fear.

If I’d had a car, a license, and a lick of good sense, I would’ve driven up north to get him right then and there. I can see it now in my mind, with the clarity of hindsight and broken-heartedness: the sun rising over the horizon’s edge, the sound of wind flowing past rolled-down car windows, and his kicked-puppy face as I pull up in front of the academy’s ostentatious gates. He would say something like, “I tried my best,” or “you didn’t have to come all this way.” I would tell him to get in already and throw his luggage in the back.

But I didn’t have a car, a license, or enough good sense to know what to do in that moment. All I knew was that something was wrong, it was too big for me to fix on my own, and neither one of our shitty, no-good parents would be able to help even if Silas wanted their help.

Finally, after a long handful of seconds, Silas spoke. “It’s nothing you need to worry about. I’ll... I’ll handle it myself. I’m sure by the time the school year starts it’ll all die down.”

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