Page 4 of The Snake in the Grass: The Prequel

Alarm set the steady rhythm of my heart off-kilter. “Settle down?”

“Go back to sleep,” he said. “Sorry for waking you.”

The line went dead before I could respond.

I slept, somehow. I slept despite the worry in my heart. I told myself I would see him again in a few days, and he would tell me all about it. In my mind it was so easy to imagine what those other students would do to him: make fun of his clothes, call him poor, imitate his accent, and single him out as an outsider.

Now I realize that I lacked imagination.

What they did to him wasn’t the run-of-the-mill bullying that a new kid gets when they transfer schools.

It was something else, something that lurked in the dark and struck before you sensed it. They bit down hard and left a poison inside him that spread through his veins fast as blood. By the time they were done with him, they didn’t even have to lift a finger to finish the job; the events they set in motion did all the hard work for them.

Let it never be said that rich people don’t know how to delegate.

After that phone call, I punched the number of the landline he’d called from more than once, trying to get someone to track him down. But though I got a friendly menu response, and more than one friendly receptionist, no one seemed to be able to find him for me when they went looking.

So I just had to sit at home and wait, whittling down the hours.

The day before Silas came back, I went to Jade’s house.

Chapter 4

Jade lives in the part of Wayborne that floods when the river is fat and full. Her house has been rebuilt from the foundation up three times; by the third incarnation, it had stilts and a ten-step staircase leading up to the front porch.

If you’re the kind of person who doesn’t look too close, you’d probably assume that Jade and her family lived in a lower elevation part of Wayborne. You’d fault the flooding of her house on the land itself, andtsk-tskevery time they refused to evacuate or rebuilt instead of moving.

But what you don’t know is that Wayborne, built straddling a river, has a not-so-well-kept secret. The north side of town is where the white folks lived back when segregation was legal, and the south side of town was where the black folks wereallowedto live. Bisecting the two sides of town is a lazy river that swells every few years or so, its fat, full belly squeezing water out onto the land.

The north side has levees to prevent flooding.

The south side doesn’t.

So while my father’s father built his house north of the levees, Jade’s grandparents had no choice but to go south to find a plot of land to settle on. And if the color of their skin made their options narrow, well, they refused to let the inevitable storms rip their roots up from the soft ground.

Each year that the floods came, they sat in their house and watched the water rise.

When it left, taking things they loved and people they knew with it, they turned their backs to the rising sun and rebuilt that which was stolen from them. They set down roots in land that had been theirs for generations. Suggest to them that they’d be better off moving, and you’d get a look that would scald your very skin from head to toe.

The south side of Wayborne had its hazards, sure, but it had its beauties too. It was where their children were born; it was the land they played and grew on. It was here, south of the river’s screaming destruction, that they made the best of it and leaned on each other for help.

Each flood they built better. Each flood they lost neighbors to the waters, the destruction, or the cold aftermath. Some moved up north; others moved down south. But the Smiths never left. They’d been put in Wayborne, Virginia generations long past, and they refused to give ground. It would take God Almighty himself to remove that family from the blue-painted, clapboard-sided house with its dark brown shutters.

Jade’s mom Grace used to say, “I was born in Wayborne and I’ll die in Wayborne, no matter what may knock on my door. I’ve got more blood in this soil than circulates through my body, and I won’t walk away from a single drop. This land is as much mine as anyone’s.”

Staring up at the house’s third rebirth the day before Silas returned, I tried to summon some kind of courage. Unlike every other time I stood at the foot of those steps, this time I was coming with my metaphorical hat in my hand to beg for forgiveness. And I didn’t know if I’d even be let through the front door.

But I was lonely, desperate, and all out of pride. I’d do anything to get back in Jade’s good graces. Even grovel, probably.

Standing at the bottom of those steps, though, I couldn’t quite make myself go up them. Maybe because I knew the instant I did I would have to face what I’d done.

So it was a relief when the front door opened, Jade standing at the threshold of the house, her hair a gentle halo pushed back from her forehead by a thick headband. She looked at me the way you look at a stray cat when it drags its dirty, wounded body to your front porch after weeks away, begging for a morsel of food and a pat on the head.

“Long time no see,” she said, sounding neither angry nor happy to see me. “You picked a hell of a time to darken this door again.”

“‘Darken this door?’” I raised an eyebrow at her choice of words. “You’ve been reading too much lit fic again. You only speak in metaphors when you spend all day buried in a book.”

“What else do you expect me to do?” The way she put her hand on her hip and looked down on me, Jade made it clear she was judging me and found me wanting. “If I even so much as step out of this house I have to worry my dumbass juvenile probation officer will drop by for a surprise visit to make sure I’m not breaking the law. So yeah, Brenna, I’ve been sitting in my room reading my mom’s old paperback books all day. There’s not a whole lot else I can do.”

---