The Snake in the Grass (Coleridge Academy Elites Book 0)

by Lucy Auburn

  The Snake in the Grass

  Coleridge Academy Elites: The Prequel

  Lucy Auburn

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Get Updates

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  11. It continues…

  Also by Lucy Auburn

  About the Author

  Author’s Note

  This book contains triggering content, including suicide, domestic abuse, bullying, mentions of an off-page sexual assault, and mentions of past violent racism.

  Reader discretion advised. Please read with care.

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  Father father,

  Brother brother,

  Love me as you

  Loathe each other.

  Chapter 1

  My brother died biting his tongue, a bruise the shape of four knuckles shadowing his rib cage.

  Some things start with a bang, others with a whimper. This story starts with both. It ends in the tall grass of the late summer sun, the air heavy with humidity, tree branches creaking beneath impossible weight. I remember it all, burned into my retinas and echoing in my mind. There was the croak of cicadas starting up in advance of the coming evening. There was blood dripping onto blood-soaked ground, consecrating a place where no bodies should’ve ever fallen.

  All things being equal, there are worse things in the world than the sound of a chair hitting the floor. But not in the house where I grew up. Beneath the rafters Papa Edwin cut and hammered, in the kitchen where Meemaw made pecan pie and sang show tunes, there was one single defining sound that warned of a coming storm. Like the finger of a dark funnel cloud dipping down on the horizon, it made clear that destruction lived above you and was about to come to Earth to tear whole worlds apart.

  There ain’t no eye in the middle of a tornado. And there was no calm in the midst of the storm my father’s fists rained down.

  “This is unacceptable.” He held the letter in hands that were steady despite the depth of his rage. The chair he pushed over as he surged to his feet was still rocking on the ground behind him from the force of his violent anger. “You were told not to apply to that school. The public high school is more than good enough for you, boy.”

  It was always “boy” when he was acting up by trying to survive. Never Silas. The kicked dog doesn’t get a name.

  “They don’t teach violin at the public high school.” I remember the way my brother’s eyes lit up. The fight didn’t go out of him until the end; it took them to make him whimper instead of snarl. “I’m going to Coleridge. They gave me a full ride scholarship. It’s not like it’ll cost you any money.”

  Silence at these words. Mom, looking down like always, because looking up had been trained out of her—or maybe she’d never wanted to fight in the first place. Dad, crumpling the letter in his hand, rage leaking out of him like rusty water from a dripping faucet. I kept my mouth shut and my eyes fixed in front of me, watching it all with my peripheral vision, waiting for the sound of a train hurling down the tracks, a storm’s last warning of its coming fury.

  When his fists descended, it was quick but deadly. A smash, a crash, a snarl, a boy no longer small enough to throw getting pushed into the wall. Knuckles to a rib cage, kicks until he went down, one more for good measure. The big man standing back, triumphant and cruel.

  Normally Silas curled up on the ground, waiting for it to end, for Dad to slam his bedroom door and retreat. Afterwards Mom would pull off his shirt and tend to what she never stopped from happening. All the while he’d keep a stiff upper lip and a docile look in his eyes. He was well-trained in hiding his anger away.

  This time the voice that came out of him didn’t hide anything at all, and it shocked me like the earth trembling beneath my feet.

  “Is that it?”

  My brother rose up defiantly, sides covered in bruises—but never his face or his arms or anywhere the people in town couldn’t look away from. Daddy always did love to give the good, proper folks of Wayborne plausible deniability.

  “I know you’ve got better than that.” Silas sneered at Daddy. “Go on. Break a rib. Bruise a spleen. I’ll still outrun you and leave you behind one day.” His eyes flicked to me. “And I’m takin’ Brenna with me.”

  Daddy looked at me all cold and distant. I averted my eyes. And deep down inside, in my very core, I trembled.

  Not with fear.

  But with rage.

  In the middle of the summer nights, when the stars were out and the air smelled heavy with coming rain, my brother and I—who shared a birthday and a middle name—used to lay out in the heavy grass staring up into the endless sky. One night, when he laid down groaning on the ground and got up with his middle curled around pain, I wondered aloud why Daddy hit him and not me.

  “Is it because you’re a boy?” I asked him, poking at the sore spot as if it were a missing tooth. “It’s not like he loves me any more than you.”

  Silas leaned down and cupped the top of my head with a curved, soft palm. “It’s because he knows if he hit you, you’d hit him right back twice as hard. You have a fire inside you, Brenna, and you’d burn the whole house down if he ever prodded at it.”

  That day, the day Silas stood up instead of staying down, the day he told Daddy he was going away to that wretched school, I felt the flames within me crackle. It was like the cold coals of a bonfire getting stoked back to life by a skilled hand, a bit of fresh tinder, and some warm breath.

  Once fed, a fire rarely goes out on its own without leaving a path of destruction in its wake.

  The anger within me has the same all-consuming nature.

  But Daddy barely looked at me when Silas said my name. He sneered in contempt and turned back to his one and only son, hands loose at his sides but ready, as always, to curl into fists. “You and your sister share nothing but a birth date. You came out wrong the day you were born, and you’ll die just as wrong one day. Try to goad me all you want.” He talked down to Silas like he wasn’t the one who’d smacked him around only seconds before. “We both know you ain’t got what it takes to walk into that fancy school and come out alive.”

  For once in his life, Daddy was right.

  Just not in the way he thought.

  Chapter 2

  I didn’t sleep that night. Couldn’t, with the thunder booming in the distance and the flashes of lightning throwing my room in sharp relief. It reminded me too much of the tornadoes of ‘06, when we came so close to losing everything but made it out without a scratch.

  After the season of destruction was over, my father, in the middle of changing the lightbulbs in the kitchen, reached up and ran his
finger across the initials carved in one of the wooden beams: E.W.

  “God’s grace brought us through this. Mark my words,” he told us, “my father’s hands blessed this place.”

  Those same hands once hit him so hard his left eardrum was permanently damaged, but this was left out of the family legacy.

  Though the house came through things just fine, my memories of it as a scared four year old stayed stark in my mind forever after. The storm that night felt like a portent of things to come, a promise that my father’s rage would turn from a dark cloud hanging overhead to death itself touching the ground.

  Because I was awake, I saw the light in Silas’s room come on. I heard the quiet, tinny sound of music playing through laptop speakers. Thunder boomed, my pulse quickened anxiously, and I knew there would be no sleep for me that night.

  Slipping out of bed, I pulled on my faded gym shorts under the old T-shirt I wore as pajamas. Crossing to Silas’s door, I rapped once and walked inside without waiting for an answer. He barely looked up from the screen in front of him, back curved outward from hunching at his desk. “You didn’t wait for me to say ‘come in’ or anything.”

  “Sister’s rights.”

  “Those aren’t a thing.”

  “They are now.” I padded over to his laptop and leaned past his shoulder, peering at the screen. “Is that an orientation video? Wow, you really are the nerdy one of the two of us.”

  “Shut up.”

  He clicked the window away, face burning, but forgot to hit pause. The voice over started playing: “As a student at Coleridge Academy, you’ll enjoy unparalleled access to technology beyond your wildest dreams. Our three computer labs...”

  By the time Silas got the video to stop playing, my eyebrows had climbed all the way to my hairline. “Wow. Three computer labs. If you go you’ll die from spending all day and night programming instead of eating, sleeping, or going to the bathroom.”

  “I’m going to study the violin,” he reminded me, pointing over to the case sitting on his desk, which was beaten and worn. “Their worst instruments are Knilling, and their best are hand-carved in Italy by master craftsman. The first chair in the New York Symphony Orchestra studied at Coleridge.”

  “So you’re quitting programming?” That seemed unlikely to me—Silas spent all his sleepless nights in front of his computer, tapping away in program windows in languages I didn’t understand.

  “I’ll still study computer science, I guess.” His fingers drummed against the hard case of his laptop, a hand-me-down from our cousins, whose parents had the temerity to leave Wayborne and make their shaky way to the middle class. “I’ll need a career to fall back on if I don’t make it in music. It takes more than just talent, you know. There’s luck. And... connections.”

  I snorted. “Good luck getting those, Stinky.”

  Scowling at my old nickname for him, Silas threw an arm around my neck and rubbed his fist in my hair. I yelped, struggling out of his grip and laughing, feeling like a little kid again.

  But as we fell apart, sides heaving with laughter and exertion, a sober thought occurred to me. “If you go to Coleridge...”

  “When.” He was insistent, a fiery look in his eyes, chin lifted. “When I go to Coleridge.”

  I didn’t have the heart to tell him I thought Dad might just break his legs if he tried. “Well, when you go, I’ll be all alone here.”

  “No you won’t,” he swiftly corrected me. “You’ll always have Maggie.”

  Maggie Reynolds, my best friend—sort of. We’d been the closest of pals in elementary school and middle school, but since starting high school things had changed. I hadn’t even seen her all summer; she was on vacation with her boyfriend, Henry, who floated in from Richmond and swept her off her feet. They were staying at his parents’ beach house in Rhode Island, and our primary communication had faded to my commenting on her social media photos and her “liking” my responses but never bothering to reply.

  From the photos, she looked happy: tan, thin, her hair developing bright blonde streaks that I had the feeling were salon-sourced and not natural. Nothing like my pale, curving self or the dark hair that made my sharp face look more severe.

  I envied her, but only because she hadn’t taken me along for the ride. I would’ve cut my own fingers off for the chance to leave Wayborne for longer than a sad solitary week at a time. I wanted to see the world, no matter the cost. I wanted a life of adventures.

  But I didn’t think Maggie would be going with me on those adventures.

  My sadness must’ve shown on my face, because Silas made that puppy dog expression he always made in times like this, his lips puckering comically, thick dark brows drawn together over shocking blue eyes. “Poor Brenna. You should get some friends before I leave you forever and ever.”

  I mock punched him in the shoulder, and he made an oof sound like it really hurt. “I miss Jade,” I confessed. “I haven’t talked to her since...”

  “Since you both shoplifted and only she got arrested?” My brother’s wry look only deepened the twisted, guilty shame in my stomach. “She’s probably still serving her community hours. Maybe you can catch up with her picking up trash on the side of the road.”

  “Maybe,” I echoed. The truth was, Jade deserved better than me. I wanted our old friendship back, but I didn’t know where to find it beneath the wreckage of the things I’d done—and the things I hadn’t done, which were worse in a lot of ways. “I probably have a better chance of getting into that fancy schmancy academy with you than I have of getting Jade to ever look me in the eyes again.”

  “Stranger things have happened,” he quipped. “I’m sure if you grovel hard enough Jade will forgive you. It’s not like you turned her in or something. You’re a yellow-bellied coward, not a traitor.”

  I wanted to mock punch him again for the insult, but I couldn’t because it was true. So instead I flicked him in the forehead and suggested, “Late night binge watching until we both fall asleep on the floor?”

  “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 we had talked, 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

  I watched 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.