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

by Lucy Auburn

  By the time he declared he was heading to Coleridge, our prayers were more of a soft conversation filled with bits of truth.

  “Lord Jesus, don’t let me fail this next test. I think if I do I might never get to go to college like my brother.”

  “Grant me the patience to tutor my sister in math so I don’t have to support her financially for the rest of my life.”

  “Forgive me for walking out on Jade when she needed me the most.”

  “Don’t let my family fall apart while I’m gone. And... I hope this new school is worth it. I hope going there takes me out of this godforsaken shithole. No offense or anything, Big Man.”

  “I hope tomorrow Dad is in a good mood.”

  “I hope tomorrow Mom doesn’t have those sad eyes of hers.”

  After we said our amens we let it all go and moved on like it never happened. He didn’t mention the fading bruises; I didn’t mention the extra makeup classes I was going to have to take in the fall. Prayer was how we talked about the hard things without ever really talking at all.

  I didn’t really believe any of it had some sort of power. If God was looking down at us, I figured it was with indifference at best and scorn at worst. We were little more than ants whittling our short lives away.

  But as the sky grew darker, my stomach grumbled, and the bicycle lost its appeal, I found myself praying for real. In quiet, silent bursts of plaintive words, I prayed that Silas was okay and that he would come home soon.

  A dark little corner of my heart wanted to pray that he hated his week at Coleridge so much that he’d change his mind about going all the way up to Connecticut for school.

  I refused to put those envious prayers into words, though. It was selfish to try to drag him down with me. So I acknowledged the best of myself in murmured words to a god I wasn’t sure existed, and looked towards the dim street, waiting for familiar headlights to come barreling towards the house.

  I waited.

  And I waited.

  A stupid, panicked part of me started to really believe that the worst had befallen Silas, and he wasn’t going to come home at all. The fears that’d seemed so exaggerated hours before suddenly became plausible as the summer air cooled and the mosquitoes swarmed in the air, biting to the tune of cicada song. I tried to imagine my life without him and failed, my mind bumping up against the possibility with panic.

  It was one thing to imagine losing him for a week, a few months, or two years. To lose him for a lifetime made every thought in my mind unravel around me.

  Finally, just when I was about to give up and go inside, or ride my bike all the way to the police station to insist they do something, I saw those yellow-orange headlights and the front bumper of an old pickup truck chugging down the road. Dropping my bike carelessly in the grass, I ran up to the passenger side door as the truck slowed to a shuddering stop.

  “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 I do know 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.

  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, like Please 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’s if Mom 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.

  By then it was too late for the both of us.

  Chapter 7

  The 4th of July

  No one has ever been as happy as my mother is making dozens of people fat and full at the same time.

  As the Fourth of July picnic wore on in Freedom Park, she tossed her head back and laughed, a wine margarita in one hand, the tongs to the barbecue in the other. All around her neighbors from both sides of the river joined her with their own potluck additions, from the casserole no one would touch to the oven-baked macaroni and cheese that would disappear without a trace. My mother was the middle of it all, the fourth woman in her family to hold the Wayborne tradition, and the first to really revel in it.

  She’s a slip of a woman, my mother; turn her sideways and she’s barely there. But with her thin golden blonde hair catching the sunlight and a smile as wide as the horizon, she looked alive that afternoon, and she rubbed her happiness off on other. Even my grump of a father dared to have a conversation or two with the neighbors that didn’t end in a blowup—though he soon retreated to a fold-out chair in the shade, a beer in one hand and a plate heavy with ribs in the other, his body language making it clear that he wasn’t to be disturbed.

 
“So.” Jade joined me in the picnic line as we went through a second time, her flag-printed tank top and shorts making her stand out as absurdly as she wanted. “He still brooding?”

  I followed the crude flick of her fingers towards my brother Silas, who somehow managed to make the sun’s rays shrink from him. “I don’t get it,” I told her. “He won’t talk to me. He barely leaves his room.”

  “He is a teenage boy,” she pointed out. “Maybe he’s done with the whole glued-at-the-hip with his sister thing.”

  “Maybe.” The thought hurt, so I didn’t entertain it for long. “I know something happened while he was at that orientation thing, but he won’t talk about it. He just pretends like everything is normal.”

  “Did it ever occur to you to let it go?” I cut my eyes at her, and she snorted. “Guess not. Here—take another serving of cornbread. Mom will force feed it to me for weeks if it doesn’t get polished off.”

  She piled a huge slice of the stuff on my plate, weighing it down even further. I eyed the tray of cornbread in front of us and shook my head. “No way is all of that going to be gone by the end of the day. You’ll be eating it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner all month.”

  Jade groaned. “Maybe I can convince Mom I’m going keto.”

  “Good luck.” Grace Smith served enough carbs with her meals to make a long distance runner cry. “You’d be better off feeding it to the dogs in front of her.”

  We moved down the long table towards the dessert end, and got a slice of no bake cookie crunch cake each, balancing the little desserts on smaller, second plates that sat on the edge of our big plates. Then we wove our way through the crowd towards the long table where our seats still were, and settled in to make room in our stomachs for seconds.