You Have Us... Always.

Chapter 40- Uplifting Spirits.

And as the silence progressed and the longer Silas remained in the same room as her, the more Brynn wanted to talk to him.

Not many opportunities to talk to her older brother presented themselves. And a lot of the time Silas left the room when she entered.

Tightening her grip on the pen, she stopped circling meaningless words and tapped the end of it on the worksheet, nervously. "Will you help me with this question?"

Silas didn't move. Brynn swallowed. "Please."

Silas looked up, eyes passably widening in a way that seemed to be surprise, before nodding and discarding the snack on the island. He wiped his hands on the sides of his blazer and went back to her side and leant over to look at the page again.

Brynn shuffled in her seat as his eyes trailed over her face thoughtfully before focusing on the second question on the worksheet. He furrowed his eyebrows, pointing his right index finger at it.

"Why are you doing cubic graphs? That's a year eleven topic, you're year seven."

"Eight."

"Hm."

His brows remained furrowed as his finger trailed the graph and the third question, and then the fourth.

When he flipped the page over, Brynn thought it best to fill in the quietude. "She likes to give us topics to learn ahead of time before she teaches them properly." She looked down at her intertwined hands with interest when Silas shifted his gaze to her and mumbled, "I don't know a lot though."

Silas kept silent for a while, until he slid his hand under the worksheet and brought it up. "You aren't supposed to know any of this just yet," he said with a firm voice.

Brynn looked up at the sheet, dejectedly. "A lot of people in the class can do them."

"A lot of people in the class have private tutors to do it for them because mummy and daddy pay them to," he gritted, placing the sheet back down with more force than looked necessary.

"What's this?"

Brynn followed his eyeline to a sheet that poked out from her main maths book and tensed upon recognising it. The work she got 21/80 on.

She played with her fingers more frantically. "Uh, it's just another piece of work. It's not important."

Which probably led Silas to believe that it was important because he arched an eyebrow and reached for the booklet anyway. Brynn cringed as he pulled it out from the book and placed it on top of the dismissed worksheet, narrowing his eyes at the, unnecessarily large, score at the top.

He opened it, examining the copious amounts of zeros that filled almost every page, Brynn picking more and more excessively at her thumb nail.

He got to the only page that she was proud of. The 15/15 score stood smally against the bottom corner of the right page and she almost smiled upon looking at it.

But any inkling of a smile that had managed to crawl onto her face faded as soon as she looked at the words next to it. Her heart dropped like it had when she first read them.

It plummeted even further when she saw Silas' eyes narrow in on them.

It took no longer than a second for his grip on the page to visibly compress and jaw to clench before he stood up straight and left the kitchen, taking the sheet with him.

Brynn turned around in the seat, addled. Not much noise was in the room after that, all Brynn could clearly hear was her heartbeat and possibly even her own confusion.