Serpents

Serpents is the song by Sharon Van Etten identified in the book’s opening epigraph. Its four lines establish a compact movement from mental conflict and the effort to forgive toward change, ending in a hope that remains uncertain. Set directly before Cam appears alone at Sword & Cross Reform School, the lyric gives the opening a moral and emotional vocabulary without explaining why he has returned or specifying whom its hope concerns.

Text and Attribution

The epigraph consists of four brief lines: “Serpents in my mind,” “Trying to forgive your crimes,” “Everyone changes in time,” and “I hope he changes this time.” It is attributed to Sharon Van Etten and her song “Serpents.” The excerpt offers no further information about the song or its place beyond this attribution; its importance here comes from the lines selected and their position before the narrative begins.

The first line makes the serpent an inward image: the serpents are “in my mind.” Rather than introducing an external threat, the lyric locates its disturbance within thought. The next line shifts from that troubled interior to an effort directed at another person’s crimes. The movement is not from harm to forgiveness already achieved, but from an unsettled mind to the attempt to forgive. That distinction leaves the speaker’s work unfinished before the epigraph has reached its later, more hopeful lines.

From Conflict to Conditional Hope

The final two lines widen the scale and then narrow it again. “Everyone changes in time” sounds like a general claim, but “I hope he changes this time” turns change into a particular, awaited possibility. The repeated idea is not a guarantee: the first statement offers a broad proposition, while the second makes hope personal and conditional. The words “this time” also imply that the desired change has been hoped for before, without identifying the person or describing what happened previously.

That turn gives the short excerpt its tension. Change is presented as something time may bring, yet the speaker’s hope remains exposed to disappointment. The lyric holds belief and doubt together rather than resolving them: forgiveness is being attempted, change is declared possible, and the specific change that matters is still only hoped for. Its compressed sequence moves from an image of mental disturbance, through moral injury, to a possibility that has not yet become fact.

Placement Before Cam’s Return

The narrative that follows supplies a scene but not an explicit explanation of the lyric. Cam’s boots touch down on the eaves of an old church beneath a cold, starry sky. He draws his wings close and looks across a landscape of moonlit Spanish moss, cinder-block buildings, a weedy field, and splintery bleachers. It is winter break, and Sword & Cross Reform School is empty. The scene ends with the question, “What was he doing here?”

Placed immediately before this arrival, the epigraph invites the reader to carry its concerns into Cam’s appearance: the possibility of wrongdoing, the attempt to forgive, and the hope that someone can change. Yet the text does not say that the song is Cam’s thought, that he is its speaker, or that the reference explains his purpose at the school. The distinction matters. The lyric creates an interpretive frame, while the scene withholds the answer; Cam is present, but his reason for coming remains an open question.

Significance and Limits

The epigraph’s force lies partly in this unresolved pairing. Its language supplies an expectation of personal history and hoped-for transformation, while the empty campus and Cam’s unexplained return provide no immediate confirmation. The lyric therefore prepares a reader to notice the difference between wanting change and knowing that it has occurred. Its final phrase, “this time,” sharpens that expectation of recurrence, but the opening does not establish what earlier attempt or failure the phrase might refer to.

Serpents functions as a tonal and thematic threshold rather than a key that unlocks a single definitive meaning. It places inner turmoil, forgiveness, and uncertain change at the entrance to the story, then leaves the relation between those ideas and Cam’s arrival to be clarified by what follows. The opening holds its promise and its doubt in the same frame: change may come in time, but at this moment the school is deserted, Cam has returned, and the reason remains unstated.