The Serpent King(76)

Lydia and Dill sat in their corner of the cafeteria, which was abuzz with talk about prom in a week, at the beginning of May. Nobody bothered them anymore. Not after Travis died. But whether that was the product of some sense of decency or their classmates simply having moved on after so long, Lydia couldn’t say.

Dill had out his laptop and was reading up on which classes to take at MTSU next year. “So are we hanging out on prom night?” he asked while typing.

Lydia didn’t look up from her Djuna Barnes novel. “Sorry, Dill, I’m going to senior prom in a yellow Hummer H2 limo with my hunky football player boyfriend. We’ll have seven seconds of frenzied, grunting sex in the backseat. I’ll get pregnant and we’ll get married. He’ll get a job selling used cars and—okay, this joke is starting to depress me.”

Dill closed his computer. “No, seriously.”

“Seriously. Sure.” She snapped into a hummus-covered carrot, still not looking up.

“I think you should go to prom with me.” He said it with his alluring new confidence.

She finally set down her book and gave Dill a coy eyebrow raise. “Oh you do?”

“Yes. And I have an idea of how we can make it not suck.”

“I’m all ears.”

He leaned in. “Pathetic Prom. We set out to intentionally have the most pathetic prom night imaginable.”

Lydia let the idea sink in. “The kind that anyone who thinks about us would expect us to have.”

“Exactly. We throw this high school a big middle finger.” He extended his middle finger at the cafeteria for emphasis. No one noticed.

“The sort of thing that not only we’d have let Travis take his staff to, we’d have insisted on it.”

“Exactly.”

Lydia raised her hand for a high five. “I’m so mad I didn’t think of this first.”




Dill wore the suit he had worn to Travis’s funeral (it wasn’t like he had many to choose from). Lydia pulled up and honked. Dill jumped off his porch.

“Okay, I didn’t get you a corsage, as you insisted,” Dill said as he got in the car.

“Excellent,” she said, handing him a dead rose and a binder clip. “Clip this on my dress.” She wore a gaudy, red-sequined, 1980s vintage prom dress.

Dill complied, and Lydia binder-clipped a dandelion to Dill’s lapel.

“Wait,” she said. “Hop out. We need lots of selfies. And by the way, you’ve gotten enough mileage out of my pretending not to know you on my blog. After your hundreds of thousands of video views, you’ll be fine if people think I’m being nepotistic. So this is all going on the blog. Pretend you’re having fun with me.”

Dill laughed when he saw Lydia standing. She had gotten just her right leg and just her left arm spray tanned.

Lydia struck a pose. “They didn’t want to do it at first. They finally caved after I paid for a whole-body spray tan.”

She also had ridiculous, garish makeup caked on her face, and an elaborate, upswept hairdo. She had long, neon-pink fake nails.

“You look insane,” Dill said.

“I was going for pageant contestant made over by a truck-stop prostitute. Or vice versa.”

“Nailed it. You do actually look pretty, though.”

Don’t blush. “Oh shut up. Come stand over here.”

They took a bunch of pictures, individually and together. As Lydia tweeted and Instagrammed them, Dill smiling in each one, she basked in her relief. Dill is alive. He’s happy. He has a future.

“Okay, time for our Pathetic Prom dinner,” Lydia said. “Which I will be paying for, to make things more pathetic.”

“Nope. Sorry.” Dill reached into his wallet and pulled out a crisp fifty-dollar bill.

“Is that from the talent competition?”

“Yep.”

“Dude. Taking a girl out for a night on the town with your rock-star earnings is like the least pathetic thing ever.”

“Guess I can’t even get Pathetic Prom right; that’s how pathetic I am,” Dill said breezily.

They drove about a half hour to Cookeville. They listened to a positive affirmations self-help CD on the drive. Lydia found herself enjoying it unironically, such was the lightness of her mood. She also found herself unironically enjoying Dill’s hungry glances at her. She might have thrown Dill a few longing glances herself.

“Where are we going?” Dill asked.

“Cracker Barrel.”

“But I like Cracker Barrel.”

“I know. I’m cheating a little here,” Lydia said. “Technically, Krystal would be the most pathetic, followed closely by Waffle House. But remember? We’re so pathetic that we can’t even do Pathetic Prom right, so we’re eating decent food.” The mention of Krystal reminded Lydia of Travis. It doesn’t feel quite right without him.

They drew stares as they walked in. Lydia flipped her hair and flounced past the gawkers. Their matronly server was unfazed both by their getups and the attention they drew.

“Don’t y’all look nice all dressed up. Is it y’all’s prom tonight?” she asked.

“Yes ma’am it is,” Lydia said, with a markedly thicker Southern accent than normal. She trotted it out for special occasions.