The Serpent King(78)

Dill peeked down at Lydia as they rode. She watched the street with a blissful air. She turned and reached up to brush an errant shock of hair from his eyes. I’m really glad I’m here, now, and not lying at the bottom of the Steerkiller River.

They could hear a lawnmower somewhere. The herbaceous smell of cut grass mingled with lilac. The combination smelled like honey in the warm early May air.

“Will any part of you miss this?” Dill asked, as they turned onto Main Street and passed Riverbank Books, waving at Mr. Burson.

“What? Hanging out with you? Or”—she made a sweeping gesture at the town—“this?”

Dill mirrored her gesture as they approached Good News Coffee, the town square with the gazebo, and Forrestville’s abandoned 1920s-era downtown theatre. “This. Of course you’ll miss hanging out with me.”

“Flatter yourself much?” Her tone turned wistful. “Yeah,” she said softly. “I’ll miss this. Now that I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, this town doesn’t seem so bad anymore. Good News made a halfway decent Luke Latte. And New York City may have a lot of bookstores, but it doesn’t have Riverbank. How about you?”

“Yeah. A little bit. I’ll miss our trains and the Column.” He allowed a contemplative moment to pass while he pedaled. “I thought I’d live my whole life and die in this town. I don’t know how I existed like that.”

Lydia adjusted her position. “We’re gonna be college kids, Dill.”

“Yeah. We are.”

“Like with classes and stuff.”

“We’ll both have lots of college classes.” The thought of school had never made him excited. But that was Forrestville High.

“We’ll be able to talk about them. Or we could talk about literally anything else that’s more interesting, which is probably everything.”

They laughed.

Lydia leaned back into the hollow of Dill’s body, warm and snug against his chest. Dill leaned down and kissed her on the spot between her ear and her jaw.

“We made it, Dill.”

“Yeah,” Dill said softly. “We made it.” If only we were making it in the same direction and the same place.

And their twoness made him think of Travis again. Lying alone under the ground, in the dark, while Lydia and I live and move forward and laugh. What tempered his guilt was the hunch that if Travis was watching them from some lofty vantage point, he was happy for them. Travis would have wanted us to be doing exactly what we’re doing.

They rode on a bit farther before Dill spoke again. “This part would have been hard to do with Travis.”

“Even if we had him pedal, and you sitting on the crossbar with me sitting on your lap, we wouldn’t have had room for the staff.”

“We’d have broken the bike. I think Travis weighed more than both of us combined.”

Lydia gazed into the distance. “You’re going to make me cry again. I’ll smear my mascara.” She turned back to Dill. “Oh wait.”





They pulled up to the school as a PT Cruiser limo was leaving, having deposited its passengers. Jasmine Karnes and her date, Hunter Henry, stood a little ahead of Dill and Lydia in line to get into the high school gymnasium. Jasmine turned, saw them standing there, and scowled at Lydia in particular. You two are trodding roughshod on the most important night of my life, her heavily made-up face said. She leaned in to Hunter and whispered something. Hunter turned, looked them up and down, and laughed, but in a way more for them to hear than as a manifestation of actual mirth.

“Hunter’s laughing because Jasmine pointed out the inherent futility of human existence and illusion of consciousness, and the only way he could emotionally process these ideas was through the incongruous reaction of laughter,” Lydia whispered to Dill.

They entered the darkened gym. A DJ played some generic pop hit from four months ago. They could hear the scornful whispers and muttering and feel the stares.

“How awesome does it feel that in a few short weeks, neither of us will see any of these people on a regular basis ever again?” Lydia said.

“You won’t. Some might be going to MTSU.”

“But they’ll never achieve the same critical mass of awfulness ever again. Even at MTSU.”

“True. It feels amazing. What also feels great is to not care at all anymore what any of these people think of me.”

On cue, Tyson Reed and Madison Lucas walked by. “Oh Lydia, honey,” Madison said, her voice dripping with mock concern, “I think they missed a spot or two on your spray tan.”

Lydia laughed breezily. “Did they? That is the last time I order the ‘Madison Lucas brain activity MRI’ spray tan package.”

“Always so clever,” Madison said, sneering.

“Always so not,” Lydia said.

Dill stepped between Madison and Lydia. “Hey, Madison, Tyson. Do you guys not get it? You can’t hurt us anymore. You can’t do anything to us. You can’t take anything from us. You’re nothing now.”

Madison’s expression was as though she’d just farted during a prayer. Tyson got up in Dill’s face. “You’re lucky it’s prom, Dildo. Otherwise I’d beat your ass. I don’t give a shit that your friend died and everyone feels sorry for you.”