Page 16 of The Serpent King

“I shouldn’t.”

“You should.”

“I’m too lazy to get up.”

Her dad leaned over, grabbed the pizza box, and handed it to her.

“Shall I feed it to you as well, milady?”

“Shut up.” She took a slice.

Lydia’s mom sniffed. “Come on, Lydia.”

Lydia took off her glasses and wiped away a smudge. “I wish I could sit here and eat and nerd out with you two, but I need to work on my blog tonight. My audience awaits a back-to-school post.”

“Suit yourself,” her dad said. “But first, why don’t you go look at what’s on the kitchen counter. The senior-year fairy dropped by while you were out. We tried to tell her that you’ve been bad by telling your dad to shut up, but she wouldn’t listen.”

Lydia rolled her eyes playfully, got up, and walked to the kitchen. A brand-new Mac laptop, wrapped up with a red bow, sat on the counter. She clapped her hands to her mouth and squealed. Any lingering unease from her fight with Dill disappeared in a blink. She ran into the living room and hugged her parents, almost causing her mom to spill wine on the couch.

“The last thing you need is your computer crashing on you in the middle of a college application or writing your admission essay,” her dad said.

“I love you guys. Even despite your penchant for inferior pizza.”

Lydia bounded upstairs. Her dad always joked bitterly about how she’d annexed the top floor. Her parents occupied one bedroom. She occupied another. The other two bedrooms were Lydia’s wardrobe room—filled with wheeled clothing racks—and her sewing/project room.

Lydia sat in her bedroom at her stark, modern desk, bought on an Ikea run to Atlanta. While she waited for her new laptop to boot up, she scanned through the photos on her phone, posting the best shots to Instagram and Twitter.

Her phone beeped. A text from Dahlia Winter. Ugh first day of school?

Dahlia was her best Internet friend. Actually, they’d become close real-life friends after Lydia had spent two weeks that summer at Dahlia’s family’s beach house in Nantucket. Returning to Forrestville after that wasn’t easy. The experience had confirmed to Lydia that they’d make good roommates at NYU, which both of them had chosen as their top pick for college. Lydia had her fingers crossed to get in. Of course Dahlia would get in. Dahlia’s mother, Vivian Winter, was the infamously icy editor-in-chief of Chic Magazine. Dahlia could waltz into any school she liked, but she wanted to be near the heart of the fashion industry and she had a thing for slumming it. Hence her friendship with a “poor” girl from Tennessee.

Ugh is right. You can’t imagine my school’s awfulness, Lydia texted.

Feel for you. We have creeps at school too.

I bet Phillips Exeter has a different kind than Forrestville High. When does your school start?

Yeah, probably. September.

Hate you. (But in loving way)

LOL gotta run love. Hang in there at Hillbilly High.

Lydia set down her phone and began typing a post about the road trip to Nashville, shopping at Attic, and some thoughts on the first day of school. She got stuck and began looking for ways to procrastinate.

She downloaded her pictures from the Nashville trip to her new computer and sorted through them. Travis, leaning on his staff, doing his best to look grim. She opened a tab and pasted them into an email to him.

Can you believe it? We ran into Rainer Northbrooke (sp?) in Nashville. He said to say hi. Enjoy.

And then she started browsing through the pictures of Dill, looking distant. Lost. Haunted.

Lydia felt a familiar pang of guilt and sadness that she couldn’t use the photos on her blog. When she’d gone to New York Fashion Week, there’d been a meet-up of teen fashion bloggers. A bunch of thirteen- to seventeen-year-olds talking about content and brand preservation.

“It sucks when your friends have a look that’s off-brand and you can’t talk about them or show them on the blog. It’s so awkward to explain. What? Are you going to say ‘Hey, sorry, but your style sucks so I can’t tell people I hang out with you?’ But that’s the reality,” a thirteen-year-old from Johannesburg said with a world-weary air, the others nodding sagely.

Lydia had just sat and listened. Oh, I could tell you a thing or two about having friends who are off-brand.

Travis was hopelessly off-brand, and he couldn’t care less.