Page 25 of The Serpent King

He raises his head from his desk. He falls asleep in class a lot. He fixes the teacher with those intense, unnerving, Pentecostal eyes, which so often have dark circles under them lately. He waits several seconds to speak. Not like he’s gathering his thoughts, but instead considering whether the teacher is prepared to hear what he thinks.

“I think it’s saying that we’re all born with seeds in us. And if we let them see sunlight and air, they’ll grow through us and break us. Like a tree growing up through a sidewalk.”

Tittering from the class, but mostly awkward silence.

Ms. Lambert speaks quietly. “Yes, Dillard. I think that’s very much what this book is about.”

Logan Walker raises his hand and doesn’t wait to be called on. “My mom told me that if you eat watermelon seeds, a watermelon will grow in your stomach.” The class snickers. Dillard puts his head down on his desk again.

“That’s enough,” Ms. Lambert snaps.

But Lydia isn’t paying attention to this exchange because Dillard has earned himself an instacrush. Not that kind. Within Lydia’s taxonomy of crushes are innumerable subspecies, most of which contain no romantic element whatsoever. She once listed as many of them as she could in a post on her new blog. West-Coast-clean-hippie-girl-wearing-headband crush. Witchy-goth-British-female-singer-wearing-torn-dresses-and-going-barefoot crush. Sardonic-young-male-Jewish-comedian-who-is-only-handsome-from-one-angle-and-with-whom-she-wants-to-have-brunch-but-not-kiss crush. Et cetera and so forth.

And who’d have guessed that she had a slot for weird-outcast-rural-snakehandler-boy-given-to-apocalyptic-existential-pronouncements-in-class crush. But she did. She suspects there’s a fair chance she’ll end up regretting it and instead of being full of beautiful sorrow and loneliness and brilliance as she imagines, Dillard really is a complete Jesus/porn freak weirdo. But if that turns out to be the case, she can always drop him with no social repercussions.

She finds him in the cafeteria later, where he eats his free lunches alone, or sometimes with Travis Bohannon, another thoroughly odd duck with a sad story of his own. Today Dillard’s alone, writing in a notebook. She asks if she can sit down across from him. He eyes her with suspicion, as if he’s wondering how she intends to hurt him.

“Go ’head,” he says.

She sits down with her baby carrots, pita chips, and hummus, all bought on a recent supply run to Trader Joe’s in Nashville. Her mother’s Lexus SUV groaned under the weight of all their groceries. They’d bought a “Trader Joe’s fridge” to put in the garage, just for these runs.

“What are you writing?” she asks.

“Nothing.”

Cut-to-the-chase time. “I’m not here to make fun of you, by the way. Maybe you haven’t noticed that the people who do that to you don’t care for me much either. I liked what you said in class about the book.”

He continues to regard her warily. “Songs. I get ideas in my head and I write them down. Words, or melodies.”

“You’re a musician?”

“Yeah, I learned how to play the guitar and sing when I was really young so I could play in my dad’s church.”

“So are those, like, Jesus songs you’re writing?”

“No.”

“Do you like movies?”

“Yeah. I mean, I haven’t seen very many.”

“Every Friday night is movie night at my house. Wanna come this Friday?”

“My mom’s pretty strict.”

Lydia shrugs. “Okay. Maybe some other time.”

Dillard hesitates. “But she’s working on Friday night. She works pretty much all day every day and every night. So as long as I’m home before ten…”

“I’m no snitch. Snitches get stitches.”

And for the first time she can recall, she sees Dillard Early smile.

Lydia pulled herself from her reverie just as Travis bumbled into Good News, his hair still wet from the shower.

“Sorry, I got held up at work. Telling stories.”

He sat down next to Dill and pulled out his tattered copy of Bloodfall.