Page 85 of The Serpent King

“You don’t need to be alone right now.”

“The hell I don’t. I might as well get used to it. GO.” Dill had never been so sharp with her before.

“No.” She tried not to sound as frightened and helpless as she felt.

“Go!” he shouted. “Leave me alone!”

She stood, grabbed his arm, and spun him onto his back. She tried to will her voice not to quaver, but was mostly unsuccessful. She jabbed her index finger into his bare chest. “Okay. You know what? You’re being shitty. You’re being unfair and it sucks. And if you think I’m going to just let you drown and not try to do anything about it, you’re dead wrong. So I’m going to let you wallow today, because sometimes people need to wallow, but believe me: I’m going to hold you to the promise you made me. And we’re going to fix that broken string on your guitar. Got it?”

“Fine. Just go.”

“You know how bad you hurt right now? I would feel that times a hundred—times a million if anything happened to you.”

Dill didn’t answer. He turned back on his side. Lydia stared down at him, pitching around for one last thing to say. Something that could fix everything. The perfect joke. The witty rejoinder. The insightful quip. And for once her mind was barren.

She turned and walked out. She stood for a second in the living room, clenching and unclenching her fists. Taking deep breaths, trying not to cry.

As she closed Dill’s front door behind her, it felt like rolling a stone over the entrance of a tomb.

She lay on her bed in complete, leaden exhaustion. School was shitty. Everything was shitty. She was about to put on her favorite music for calming herself down—Dill’s videos—when she remembered that all was not yet well there.

Lydia knew Dill hated texting because it was so cumbersome on his ancient flip phone. But she texted him anyway because the sound of his gray voice hurt her heart. I’ve had the worst day and I need to know right now that at least you’re ok or I’m going to scream and break things.

A few seconds later. I’m ok I guess.

But he wasn’t okay. Despite everything, the darkness encroached. Day by day, the poison spread, strangling him.

Sleeping didn’t help. It never left him feeling rested. He had dreams of serpents. Visions of handling them, allowing them to twist around his arms and neck. Of wearing their skins and skulls and fangs; unkempt, bearded, and reeking of decay; a derelict hull. Of passing Lydia, home from college, on the street, where he stared at her with dead eyes but with no words between them.

Travis came to him in dreams, and they would make plans to live in a house together and have desks side by side and then he would wake up and for several seconds, he couldn’t tell whether it had been a dream. He dreamed that Lydia announced she was staying and not abandoning him after all. And he’d wake up and he was a day closer to losing the only thing he had left.

Lydia looked at him with eyes that said she knew he was slipping away, disappearing before her like fog in the morning sun. And there was nothing she could do about it. And so he spent a lot of time alone. He wouldn’t return Lydia’s calls. Being around her—aware that the seconds were ticking away to her leaving too—made things worse. When they were together, she would take him to watch trains, but he couldn’t bear their life and energy. He had no space for it.

His mom tried to reach him through scripture, by reminding him of Jesus’s travails. It didn’t work. And she didn’t have the time to do much anyway.

Everything seemed muted and colorless. Every sound reached his ears as though through a thick wool blanket. He had no music in him. On the few occasions when he would sit to write, he ended up with a blank page in front of him. His fingers couldn’t form chords on his guitar strings. His voice left him. Lydia would show him the mounting likes and views of his videos in an effort to break through, but it never worked.

Food had no flavor. All he could taste was the pervasive and consuming despair, like soot on his tongue. He stopped going to appointments with the grief counselor.

He walked through his days like an apparition. The act of living felt wrong and harsh and uncomfortable. Nails on a chalkboard. A machine running without oil. Gears grinding and gnashing on each other, breaking teeth, disintegrating. Burning up. Wearing out.

He would get up and go to school with Lydia, their rides mostly quiet, with Lydia trying to get him to talk. He would count the minutes until school let out, unable to focus or concentrate. He would go to work and perform his tasks in a somnolent haze. Then he would return home and go to sleep as soon as humanly possible, so that he wouldn’t have to interact with his mother. She also knew she was losing him. He could see it on her face, and that was just one more thing that hurt. He knew she was praying for him and he didn’t want to become one more unanswered prayer.

And most of all, there was the crushing weight of destiny. The ossifying conviction that he was living out some ancient and preordained plan, encoded in his blood, built into the architecture of his name. Something horrible and inevitable.

One day at the end of March, he woke up and wondered if he’d ever be happy again. It was a sunny day at least. The world was verdant, in contrast to the desolation inside him.

He went to Bertram Park to watch a train. He had to wait a long time. Then he walked alone to the Column and climbed up it. He wore his favorite clothes. Ones Lydia had picked out for him.

He sat with his back resting on his handwritten list of the things that he once loved. He closed his eyes and felt the sun on his face as he watched the light patterns behind his eyelids and thought about whether he had anything left to lose—if he had any reason left to stay. No.

Would Lydia miss him the way he’d miss her? Probably not. Would she at least forgive him for breaking his promise? He hoped so.

He wondered if he’d see Travis again. He hoped so.

He wondered if his parents would miss him. Maybe his paycheck, but probably not him.

He wondered how things might have turned out differently for him if he’d had more faith, a different name, or been born to different circumstances. He didn’t know.