Page 95 of The Serpent King

Tell her you just did it for fun. Harmless fun. But then he saw himself standing on the stage at the talent competition. He saw himself kissing Lydia. And he knew he couldn’t betray who he was now. He was more now. “Because I’m going there next year. I got in.”

“We agreed you weren’t going to do that.” Her voice was soft, but not like a pillow. Like a pile of fine metal shavings or powdered glass.

“You agreed. I didn’t. I just didn’t disagree. But now I do. I’m going.”

“We cannot afford this, Dillard. You will bankrupt us.” She spoke slowly and carefully, like she was explaining to a toddler not to touch a hot stove.

“I got need-based financial aid. I’ll get loans that I’m responsible for to take care of the rest. But I’m doing this.”

She shook her head. “No.”

“I’m not asking you for permission. I’m telling you because I love you. This is happening. Maybe someday I’ll explain exactly why this needed to happen. But not now. Now all you need to know is that it’s happening.”

She breathed deeply, deliberately. The air rattled in her throat. She looked away and closed her eyes as if praying. Not as if. Of course she’s praying. For what? The words to persuade me? The grace to accept my decision?

She stood and pushed away her half-eaten plate of spaghetti, almost daintily. She turned and walked to her bedroom. She shut the door carefully, slowly. As if she knew Dill wished she would slam it.

Dill sat in the hush, listening to their clattering refrigerator. It felt like the moment between when he finished his song at the talent competition and the lukewarm applause that followed; like when he first kissed Lydia—like every time he kissed Lydia; when he knew he had done something painful, brave, and beautiful. And if you’re going to live, you might as well do painful, brave, and beautiful things.

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.”