Page 98 of The Serpent King

“Sweetie, look, I’ll drive you. Having your dad drive you to prom is pretty pathetic. I’ll wear a goofy outfit.”

“As opposed to your many outfits that aren’t goofy? I said bring the limo around.”

Dr. Blankenship shook his head and disappeared around the corner. He returned, wheeling a creaking, rusty, thrift-store Huffy mountain bike.

“Oh man,” Dill said, laughing. “I haven’t ridden a bike since I was a little kid. I’m not sure if I remember how.”

“They say it’s like riding a bike,” Lydia said.

“Be careful!” Dr. Blankenship called after them as they tottered away with Lydia perched on the crossbar.

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.