She’s in ninth grade, sitting up a row and a few seats over from Dillard Early in English class. He rarely talks. He’s frequently absent. She’s heard her dad mention that Dillard’s dad got himself into trouble for having some pretty creepy porno on his computer and maybe that wasn’t all. This confluence of perverse sexuality and strange religion is titillating stuff in a small town. Well, it is anywhere, really. It’s made national news. It’s the hot topic for hacky late-night comedians who can’t resist the low-hanging fruit of snakehandling jokes. There are rumors that the porn was Dillard’s, which would be somewhat less creepy, since at least Dillard is a minor himself. Still, people steer clear of him—even the couple of friends he had from church.
But it’s not as if she’s burning down the house in any popularity contests herself. For the most part, she’d always preferred books to people her own age. Her one close friend, Heidi, moved to Memphis the year before.
They’re reading Lord of the Flies and the teacher is asking the students about their understanding of the book, and generally teachers don’t call on Dillard because either they figure he won’t have an answer or they don’t want to put him on the spot. But Ms. Lambert, bless her heart, she goes for it.
“Dillard, what do you think this book is trying to say?” she asks.
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.
Lydia looked up from the blank page she was staring at on her screen while reminiscing. “You cannot possibly have read that book fewer than seven times.”
“Eight times.”
“So why—”
“Because Deathstorm, the final book in the series, comes out in March. And I’m rereading the whole series before then so I don’t miss any details when I talk about it on the forums. They’re brutal there. I don’t want to look like a noob. I’m reading it with one of my friends from the forums. They’re good books. You should read them.”
Lydia rolled her eyes. “Yeah, no. I wouldn’t read five thousand pages of something if it contained precise instructions on how to lose twenty pounds by eating Krispy Kremes and orgasming. Do you not have homework?”
“Damn, Lydia, you’re everyone’s mom tonight,” Dill said. Travis gave him an inquisitive eyebrow raise.
Lydia raised her hands in surrender, still gazing at her screen. “Nope. Nope. I’m done. Y’all do your thing. This is what I get for trying to help.” This is what I get for trying to keep from having to watch your life wither and die on the vine in this stupid little town.
Her phone buzzed.
OMG just got sneak peek at Vivienne Westwood pre-Fall. Mind-blowing, Dahlia texted.
JEALZ.
Cool things going on with subverting trad. ideas of femininity etc.
I ALREADY SAID JEALZ.
Soon, love. BTW spoke with Chloe this morning. Expressed interest in rooming with us in NYC.
Chloe Savignon was a young actress and fashion designer. Lydia had never met her in person, but had corresponded with her online and seen her movies. She was a fan of Dollywould.
I’m down, she texted.
She could barely process how different her life would be in a year. A change she had wrought through her own force of will and ambition. From a nobody in a nothing town at the edge of the Cumberland Plateau to rooming with actresses and fashion industry scions in the most glamorous city in the world, attending one of the finest universities in the world. The possibilities were so endless. Her new friends would dress and talk differently. They’d be from big cities and elite prep schools. They’d have beach houses where they’d spend weekends. They’d have late-night conversations about Chomsky and Sartre and Kraftwerk and Kurosawa and the Givenchy spring line. Friends who would introduce her to new things instead of it always being the other way around. That’s what would replace this. Not that this wasn’t fun. Not that Dill and Travis weren’t good friends to her. Not that she wouldn’t miss them. Not that she wouldn’t feel guilty leaving them behind. But.
A year from now, she wouldn’t be sitting in a Christian coffee shop across from friends who resented her ambition, that was for sure.
This was a good mind place for her to start drafting her college admission essay. She began typing.
I was born and raised in Forrestville, Tennessee, population 4,237, according to the last census. Not surprisingly, technology startups, software companies, media conglomerates, and so forth are reluctant to set up shop in a town named for Nathan Bedford Forrest, Confederate general and founder of the Ku Klux Klan. Opportunity and possibility don’t knock at your door in Forrestville. You have to create them for yourself.