The coffee shop faced out onto the town square. Her classmates congregated at the gazebo at its center and used the square as a turnabout when they cruised the main drag, ending up at the Walmart parking lot. She could see them beginning to gather.
Another text from Dahlia. Meeting mum for dinner in hour. Wish me luck.
Speaking of, any chance your mom would be into writing me a rec letter for college? I’ll need a few, Lydia texted.
What am I doing? Lydia thought. I just casually sort of asked for a letter of recommendation from one of the most powerful women in the media. Lydia had met Vivian Winter all of one time, at Fashion Week (Dahlia’s stockbroker father had chaperoned them in Nantucket). Fortunately, Dahlia loved opportunities to show off her influence.
Oh mum adores you. We’ll make it happen.
With that small victory, Lydia resumed work on her admission essay.
When I was thirteen, I decided that there was no reason why only adults from big cities should have a voice in the national conversation on fashion, pop culture, and the arts—the three things I love most. So I started a blog called Dollywould. I drew my inspiration from a quote by one of my idols, a fellow Tennessean and strong woman: Dolly Parton. She said, “If you don’t like the road you’re walking, start paving another one.” So that’s what I did. I paved a new road. I wrote from my heart about the things I loved and people began paying attention.
I got tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of unique visitors a month. I have over 100,000 followers on both Twitter and Instagram. Dollywould has been featured in Teen Chic, Cosmopolitan, Elle, Seventeen, and Garden & Gun. I’ve been invited to New York Fashion Week for the last two years and I’ve given an interview to the New York Times. I’ve been a guest judge on Project Design on the Bravo Network. I get packages weekly from designers giving me their pieces to feature on the blog.
My goal with Dollywould was to create a space that was empowering to young people—especially young women—who had tastes outside of the mainstream and felt lonely, like no one understood them. I can empathize. I have exactly two friends at my high school. One is the son of a defrocked snakehandling pastor who is currently serving a prison sentence. My other friend works at a lumberyard to make money to buy books.
A little Southern fetishism never killed anyone. Dill and Travis may have been off-brand for her blog, but they were resoundingly on-brand for her bootstrappy admission essay narrative.
Dill was in good spirits as he clocked out of work, took off his green apron, folded it, and put it in his backpack. Every year since he’d known Lydia, Dr. Blankenship had thrown them a back-to-school dinner on the first Friday after school started, before their Friday-night movie night. He always did it up right, with smoked pork shoulder, cornbread, collard greens, mac and cheese, sweet tea, and Mrs. Blankenship’s chess pie for dessert. It was generally the best meal Dill ate all year. In the interest of enjoying it to the fullest, he even resolved to allow himself the luxury of forgetting that it would be the last such dinner he’d ever have.
He hummed a new song he was working on as he walked from Floyd’s to Lydia’s house. He could smell lighter fluid and a charcoal fire from one of the houses near downtown.
He passed in front of the appliance repair shop, which was about to close. The door opened and a woman dressed in a plain, homemade-looking dress and two children—a boy and a girl—stepped out.
Dill stopped in his tracks. “Sister McKinnon?” He didn’t run into members of his old church very often. Most lived outside Forrestville. They weren’t big town-goers.
The woman jumped at the sound of her name and stared at Dill for a moment before recognition flashed across her face. “Brother Early? My goodness, I almost didn’t recognize you. You’re about a foot taller now than last I saw you. When was that?”
“Must have been just after my dad—so, I guess three years or so.”
“And how is your daddy doing?”
“He seems okay. I saw him about a week or so ago.”
“What a godly man. I pray for his protection and health every day.”
“Me too,” Dill lied.
“I’ve always been a believer, but to see how the signs manifested in him…if ever I had any doubt, he cast it away.”
“Come on, Mama,” the boy said, tugging on his mom’s arm.
“Jacob? Hush. Daddy’s paying the man who fixed the washer and then we need to get it in the van.”
Dill knelt down to give Jacob a high five. “This is Jacob? Whoa. The last time I saw him, he was half this size.”
“They grow up too fast. So are you and your mom attending services somewhere now?”
“We both work a lot, but we go to services at the Original Church of God when we can.”
Sister McKinnon nodded politely. “Oh, okay. Do they practice the signs gospel there?”
“No, not really. Just healing and speaking tongues.”
She nodded politely again. “Oh, well, God’s word is God’s word, wherever you hear it.”
“Mamaaaa.” Jacob tugged at his mother’s arm.
“Go inside and talk to Daddy. Go on. Take your sister.” The two children ran inside. Sister McKinnon turned back to Dill. “We go to services now at a signs church in Flat Rock, Alabama.”
“Wow, that must take—”
“It’s two hours each way. About a hundred miles.” She gestured at a battered white fifteen-passenger van. “We bought this and we give rides to the Harwells and the Breedings. They help pay for gas. Do you still run with Joshua Harwell?”
“No. We…grew apart, I guess.” A thick silence. “Are you a youth group leader like you were at our church?” Dill asked. “You were my favorite youth group leader.”
She gave a melancholy smile. “No. We don’t get callings because we live so far. How about you? Do you play in the praise band at your new church?”
“No.”
“That’s a shame. You had a mighty spirit for music.”
The shop door opened with a jingle, and Brother McKinnon and his son and daughter came bumping out with their washing machine on a dolly. Dill hurried and grabbed the door. Brother McKinnon thanked him without looking up, wheeled the washer to the back of the van, and stopped, panting and mopping his brow with a bandana. When he made eye contact with Dill, his expression soured.
“Hey, Brother McKinnon,” Dill said, extending his hand, hoping to break the ice. To be honest, this was the reaction he expected from his former coparishioners.
Brother McKinnon was having none of it. “Well, how about this. I’d have thought you’d be too busy spending your thirty pieces of silver to be bumping into us.”
Dill blushed and tried to form a response, but words didn’t come.
Sister McKinnon touched her husband’s arm. “Dan, please—”
He raised his hand. “No, no, I’m inclined to give Junior here a piece of my mind. I’ve wanted to for a long time.”
Oh boy. This’ll be fun. Dill started to turn away to leave. “Sister McKinnon, it was good to see you. I—”
Brother McKinnon grabbed Dill’s arm and squeezed hard, his voice rising, spraying flecks of spit. “Don’t you call her ‘sister.’ You know good and well what you done. And if you don’t care to hear no more about it, well, maybe that’s your conscience. But you made things hard on my family. I spend about every hour of daylight on Sundays just driving to church. Hundreds of dollars in gas. I hope you’re happy.”
Dill wrenched his arm away and stared at the ground. “I’m not happy. I’m sorry.” Passersby on the other side of the street had stopped to gawk at the snakehandler-on-snakehandler violence that was unfolding.
Brother McKinnon gave a sarcastic chuckle. “Oh, you’re sorry. Well, with your sorry and four hundred a month, I can buy gas so I can raise my kids in the true faith. You’re sorry.” He spat at Dill’s feet.