by Jeff Zentner
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.
The coffee shop faced out onto the town square. Her classmates congr
egated 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.
Dill met Brother McKinnon’s caustic gaze, his shame decaying into anger. “Yeah. I’m sorry things are bad for you. But what my dad did was not my fault. He got himself into trouble.”
; Brother McKinnon’s voice took on a dangerous hush as he jabbed Dill in the chest with his index finger, punctuating his words. “You keep telling yourself that, Judas. But tell yourself that somewhere else, because the sight of you is making me want to do something I’ll regret.”
Dill said nothing in reply, but he turned and walked away fast, adrenaline coursing through him, making his legs rubbery, sickening him. He scurried up the street, feeling like a cockroach that someone had flushed out of hiding. As he walked, he decided without much consideration that he would renege on his commitment to let himself forget that this would be his last back-to-school dinner. This is what I’ll have left when she’s gone. Spats in front of appliance repair shops with former members of my dad’s church who think I sold my dad to the Romans. He kept his head down and cast furtive glances from side to side, but by then the streets were mostly empty in the rust-colored light.
Dinner was excellent as usual. Good food and friendship washed away the run-in with the McKinnons. But even after the sour of the encounter had faded, forlornness welled up around him. Of course, he always experienced a certain anguish when hanging around with Lydia’s family at their home, by virtue of the contrast with his own family and home. Their light, airy, spacious house, filled with beautiful things and modern appliances, always perfumed with bright, clean white flowers and citrus…compared with his cramped, dark house, filled with decline, stinking of mold, old carpet, and the glue that held everything together. Lydia’s close and loving family, engaged in warm conversation—Lydia an only child by choice…compared with his fractured family, his mother treating him like a child even though she was only eighteen years older than him—Dill an only child because God wouldn’t give his parents any more (their words).