The Serpent King

After the funeral, Dill and Lydia “stood at Travis’s grave gazing at the fresh brown dirt covering it, long after everyone else had gone home” (262). Lydia tells Dill she put the signed page from Travis’s book and his dragon necklace into the coffin, and that Travis’s first story was really bad, but that “of course he’d have gotten better” (263). 

They go to The Column, where they talk about life and death, what people leave behind, and whether they still believe in God (Lydia is conflicted). Worried about the insanity in his family, Dill tells Lydia about the Serpent King. Lydia makes Dill promise that if he ever feels like surrendering to the darkness, he will tell her. 

Lydia finds her dad at home looking at her baby pictures, and they both express grief. Her dad feels guilty about not buying the whole load of firewood from Travis. 

In her room, Lydia texts Dahlia about Travis, repulsed by “the banality of Dahlia’s problems in the great scope of things” (271). She decides to write a post about Travis, where she eulogizes her friend and reveals her own hypocrisy in never featuring him on her blog because “Travis wasn’t ‘cool’ in the conventional sense” (272).