An Academy for Liars

Chapter 7

Lennon ran through the pouring rain and caught Dante just as he was leaving his office. “I’m sorry I’m late,” she sputtered. “I didn’t get to my dorm until after two, and no one told me we had this meeting—”

He turned to look at her. He had a cigarette in his mouth, which he was in the process of lighting with a match. “What meeting?”

“This one.” She opened her folder, which she’d used as a makeshift umbrella as she dashed across the campus, rifled through the damp papers, withdrew the schedule, and held it out for him to see. It was wet, and the ink was bleeding. “It says—”

“I can read,” said Dante. “Come in.”

He led her down a narrow hall and into a small waiting room where a group of three students sat, talking in whispers. There was a lanky boy with ice-blond hair who was so pale Lennon was actually concerned for his well-being. Beside him, a boy who was his opposite in every way, except in frame and height—dark skin, dark hair, dark eyes, enviably long lashes. Lennon immediately guessed he was Nigerian and was right—she had an eye for these things. Next to him, a scowling girl who glared at Lennon from behind a pair of thick-rimmed, but decidedly chic, glasses. All of them wore the same blue jacket embroidered with an ouroboros.

Their conversation lulled when Dante and Lennon entered the waiting room, though whether this was because of her or Dante she couldn’t say.

“Wait here,” said Dante, heading down the hall. And then, to the group whispering at the other edge of the waiting room: “Be nice.”

The three of them nodded and—still ignoring Lennon—resumed talking among themselves. “Have you decided who you’re voting for, Kieran?”

The blond, Kieran, rolled his eyes. “No one if I could.”

“Well, George seems like a promising prospect.”

“He’s a sycophant,” said the girl. “Besides, he pissed himself in my first-year persuasion class. Sawyer’s a better candidate. Stronger.”

“Stronger?” Kieran demanded, raising his faint eyebrows. “You can’t be serious. Even if it was possible to pry him out of the library—and that’s a big if —he can’t scale a flight of stairs without triggering a fucking asthma attack.”

“Strong in spirit ,” retorted the girl, who was called Yumi. “I mean, I don’t like him either—”

“No one does,” said the other boy, who Lennon later learned was named Adan. “But that doesn’t detract from his talent. If anything, it makes him more impressive.”

Yumi rolled her eyes. “He’s a waste of time.”

They weren’t faculty—that much was apparent to Lennon—but they were certainly more self-assured than the average student. The tell was not the ease with which they carried themselves, but the urgency, the decisive air of important people with important places they needed to be.

Adan picked idly at his fingernail. “Emerson said the newcomers have some talent.”

“Did she now?” Kieran’s gaze wandered languidly over to Lennon. “Is that true?”

Lennon, startled, turned to look over her shoulder to see if he was speaking to someone else. “Me?”

“Yes, you.” He repeated his question. “Is it true?”

“Is what true?”

“Is there any talent in the new year?”

“How would she know?” Adan demanded. “She clearly just got here. Who’s your advisor?”

“Him,” she said, nodding down the hall toward Dante’s office.

Yumi’s mouth gaped open. She looked absolutely affronted. Personally offended, as if Lennon had just insulted her. “Professor Lowe ?”

Lennon nodded.

“But the admin office said he doesn’t take new candidates,” said Yumi, looking as though Lennon had stolen something that belong to her. “I tried to apply to him last semester—”

“Not taking new students and not taking you are two entirely different things,” said Adan.

“But I got a mark of distinction on my Persuasion II class—”

Kieran rolled his eyes. “Nobody gives a shit about that. If you’re not Emerson, or, I guess, her for whatever reason”—the boy gave Lennon a lingering and contemptuous glare, as if he was struggling to parse out whatever it was that made her so important—“then I doubt he’s interested.”

Just then, as though on cue, Dante reemerged from his office down the hall and gestured for Lennon. She got up rather gracelessly, collecting her folder to her chest.

Dante’s office was more of a tightly contained library, really. Every available inch of wall space, and half of the floor, was devoted to books. There were so many of them, neatly organized into stacks, and Lennon could tell—based on the broken spines and the bare hard-covers without dust jackets—that they’d been read and reread many times over. It was a collection curated out of love, and not for show. There was a hearth, crowded between two bookshelves, more books stacked up on the mantle, a few of them open, others closed over pens and receipts, the flattened boxes of cigarettes and other makeshift bookmarks. In one corner of the room, a well-stocked bar cart. In another, a potted palm. Before the fireplace, a long brown leather sofa, standing low to the ground on wooden legs as thin as pencils. And, of course, there was a desk, with chairs on either side of equal size. Standing at its left corner, in the shadow of a computer monitor, was the three-legged pig she’d compelled Dante to lift during the entry exam.

Lennon sat in the chair in front of the desk, and she expected Dante to fill the seat opposite her, but he remained standing. She was taken with him, she could admit that to herself, and she observed—with an almost clinical detachment—the familiar rhythms of her attraction: the fluttering in the pit of the stomach, a feeling like static in the fingers, a pull toward what she knew she couldn’t have, which made her desire all the more intense. But as Lennon examined the sensation of that attraction, she became aware too that she was afraid of him, terribly afraid without really knowing why. She felt caught between the two opposing instincts—attraction and fear—as if shackled by either wrist and dragged apart, until she felt ready to rip down the middle.

Dante finally took a seat on the opposite side of the desk. He pressed a button on his phone. It began to ring. “Do you have any dietary restrictions?”

“I…no? But I’m not hungry.”

“Yes, you are,” he said, and it was rather dickish of him to tell her what she did or didn’t feel. But he was, annoyingly, right.

A man’s voice sounded over the line. “Yes, Dr. Lowe?”

“Could you bring us up two sandwiches? Whatever they have.”

“Of course.”

The phone line went dead, Dante eyed her, and Lennon wondered, in passing, exactly what he saw when he did. What did he make of her, and was it any different than what she made of herself?

“Any questions?” he asked. “You look confused.”

Lennon was quiet for a moment. “Is it magic? Real magic, I mean.”

“That depends on who you ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Then no. I wouldn’t call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“The remarkable strength of the human will.”

“And that’s it? This whole school is devoted to the study of forcing people, and I guess sometimes things, to do stuff?”

“That’s a succinct, if facetious, way of explaining it.” Dante tapped his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. He’d been forgetting to smoke it. Lennon took this as a good sign. He was engaged, and that came as a relief, because she felt the urgent need not to bore him. “Persuasion of other living creatures forms the bedrock of what we study here. Most students will never proceed beyond that. However, a select handful of particularly talented persuasionists possess greater abilities. Like, for example, the ability to persuade matter.”

“And the people who can do that—the particularly talented students—are they selected to study at Logos?”

“As a rule, yes. Though there are a few students each year without the ability to persuade matter who are either strategic, charismatic, or talented enough to get in without that ability.”

Dante flipped open her folder, selected her class schedule, and crossed out her ethics course and replaced it with course ART789: Art and Ego, which was instructed by a Dr. Ethel Greene. It took place in the evening, at the Melgren Art Center on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Evening courses, Lennon would come to learn, were the norm at Drayton.

Just then, there was a sharp knock on the door, and a slight man, presumably a secretary, dressed in slacks and a blousy peasant shirt, entered the office with a grease-stained paper bag clutched in his hand. He set it on the desk. Dante thanked him and he left, casting a sidelong glance at Lennon over his shoulder as he went. From the bag, Dante removed two large sandwiches: one a Reuben, the other an antipasto, with paper-thin slices of prosciutto, Parmesan cheese, and a generous layering of basil leaves. He extended the latter to Lennon. “For the road.”

Lennon took this as her sign that their brief meeting had come to an end. So she took the sandwich, got up, and headed for the door.

Dante called after her. “Lennon?”

She stopped with her hand on the knob, half turned to look back at him. There was a blur, and Lennon felt her own hand animate, watched as it snapped up—as if of its own volition, with speed well beyond the limits of her reflexes—and snatched something from the air. Her palm stung. She looked down: in her hand was the three-legged pig. Dante smiled and as Lennon slipped the figurine into her pocket, she asked herself a question to which she had no answer: Had she caught it, or had he?