Chapter 17
The next day, after her Persuasion I course adjourned, Lennon lurked in the hall waiting behind a corner. By now, she knew Dante’s routine. After every class period, he took the time to speak with any lingering students. Sometimes these exchanges lasted only a few minutes, but on other occasions he’d remain in the classroom for more than an hour, answering questions and tutoring any students who were struggling. On some occasions, these impromptu meetings became small lectures, and half the class would remain just to listen to him. And if that wasn’t enough, those same students would appear during his office hours, cramming the waiting room and spilling over into the halls beyond it, leaning against the wall or sitting on the floor with their legs thrown into the corridor, waiting for hours just to speak with him.
And, sure, Dante had a certain star power. At thirty-three he was the youngest tenured professor on campus, and as Eileen’s former apprentice, he was slated to take on the coveted role of vice-chancellor someday. But Lennon knew that it wasn’t just his accolades that made so many people want a piece of him. It was something else, a charisma, an ineffable quality that made you feel all the better just for being near him and made everyone regard him with a sense of awe that Lennon found, in truth, a little sickening, if only because it was such an ugly reflection of her own susceptibility to Dante’s draw, a reminder that what she felt for him wasn’t special at all.
Luckily for Lennon, Dante dismissed himself early that night, so she didn’t have to wait very long. With a murmured apology about his being double-booked, Dante emerged from the classroom minutes after the last student departed, holding the rats under his arm in their shared transport cage. As usual, he made his way to the exit of the building, and Lennon waited for the sound of his footsteps to fade before she emerged from around the corner and followed him to Wharton Hall, which housed all of the labs on campus.
Lennon herself had never stepped through the doors of Wharton (first-year students like herself never took lab courses), and she almost lost Dante in the labyrinthine halls of that building. But Lennon caught up with him just as he disappeared through the double doors at the end of a short corridor, slipping a key into his pocket before stepping between them. Lennon had to sprint to catch the doors before they closed. She slid inside, casting her gaze about the lab as she did.
Dante, his back turned to the door, had not noticed her.
With a silent sigh of relief, Lennon ducked down the narrow aisle between two tall shelves that were packed top to bottom with more than a dozen rat cages. And there were countless other identical shelves in that long galley of a room just like it. What disturbed her wasn’t a lack of care, per se—all of the cages were small but clean, and they each had food, wooden toys, water droppers, a bed of pine shavings, and some sort of structure, even if it was just an overturned yogurt cup with a hole cut into the side. What troubled her was the sheer number of rats in that room. There must have been hundreds on the shelves. The task of finding the one that Kieran had asked her to retrieve was all but impossible, especially with Dante just feet away, on the other side of the shelves she was hiding behind.
Trying to be light on her feet, Lennon paced the aisles searching for this brown, human-eyed rat. It was sheer luck when she found him, only a few minutes into her search, on a lower shelf that she only saw because she’d ducked to avoid being spotted by Dante. He was unusually large, with intelligent eyes.
This was Antonio. She was sure of it.
Lennon slid the cage off the shelf as quietly as she could and, still ducking, retreated toward the double doors at the front of the lab. She was almost there too, her hand just inches from the door handle, when Dante spoke: “Be careful with that one. He bites.”
Lennon froze, almost dropping the cage.
She turned to see Dante, standing at a table in the heart of the lab, his back toward her.
“How did you—”
“If you’re going to tail someone you should really consider wearing softer shoes or just socks maybe, to muffle the sound. Your footsteps are unusually loud.”
Lennon felt the tips of her ears go hot. Embarrassed, she stepped out from behind the shelf and approached him. Up close, she saw that he’d rolled up his sleeves, exposing his tattooed forearms. There was something small and pink in the flat of his palm. A baby rat. He appeared to be feeding it formula with a thin syringe.
“They have to eat every one to two hours at this age,” he said, nodding down at that rat in his palm, so small and pink that at a distance it looked more like a grub. “Before I found a lab tech to bribe, I used to keep rats like this one in a paper coffee cup padded with lots of pine shavings. I’d carry it with me from class to class and hope none of my students snitched when I pulled out the syringe to feed it.”
“What happened to its mother?” Lennon asked, coming up beside him.
“She rejected it,” said Dante, and then, in a firmer tone, “Go ahead and set that cage down.”
Lennon, flushing, placed Antonio on a nearby lab table. “You could’ve just told me you’d heard me.”
Dante smiled to himself, never taking his eyes off the rat in his hand. “I could have, but I would’ve missed out on the joy of watching you attempt to be discreet.”
Lennon frowned.
“What do you want with that rat?” he asked, without judgment. If he was angry with her for attempting to steal it, he gave no indication.
Lennon hedged her bets, hastily, trying to deduce the best way forward. She decided, after a brief debate, to be honest. “I need it. To trade with.”
Dante raised an eyebrow. “Kieran has his claws in you already?”
She was surprised he knew about Kieran’s enterprise, but perhaps she shouldn’t have been. Dante, it seemed, knew about everyone and everything that happened on that campus.
Lennon stared down at her hands. “I was high the night I called the elevator.”
“And you think that this…altered state might’ve opened your mind? Made it easier?”
Lennon nodded. “That first time, when I was high, it was effortless.”
“And you think that’s how this should be? Effortless?”
“I mean, no. I realize that I’ll have to work for it, the way I’ve worked for everything here. But the thing is, I tried so hard with Benedict, but there was just nothing on the other end. I think the drugs would open my mind more, make it easier for me to reach whatever it was I tapped into in the garden that night when it first appeared.”
“How does the rat come into play?” When Lennon didn’t answer (she was no snitch) Dante nodded as if she had. “Oh. Kieran. I assume he wants it dead?”
As he said this, Lennon became aware of how large Dante’s hand was and how pitifully small the rat was in comparison. He could’ve crushed it in a closed fist.
“I thought you didn’t want to hurt anything?” Dante asked, pressing her for a real answer.
“I don’t,” said Lennon. “But if it’s suffering—”
“What do you mean by ‘suffering’?”
“If it’s in pain—”
“Everyone has experienced pain.”
“Well, I mean constant pain.”
“Constant physical pain or constant psychological pain?”
“Just…I don’t know, any kind of pain.”
“What level of constant pain warrants a moral euthanasia?”
“Agony.”
“And how would you define ‘agony’?”
“I don’t like this line of questioning.”
“No one does,” said Dante. “But when you hold the power of life and death, it’s important that you produce answers. If only to quiet your own conscience.”
Lennon swallowed dry. “If someone or something is in a state of constant agony, a state of torment, I think it’s a mercy to end that suffering, even if there’s only one way to do it.”
“And that’s why you want the rat dead?”
“I don’t want it dead. Kieran does.”
“Do you think I would let something suffer like that?” Dante asked. The question, Lennon realized from the earnestness of his delivery, wasn’t rhetorical. He wanted her read on him.
“I mean, I don’t know…I don’t think so—”
“Does the rat look like it’s suffering?”
Lennon peered down into the cage. Kieran was right—the rat had human eyes—but it didn’t seem any worse for it. “Well, no.”
“That’s because it isn’t. Kieran is. And not from some psychic tie either.”
“Kieran? What do you think is wrong with him?”
“Nothing. He just has a newly acquired conscience,” said Dante, very matter-of-factly.
“So he’s just…feeling guilty for the first time?”
Dante nodded. “He had antisocial tendencies. A consistent lack of guilt made worse by the fact that the entirety of his childhood was devoted to the role of being a media object. No one expressed empathy toward him—least of all his parents, who enriched themselves on his celebrity—and as a result Kieran never learned to express empathy to anyone else. Until he came here.”
“And studied under you.”
“Persuasion is often a perverse exercise in empathy,” said Dante. “To be good at it, you have to grasp that, and Kieran, one of the more driven students in his class, very much wanted to be good. So there you have it. Kieran meddles in the minds of a few rats and becomes a real boy with the conscience to prove it. It’s really kind of sweet.”
“Kieran doesn’t think so,” said Lennon, flushing. Dante looked up at her. Something about being under Dante’s gaze always made her want to squirm…but in a way she kind of liked it. She’d had crushes on professors before. That had been in a distant way part of Wyatt’s appeal. But never quite like this. “He’s tormented. He says he can’t sleep.”
“Is that why he had you come here to kill that rat?”
“I wasn’t really going to kill it,” said Lennon. “I was going to let it go.”
She wasn’t sure if Dante believed her. She wasn’t even sure if she believed herself.
“You know,” said Dante as he took up the syringe again, began to dribble the milk mixture into the baby rat’s mouth, “psychedelics can be particularly dangerous for people like us. The wrong drug—or the wrong dose of the right drug—can be the equivalent of cutting a psychic artery. The damage could be incalculable. You’re willing to take that risk?”
She shrugged. “I don’t see another way forward. I have to perform if I want to stay here.”
“And you want to stay?”
“Of course,” she said, made defensive not so much by what he said as the way he said it. As if he wasn’t sure whether or not she had the chops. “There’s nowhere else I want to be, and I’ll do what it takes to make sure that I get to stay. I want my memories. I want to keep my life here, even if that means—” Her voice broke when she looked at Antonio, those sad human eyes of his, and she cast her gaze to the floor.
“I can respect that,” said Dante, and the little rat twitched in the flat of his hand. He picked it up, gingerly, between thumb and index finger and lowered it back into the incubator that stood on the table. “But you should know that it’s a dangerous game you’re playing now. A game that many have lost before. And I know you think you’re different, that you won’t get addicted—”
“I am, and I won’t,” she said, sounding surer than she felt.
“Maybe that’s true. But addiction isn’t the only thing you should be afraid of. Sometimes when you open your mind you can’t close it again.” It hurt a little, how flatly he delivered this warning, as if he was obligated to say it but really couldn’t care less if she turned up overdosed in a ditch on the side of the highway. But then she saw something in his eyes, a fear in them. Though as soon as he caught Lennon staring, he masked it, withdrawing into himself and shutting her out in the process.
“If it’s so dangerous, aren’t you obligated to stop me?” she said, almost daring him to do it, daring him to care about her or give some indication that he was invested, if only a little. Her ploy worked, because Dante looked up from the table and they locked eyes. She hated herself for the way she stiffened, flinching, as she met his gaze. Her cheeks warmed and reddened, and she was certain he noticed.
“You have a habit of wounding yourself,” he said after a long beat. “I stand in your way now and you’ll just hurt yourself again tomorrow. At some point, you have to learn how to deter your own worst impulses, or if not that, then work around them. Maybe this is your way of doing that. And if so, who am I to interfere?”