Chapter 6
After the assembly adjourned, a handful of upperclassmen led the first years to Ethos College, the residential dorm where they’d be staying. They walked along a slate path, the tiles slippery with moss, cutting through the gardens and the breezeways that ran between buildings. Ethos College sat on a wide fog-washed green overlooking a grove of magnolia trees. It was composed of four conjoined townhomes with slanted tin roofs and tall stained-glass windows. Taking it in, Lennon felt as though she were walking through the trappings of a dream that wasn’t hers. It was an odd feeling, to have such a loose grasp on one’s own reality. Her thoughts seemed entirely scattered, a fistful of sand tossed to the wind.
The foyer of the college was empty, and dim to the point of being dark, but she was almost immediately greeted with the lively din of conversation, the mingling aromas of fresh bread and cigarette smoke. To the left was a welcome desk, with a girl about her age seated behind it, her face alight with the artificial glow of the computer monitor in front of her. The other students dispersed—heading to their dorms, presumably—leaving Lennon and the girl alone. She called out from across the hall, her voice echoing. “Your name?”
Lennon gave it, edging up to the desk.
The girl, whose name (according to the tag pinned to her lapel) was Allison, keyed something into the computer, her manicured nails clicking as they connected with the plastic buttons. “Welcome to Ethos College.”
What followed was a brief overview of the college. From Allison, Lennon learned that Drayton’s approach to housing was rather old-fashioned in that each of its colleges (except one) were separated by gender. Those who fell between (there were several genderqueer students among their cohort) were allowed to select the housing they felt most comfortable with.
There were, according to Allison, three residential colleges on Drayton’s campus: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, named after Socrates’s three rhetorical appeals. Logos was the smallest of the three, the only coed college and the most exclusive, as it housed only a handful of Drayton’s most promising students. It was a self-governing college and as such its inhabitants retained special privileges, like the ability to leave the campus when they wanted to. As a rule, nonmembers were forbidden from entering Logos without a formal invitation from a resident. As a result, few of those in Drayton had ever entered through the courtyard gates. Fewer still had been formally invited to live and study there.
The boys’ college, Pathos, was on the southern end of the Twenty-Fifth Square, whereas Ethos was on its northern end. Each of these residences was equipped with a kitchen and dining room, where students could take their meals at any hour of the day (meals at Drayton tended to occur at unusual times—breakfasts were often taken well past midday, lunch in the late hours of the night, and dinner often lapsed into the wee hours of the early morning).
All of the dorms of Ethos College were in the west wing of the building, on the other side of the greater common areas. Lennon walked past a large dining room, with wood-rafter ceilings and a long banquet table. In a small study just down the hall, a few students sat smoking and talking in hushed tones.
The residential wing of Ethos had a decidedly homey quality. Its wood floors were laid with plush Persian runners, the walls lined with well-stocked bookshelves. Allison showed Lennon to her room, at the end of a long corridor. It was sensibly furnished and entirely symmetrical: two beds, two desks, two overstuffed armchairs standing in front of a small hearth. There were even two oak wardrobes, filled with clothes (Lennon would later discover that all of them were tailored to her specific measurements).
Sitting cross-legged on the edge of the bed to the left was a girl that Lennon immediately recognized from the entry exam, the pretty one with the nose ring, which she’d since removed. She had long hair that fell in feathery layers about her shoulders. She was slim, with slightly vacant blue eyes, and she had a gap between her two front teeth that was just wide enough to slide a quarter through. Lennon imagined doing just that, imagined the girl swallowing down the coin, where, in the pit of her stomach, it would be digested. How might I assist you? the girl might’ve asked, in the cheery and robotic monotone of an AI helper.
Looking at her, Lennon thought that almost every girl who had ever lived—every teenager clawing through the bowels of the internet, every middle-aged woman armed with a diet plan and a prayer, every awkward girl who’d sat alone at lunch—had hoped to look like some iteration of her, if only because it would make life that much easier.
“I’m Blaine,” said the girl, her voice gravelly.
“And I’m Lennon.”
“From the entry exam. We sat across from each other.”
“I remember you,” Lennon said. Blaine wasn’t the type that anyone would easily forget. In fact, no one she’d met at Drayton was. Every person she’d encountered so far fell along the spectrum of peculiar, striking, or egregiously attractive, and she couldn’t help but think this was intentional.
“You looked like you knew what you were doing on that exam,” said Blaine.
“I have a decent poker face.”
Blaine laughed. “How’d you end up here?”
Lennon would come to recognize this question as the standard introduction among Drayton students and alumni, who relished trading stories about the strange and impossible ways they’d first come to the campus. Eager to share her story, Lennon told Blaine about the anachronistic telephone booth in the parking lot of the abandoned mall, about Benedict and the elevator that had carried her up to the eighth floor of his two-story house, how its doors had opened to Drayton.
Blaine, as it turned out, was a hospice nurse who worked at a facility in Chicago. She was French by birth but had grown up in the Midwest. She’d received news of her consideration via a call that came through late at night. The voice of her dead grandfather relayed a series of coordinates that led her to a diner just a few blocks from her apartment. There she was greeted by a woman. “She was old, my grandfather’s age, dressed too warm for the weather. Wearing all black. She was expecting me. Said I was late.”
Unlike Lennon’s interview with Benedict, Blaine’s interview was brief, and within fifteen minutes she passed and was ordered to board the L and get off at a stop that, according to Blaine, didn’t exist. At least, she thought it didn’t exist until the empty train cab stopped, abruptly, at an abandoned platform. When she took the elevator up to what she thought was street level, she found herself in Drayton instead. “I thought I was going insane.”
“So did I,” said Lennon, and there was a crack of thunder. She looked to the window and saw that it had started to rain. “What was the entry exam like for you?”
“Strange,” said Blaine, and she looked a little haunted. “The written portion was weird enough, all of those faces. They started blurring together at the end.”
“And what about the second half, the expressive interview? What were you asked to do?”
“Make a man slap himself,” she said.
“Did you do it?”
“Nope. I couldn’t even get him to raise his hand. But his thumb twitched, and since I’m still here I’m guessing that counts for something.”
This was news to Lennon. She’d assumed that everyone who was admitted into Drayton had passed because they’d succeeded in fulfilling the request of their proctor. Dante had framed the final portion of the exam as the only thing that stood between her and admittance. Failure to complete the task had seemed synonymous with rejection. Maybe Dante was particularly harsh. Or perhaps Blaine had scored higher on the written exam, so that her admittance wasn’t entirely dependent on passing the expressive portion.
“What about you?” Blaine inquired. “What did they want you to do?”
“There was a man, Dante. I think he’s a professor here. He took a pig figurine from his pocket and asked me to make him lift it.”
“And did you?”
Lennon nodded. “But I don’t know how. Something came over me. Or him. I’m not sure. In the end, he lifted the pig, and I blacked out. Apparently, it was some sort of seizure.”
“Damn,” said Blaine, but she said it with an edge. Was it jealousy that Lennon saw in her eyes? Or was she mistaken?
In the awkward silence that followed, Lennon half turned to her own bed and saw that there was a thick leather folder, embossed with her name, lying at the foot of it. She picked it up and flipped the cover open. There was a letter for her there, handwritten on thick cardstock, which smelled faintly of ammonia. It read:
Dear Lennon,
It is our great honor to accept you into Drayton College. As part of our admissions agreement, we ask for a minimum of two consecutive years, during which time you will study here on Drayton’s campus, under the tutelage of some of the brightest academics in the Western Hemisphere, who will personally oversee your studies.
At the discretion of our faculty but depending entirely upon your academic performance and conduct on campus, your tenure may be either lengthened or shortened. Upon graduating you will receive a large stipend, befitting of a graduate of Drayton’s caliber, as well as a position befitting your specific skill set. We trust that with time and dedication to your studies, you will be a worthy addition to our school.
We wish you the best.
Sincerely,
The Chancellor
Lennon flipped to the next page in the pamphlet. It was a map of the campus. Drayton, as it turned out, was more extensive than Lennon originally assumed it to be. Its grounds included several large gardens, an Olympic-sized swimming pool, an observatory, and several other amenities. The next page featured her class schedule. It detailed a rigorous eighteen-credit-hours semester that included courses in abnormal psychology, ethics, mindfulness and meditation, and of course the study of persuasion.
Lennon frowned. The classes were strange, certainly not what she would’ve expected from an institution like Drayton. And she was disappointed to see the name of the man, Dante (or Dr. Lowe, as Sawyer had called him), who’d administered the last half of her entry exam among the list of instructors.
She held up the schedule for Blaine to see. “We don’t get to choose the classes we take?”
“Not during our first semester,” said Blaine. “My advisor, Eileen, told me all the first years have the same course schedule. Apparently, the standardized curriculum allows them to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the incoming class more objectively.”
“Your advisor is Eileen? The vice-chancellor?”
“The very one.”
“You must be special.”
The girl shrugged. “I like to think so.”
Lennon flipped to the next page of the folder and discovered a detailed schedule that accounted for almost every hour of the next several days. Among the listed activities—orientation, campus tours, brunches, luncheons, and a convocation garden party—she had an appointment to meet with her advisor, Dr. Dante Lowe, at two thirty p.m. (sharp). With a wave of dread, Lennon checked the clock hanging on the wall above the desk.
The time was 2:42 p.m. She was late.