Chapter 42
The sun had set by the time they arrived at Dante’s home, on a ragged stretch of the South Carolina coastline. It was a ranch with a low-slung roof, half-overgrown with ivy and great flowering tangles of honeysuckle, flocked by wasps. The living room looked like an extension of Dante’s office back at Drayton. There was a well-worn leather couch, sagging a bit in the middle. On the edge of the coffee table was a metal ashtray fashioned into the shape of a large fly. The eastern wall of the living room had a run of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto the black and glistening waters of the ocean. Unlike Dante’s townhome in Drayton, this place had a decidedly lived-in quality. It smelled like him, felt like him in a way that immediately put Lennon at ease.
Dante showed her into the guest room. It was quaint, with a queen-sized bed bracketed by two barrel nightstands and French doors that opened out onto a small, private patio. From that patio led a narrow path that threaded through the marsh and down to the beach.
“I’ll give you some time to wash up,” said Dante, and he set a stack of folded towels on the bathroom countertop. “Holler if you need anything.”
Alone, Lennon took a long shower in the adjoining bathroom, relishing the steam and the heat of the water, scrubbing herself clean and raw. She climbed into bed and fell asleep to the gentle rush and draw of the ocean, the sound of waves storming the ragged scrap of beach beyond the dunes. In her dreams, there were dead things in the water—limbs and viscera drained of blood; bones picked almost clean by crabs and the other things that scuttled and lurked in the dark of the ocean, waiting to subsume the corpses.
She woke up screaming, with Dante by her side, her hand held firmly in his.
“You lied to me,” she said to him, her voice thick both with sleep and the tears she was holding back. “All those months ago, you said I wouldn’t have to hurt anyone. You lied. Why did you lie to me?”
“I thought I’d lose you if I didn’t,” said Dante. “And even back then I knew a talent like yours was too great to waste.”
“But you knew I’d hurt people?”
“Yes,” said Dante. “I had a feeling.”
“I should’ve never been allowed to stay at Drayton. You should’ve extracted my memories like Eileen told you to. If you had, Ian would still be alive.”
Dante merely shrugged. “His life isn’t worth half as much as yours is.”
“He was brilliant.”
“And possessive and unhinged, and he would’ve been a thorn in your side for as long as he was alive to hurt you.” Dante pressed to his feet, dropping her hand. “You did what you needed to do.”
Lennon wanted to believe that was true, but her thoughts kept returning to Ian, one hand outstretched, in his final moments. If she’d pressed the button to open the doors—or if she’d never pressed the button to close them in the first place—Ian wouldn’t have been torn apart. Deep down, she knew she hadn’t acted solely out of necessity. Ian wasn’t dead by accident or ambivalence. He was dead because she chose to close the doors of that elevator.
“What happens now? Is anyone going to come for me?”
“Not if you stay here,” said Dante. “Drayton is their domain. This house is mine, and they know that. You’re safe here.”
But Lennon didn’t want to be safe. What she wanted—even after all of this—was to return to Drayton, the only place where she’d ever really belonged. “I want to go back—”
“Lennon—”
“I have to go back. Take me back now. I’ll face the hearing, or Eileen. I’ll do whatever I have to, but I can’t risk expulsion—”
“It’s not safe for you there. You need to be patient.”
“ Patient? You don’t understand. At Drayton I’m something. But out here, without it, I’m nobody. Nothing. I won’t go back to that. To being pathetic, to being no one.”
“I do understand,” said Dante. “Better than you know. But this isn’t the end for you—”
“I killed someone.”
“We all make mistakes.”
“But will those mistakes be forgiven? I mean, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but things don’t normally turn out well for people who look like us when we fucking kill white kids—”
“He wasn’t the kind of white that matters.”
“Jesus Christ, Dante !”
“It’s true, and you know it.”
“Ian was at the top of our class.”
“Until he wasn’t, and remind me, who was it that replaced him? Who was it who put the blade through his hand and secured a bed in Logos?”
Lennon hung her head.
“Look at me.” Dante crouched in front of her. Lennon looked down at him. “At Drayton—and in other places too—some lives are worth more than others. That was the case when the school was founded, and it’s still true now, a century later. It just looks different now.” He straightened, drew away from her. “Ian was a persuasionist of middling talent, from a family of no consequence, who if left to his own devices would’ve died of an overdose before age thirty. As far as I’m concerned, you sped up the inevitable.”
“That’s fucking cruel.”
“Maybe. But it’s true,” said Dante. “He wasn’t your equal. You have a power that comes once every few generations, and you’re going to prove that to them, in time.”
“But what if someone comes for me?”
“They won’t,” said Dante. “I’ll see to that. All you need to do is lie low for a little while, let the dust settle, and then when the time comes, you’ll return to Drayton and continue your studies.” He said this with so much confidence it was like he was writing the future as he spoke it aloud. “And sure, they’ll hate you, but they hate you already. Now they’ll just have a way to justify what they’ve felt all along.”
“So that’s it, then? This is how I get away with murder?”
“This isn’t the first time a student has died on Drayton’s campus at the hands of a peer. It won’t be the last either. You’re not special in that respect, you’re just indispensable and lucky because of it.”
“But what about that hearing where everyone was so up in arms about me and what I might do? What were they so afraid of if not this?”
Here Dante went dark, his eyes out of focus. “It’s easier to lie when you don’t know the truth. Benedict used to tell me that. He called it strategic ignorance, said it was one of the greatest skills to have in your arsenal.”
“What are you trying to say, Dante?”
His gaze went to her, and behind it she saw a glimpse of his aberration, as if his real eyes were just lenses that it was gazing through. “We’re both tired. We should get some rest.”