Page 100 of An Academy for Liars

“He showed up to school covered in bruises.”

“And he didn’t say who gave them to him?”

“He didn’t say anything at all. According to his file, he was mute for the entirety of his childhood. After CPS took him from his mother, he went to live with his great aunt, Rosetta Lowe, near Beaufort, South Carolina, for several years.”

“Is her house the one I’ve been staying in?”

Carly shook her head. “That home was demolished, the land sold to a homeowner nearby who absorbed it as part of their property. That is the home you’ve been staying in, I think. Dante purchased the entire estate fourteen years ago. I was able to find a deed with his name on it, the name you now know him by, Dante. He bought the house when he was nineteen for two million, cash.”

“What?”The idea Dante had purchased a property like that at just nineteen staggered her. Drayton must’ve rewarded him well.

“That’s not even the half of it.” Carly scrolled lower, highlighted a chunk of text from a police report. “After Rosetta Lowe’s passing, Dante was released back into the custody of his mother, who was living with aman who would later become his stepfather. There were whispers of alleged abuse, a domestic violence charge that didn’t go anywhere. The police were allegedly called to the house a few times. None of those rumors can be corroborated with evidence. What we know is that at nine years old he beat his stepfather so badly that he was almost decapitated internally; by the time the police found him in the bathroom he had no pulse. I have no idea how a nine-year-old kid was able to do that to a grown man almost three times his size. But they were the only two in the apartment at the time. There was no weapon. No one else to blame. He was immediately placed in juvie, in the aftermath of that assault.”

“What happened to his stepfather?”

“Paralyzed from the neck down for the rest of his life. Died in a care facility four years ago.”

“My god.”

“It gets worse,” said Carly. “He was held in a maximum-security prison called the Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility. The week he first arrived there, the first riot in the prison’s thirty-year history broke out. And these riots continued for the months that he was there. Weirdly, each of the boys who’d had a hand in inciting these riots—inmates with good behavior, no citations, who abruptly turned violent—had had strange interactions with Dante just prior.”

“Strange interactions? But I thought he didn’t speak?”

“He didn’t. Not out loud. The boys all claimed, and later a few of the prison guards too, that they could hear Dante in their heads. Speaking without a voice.”

A chill carved down her spine. “And what did he say to them?”

“That’s the thing. No one knows. None of the boys could remember. What we do know is that he was placed in solitary confinement in an effort to contain him from the rest of the prison body. And this is where things get weird. At midnight on his eleventh birthday, hewasreleased. Or at least they think he was. All that’s known is that he disappeared from the prison that night. There were whispers that the guard on duty, a woman by the name of Judy Parker, might’ve aided some type of escape or prison break. She was questioned but remembered nothing of that night except that he had had a visitor.”

“A visitor? Who?”

“She either didn’t know or couldn’t say. Eventually, after no evidence of her interfering was found, they let her be. She died a few years later. A stroke. As for your Dante, or the boy that became him, his criminal record was expunged a year after he disappeared from the prison. Then less than a decade later, he graduated from Drayton College with his doctorate, making him one of the youngest PhDs in the country. And one would think that, given the strangeness of this story, given his past, there’d be some curiosity, some media coverage,something. But it’s almost like a gag order was placed, like his record wasn’t the only thing that was expunged. It was his history too. His birth name—I think that’s when it disappeared from all the records. Even physical ones. Look at this.” Carly fished through her bag and withdrew a yellowed newspaper. She opened it flat on the bar top and pointed to an article at the bottom of the page. There was a grainy picture of a prison, and an article beneath that talking about a juvenile inmate. The rest of the article was riddled with empty spaces where a name should’ve been, like the ink had been bleached from the paper.

A little lower down was a blurry school photo of the boy who had been haunting Lennon’s dreams from the day she’d first stepped foot on Drayton’s campus. In the photo he wasn’t smiling, but his lips were parted wide enough to see that he was missing his two front teeth. His eyes were large and solemn.

“Is this all you found?” Lennon asked.

Carly nodded.

“I want you to forget this happened,” said Lennon then, with real force behind the words, making them a reality as she spoke out loud.

Carly shifted in her seat, looking pained. “What do you mean…I—I don’t feel well.”

“It’s okay,” said Lennon. She felt sick with guilt over what she was doing but couldn’t run the risk of someone else tampering with Carly’s mind. If, somehow, Dante discovered that Lennon had been looking into his past, she had no idea what he’d do to her. But she was certain he wouldn’t hurt Carly if she posed no threat to him. Now, if he glimpsed into Carly’s mind, he would see that she had no memory of what she’d done or why she’d done it. If he wanted answers, he’d simply have to find them with Lennon.

“I think I’m drunk,” said Carly, disoriented, eyes screwed shut.

Lennon, in a quick sleight of hand, grabbed her sister’s laptop and the folder that contained all the information about Dante. She would destroy both of them later, burn the papers and remove the hard drive from the shell of the laptop, break it into pieces and then cast those pieces into the sea, erasing the last bit of evidence that could possibly tie Carly to Dante.

“You’re not drunk,” said Lennon, squeezing her sister’s hand.

“I think someone put something in my drink.”

“It’s okay. You’re safe with me. No one is doing anything to you.”

Carly turned to look at her sister, a fat tear spilling down her cheek. “Why are you lying to me? We never used to lie to each other.”

Lennon squeezed her eyes shut, reached deeper into her sister’s mind, retrieving the memories one by one the way someone plucks out splinters with a pair of tweezers. It was painstaking work, painful for the both of them.

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