Page 118 of An Academy for Liars

They ate dinner on the floor of the living room by the TV light, gathered around the coffee table, pouring glasses of lukewarm champagne into overlarge wineglasses, downing one after the other. It was the first good night that Lennon had had since Dante’s death. The conversation flowed well—thanks to the food and champagne—and for the first time in a very long time Lennon felt almost normal. More like herself than she had since William’s death.

Over heaping plates, Lennon listened as Blaine, Sawyer, and Emerson spoke of the campus and all they were doing to improve it. More services for students. More regulations on persuasion. Better placement and support for graduates.

As vice-chancellor, Emerson had been presiding over future admissions, and had been combing through information of prospective candidates of the school, a shadowy process that involved a network of alumni casting out their psychic nets to harvest the best candidates. It sounded like exhausting work, but Emerson seemed to enjoy it. Lennon could tell she was happy; they all were.

And she resented them for it.

They had new lives and beginnings, but what did she have to show for her sacrifice? An empty house haunted by the ghost of the man who gave it to her? Gregory and grief, her newest and closest companions, now that everyone else had left her behind to start their new and promising lives?

Blaine reached across the coffee table to squeeze her hand, and it was only then that Lennon realized she was crying. “There is life beyond him,” she said, in a soft voice. “You do know that, right?”

Lennon flinched. “I know that you want me to believe that. I know that I’d be happier if I could.”

There was a long and awkward silence, the first one of the night. Sawyer, Emerson, and Blaine all exchanged long looks across the coffee table, as if some unspoken fear had just been confirmed. Sensing the awkwardness, Kieran got up to grab another bottle of champagne from the fridge, which was probably the smartest thing anyone could’ve done in the moment.

“Don’t do that,” said Lennon.

Blaine sipped foam off the top of a fresh glass of champagne. “Do what?”

“The theatrical concern,” said Lennon. “You know I can’t stand it.”

“It’s not theatrical,” said Sawyer, waving Kieran off when he tried to top him up. “It’s been months, Lennon. We’re worried about you. You can’t just hide away from the world forever.”

“He’s gone,” said Blaine, trying to be gentle. “You have to accept it at some point. It’ll hurt at first, but I promise you’ll be better for it.”

“They never found a body,” said Lennon, and there was a long silence.

Only Emerson was brave enough to respond. “That’s because there wasn’t a body to find. The building imploded. What matter they were able to salvage from the wreckage—”

“You weren’t there,” Lennon snapped. “He was bleeding all over the floor. DNA isn’t enough. I need something more than that before I’m willing to believe he’s really gone.”

No one challenged her.

That night they all slept together in the guest bedroom. Blaine, Sawyer, and Lennon all squeezed together on the bed. Kieran and Emerson insisted on sleeping on the carpet—in a nest of pillows and comforters—despite Lennon’s assurances that there were other, morecomfortable beds in the house. They said their good nights—drunk and pleasantly stuffed from dinner—and cut the lights. But long after the others fell asleep, Lennon remained awake, listening to Kieran’s soft snores, and the gentle hush of the ocean. She thought of Dante in those final moments before the house imploded, an image she usually tried to cast out of her mind because it simply hurt too much to hold it there. But tonight, she allowed herself this painful indulgence, turning over that last memory she had of him, kneeling on the floor, palms up in surrender, smiling. She remembered too the flash of gold she’d seen behind him, a split moment before the wall collapsed. A warped bell ringing. Elevator doors gaping open.

The following day,after her friends had gone, Lennon attempted to call an elevator to the past. With the Drayton gates a constant drain on her power, it wasn’t easy work. In fact, the first elevator she summoned resulted in her seizing on the floor of her bedroom for the better part of ten minutes. It went on like that for days.

While Lennon struggled to summon the dregs of her power, she delved deep into Dante’s past. Previously, he’d stated that his efforts to raise gates had only accessed a specific moment in time, one that was only important to him. If Dante really had called his own elevator as the chancellor’s mansion was imploding, it stood to reason that it must’ve taken him back to that point.

But what was it?

Dante had been vague about the details of his past, prior to Drayton. So Lennon had to rely heavily on Carly’s previous research into his life, piecing together a timeline of short-term apartments and the schools he’d briefly been enrolled in, the cities where he’d lived for little more than weeks at a time, the minutiae of a fraught childhood.

It was some months before she was able to open a gate to that crisp winter night when Dante had been freed from the prison. She’d chosen this night because, on all counts, it was one of the most significant of his life. The night that had changed everything, the night he’d been taken to Drayton.

Lennon stepped off the elevator cabin, and into the fresh-fallen snow. The Pendleton Juvenile Correctional Facility stood on a gentle hill, its few windows glowing dully in the cold dark. In the parking lot, a handful of cars were half buried under drifts. The whole night felt like it was holding its breath as Lennon approached the prison.

The lobby was empty, save for the security guard seated behind the front desk. “Visiting hours are over. You can try coming back—”

When Lennon didn’t break pace, the man sprang to his feet, started to come from around the desk, but she raised a hand and the man went stone still, stopping midstep, and crashing—stiff—against the welcome desk. Lennon stole her memory from his mind a moment before he struck the floor.

As she walked, Lennon let her consciousness extend, roaming through the halls and the run of cells until she homed in on one that contained an essence that felt familiar. Dante’s cell was in the solitary confinement block, and it took some effort to subdue the prison guards who oversaw the ward, the thick wall of bulletproof glass between them and Lennon making it difficult for her to extend her will and catch hold of their minds. Still, she managed to force them up from their seats and walked them down the hall, single file, into one of the only open cells on the block.

None of those under the force of her will so much as raised a finger in resistance, except one woman—visibly pregnant and terrified—who proved so contentious that Lennon had no choice but to drag herinto a deep fugue. She slumped, comatose, against the wall, Lennon guiding her down to the floor.

The prison cell she sought was the last on the ward. It had a small slit for a window. Bleeding profusely now, her legs soft beneath her, Lennon stepped forward to look into the cell. It was empty, save for a small brown moth with tattered wings, throwing itself senselessly against the only light in the cell.

Lennon returned to the present, exhausted, crawling out of the elevator on her hands and knees, collapsing, spent, on the floor of the living room, her nose and eyes bleeding. It was some time before she managed to pick herself up off the floor, and when she did, she went out to the water, fully dressed, and waded waist-deep into the black surf. She stood there for some time, staring out toward the island, then she went inside, peeled off her wet clothes, and climbed into bed.

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