Page 30 of An Academy for Liars

Eileen waved him off. “She isn’t worth the trouble. Irvine was a prodigy. He’d been taught in the ways of persuasion for years. Whereas Lennon—”

“Hasn’t had the opportunity to prove herself,” said Dante, cutting her off. “All I’m asking is that you give it to her. Under my instruction—”

“Yourinstruction?” Eileen looked incredulous—baffled, even.

“All right, if not mine, then Ben’s. Let him show her the ropes. She has promise, Eileen. The least you could do is give her the chance to prove it.”

But Eileen shook her head. “I’ve heard enough. Let’s put this to a vote and be done with it. Shall we?”

“Lennon hasn’t done anything dangerous. All she did was open a gate to another part of campus. That’s hardly a capital offense—”

Eileen ignored him, turned to address the rest of the room. “All in favor of expulsion?”

All the professors around the table, save Benedict and Dante, raised their hands.

Lennon’s heart seized. Just that quickly, with a few raised hands, she had losteverything. “W-wait please—”

Eileen stood up, collecting her papers. “Well, that decides it. Dante, as her advisor, I’ll leave you to handle this situation in whatever way you see fit. Just make it clean, will you? You know how messy these things can become when a memory is left half-intact.”

But Dante didn’t move or speak. His gaze homed in on the rotary phone, just a split second before it started to ring, a shrill tinny sound that silenced the room—the murmurings of conversation and the shuffling of papers, the heartbeats and ragged breaths, the buzzing of the bulbs in the old chandelier that dangled above the table—it was a sound that seemed to suck up every other.

Eileen, along with the rest of them, stared motionless at the phone for a few rounds of ringing before—as if emerging from a trance—she picked it up, snatching the receiver from its cradle, holding it to her ear. “Yes. Yes, sir. No. Of course.”

Dante locked eyes with Lennon and smiled.

Eileen pulled the receiver from her ear and placed three fingers over the mouthpiece. “Lennon, the chancellor would like to speak with you.” She passed the phone down the table, the coiled cord stretching almost taut.

Lennon took it, raised the receiver to her ear. “Hello?”

“You will continue your studies here at Drayton.” The voice crackling over the line was the same one that Lennon had heard, weeks prior, when she’d first received word of Drayton. A voice like all of the voices of everyone she had ever known together in horrid synchrony. Her mother, her sister, Wyatt and Sawyer, Sophia and Dante, Blaine and Benedict, the childhood friend with whom she hadn’t spoken in more than eleven years, the clerk at her favorite grocery store. And then—perhaps the loudest voice of all—her own. “You will train under Benedict to hone your skill as a gatekeeper, in the service of this school. Do you understand, Lennon?”

A muscle in Lennon’s clenched jaw jumped and twitched. “Yes.”

There was a rattling sound—like loose change in a cup, or perhaps the clearing of a throat through a storm of static. “I wish you the best of luck with your future studies.”

Lennon and Danteemerged from the hearing to find that the mild showers from earlier had given way to a punishing deluge. They waited for the worst of the storm to pass in a dark and empty breezeway off of Irvine Hall. Dante fished a tin of what appeared to be hand-rolled cigarettes from the pocket of his trousers. The wrappers were black, and they smelled strongly of clove. He offered one to Lennon, and the two of them smoked and watched the rain come down. It was a particularly good cigarette—wrapped tight and thin with a milky clove smoke that, when exhaled, made pale whorls on the air.

“Did you speak to the chancellor on my behalf?” Lennon asked. “Is that why he called when he did?”

“I might’ve put a good word in for you,” said Dante.

“I owe you one.”

He waved her off. “You owe me nothing. I’m your advisor. It’s my responsibility to look out for you.”

That responsibility seemed starkly at odds with what Eileen hadasked him to do during the hearing. “I don’t think Eileen shares your concern.”

“She’s just afraid.”

“Of what?”

“You, of course.” He paused to examine the tip of his cigarette. Flicked away the ashes. “Here at Drayton, we like to think of persuasion as a science. Our founder, John Drayton, believed in developing skill through practice and firmly asserted that mastery could only be ascertained through complete and total control of your own mind and, with practice, the minds of others. But there are some among us whose abilities are more…compulsive. Emotional, you could say. John found them threatening because a power like that can’t be entirely controlled. It’s instinctual and, by proxy, volatile.”

“And you think that was what happened when I opened that elevator? My emotion was the trigger?”

“Yes. But you shouldn’t be too hard on yourself. There are quite a few of us, actually. And we can do great things if we devote ourselves to understanding the particulars of our own process. Your elevator gate may have appeared compulsively—may still appear that way—but you have a responsibility to learn your triggers and master this power as best you can. Because if you fail to do that…there will be repercussions.”

“Like you taking my memories?”

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