Page 35 of An Academy for Liars

“Why don’t you just ask him to kill it, then?”

“He’d never agree. He keeps those rats as experiments. If I told him Antonio was sentient, he’d just have even more incentive to keep him alive and suffering for as long as he could. Thank god you’re willing to help.”

“I never said I was willing.”

“You didn’t have to,” said Kieran, chugging down his milk. “I can see it in your eyes. You’re desperate.”

She bristled. “No, I’m not.”

Kieran’s mouth pulled down at the corners. “Lennon, admitting you have a problem is the first step toward sobriety.”

“I’m not an addict.”

“Then what is it? Why do you want the drugs so badly? Trouble in class?”

Lennon started to stand up. “You know what? Forget it.”

“Don’t be like that,” he said, and he opened his arms. “You can trust me. I don’t expose the personal information of my customers. Your secrets are safe with me. And I already know all about the elevators, so there’s no point being coy.”

Lennon relented, not because she trusted him but because Kieran possessed a kind of exhausting charisma. He had a way of wearing you down that she found at once draining and highly amusing, and as much as she wanted to dislike him, she just…couldn’t. It was easier (not to mention more fun) to just play along, give him what he wanted. “That night the gate, or whatever it was, first appeared, it was after I took those mushrooms you gave me. And I haven’t been able to open a gate since.”

Kieran seemed unsurprised. “You shouldn’t feel too bad. Plenty of us need a little chemical boost to get us going. It’s why everyone around here smokes so much. And why I have a business.”

“Is that what you call it?”

Kieran smiled, choosing to ignore that insult. “The doors of Wharton are locked, but if you’re quiet and careful you should be able to tail Dante, or someone else, through the doors and duck behind one of the shelves without being seen. Antonio is the biggest rat in the lab. He’s all brown, and his eyes are human. You can’t miss him. Just go in, kill him, and be done with it. And don’t try to lie and say you’ve done it when you haven’t. I’ll know.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” said Lennon, and she got up from the table, feeling a little sick and unsteady on her own two feet. She realized that she had never killed anything before. Not really. Not on purpose anyway. Once, though, she’d had a particularly sadistic friend, a little white boy in her neighborhood, a few years older than she, who’d asked her to watch as he poured a pot of boiling water over an anthill. Halfway through the horrible act, overcome with guilt and disgust, she’d caught him by the wrist and tried to stop him, splashing boiling water all over her thighs in the process. The resulting burns had blistered so badly she’d had to go to urgent care, and she couldn’t wear anything but dresses for weeks after. She’d hated that, but what she hated even more was that the pot had been half-emptied, and all the ants and their precious eggs boiled alive, by the time she’d worked up the courage to intervene.

The next day,after her Persuasion I course adjourned, Lennon lurked in the hall waiting behind a corner. By now, she knew Dante’s routine. After every class period, he took the time to speak with any lingering students. Sometimes these exchanges lasted only a few minutes, but on other occasions he’d remain in the classroom for more than an hour, answering questions and tutoring any students who were struggling. On some occasions, these impromptu meetings became small lectures, and half the class would remain just to listen to him. And if that wasn’t enough, those same students would appear during his office hours, cramming the waiting room and spilling over into the halls beyond it, leaning against the wall or sitting on the floor with their legs thrown into the corridor, waiting for hours just to speak with him.

And, sure, Dante had a certain star power. At thirty-three he was the youngest tenured professor on campus, and as Eileen’s former apprentice, he was slated to take on the coveted role of vice-chancellor someday. But Lennon knew that it wasn’t just his accolades that madeso many people want a piece of him. It was something else, a charisma, an ineffable quality that made you feel all the better just for being near him and made everyone regard him with a sense of awe that Lennon found, in truth, a little sickening, if only because it was such an ugly reflection of her own susceptibility to Dante’s draw, a reminder that what she felt for him wasn’t special at all.

Luckily for Lennon, Dante dismissed himself early that night, so she didn’t have to wait very long. With a murmured apology about his being double-booked, Dante emerged from the classroom minutes after the last student departed, holding the rats under his arm in their shared transport cage. As usual, he made his way to the exit of the building, and Lennon waited for the sound of his footsteps to fade before she emerged from around the corner and followed him to Wharton Hall, which housed all of the labs on campus.

Lennon herself had never stepped through the doors of Wharton (first-year students like herself never took lab courses), and she almost lost Dante in the labyrinthine halls of that building. But Lennon caught up with him just as he disappeared through the double doors at the end of a short corridor, slipping a key into his pocket before stepping between them. Lennon had to sprint to catch the doors before they closed. She slid inside, casting her gaze about the lab as she did.

Dante, his back turned to the door, had not noticed her.

With a silent sigh of relief, Lennon ducked down the narrow aisle between two tall shelves that were packed top to bottom with more than a dozen rat cages. And there were countless other identical shelves in that long galley of a room just like it. What disturbed her wasn’t a lack of care, per se—all of the cages were small but clean, and they each had food, wooden toys, water droppers, a bed of pine shavings, and some sort of structure, even if it was just an overturnedyogurt cup with a hole cut into the side. What troubled her was the sheer number of rats in that room. There must have been hundreds on the shelves. The task of finding the one that Kieran had asked her to retrieve was all but impossible, especially with Dante just feet away, on the other side of the shelves she was hiding behind.

Trying to be light on her feet, Lennon paced the aisles searching for this brown, human-eyed rat. It was sheer luck when she found him, only a few minutes into her search, on a lower shelf that she only saw because she’d ducked to avoid being spotted by Dante. He was unusually large, with intelligent eyes.

This was Antonio. She was sure of it.

Lennon slid the cage off the shelf as quietly as she could and, still ducking, retreated toward the double doors at the front of the lab. She was almost there too, her hand just inches from the door handle, when Dante spoke: “Be careful with that one. He bites.”

Lennon froze, almost dropping the cage.

She turned to see Dante, standing at a table in the heart of the lab, his back toward her.

“How did you—”

“If you’re going to tail someone you should really consider wearing softer shoes or just socks maybe, to muffle the sound. Your footsteps are unusually loud.”

Lennon felt the tips of her ears go hot. Embarrassed, she stepped out from behind the shelf and approached him. Up close, she saw that he’d rolled up his sleeves, exposing his tattooed forearms. There was something small and pink in the flat of his palm. A baby rat. He appeared to be feeding it formula with a thin syringe.

“They have to eat every one to two hours at this age,” he said, nodding down at that rat in his palm, so small and pink that at a distance it looked more like a grub. “Before I found a lab tech to bribe, I usedto keep rats like this one in a paper coffee cup padded with lots of pine shavings. I’d carry it with me from class to class and hope none of my students snitched when I pulled out the syringe to feed it.”

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