Page 37 of An Academy for Liars

“And that’s why you want the rat dead?”

“I don’t want it dead. Kieran does.”

“Do you think I would let something suffer like that?” Dante asked. The question, Lennon realized from the earnestness of his delivery, wasn’t rhetorical. He wanted her read on him.

“I mean, I don’t know…I don’t think so—”

“Does the rat look like it’s suffering?”

Lennon peered down into the cage. Kieran was right—the rat had human eyes—but it didn’t seem any worse for it. “Well, no.”

“That’s because it isn’t. Kieran is. And not from some psychic tie either.”

“Kieran? What do you think is wrong with him?”

“Nothing. He just has a newly acquired conscience,” said Dante, very matter-of-factly.

“So he’s just…feeling guilty for the first time?”

Dante nodded. “He had antisocial tendencies. A consistent lack of guilt made worse by the fact that the entirety of his childhood was devoted to the role of being a media object. No one expressed empathy toward him—least of all his parents, who enriched themselves on his celebrity—and as a result Kieran never learned to express empathy to anyone else. Until he came here.”

“And studied under you.”

“Persuasion is often a perverse exercise in empathy,” said Dante. “To be good at it, you have to grasp that, and Kieran, one of the more driven students in his class, very much wanted to be good. So there you have it. Kieran meddles in the minds of a few rats and becomes a real boy with the conscience to prove it. It’s really kind of sweet.”

“Kieran doesn’t think so,” said Lennon, flushing. Dante looked up at her. Something about being under Dante’s gaze always made her want to squirm…but in a way she kind of liked it. She’d had crushes on professors before. That had been in a distant way part of Wyatt’sappeal. But never quite like this. “He’s tormented. He says he can’t sleep.”

“Is that why he had you come here to kill that rat?”

“I wasn’t really going to kill it,” said Lennon. “I was going to let it go.”

She wasn’t sure if Dante believed her. She wasn’t even sure if she believed herself.

“You know,” said Dante as he took up the syringe again, began to dribble the milk mixture into the baby rat’s mouth, “psychedelics can be particularly dangerous for people like us. The wrong drug—or the wrong dose of the right drug—can be the equivalent of cutting a psychic artery. The damage could be incalculable. You’re willing to take that risk?”

She shrugged. “I don’t see another way forward. I have to perform if I want to stay here.”

“And you want to stay?”

“Of course,” she said, made defensive not so much by what he said as thewayhe said it. As if he wasn’t sure whether or not she had the chops. “There’s nowhere else I want to be, and I’ll do what it takes to make sure that I get to stay. I want my memories. I want to keep my life here, even if that means—” Her voice broke when she looked at Antonio, those sad human eyes of his, and she cast her gaze to the floor.

“I can respect that,” said Dante, and the little rat twitched in the flat of his hand. He picked it up, gingerly, between thumb and index finger and lowered it back into the incubator that stood on the table. “But you should know that it’s a dangerous game you’re playing now. A game that many have lost before. And I know you think you’re different, that you won’t get addicted—”

“I am, and I won’t,” she said, sounding surer than she felt.

“Maybe that’s true. But addiction isn’t the only thing you should be afraid of. Sometimes when you open your mind you can’t close it again.” It hurt a little, how flatly he delivered this warning, as if he was obligated to say it but really couldn’t care less if she turned up overdosed in a ditch on the side of the highway. But then she saw something in his eyes, a fear in them. Though as soon as he caught Lennon staring, he masked it, withdrawing into himself and shutting her out in the process.

“If it’s so dangerous, aren’t you obligated to stop me?” she said, almost daring him to do it, daring him to care about her or give some indication that he was invested, if only a little. Her ploy worked, because Dante looked up from the table and they locked eyes. She hated herself for the way she stiffened, flinching, as she met his gaze. Her cheeks warmed and reddened, and she was certain he noticed.

“You have a habit of wounding yourself,” he said after a long beat. “I stand in your way now and you’ll just hurt yourself again tomorrow. At some point, you have to learn how to deter your own worst impulses, or if not that, then work around them. Maybe this is your way of doing that. And if so, who am I to interfere?”

That same night,in Kieran’s room on the lower floor of Logos, Lennon imparted everything she’d learned about Antonio. She told him that the rat wasn’t in pain, and therefore couldn’t be paining Kieran. She carefully explained that there was, in fact, no psychic bond at all except for, perhaps, Kieran’s own attachment to his newfound conscience.

“I think if you learn to forgive yourself, even a little bit, the insomnia and stress might ease up,” said Lennon. She herself knew a thing or two about what a bludgeon guilt could be when wielded like a weapon of self-destruction. In fact, it had been something she’d struggled with every day since coming to study at Drayton, every time she meddled in the mind of Gregory during persuasion class, or thought about how anxious her family must be to think that she’d abandoned her life in Denver to study at some institution they’d never even heard of. “Once you’re clear of the guilt, I know you’ll feel better.”

Kieran nodded, frowning. There was a long silence, and for a moment Lennon thought he wouldn’t hand over the drugs. She hadn’t,after all, delivered on her end of their deal. But she was surprised when Kieran retrieved a small baggie from a loose floorboard beneath his bed and handed it to her.

“Ideally,” he said, “you’ll have four people with you when you take this. Two to restrain you, one to intervene psychically if things go awry, and another to distract anyone who might overhear and try interfering. But that’s only if things go south, of course. And they probably won’t. You seem sane, and as long as you keep calm, you should be all right.”

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