Page 50 of An Academy for Liars

“You brought me here so I could learn something, right? Tell me, what am I supposed to learn sitting around in a hotel room all night twiddling my thumbs while I wait for you to return from hell knows where?”

“Patience would be a start.”

Lennon rolled her eyes. “I’m going with you.”

“I don’t think that’s a good idea.”

“You should have thought about that before you invited me.”

To Lennon’s immense satisfaction, Dante looked rather pissed. She knew then that she’d won this battle of wills. “Fine. We leave in five minutes.”

They went toCipher, one of those clubs where everyone wears black and people queue for hours only to be turned away at the door. As it was, neither Lennon nor Dante had packed anything black but they bypassed the line and got in anyway. Lennon wondered if this was a trick of persuasion, wherein Dante had pulled a few psychic strings. But if so, it was an extraordinarily convincing act of manipulation, because the bouncer—a Bulgarian man who clocked in at nearly seven feet tall and was built like a linebacker—smiled at them from behind his darkly tinted sunglasses and ushered them in.

“Don’t talk to anyone. Don’t touch anything. Don’t look in mirrors,” said Dante, as if she were a handsy and rambunctious child entering an expensive shop full of fragile items to be broken.

“Why did we come here?” Lennon inquired, half shouting over the music. Dante didn’t look like he was in the mood for a party tonight. He seemed…tense, leveling that thousand-yard stare of his with particular malice, as if he could kill with it.

“Like I said earlier, I have an errand to run,” he said, vague as ever.

“What kind of errand?”

Dante’s gaze raked, back and forth, across the club. He was looking for someone. “Do you always ask this many questions or are you just making a point to be particularly annoying because you know I’m not currently in a position to send you back?”

They stopped short in a hallway that was mostly empty except for a couple copulating discreetly in the dark. There was a door there, some sort of private room.

“Don’t talk to anyone,” said Dante. “And stay out of the way.”

He opened the door. The room behind it was small and dim. The air turbid with cigarette smoke. The walls padded. There was one woman there, petite with a mawkish smile. She appeared to be in her late fifties and was dressed like a librarian—fuzzy cardigan sweater, buttoned up to the throat, loose slacks, and ballet flats. There was something about her poise that reminded Lennon of the vice-chancellor, Eileen. She realized, a little startled, that this woman was likely a persuasionist.

“Always a pleasure,” she said to Dante, ignoring Lennon entirely. The ensuing exchange was shorter than Lennon had expected it would be. Short enough that she wondered why this hadn’t happened over the phone.

“Two point five,” was all Dante said, flatly.

The woman maintained her placid smile. “One seven,” she said. Her accent was British.

Whatever was exchanged next wasn’t communicated in words. But Lennon saw, in the set of the woman’s expression, and in Dante’s, that some sort of psychic contention was occurring in the lapsing silence. It was all very brief and it concluded with the woman standing—she was so short that Lennon loomed over her—and extended her handto Dante. He took it, a firm fast shake, and gestured for Lennon to follow him out into the hall. The woman slipped out behind them without acknowledgment and disappeared into the crowd.

“What the hell was that?” Lennon demanded, shaken, though she didn’t know exactly why.

Dante slipped his hands into his pockets, looked up at the ceiling as though he expected to find a tactful answer to her question in the rafters. “It’s a donor system. No different from any other college.”

“I don’t understand.”

“At some schools, if you donate a library, you’ll get a box seat at the stadium and an admissions guarantee for your kids, among a number of other perks. At Drayton, a sizable donation could be rewarded with a cabinet seat or a congressional hearing, a sympathetic judge, a ceasefire.”

“That’s unethical.”

“Everything pertaining to politics and business is. I mean, think about it: Presidential candidates use psychological conditioning in their campaign ads. Companies test commercials with focus groups and track the pupil dilation of their subjects to see how effective they are. Food corporations put addictive chemicals into their products to create cravings. Record labels engineer earworms. We’re not doing anything that hasn’t been done before—we’re just doing it more effectively and with tact.”

“And that makes it better?”

“I don’t care to examine what we do through the lens of morality,” said Dante, and something about the way he said it made Lennon believe this was less than true.

“What was it that she wanted?” Lennon asked.

“What most people do,” said Dante, “power, in whatever form it comes in.”

Just then, a man shoulder-checked Lennon so hard, she lurched off-balance. The ceramic pig Dante had given her—a kind of talisman, the equivalent of Dumbo’s crow feather—fell from her pocket and bounced across the floor, disappearing into a forest of platform boots and legs sheathed in fishnet. Lennon dropped to her knees to retrieve it, but the pig was lost in the chaos.

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