Page 77 of An Academy for Liars

“Dante doesn’tletme go anywhere,” said Lennon, bristling a little at the implication. “I go where I want to go. When I want to go there.”

“Is that what you tell yourself?” said Claude, a smile pulling at the edges of his mouth.

“What is that supposed to mean?”

He exhaled smoke. The gray tendrils festooned his head in a tattered halo. “Only that you mean a lot to him, and he tends to keep the people and things that matter most to him on a short leash. He’s careful that way.” He ashed his cigarette. “Why did you two come here?”

“We wanted to know if you were okay,” said Sawyer.

“Bullshit.”

“And we wanted to know what happened between you and Dante.”

“We fought,” said Claude, looking annoyed. “Dante didn’t appreciate my tone, and here we are. It’s not even a story worth telling.”

“Do you really think he killed Benedict?”

“Why ask the question when you already know what I think?” Claude snapped. “Admit it: you don’t want to know if Dante really killed Benedict, you want to know if you’re allowed to love him if he did. And you want me to tell you instead of him, either because you trust me more, and for good reason, or because you’re afraid that if you hear it from his own mouth, you’ll force yourself to hate him like you already should. That about sum it up?”

“I just want the truth,” said Lennon.

“No, you don’t,” said Claude. “Not really. You just want me to tell you a story that gives you license to love him, and I know that because I’ve been in your shoes before. But you’re worried about the wrong thing—don’t you see that? It’s not about what he did or didn’t do to Benedict. It’s about what he’s going to do to you.”

“And what is he going to do to me, Claude?”

“What he does to everyone. He’s going to use you for as long as you’re useful to him and then, one day, he’s going to cast you aside like the broken thing you are. Like he did to me. Like he did to Benedict. And the worst part is you’re going to let him.”

“Dante can be kind,” said Lennon, a soft rebuttal that sounded less pathetic in her head. “I’ve seen it.”

“You’ve got him wrong,” said Claude, shaking his head. “For the longest time I thought he’d just learned to hold poison in his mouth so he could pass for a viper. But then I realized that’s not the case. He’s just as bad as the worst of them, and Ben knew it. He was maybe the only one who wasn’t afraid to say it to his face—”

“And you think Dante killed him for it?” Sawyer asked, sounding less certain than Lennon. More wary. “You think that could’ve been some type of motive?”

“I don’t know,” said Claude, sinking deeper into the tub. “And frankly, I don’t care either.”

“What do you mean you don’t care?” Lennon asked, finding it difficult to believe this was even the same man who had raged and broken windows, desperate to discover what had happened to Benedict only weeks before. Dante had claimed that he hadn’t tampered with Claude’s mind, but now, standing in front of him, Lennon wasn’t so sure.

“I’ve decided I’m done with it,” said Claude. “Done with Drayton…or at least as done as I can be for now. I just want to keep the goodmemories I have, of Benedict mostly, and stay as sober as I can. If I do that, my mind stays my own.”

“So you’re giving up? You’re not even going to attempt to figure out what really happened to Benedict?” Sawyer asked, looking as disturbed as Lennon felt. She could tell he had the same suspicions she did, could tell he was wondering if these words and sentiments were truly Claude’s, or if they’d just been planted in his mind to be recited on an occasion like this one.

Claude’s eyes narrowed and filled with tears. “I’m tired. You couldn’t possibly understand how fucking tired I am.”

Lennon could see it in his eyes when he said it—a kind of weariness she’d once seen when she met her own gaze in the mirror, back when she’d lived with Wyatt, when it was a struggle just to get up and face the drudgeries of the day. “Before we go, I have one question, about something you said the night Emerson and I took you to the infirmary. You mentioned something that happened in August, but you didn’t say what. What was it?”

Claude was quiet for a long time, staring up at the skylight, the pall of yellow smoke. When he stood—an abrupt and violent motion—water sloshed out of the tub and flooded the bathroom. Both Lennon and Sawyer staggered back, on edge, as if bracing for a blow. But Claude stepped carefully out of the tub, his hands limp at his sides. He looked so sad and frail in that moment, weighted down by his wet clothes, that Lennon had the sudden urge to pull a towel off the rack and put it around his shoulders. But she held back.

“I don’t remember saying anything like that,” said Claude—a lie. Lennon was certain of it.

After that meetingwith Claude, the first half of the semester passed in a gray blur. In those weeks, Lennon replayed her conversation with Claude countless times, his warning about Dante haunting her perpetually. She could tell that it was the same with Sawyer, though he never mentioned it once over their weekly coffee dates. They became good at pretending to forget him. So good, in fact, that eventually they did.

Once a week, Lennon had a private course with Dante to develop her gatekeeping abilities. Now that she’d learned to call elevators on command, her studies focused on refining this practice and building her endurance. Each time they met, Dante had her open a gate to a new place—Madagascar, Boston, the tundra in the north of Siberia. He never permitted her to enter these doors, though, only to open them, which she did with increasing efficiency until it was almost second nature to her. Under Dante’s careful supervision, she excelled.

By far the most difficult course of her semester was Persuasion II, with Professor Alec Becker. He was a grave man as tall as Dante, andeven more heavily tattooed. The entirety of his face, his shaved head, his neck and hands, were covered, allowing only pale glimpses of skin to show through. He had blue eyes that looked almost frozen over, as though he were staring through a thick sheet of ice. His eyebrows were so white they were barely visible. Next to Dante, Alec was the youngest tenured professor on campus. He was known to be both exacting and kind, though Lennon had never particularly warmed to him, or he to her. Alec—amiable toward his other pupils—regarded Lennon with a kind of coldness she found strange, given how well she performed in his class. She wondered if Ian had poisoned Alec against her, and, if so, she couldn’t fault him for it, not after she’d put a knife through his hand.

Alec was difficult to impress. It seemed like every class he taught was a challenge to be met, an exercise to complete, a test to pass or to fail. Every class period, they were made to spar with one another, brutal battles of will that often ended with teary eyes and bleeding noses, burst blood vessels that turned the whites of their eyes an eerie red. Adan even cracked a molar in the middle of their sparring exercise and had to depart for the infirmary halfway through class because of the pain.

When the weather allowed for it, Alec liked to hold these grueling matches outside instead of in their classroom in Irvine Hall. That was the case on this night. At Alec’s bidding, they formed a tight circle on the ground. The task at hand was a simple one. Each of them was given a small article, chosen at random—a rock, a seashell, a dead leaf, a splintered tree branch—which they placed on the ground in front of them.

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