Page 17 of An Academy for Liars

Dante’s office was more of a tightly contained library, really. Every available inch of wall space, and half of the floor, was devoted to books. There were so many of them, neatly organized into stacks, and Lennon could tell—based on the broken spines and the bare hard-covers without dust jackets—that they’d been read and reread many times over. It was a collection curated out of love, and not for show. There was a hearth, crowded between two bookshelves, more books stacked up on the mantle, a few of them open, others closed over pens and receipts, the flattened boxes of cigarettes and other makeshift bookmarks. In one corner of the room, a well-stocked bar cart. In another, a potted palm. Before the fireplace, a long brown leather sofa, standing low to the ground on wooden legs as thin as pencils. And, of course, there was a desk, with chairs on either side of equal size. Standing at its left corner, in the shadow of a computer monitor, was the three-legged pig she’d compelled Dante to lift during the entry exam.

Lennon sat in the chair in front of the desk, and she expected Dante to fill the seat opposite her, but he remained standing. She was taken with him, she could admit that to herself, and she observed—with an almost clinical detachment—the familiar rhythms of her attraction: the fluttering in the pit of the stomach, a feeling like static in the fingers, a pull toward what she knew she couldn’t have, which made her desire all the more intense. But as Lennon examined the sensation of that attraction, she became aware too that she was afraid of him, terribly afraid without really knowing why. She felt caught between the two opposing instincts—attraction and fear—as if shackled by either wrist and dragged apart, until she felt ready to rip down the middle.

Dante finally took a seat on the opposite side of the desk. He pressed a button on his phone. It began to ring. “Do you have any dietary restrictions?”

“I…no? But I’m not hungry.”

“Yes, you are,” he said, and it was rather dickish of him to tell her what she did or didn’t feel. But he was, annoyingly, right.

A man’s voice sounded over the line. “Yes, Dr. Lowe?”

“Could you bring us up two sandwiches? Whatever they have.”

“Of course.”

The phone line went dead, Dante eyed her, and Lennon wondered, in passing, exactly what he saw when he did. What did he make of her, and was it any different than what she made of herself?

“Any questions?” he asked. “You look confused.”

Lennon was quiet for a moment. “Is it magic? Real magic, I mean.”

“That depends on who you ask.”

“I’m asking you.”

“Then no. I wouldn’t call it that.”

“What would you call it?”

“The remarkable strength of the human will.”

“And that’s it? This whole school is devoted to the study of forcing people, and I guess sometimes things, to do stuff?”

“That’s a succinct, if facetious, way of explaining it.” Dante tapped his cigarette on the edge of the ashtray. He’d been forgetting to smoke it. Lennon took this as a good sign. He was engaged, and that came as a relief, because she felt the urgent need not to bore him. “Persuasion of other living creatures forms the bedrock of what we study here. Most students will never proceed beyond that. However, a select handful of particularly talented persuasionists possess greater abilities. Like, for example, the ability to persuade matter.”

“And the people who can do that—the particularly talented students—are they selected to study at Logos?”

“As a rule, yes. Though there are a few students each year without the ability to persuade matter who are either strategic, charismatic, or talented enough to get in without that ability.”

Dante flipped open her folder, selected her class schedule, and crossed out her ethics course and replaced it with course ART789: Art and Ego, which was instructed by a Dr. Ethel Greene. It took place in the evening, at the Melgren Art Center on Tuesdays and Thursdays, 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. Evening courses, Lennon would come to learn, were the norm at Drayton.

Just then, there was a sharp knock on the door, and a slight man, presumably a secretary, dressed in slacks and a blousy peasant shirt, entered the office with a grease-stained paper bag clutched in his hand. He set it on the desk. Dante thanked him and he left, casting a sidelong glance at Lennon over his shoulder as he went. From the bag, Dante removed two large sandwiches: one a Reuben, the other an antipasto, with paper-thin slices of prosciutto, Parmesan cheese, and a generous layering of basil leaves. He extended the latter to Lennon. “For the road.”

Lennon took this as her sign that their brief meeting had come to an end. So she took the sandwich, got up, and headed for the door.

Dante called after her. “Lennon?”

She stopped with her hand on the knob, half turned to look back at him. There was a blur, and Lennon felt her own hand animate, watched as it snapped up—as if of its own volition, with speed well beyond the limits of her reflexes—and snatched something from the air. Her palm stung. She looked down: in her hand was the three-legged pig. Dante smiled and as Lennon slipped the figurine into her pocket, she asked herself a question to which she had no answer: Had she caught it, or had he?

Convocation took theform of a rowdy cocktail hour on the vice-chancellor’s lawn, which was still soft and muddy from the rain earlier that day. Despite the mud and poor weather conditions, the party was well attended. There were large canvas tents pitched in the yard, people milling about between them, grasping sweaty cocktail glasses, exchanging furtive glances. It was easy to tell the first years from the upperclassmen and faculty, who possessed a distinct ease that the newcomers lacked. The first years clustered together, in odd little groups of three and four. There weren’t many of them, especially given that the party was being thrown to welcome them, and Lennon began to wonder just how many of them had even passed the written portion of the exam, and what had become of those who hadn’t.

(What she did not know then, but came to discover, was that those who had failed to pass the test had woken in their own beds, at home, wherever home was then. They would’ve been aware of the fuzzy memory of a dream, or the dream of a dream, and as they rose out ofbed and began to brush their teeth or carry on with the rituals that structured their mornings, the dream of Drayton, a dream they had lived and breathed in the flesh, would have been fast and quickly forgotten, the way that dreams often are.)

Somewhere during the course of the party, Lennon began to think of Wyatt. She came close to missing him, which felt like something of a betrayal. Here she was at the precipice of a new life, and all she could think about was the cheating ex she’d left behind in the suburbs. She realized then that she needed to erase him, once and for all, and sought a way to do just that.

After scanning the party once or twice, Lennon locked eyes with a man seated on the far edge of the garden. He was, perhaps, one of the more interesting characters gathered on the lawn that evening. He had a shaved head, and he was, like Lennon, almost worryingly thin, skinny to the point of scrawniness. There were bluish bags beneath his eyes, so dark that it took Lennon more than a minute to realize that the one under his left was actually a bruise.

Looking at him, Lennon thought, simply:He’ll do.

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