Page 20 of An Academy for Liars

Nadine gave a little laugh, but it wasn’t that funny. “I mean, if not that, what, then? You heard from the vice-chancellor herself. John Drayton was a Quaker, a Christian.”

“Everyone was Christian back then,” said Blaine.

“He was also an abolitionist,” said Felix. He was a dusty blond from Montreal who spoke English with a French accent and had asmall pride flag pinned to the lapel of his jacket. He’d been working at a center for gay youth in Canada before coming to Drayton. “I mean, surely that had to be a founding principle behind all of this. John wanted to free people with this power.”

Lennon raised an eyebrow. “Free people by controlling them? Does that even make sense?”

As it turned out, each of them had a very different idea about what exactly would ensue upon their graduation from Drayton. This was mostly because they’d all been told different things by their advisors. Ian’s advisor, Dr. Alec Becker, told him he’d be placed in a high-powered job of his choosing, with enough money to fund the lives of his children’s children. Nadine had been informed that she’d start a Catholic mission in India, where her mother had emigrated from, and a generous donation of more than fifty thousand dollars was made to the charity of her choice after she’d formally enrolled at the school. Other first years had been promised anything from congressional seats to tenured professorships at Drayton and anything in between.

Lennon, however, had been made no promises, a fact that she kept to herself out of sheer embarrassment. Why had she been offered nothing? Was her desperation to escape her former life that obvious to the admissions department? Did they know that anything—even a role as small as a secretarial position in Irvine Hall—would have been far more rewarding than the misery of her failing relationship with Wyatt and a life she was quite literally willing to die in order to escape?

“If this is a ruse, it’s an expensive one,” said Blaine, peeling apart the layers of a croissant. Something about this made her look a lot younger than she was, a little girl playing with her food. “The clothes they gave us are ridiculously well tailored. And clearly the professors are loaded. I mean, have you seen their offices? Eileen has two Eames chairs. I could almost understand one Eames chair. Buttwo?”

“And let’s be honest,” said Ian, “we aren’t expensive. We got a wannabe nun, an aspiring actress, and a college dropout turned housewife.” Here he jabbed his thumb at Lennon. She’d told him about the particulars of her past life during the convocation party and, in that moment, sorely regretted her drunk self-disclosures. “Then there’s me, working at the convenience store. I don’t want to speak for anyone else, but they could’ve lured me into an unmarked white van with the promise of free rent, beer, and a pack of cigarettes.”

That got a long, sad laugh out of the table. But they all knew he was right. In a conventional sense, none of them had been slated for particularly promising futures. They hadn’t graduated from Ivy Leagues or accomplished anything worthy of note. They weren’t moneyed or from the sorts of families that mattered.

“Is it possible that they’re right and that we are somehow…innately talented?” Lennon asked, and the table went suddenly very quiet. Perhaps they, like Lennon, hadn’t allowed themselves to fully consider this possibility until that very moment. “Maybe we do have some skill that all of the most brilliant people we know simply don’t? Maybe we are that special?”

Persuasion was Lennon’slast class of the day, and she arrived just a few moments before the period began. The classroom was already full, students seated behind all but one of the twelve desks in the room. On each of them, there was a small glass cage that contained a single live rat.

Dante stood at the front of the classroom—dressed smartly, in wool trousers and a white button-down, the sleeves rolled up to the elbows to expose tattooed forearms. If he had any memory of their encounter outside of Irvine Hall, he gave no indication. “Lennon, nice of you to join us. Have a seat.”

She claimed a desk in the middle of the room, stared into the cage in front of her. The rat on the other side of the glass was dun brown with a little white patch on its left ear. He was shaking.

“I have no idea if you’re a boy or a girl, but I’m going to call you Gregory because you look like one,” said Lennon in a whisper, and the rat looked up at her, nose twitching, as if he understood.

“What’s the difference between training and an act of persuasion?” Dante asked the class, but his gaze lingered on Lennon.

Nadine raised her hand, her arm stiff with urgency. Behind her, Ian rolled his eyes.

“Go on,” said Dante, nodding to her.

“Persuasion is forced. Training is taught,” said Nadine, and she cut a quick glance back at Ian, her cheeks flushing pink. Was she just embarrassed—Lennon wondered in passing—or was it that even nuns weren’t immune to the wiles of tattooed, toxic men?

“An interesting perspective…but is that entirely accurate?” Dante picked up a nub of chalk from the sill below the board and sketched the question:Is persuasion an act of force?

This question, once written in full, triggered a chorus of murmurs. The class dissolved into a general conversation, no one bothering to raise their hands, people talking over one another, or interjecting in the short breaths between words and sentences.

“Persuasion is the ability to project one’s own will onto a being, object, or entity,” said Dante, and everyone fell quiet. “There is not a living being in the world that lacks the ability to persuade. It is a gift inherent to all of us. From the smallest microorganism to the smartest humans that have ever walked the face of the earth—every one of us is bestowed with the power to enforce our own will upon the world. I want you to think of a newborn baby, crying for its mother’s milk. This early instinct is, for most of us, our first discernible act of persuasion. Now imagine this same newborn baby grown into a man. He goes to a bar, flirts with a woman there, and he ends his night in bed with her. This too is an act of persuasion. But while persuasion is a skill we all possess, our degrees of efficacy vary greatly depending on our social status, natural intelligence, nationality, the money in our bank accounts, even our race.

“Here at Drayton, we believe that a handful of extraordinarily gifted individuals can be taught to command a persuasive ability powerful enough to bend, or even break, the rules of reality itself. This skill is well beyond the natural limits of most people walking the planet. Most who would so much as attempt to wield such a power would either die or go insane. Which is how we come to you, the chosen few.” As Dante said this, his gaze again affixed itself to Lennon. She shifted uncomfortably in her chair.

“For the rest of the semester, you will work to persuade—not train—the rat sitting on the desk before you. So I suggest you spend this class session building a sense of rapport with your charge, learning its peculiarities, understanding the subject onto which you intend to impose your will. Cruelty—by way of pain, starvation, or verbal abuse—will not be tolerated. Nor will it help you achieve the kinds of results you’ll need to pass this class. Am I clear?”

Lennon nodded along with the rest of her classmates.

“Good,” said Dante. “Then let’s begin.”

What followed was a brutal crash course in rudimentary persuasion. Dante adopted a sink-or-swim approach to the lesson, which Lennon privately suspected was more a test of natural aptitude than anything else, a way to gauge what he was working with. What little instruction he did offer was vague and rooted not in pragmatism but in feelings and intuition. “Think of your will as an extension of your body. No different than a limb. When you extend it to the rat—as you might your hand—imagine yourself expanding around it, the fingers of your psyche closing into a fist. That’s how you make first contact and establish control.”

Other tips adopted a more athletic approach, focusing more on the body than the mind: “Breathe through the belly, not the chest. Try to keep your hands from fisting up. Palms to the sky. It’ll help you relax.”

Dante delivered one of the most helpful tips of the evening while standing behind Lennon’s desk: “Focus and stress are not synonymous. Try to concentrate without tensing up.”

As the night progressed, the class dissolved into utter chaos. There were rats that raced in circles around the perimeters of their cages. Rats that stared blankly into the eyes of their persuaders. Some rats who did nothing but shit and burrow into the pine shavings for a nap. But one, Ian’s, convulsed pitifully on the floor of his cage, only to go limp, then startle awake a few moments later. Ian received a sharp scolding from Dante for his heavy-handedness.

Lennon, for her part, couldn’t bring herself to impress her will on the timid creature cowering in the cage before her. Gregory was smaller than the other rats—just a baby, really. And despite her best efforts to remain stoic, she felt strangely protective of him. She didn’t want to hurt him and couldn’t ensure that she wouldn’t if she attempted to persuade him.

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