Page 23 of An Academy for Liars

Lennon nodded, turned to press her lips to his. It was wordless and slow, and while Ian moved within her, Lennon thought of Dante and their exchange out in the hall. The way he’d talked her down out of that panic attack, the moth tattoos on the backs of his hands, the tattered wings that stretched and moved when he flexed his fingers.

That night, in Ian’s bed, Lennon slipped into a dream that didn’t belong to her. In it she walked barefoot through the Twenty-Fifth Square. The campus had emptied itself. There wasn’t a soul in sight. She walked beneath the cover of the live oaks and magnolias, through the fog and dark. The air was wet and heavy, and she felt less like she was walking and more like she was wading through waist-high water, dragging her way through the murk of the fog and heat.

She found her way to the wrought-iron gates of a house half-swallowed by blooming magnolia trees, the blossoms large and monstrous, like the severed heads of white lions, gaping down at her,open-mouthed and starving. The house itself stood proud amid a blizzard of falling petals. On its porch was a boy, barefoot, his back to her. She gazed upon him—the tight frail shoulders, the goose bumps along his nape, the fingers that flinched and shuddered at his sides.

She realized then that this dream was not hers, but his.

The boy turned suddenly. The moment their eyes met, some powerful thrall—like a cold riptide swirling about her thighs—drew her violently through the boy’s back, into his body, so that she was within him, housed in the cage of his skeleton, the two of them tragically enmeshed, like rats with their tails tied tight.

The boy turned back to face the house. He raised a hand to the door, pressed his small palm flat against it. Then drew back, clenched his fingers into a fist, and knocked and knocked and knocked. Until his bulbous knuckles blackened with bruises.

No one answered.

A week passed.Then another. Before Lennon knew it, the second half of the semester was rapidly approaching. Lennon spent most of the time she wasn’t in class studying. It was not unusual for her to stay up through the better part of the night, reading material in metaphysics in preparation for their weekly exams, or meditating into the wee hours of the morning. The stress and lack of sleep would’ve been enough to send her reeling into a series of panic attacks and breakdowns, but Lennon remained surprisingly stable. It was not that she was getting any better—she didn’t think she was, or that she ever would. It was just that she was finally channeling her sickness into something that wasn’t herself. Her studies consumed her thoughts, so that she had no fuel for panic attacks or compulsions, the dark thoughts that used to send her reeling.

Of all the classes she was enrolled in, persuasion remained the most demanding. Their weekly classes consisted of gruesome exercises wherein they honed their will to a knifelike point and inflicted it on the innocent rats. Under Dante’s instruction, they learned howto lull the rats to sleep, calm their racing heartbeats, or drive them mad with rage. Lennon had come to dread these exercises not only because of her guilt about inflicting her will on Gregory time and time again, but because she was so terribly bad at it.

And that thought hung with her—a kind of gray loathing—as she settled behind her desk for class that night. Gregory approached the glass to greet her as he always did, rising up on his back legs, nose twitching, and it was stupid, but in the moment, she swore he was trying to cheer her up.

“Today, you’ll learn to lull your subjects into a state of total catatonia, which should not be mistaken with sleep.” Dante paced slowly between the desks as he lectured. “Unlike sleep—a state that is familiar, even comforting, to most of us—catatonia has to be forcibly maintained through constant psychic pressure.”

What Dante wasn’t saying was that catatonia in itself was a kind of torture. Lennon knew that because she herself had once entered into such a state, just before she’d dropped out of college. Her body had frozen in a kind of rictus, and for three days she remained totally despondent. She didn’t eat and barely blinked, and her sister, Carly, had to take family leave at the law practice where she worked, to camp out in Lennon’s dorm room and ladle broth into her mouth in a desperate attempt to keep her from being hospitalized (Lennon didn’t fare well in hospitals).

“Think of catatonia as the bedrock of our practice. It’s a versatile skill, one that can be used as a launch point for different persuasive strategies that range from the planting of memories to the removal of them. Catatonia, for our purposes here, becomes a way to manipulate time itself. It allows us to essentially shut down our subjects, subdue them enough to allow for the work we do. Think of it as general anesthesia for a persuasionist.”

The students got to work, several of them succeeding almost immediately. Ian and Nadine seemed particularly well suited to this task, lulling their respective rats into a deep and glassy-eyed stupor that seemed close to death. Lennon, however, struggled with the task of subduing Gregory, who was an anxious and unwilling participant. While she was successful in her attempts to suppress his brain function and induce a state of drowsiness, true catatonia remained well beyond her skill set.

“Shit,” she muttered, putting her face in her hands.

“You don’t want it enough,” said Dante. He was frustrated with her, had been for some weeks now, on account of her abysmal performance in his class. And maybe she was sick for this, but it made her skittish and hot when he was angry with her. “You’re still too timid.”

Lennon tried again. Two bright spots of throbbing pain pierced at her temples. She could smell the beginnings of a nosebleed high up in her sinuses, but she kept pushing, hunched over the terrarium, honing her focus, trying and failing to extend her will to Gregory.

Several fat droplets of blood struck the surface of her desk.

It was raining, and Lennon’s nosebleed had slowed to a dribble by the time she returned home to the doorstep of Ethos College. She found Blaine seated at the desk in front of the window, thumbing through the sun-dyed pages of a mass-market paperback from the ’60s. Its cover featured a shrieking woman in a metal cone bra caught in the vise grip of a tentacled alien. It was titledInvasion of the Octopi. Blaine looked up when Lennon closed the door. Her makeup was smeared and running, like she’d had a good cry and tried to clean herself up with a wad of toilet paper but had given up halfway through.

“What happened to your face?” Blaine blurted, snapping her book shut.

“I could ask you the same question,” said Lennon, and she kicked off her loafers. She stripped out of her pants and shirt and changed into one of the soft jersey T-shirts—embroidered with Drayton’s logo—that were distributed to all the new students as part of their welcome package. “And if you must know, it was persuasion with Dante—I mean Dr. Lowe.”

“You’re pushing yourself too hard in that class.”

“Well, according to him I’m not pushing myself hard enough. I couldn’t even get Gregory to fall asleep.”

Blaine raised an eyebrow. “Gregory?”

“He’s my rat,” said Lennon.

“You named yours?”

Lennon nodded. “I just feel like I’m oscillating between guilt and hopelessness.”

“Go easy on yourself. You’re still learning. We all are.”

“Ian doesn’t seem to be having any trouble.”

“Too bad you can’t absorb his skill by osmosis when you hook up with him.”

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