Page 40 of An Academy for Liars

“There’s someone under the school,” she said, dropping to her knees, flipping up the rug so that she could press her hands flush to the bare wood beneath it. “I can feel it.”

“It’s crack,” said Sawyer then, nodding grimly. “It’sdefinitelycrack. He gave her crack, Blaine. What are we going to do now?”

“Shut up,” said Blaine, and she got down on her hands and knees beside Lennon, her entire presence like the pulse of a heartbeat beside her.

The ground trembled again.

“You don’t feel that?” Lennon asked.

“Feel what?”

“The ground. It’s moving.” Lennon scrambled to her feet and tore through the common room and downstairs, barefoot and in her pajamas. She made several long strides into the green before Blaine and Sawyer—winded and hollering—caught up to her. By that time she was on her knees, fingers sunk deep into the soil, which rose and fell like the belly of a big, hairy man as he breathed.

“It’s alive. There’s something alive under there,” she said, and passed out cold.

Lennon spent thenext three days in the infirmary recovering from a near-fatal overdose. After Lennon passed out in the middle of the park, Blaine had very nearly broken her sternum with a vigorous—and as it turned out, lifesaving—round of CPR.

“You’re lucky to be alive,” said Dr. Nave. Every time he made his rounds, he was sure to squeeze in a good scolding. “Are you sure you don’t know who gave you those drugs?”

Lennon shook her head. Kieran may have almost killed her, but she was no snitch. “I didn’t get his name. He was just some guy in Utah I met at a gas station.”

Dante visited several times during the course of her stay. At any point, he could’ve outed her for her lie, and she was grateful—though not entirely surprised—that he didn’t. The first time he’d visited, she’d woken up in the middle of the night to see him sitting in a chair at her bedside, staring at her. It took her a moment to register his worry, and she’d been surprised by it. But the moment passed so fast,Dante leaning back into his seat, slipping a paperback from the inner pocket of his jacket, that she’d wondered if she’d been mistaken.

On that visit, Lennon had asked him if she was going to be expelled, if this overdose would be deemed a damning offense in the eyes of Eileen and the other governing faculty members.

But Dante shook his head. “You didn’t call an elevator compulsively or jeopardize anyone. So no harm, no foul.”

He read in silence for the rest of that visit.

On later visits, he came in the evenings. Mostly, he just sat at her bedside, reading or occasionally grading papers, content to sit in silence.

“Are you mad at me?” It had taken her some time to work up the courage to ask the question.

He looked up from his work, and she saw in his eyes that he was. In fact, he was angry in a way that almost scared her, that made her stiffen and brace to be yelled at. But that wasn’t Dante’s way. “Of course I’m angry.”

“You could’ve stopped me,” said Lennon.

“I had hoped you’d have the good sense to do that yourself.”

Lennon took the scolding in turn. Tilted her head back against the headboard and stared up at the ceiling. “I couldn’t even call an elevator, and my mind didn’t open up the way you said it might. It was all pretty stupid in the end. I thought the ground was breathing—”

Dante glanced at her, eyes narrowed.

“What?”

“Nothing,” he said.

“It was something. I saw it. You glanced at me.”

“I can’t glance?”

“Not like that,” said Lennon. “Not when you’re thinking things about me that you won’t share, for whatever reason. What was it?”

“I just found it intriguing, that’s all. The ground breathing beneath you. It sounds like you might’ve tapped into something…manipulatable.”

“What do you mean?”

He set the stack of papers he’d been grading on a nearby table. “The first step of persuasion is observation. We lend our attention to the subject we want to manipulate; you know this already. But when you’re trying to manipulate something inanimate, it helps to find a sort of energy in it that can be bent to your will. Just like a human mind. It sounds like the night you overdosed, you might’ve done just that. Might’ve seen a glimpse of life where formerly only its lifelessness was visible to you.”

---