Page 46 of An Academy for Liars

There was a knock on the door, and it opened before Lennon could even say,Come in. She wasn’t entirely surprised to see Claude; she’d expected he’d reach out to her at some point, given his closeness to Benedict. But she hadn’t expected it to be so soon. The night was still young, and Dante hadn’t been gone for long.

“You heard?” Lennon asked him.

“Bits and pieces,” said Claude, looking troubled. “Fill me in.”

“Ben compelled her to stick herfuckinghand in a fire,” said Blaine, sitting up, angrier than Lennon had ever seen her. “So if you want to know what happened, I suggest you talk to your boyfriend.”

Claude actually smiled at this, a cruel grin that made Lennon want to hide under the blankets. “You’re one to talk.”

Blaine paled a little, half turned to Lennon. “Look, I have to go—”

“I’m sure you do,” said Claude, but Blaine chose to ignore him.

“Claude’s going to sit with you while I’m gone.” Blaine glared up at him. “Isn’t that right?”

Claude nodded. “I’ll stay with her. Wouldn’t want her to die of a scraped knee while you’re gone—”

But Blaine was already out the door. Claude sat down on the edge of Lennon’s bed, slumped back against the wall. He had a strange thrall—Lennon could never quite decide whether she liked him or not. He could be so rude and yet in the next moment, entirely charming and sincere. It kept her on her toes. She could never be bored around him, but she could never be entirely at ease either. No wonder Benedict liked him so much.

“Dante’s pulled a lot of strings for you, hasn’t he?”

When Claude spoke, his warm breath smelled of booze—whiskey or something equally strong—which usually Lennon would’ve found a little gross. But somehow, when it came to Claude, these small imperfections only added to his charm.

“He’s a good advisor.”

Claude smirked. “I think he’s got a soft spot for you.”

“What are you trying to say?”

Claude shrugged. “Exactly what you think I’m saying. Don’t worry, it’s a safe space. I’m not one to judge.”

“Well, it’s not like that.”

“I said the same about Ben, at first. I lived in a state of utter denial that bordered on delusional for months. It was kind of hot. Like sex with a blindfold on. When things came to a head, there was all of this angst and buildup to fuel us.”

“How did it start between you two?”

“The way these things always do,” said Claude. “I thought he was brilliant. He thought I was precocious, which in turn made me feel almost as brilliant as I believed him to be. You know the story.”

Lennon did. She’d lived that story, with Wyatt and half of the other older, emotionally unavailable men that she’d loved and fucked and obsessed over.

“The beginning isn’t the interesting part, though. It’s what comes after. You probably know that too. You have to come up with who you are and prove it to a person who already knows themselves because they’ve had all these years to figure that out. But it’s unfair because you haven’t yet and then you’re trying to catch up to them. The whole time you’re hoping you don’t fuck it up and become less precocious and, in doing so, unfuckable. That’s a real risk when you get older. The expectations are higher when you’re not young anymore. You go from unusually bright to just…pretty smart, or not dumb orwhatever, and then before you know it, you’re not remarkable anymore. You’re nothing special to them or to anyone else.”

Lennon had the sudden urge to clamp a hand down, tight, over Claude’s mouth. To make him eat the deluge of words he’d just regurgitated onto the bed between them. Why was it that almost everything Claude said—not just then but on other occasions too—was so blunt it hurt? It felt like he was always looking for a bruise to press on, just for the pleasure of watching her squirm.

“I am sorry about Ben,” said Claude, relenting a little. He sounded almost sleepy. “He was in a bad way today. I’m sure whatever he said or did, he didn’t mean it. You know how it is. The people here, they’re not quite right. Ben’s no different.”

In the daysthat followed, Lennon received no word from Benedict. She had half expected to hear from him during her convalescence, to receive something by way of an excuse or perhaps an apology for the cruel way he’d conducted himself. But there had been nothing except a brief notification from the school, slipped under her door in the middle of the night, informing her that all future lessons with Benedict had been canceled. Lennon became certain, then, that she was about to be expelled but heard nothing to that end. She attended classes as usual, and there was no talk of hearings or Eileen or anything else of concern…except for Dante’s sudden absence.

Lennon had not seen or heard from him since the night he’d bandaged her up at Logos. He had canceled a week’s worth of persuasion classes, and when Lennon asked around about his whereabouts she heard a number of conflicting stories: he was away on business, he had been called to New York as a witness to testify as part of a DOJ litigation, he’d been sent to quell (or cause) a coup somewhere in EasternEurope, he’d taken a sabbatical—no, he was actually in Budapest as part of his research. But none of these stories explained why he’d left so abruptly, without even checking to make sure his advisee was okay.

Lennon couldn’t help but feel she’d been abandoned.

So it came as something of a surprise when—more than a week after her cruel encounter with Benedict, on the first day of November—Dante reappeared. He didn’t apologize or account for his absence. In fact, he resumed lecturing exactly where they’d left off, as though he’d never been gone at all. That evening, they focused the bulk of their attention on planting memories within the minds of their rat subjects, a painstaking skill that involved lulling the subject into a state of catatonia, so that the mind and memories could be accessed without interference. Devising wholly new memories was a skill beyond their current capabilities, so Dante had them focus on removing specific memories of events that had occurred and then placing them back within the minds of their respective rats.

The fruits of their collective efforts were abysmal. That evening, many rats forgot how to walk or eat. Several of the rats forgot the stimulus to certain sounds they always responded to—like, for example, the sound of someone shaking their bag of treats. A few rats even forgot life-sustaining actions—like breathing or swallowing—and it was only Dante’s skill that kept them from dying on the spot. The class was easily one of the worst of the semester, and Lennon was surprised she was able to spare Gregory from any lasting psychic damage as she carefully extracted the memory of his favorite toy—a red wooden wheel that he liked to gnaw on—and then planted it within his mind again.

“Good work,” said Dante, stopping behind her desk to watch her. It was one of the few times Lennon had received his praise, and the significance of the moment wasn’t lost on her.

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