An Academy for Liars, page 27
Blaine only shrugged. “The call from Drayton snapped me out of it. I remember stepping over him to answer it. I put my cell to my ear, and I heard my husband’s voice over the line, which didn’t make any sense because my husband was lying unconscious at my feet, bleeding out. I knew then that either what the operator was saying was true, or I was really going insane. Something I’d suspected for some time, to be honest. When they asked me to go for an interview, I said yes. I left my husband on the floor, packed half my stuff, and I just, I don’t know, I just went. They said if I passed the interview and entry exam, everything would be okay. And I did, and it has been.”
“What happened to your ex?”
“Oh, he’s alive. I think he lives in a care facility now. Somewhere. So it all worked out. I think that brick might’ve saved him from drinking himself into an early grave.” She said this like the brick just up and hit him itself, like the situation had no affiliation with her.
Lennon reached across the sticky bartop to squeeze her hand. “I’m glad you told me.”
“Why?” Blaine asked, looking up at her. “So you know what you’re dealing with?”
“So I know you,” said Lennon. “I’m not afraid. And I don’t judge you. I just…I just want to understand where you’re coming from, you know? And tonight, I feel like I do.”
“Do you?” Lennon could tell that Blaine took this as an insult. She hated being known, pinned down. “If that’s true—if you really understand me—tell me what I’m thinking right now. If you get it wrong, drink.” Blaine pushed another shot toward her.
“Are you inviting me to enter your mind?”
“Only if you can,” said Blaine. “But if you know me so well, you shouldn’t have to.”
Lennon squared her shoulders, tried to sober up enough to get a proper read on her. She began with the features of her face. Her lips were wet, and her breath smelled of malt and sugar. Her eyes were glossy, her pupils swollen fat so that they were barely limned by the blue of her irises. There was an urgency in them—Lennon was inclined to call it desperation—this desire to be seen and understood without having to say anything at all. After that, it became easy to sift through her thoughts, find the one that she wanted Lennon to see. But she was still surprised by what she found.
“You want me to run,” said Lennon.
Blaine’s expression fractured as soon as the words left her mouth.
Lennon often found that when she went out, there was a moment when the night went south, when whatever horrible outcome had been set into motion and the evening was doomed to end with her vomiting all over a curb or waking up beside someone who was about three times uglier than she’d thought he was when she was drunk.
This was that moment.
“I need to sober up,” said Blaine, and she appeared to go boneless, sliding off her stool. “Let’s take a walk.”
The two of them stepped out into the biting cold. There was a sharp wind blowing west off the river, tossing the greenish water into frothy whitecaps. Underfoot, the cobblestones were slick with slush and ice. It was one of the coldest nights Savannah had seen in some time, and Lennon’s knit sweater felt pitifully thin. She shoved her cold-stiff hands into her pockets, rounded her shoulders against the wind.
“So did I guess right?” she asked, shivering.
“More or less,” said Blaine, not looking at her. But it wasn’t that Blaine was avoiding Lennon’s eyes; it was as if she was seeing another, second Lennon, somewhere down on the ground among the cobblestones. “What I really wanted to know was if you’d run away with me tonight, if I wanted to go. Would you leave Drayton behind?”
“Why would you want to do that?”
Blaine didn’t answer.
Lennon took her by the hand. Her fingers were ice. “Why, Blaine?”
“Forget it,” she said, stealing her hand away. “We should be getting back anyway. It’s late.”
They walked back to the narrow alley that housed the Drayton gate. As they did, two drunk men began to tail them. They were subtle at first, but when Lennon and Blaine turned down the alley, they did too.
“Let’s hurry up,” said Lennon, and turned to face the rotting wooden door that concealed the elevator. But when Lennon drew it open, there was nothing behind it but a brick wall slimed with algae.
The gate that was supposed to take them back to Drayton was gone.
Blaine—eyes alight with panic—slammed the door shut and opened it again.
Still no elevator.
“What the hell?” she said in a thick whisper, her breath a white bloom of steam on the air.
The men at the mouth of the alley came closer, calling after them, waving. Lennon turned to face them.
“Whatever you want, we’re not interested,” she said, but the quiver in her voice undermined any authority she tried to channel with those words.
“We just want to talk a little,” said one of the men, leering. He held a cup of beer, and when he gestured at Lennon some of it sloshed over the rim and splattered the sidewalk. “You don’t like to talk?”
He was close enough now that Lennon could smell him, all beer and musky cologne. They were both relatively well-dressed—leather shoes, expensive watches flashing on their thick wrists. They looked like stragglers from a bachelor party. In their wake, Lennon felt like a small mouse, held between two cupped hands large enough to crush her. It was the same feeling she’d had that very night while sparring with Ian as he’d violated her mind and humiliated her in front of her peers. The same feeling when he’d told her to go belly-up, the night they’d been called to Logos.
“Look, we’re just trying to get home,” said Lennon, adrenaline spiking through her. Blaine kept fiddling with the door.
“There’s something wrong with the gate,” she said, panicking less because of the threat of the men, Lennon realized, and more because she couldn’t get back to Drayton. Here, in the real world, they were stranded until someone thought to look for them. But if she and Blaine couldn’t get into Drayton, there was a good chance that those inside of Drayton wouldn’t be able to get out either. Everyone would be trapped on campus, which to Lennon seemed preferable to being trapped outside of it, removed from the only world she’d ever wanted to be a part of.
“You two shouldn’t be out here alone,” said one of the men. They were imposing and tall enough to blot out the light of the streetlamp at the alley’s end. “Savannah’s not a safe city anymore.”
“Leave us the fuck alone,” Lennon snapped.
And one of the men, the taller and drunker of the two, screwed his face into a boyish frown. “You don’t have to be so aggressive about it. We just wanted to invite you out for a drink. Can a man invite two ladies out on a Friday night, or is that not allowed anymore—”
Lennon strangled him. There was no other way to say it. She induced a reaction that was not unlike anaphylaxis, a cruel application of persuasion that Lennon had picked up in Dante’s class. One moment the man was on his feet, the next he was doubled over and turning red, with a series of desperate, raw gasps. The artery running up the side of his neck fattened to the point of bursting. He opened his mouth, and Lennon saw that his tongue had swollen to the size of a crab apple, lodging itself so firmly against the roof of his mouth there was no way for air to pass through.
He dropped to his knees, his cup falling through his hand, beer splattering all over Lennon as he fell. His friend dropped beside him, smacking him on the back frantically as he writhed and gasped for air, scrabbling helplessly at the cobblestones.
Lennon stepped past both of them, shooed Blaine away from the fallen gate, and attempted to call one of her own. But when she extended her mind to Drayton, there was nothing on the other side. As if the school itself didn’t exist.
Panic washed through her and then rage after it. She gave the door a vicious kick, and the wood broke and splintered. “Goddamnit.”
“Lennon,” said Blaine, putting a hand on her arm. “I think you’re killing him.”
Lennon turned to see the man unconscious, his face gone blue, froth collecting at the corners of his open mouth. His friend was on the ground beside him, fumbling with his phone.
“Fuck,” said Lennon, and she stepped right over him, snatched the phone from his hand, tossed it to the ground, and stomped on it, shattering the screen. She cut the choking man loose. There was a long silence—and for a moment Lennon thought she might’ve actually done it, that she may actually have killed someone—but then he stirred to life with a juddering breath.
“He’ll be fine,” said Lennon to the other man, who burst into great blubbering sobs of relief. “And you’re going to forget this ever happened.” She made this true as she said it, snatching every memory of what had occurred in the alley, putting him to sleep beside the dumpster, curled fetal against his friend so the two of them would be warm enough to sleep through the night without any danger of freezing.
“Look,” said Blaine, and she pointed to the door. The birdcage elevator had appeared behind it, the bands and whorls of iron forming its door.
Lennon drew it open and the two of them stepped into the cabin.
Lennon and Blaine stepped off the elevator and back into Logos to find the house empty, the lights on despite the late hour, all the doors along the hall flung open. A cold breeze gusted in through the front door. Lennon and Blaine exchanged a horrified look and wordlessly raced down the stairs and out of the house to find the campus in total chaos. People stood outside their dorms bleary-eyed and wrapped in blankets, huddled close together to keep warm. The church bells were tolling.
“What the hell is going on?” Blaine asked, looking around in a daze.
“I don’t know,” said Lennon, wondering if there had been an ill-timed fire drill or perhaps a false alarm. But if that was the case, she had no idea why every building on campus seemed affected. Lennon also noticed that a few of those buildings had broken windows, and a couple of the magnolias around campus, and one of the live oaks, had fallen.
The two walked until they spotted the bulk of the first years, standing in the lawn outside of Ethos College. There was Ian, shirtless despite the cold, his arm slung around Nadine, who appeared to be wearing his shirt as a dress. Blaine approached, but Lennon, feeling uneasy after the fight with Ian, trailed after her with some reluctance. She was relieved when Nadine ducked out from under Ian’s arm and met them halfway, as if making a conscious effort to keep Lennon and Ian apart.
“What happened?” Blaine asked her.
Nadine half turned to face Blaine so that it was obvious she was only talking to her when she said, “The gates malfunctioned and there was some sort of quake—you didn’t feel it? The whole campus was shaking.”
“We were out,” said Blaine. Her expression was flat and blank, almost like she was wearing a papier-mâché cast of her own face. She half turned to face the trees, as if looking for something specific, and very nearly lost her balance.
Lennon reached out to steady her. “What do you mean they malfunctioned?”
Nadine very pointedly didn’t look at Lennon. She crossed her narrow arms tight over her chest, stomped in place to pump blood into her feet. She was only wearing socks, Lennon realized. “I don’t know. The ground started shaking and the church bells started ringing and we all came outside because we thought there might be an earthquake. Windows started breaking and it was so loud it woke everyone up and then the RAs came in and alerted everyone that we needed to evacuate to the center of the square. When we asked what was going on they said the gates were failing or something? That didn’t explain the shaking, though.”
“What did they mean when they said the gates were failing?” Lennon asked.
“I don’t know,” she said. “But I’d barely made it out to the square when there was this feeling of…dropping or moving. It brought everyone to their knees. A couple people even got so dizzy they threw up.”
“How long did it last?” Blaine asked, and she looked on the verge of tears.
“Not long,” said Nadine, and she began to rub slow circles into Blaine’s back. “It was nothing, really—everyone’s fine. No one got hurt, and only a few buildings have broken windows. I did hear that a downed tree might’ve clipped the chapel. But no one was hurt, and I think things are stabilized now, so—”
“Why did the gates start to fail?” Lennon asked.
“No one knows,” said Nadine with a shrug. “And the faculty aren’t answering any questions.” She nodded a few yards away. A small crowd of professors cut down the sidewalk, striding from their townhouses and moving across the campus, in the same direction that Blaine was staring. Dante and Eileen led the pack, their heads close together, talking in a rapid-fire exchange of whispers. They didn’t look at Lennon, but the rest of the professors did, their gazes snaring on her briefly as they passed by. Watching them go, Lennon realized they were heading toward the chancellor’s mansion, which took the form of a large plantation house on the far edge of the campus.
Lennon took off after the professors, running a little to catch up, and was winded by the time she matched Dante’s long strides.
“Hey,” she said, catching him by the arm. “What’s going on?”
“Not now, Lennon.”
“What happened to the gates?”
Dante stopped then. Eileen cut a glare over her shoulder that could’ve curdled milk but kept going with the rest of the faculty close at her heels, a few professors jockeying for the place by her side that Dante had abandoned.
“I don’t have time for this tonight, all right?” he said. “Go back and wait with your classmates.”
“Did the gates go down?” Lennon asked again. “And if so, is there any way I could—”
“No,” he said, the scrape of a whisper, unusually harsh. “You stay clear of this.”
“What do you mean stay—”
He turned and left before she could finish the question, catching up with the others in just a few long strides. Eileen immediately caught him by the arm and resumed their conversation. Frustrated, Lennon turned and walked back to her peers.
“What was that about?” Nadine asked, and it was clear she wasn’t the only one wondering. At least a dozen of her classmates were looking on, arms folded tight across their chests, murmuring among themselves.
“Nothing,” said Lennon, edgy, defensive though she didn’t know why—something about all those eyes on her then, and not in a good way. A couple of people—most of them from Ian’s clique—even cut her dirty looks and whispered behind cupped hands as if afraid she’d read their lips.
“It didn’t look like nothing,” said Nadine, and Lennon wondered in passing when she’d become such a bitch, or if she was just pretending to be one in defense of Ian. As if he needed any real defending.
“I was just asking about the gates,” said Lennon. “But he wouldn’t tell me anything.”
“Hm,” said Nadine, lower lip ejected, slightly, beyond the upper. “You two really are close, aren’t you?”
“I mean, we have to be. He’s my advisor.”
“But it’s not just that. Is it true you vacationed with him?”
“It wasn’t a vacation,” said Lennon. She could feel her cheeks going red, and not from the cold. “It was a work thing—”
“A work thing?” Nadine raised an eyebrow. “What kind of work thing?”
“Why do you care so much?” Blaine asked, sobering up enough to defend her. “Are people asking?”
Nadine only shrugged and retreated back toward Ian, who was watching. He smiled at Lennon, his split lip tearing open a little wider as he did.
The last days of March came and went. April brought with it the warm promise of summer, and a new wave of anxiety that rippled throughout Drayton’s student body. In the days leading up to final exams, Lennon became increasingly reclusive, locking herself away in her dorm to study and train. Preparations for her persuasion course with Alec proved particularly challenging. Comprised of both written and combat portions, the final exam would take place over a four-hour class period that culminated with a pass-or-fail sparring match. Unless you scored almost perfectly on the written portion of the exam, it was almost impossible to pass the class if you lost your spar.
The night before the final, Lennon stayed up to study. She was dead tired, and her notes blurred and doubled as she scanned through them. She closed her eyes, tempted by sleep, and when she opened them again—what felt like mere moments later—it was not to her textbook, or her cluttered desk, but to the wan and dappled light of the moon, filtering down through the branches of the magnolia trees.
Lennon wasn’t in her bedroom anymore. She was standing in the middle of the Twenty-Fifth Square. She had no recollection of how she’d found her way there. The last thing she remembered was resting her head on her desk, letting the tide drag her out to the deep sea of dreams.
Two feet from her, grinning at her through the thickening fog, was Ian.
“Why am I out here, and what the hell do you want?” Lennon asked, in a white huff of steam. It was cold, and she had on nothing but a thin T-shirt and shorts, which offered little reprieve from the cold. “Wait, did you persuade me to come here?”
“You want to know what I like about you, Lennon?” Ian began to walk around her in a slow circle that became something of a spiral, drawing nearer with each completed revolution. “You don’t know when to leave well enough alone.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“Kneel,” he said, and Lennon broke to her knees there, in the middle of the square. Ian’s will was nothing if not demanding. His strength had more than doubled since the last time she’d contended with him. She realized, with a wave of horror, that he had been holding back during their spar. “What do you want?”
