That same night, in Kieran’s room on the lower floor of Logos, Lennon imparted everything she’d learned about Antonio. She told him that the rat wasn’t in pain, and therefore couldn’t be paining Kieran. She carefully explained that there was, in fact, no psychic bond at all except for, perhaps, Kieran’s own attachment to his newfound conscience.
“I think if you learn to forgive yourself, even a little bit, the insomnia and stress might ease up,” said Lennon. She herself knew a thing or two about what a bludgeon guilt could be when wielded like a weapon of self-destruction. In fact, it had been something she’d struggled with every day since coming to study at Drayton, every time she meddled in the mind of Gregory during persuasion class, or thought about how anxious her family must be to think that she’d abandoned her life in Denver to study at some institution they’d never even heard of. “Once you’re clear of the guilt, I know you’ll feel better.”
Kieran nodded, frowning. There was a long silence, and for a moment Lennon thought he wouldn’t hand over the drugs. She hadn’t, after all, delivered on her end of their deal. But she was surprised when Kieran retrieved a small baggie from a loose floorboard beneath his bed and handed it to her.
“Ideally,” he said, “you’ll have four people with you when you take this. Two to restrain you, one to intervene psychically if things go awry, and another to distract anyone who might overhear and try interfering. But that’s only if things go south, of course. And they probably won’t. You seem sane, and as long as you keep calm, you should be all right.”
Lennon stared at the baggie in the flat of her palm. Within it were two white tabs. It was hard for her to believe that such a strong psychedelic could be confined to something so small. “Thank you.”
“Nothing to thank me for,” he said. “We had a deal.”
Lennon took that as her cue to leave, but Kieran called her name before she reached the door. She half turned to him. “Yes?”
“If you ever need anything else…you know where to find me. Not as a dealer but, you know, as an associate.”
“You mean a friend?”
He wrinkled his nose, disgusted, flustered. “I don’t have friends. But you know. I’m around.”
Per Kieran’s advice, Lennon gathered four of her closest classmates—Ian, Sawyer, Blaine, and Nadine—in her dorm room later that same evening and almost immediately regretted the decision. Blaine and Nadine, to her surprise, expressed some mild concern but took the idea in stride. Sawyer, however, was conflicted, and Ian was utterly incensed.
“Let me get this straight,” said Ian, pacing the room, “you’re going to take drugs you got off a teenage psychopath who turned a rat into a crackhead? Are you hearing yourself?”
“I don’t think you’re supposed to say ‘crackhead,’ ” said Nadine in a soft voice. “I mean, addiction is a complex issue—”
Ian ignored her. “This is a bad idea, Lennon. A dangerous one. It could ruin your life. Trust me, I would know.”
“We took the drugs at the party, and we were fine, right, Sawyer?”
Sawyer, sitting on the edge of her bed, only frowned.
“Nadine’s right,” said Lennon, unbothered by Sawyer’s lack of verbal support. “Don’t be such a fucking prude. I mean, didn’t you deal drugs?”
“This is different. That kid Kieran has killed people with whatever he was cooking up in his kitchen. And you’re fragile—who knows what the hell that’ll do to you.”
“I’m not fragile, and that was years ago. He was thirteen. He promised me this was clean.”
“I really worry about you sometimes,” said Ian. He had done a lot of worrying about Lennon recently. Worrying about who she liked or was maybe sleeping with. Worrying about where she was and why she’d come home to Ethos late. Worrying about what she said to him, and more importantly what she didn’t.
Lennon had first attributed this new possessiveness to the stress of their increasing workloads—the hours of homework, the hundreds of pages worth of reading, the pop quizzes, and of course the grueling exercises they performed on rats in persuasion. But Ian was easily at the top of their class, securing the highest grades not just in persuasion but in every other course he was enrolled in too. He was all but guaranteed a bed in Logos House. And yet he seemed miserable—edgy and irritable and corrosively jealous in a way that Lennon found at once exhausting and assuring. As shameful as it was—and she was ashamed—she liked the fact that Ian found her worthy enough to be jealous over. After all she’d been through with Wyatt, it was nice to feel like she was something precious that someone as brilliant as Ian had to fight to keep.
“Are you going to say something to your roommate?” Ian demanded, imploring Blaine now.
“I’m not her keeper,” said Blaine.
“Maybe not,” said Ian, “but you are the only one who she might consider listening to, so how about you have at it?”
Blaine looked to Lennon for a long beat, then back at Ian. “She can do what she wants.”
“Fuck.” He kicked over the trash can by the desk. Crumpled papers and cigarette butts spilled across the floor. Nadine moved to clean up the mess, and as she leaned over, Lennon noticed that her blouse was open lower than usual (before, every button had been fastened, all the way up to her throat), exposing a pale slice of her chest. She wasn’t wearing her crucifix either, and her hair, which she’d worn in a sensible bun at the nape of her neck on every occasion that Lennon had previously seen her, now fell long and loose about her shoulders.
“Mark my words,” said Ian, stepping right over Nadine to jam a finger into Lennon’s chest, “this is a bad fucking idea.”
“Look,” said Lennon, squaring with Ian, “I’m taking the tabs. So you can either stay here and watch, or you can leave. I won’t hold it against you either way.”
He glared at her. “I didn’t think you were this dumb,” he said, then he turned on his heel and was gone, slamming the door shut behind him.
Nadine scrambled to her feet. “Should I go after him?”
Lennon nodded. “Just…try to keep quiet, all right? I don’t think he would tell anyone, but if he does—”
“I’m on it,” said Nadine, and then she too was gone, leaving just Lennon, Sawyer, and Blaine alone.
Blaine stared down at her hands. “I’m loath to agree with Ian on anything, but what if he’s right? What if this is a bad idea?”
“Jesus Christ,” said Lennon, “when did you all become such prudes?”
“It’s not that,” said Blaine. “The last time you took a psychedelic, you were so…so—”
“Catatonic,” said Sawyer, finishing for her.
Blaine nodded. “It was like a part of your brain had broken for a moment. I really thought we weren’t going to get you back. It was terrifying. It almost would’ve been less scary if you were just out cold. But you weren’t. Your eyes were open and you were tracking us, but your expression was so vacant. It was clear that you weren’t behind your own eyes anymore.”
“Even Dante looked worried,” said Sawyer. “And he’s never worried. About anything. But you were in rough shape, Lennon. You weren’t present enough to see it, but we were. It was bad. Really, really bad. And this drug is even stronger than the last one you took, so who knows what will happen. Is it really worth the risk just to pass a class?”
“It’s not just a class,” said Lennon. “If I don’t prove to them that I have a handle on this whole elevator gate thing, they’re going to take my memories of this place and kick me out.”
“They said that?” said Sawyer, looking stunned.
Lennon nodded. “So I have to do this. Okay? With or without you.”
Sawyer just shook his head, but Blaine—lips bloodless and pursed—nodded.
“All right,” she said. “Let’s do it.”
Following Kieran’s instructions, Lennon removed one of the two tabs from the baggie and placed it on the tip of her tongue. She waited for a while, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed at the foot of her bed. The minutes ticked by, and she tapped out a rhythm on her thigh to keep the nerves at bay. Sawyer paced with his hands behind his back. Blaine nibbled at a hangnail on her pinky finger. “A disgusting habit,” she said, sheepish, when Lennon looked her way.
Ian and Nadine did not return.
Exasperated, Lennon made to stand. “This is bullshit. I don’t even feel—”
The ground rattled. A brief little shudder that reverberated through her bones.
“Did you feel that?” Lennon asked, sliding all the way out of bed. Her legs felt limp beneath her.
“No,” said Sawyer and Blaine in unison. Their pale faces had taken on a strange glow that reminded her of those Bible stories where people encountered angels whose brightly shining faces hurt to look at.
“Well, I think it’s working,” said Sawyer, and when he spoke, she saw a glimpse of pink tongue, the black at the back of his mouth where his throat began. His voice sounded wet and muffled.
“Easy,” said Blaine, or the suggestion of Blaine, really; there was no part of her that Lennon recognized as the friend she knew. A white light had overtaken her. Blaine’s hand felt hot and foreign on her arm.
“You need to call an elevator,” said the voice that belonged to Sawyer. “Hurry before you get too high.”
When Lennon nodded, the whole room pitched this way and that like a snow globe shaken. And she was surprised when all the furniture remained in place.
She started chattering, teeth cracking together so violently she bit every word she attempted to speak clean in half, like brittle cookies. The crumbs of everything she meant to say scattered across the rug at her feet.
“She’s not making any sense,” said the Sawyer voice, sounding panicked. “We should call someone.”
“Just give her a chance,” said the one that was Blaine. “She can do it.”
Lennon’s vision blurred badly at the edges, so she only had a pinhole to see through.
“Go ahead, call the elevator,” said Blaine. “You can do it. I know you can.”
“I’m trying,” Lennon managed to say, though she was not in fact trying to do anything more than stay on her feet and keep from throwing up.
The blurriness cleared some, retracting back to her periphery. And the light in Blaine and Sawyer’s faces dimmed along with it. She could see the room again—the dimensions a little warped, as if gazing through a glass tumbler, and she felt her legs firm up beneath her.
Lennon then homed in her vision on a bare spot on her bedroom wall because that seemed like the likeliest place for an elevator to appear. But every time she tried to focus, her gaze kept being pulled back to the door. She felt like if she squinted hard enough, she’d be able to see right through it, see through everything.
“Why does she keep going cross-eyed?” Sawyer asked.
“Don’t talk about me like I’m not right here,” said Lennon, and her voice didn’t come from her mouth but from beneath her feet. The floor shook with it.
Someone in the ground was speaking along with her.
“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’s definitely crack. 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.