The Favorites

by Rosemary Hennigan

Genres: Feminist; Literary Fiction; Domestic Thrillers

Synopsis

A graduate student plots a takedown of the popular professor who wronged her sister in this provocative campus novel about privilege, power, and obsession

“Dark academia at its best. I absolutely devoured it.” —Disha Bose, author of Dirty Laundry, A GMA Book Club Pick

From the moment she discovered her sister’s secret relationship with charismatic professor Jay Crane, Jessie Mooney has been convinced that he’s to blame for the events leading to her death. Haunted by their last email exchange—You know what you did—she enrolls in graduate school and competes her way into Crane’s famous “Law and Literature” class, setting into motion a plan to get close to him so she can expose who he really is.

Jessie will cross any line to hold Crane accountable. But when she finally earns his trust and the coveted position as one of his “favorites,” attracting the other students’ envy and suspicion, the truth becomes darkly twisted. Is it justice Jessie craves, or revenge? And what does she stand to lose if she gets her way?

Shimmering with tension, The Favorites explores the ways that love, desire, and anger reveal the best, and worst, of us.

Release date: November 14, 2023

Publisher: Graydon House Books

Print pages: 249

Sample

Chapter 1

He was standing with my sister the first time I saw him, in the Trinity Arts Block after class. He had a crooked nose, sharp brown eyes, and graying stubble, and wore a simple black turtleneck. Physically nondescript, nothing unusual in his bearing. Just a shiny American smile and the confidence of a man with no reason to question his position in life.

They had a short and slightly awkward exchange that I couldn’t hear at a distance. Audrey’s fingers were playing with the strap of her handbag, her weight shifting from one foot to the other. I wandered over, but he turned to leave before I reached her. All I caught were his parting words. “See you around, kid,” he said, with a small wave of a large hand.

Arriving next to her, I angled my head in his direction. “Who was that?” He was already disappearing into the crowds pouring out of different lecture halls. They milled around us, a noisy and bustling mess of bodies, through which he cut like a knife. His stride was purposeful, his gaze deliberately pitched above the heads of students, who parted at his approach.

“Him? Jay Crane. He’s one of my professors,” Audrey replied before setting off down the steps in the opposite direction.

She didn’t elaborate, and, at the time, I took her at her word. I hadn’t the faintest suspicion of how much he would come to mean to her, or how much he already meant.

I exited the Arts Block through the swinging doors and stepped outside to Fellows’ Square. Trinity’s campus struck me as it always did. The gray walls wept in the October rain, the points of Alexander Calder’s cactus sculpture made sharp by the dusk light. The long summer days in Dublin were over, the nights closing in again. Together, we made our way to the train station, heading home to Malahide, my older sister walking slightly in front.

It seems so obvious now, so hard to imagine events unfolding in any other way. But, back then, there was ignorance. There was bliss. I didn’t know it yet, but we would never be the same, not once Professor Jay Crane entered our lives.

What chance did Audrey have against him? Nobody had ever told her that the word of a man like Crane was not gospel, that he was no god, that his influence could be dangerous, that he could hurt her. Nobody ever told her to be careful of men who dazzle and then withdraw, leaving a wasteland of human wreckage in their wake. Nobody told her of the darkness that can lurk behind an easy smile and a few kind words, and by the time she learned it for herself, the damage was done.

There’s no fixing it now.

---

I should say that what follows is not a confession. It’s not an exercise in atonement or motivated by guilt. If I consulted a lawyer, she would tell me not to write it down at all. It could be used against me. Sometimes, my finger hovers over the backspace key, ready to let the cursor chase these words away into nothingness. But always in that moment, just before I give in to that compulsion, I think of Audrey again, and I hesitate.

It was her story first, before I made it mine.

When you came seeking answers, I didn’t know what to say, because the truth is not an easy thing. I don’t even know if I can tell the right and the wrong of it anymore. Every day, more women are speaking up and, as they do, my silence weighs more heavily on me. There have been so many lies that telling the truth now feels like an act of bravery, a leap of faith. Sunlight burning away the haze. So here it is: an honest history of what happened.

Insofar as certain events may have followed from my decision to enroll at Franklin University, I can hardly be held responsible for that. The only guilty mind involved was Crane’s. What happened to him was his own fault, but I don’t need to tell you that. You’ll see for yourself.

 

Chapter 2

On the morning of my first day at Franklin University, I sat in the courtyard of the law school, my notes spread on the round metal table in front of me, a pen in my hand, and premeditated intention in my heart. It was late August in Philadelphia, the city a swamp, the sun raging down relentlessly. Even in the shade, the heat was audacious, and I had been sweating into my jean shorts for forty minutes. I was about to meet Professor Jay Crane face-to-face for the first time and I felt far from ready.

There had been a time in my life when Jay Crane was not at the center of every thought, but that time felt distant now, like a half-remembered dream. He had become a waypoint that I used to direct me, Polaris in the night sky, and I had traveled thousands of miles to find him here, securing a place in his prestigious Law and Literature class at Franklin’s law school. All final-year and master’s students completing an LLM, like me, were eligible to apply and, every year, only six were chosen. It was a long way to come for such a niche course, but I had my reasons.

A mystique hung over the class, as if secret knowledge was shared behind the closed doors of room 1.04B, and over the professor, whose ideas could be found in newspaper columns and podcast interviews, on bookshelves, and in the law journals we studied. He had a high public profile, at least among the sort of people who pay attention to law professors.

In the baking heat of the courtyard, I was using what little time I had before my first class to read, for the fourth time, the article Crane had assigned us. There were crumbs on my T-shirt, grains of sugar from the doughnut I had just eaten. My foot tapped against the leg of my chair, my hand scratching subconsciously at the mosquito bites along my calves. My T-shirt was the same pale pink as my skin, owing to an unintended nap in the sun the afternoon before. I was beginning to think I might be allergic to the weather here, hot-girl summer not an Irish phenomenon.

Right from the beginning, I would need to impress Crane. I had to catch his eye, just as Audrey had done that term at Trinity. My purpose here depended on it.

I needed Crane to notice me, but I had never possessed the conventional, easy attractiveness of my sister. We looked nothing alike—a difference so notable that people felt free to comment on it. My sister and I were direct physical opposites in most respects, as if our genes had been selected to produce the starkest contrast. My face was long, eyes deep-set, hair dark, thick and unruly. Audrey’s face was round, eyes bright and blue, hair blond and sleek.

Even when we were young—too young—men would notice her. She would point them out to me when she caught them looking and I would meander their way to “accidentally” step on their feet, or spill a drink on their laps, or—on one particularly egregious occasion—run a key along the paintwork of his car.

But it wasn’t just the bare physicality that made us so different. There were other qualities Audrey possessed that set us apart. She had an openness, a way of smiling out at the world, that I lacked completely. Something in her movements, in her habits, drew people’s attention. It felt good to be around her. I know this because I felt it in her presence too. The deep peace she had in herself, an unguardedness in the way she met the world—something Crane took from her, an unforgivable theft.

I don’t think it was Audrey’s looks alone that attracted Crane. But if her beauty had ever caught his eye in a crowded lecture hall, I doubted I would stand out the same way. I would not have the luxury of such an easy appeal to base instincts. I would have to rely on rat wit and fox cunning, on animal chicanery, instead of feminine wiles.

“Jessie?”

A man’s voice shook me out of my thoughts. I squinted up at him, his face framed by a sun so bright it seemed to scorch my eyes. 

“It is Jessie, right?”

He was tall, with dark hair and small brown eyes behind Henry Kissinger glasses, wearing a black T-shirt with Hillary 2016 printed in white. I remembered dimly a conversation we’d had the previous night at a dorm party on the floor below mine about the upcoming presidential election. I had gone to hoover up what intel I could get on Crane before I would face him in class. But, preoccupied by this hunt for information, I had managed to forget this guy’s name.

“Yeah,” I said, eyes blinking back the sunlight. “Hi... I’m sorry, I’m useless at names.”

“Right...ha! It’s Joshua. We spoke last night? You were arguing with me about Bernie Sanders.” He pushed his glasses up his nose, still smiling.

“Oh, yeah. That rings a bell.” I shaded my eyes so I could better see him. “He should be the candidate.”

“Yeah... Yeah, you said that last night.” He shifted his backpack on his shoulder, grinning broadly. There was something deeply appealing about that grin, something soothing in its simplicity. “So, you said you’re also in Crane’s Law and Lit class, right? I’m on my way there now.”

“Yes!” I sat up straighter. Joshua—of course. He was the first of the other Law and Lit students I had met, and I was curious to learn who Crane had chosen, these students who would, unknowingly, witness my plan unfold. “Yes, I am... I’ll just grab my bag and I can come with you?”

I bundled my papers into the backpack at my feet and wrapped a plaid shirt around my waist to hide the presence of any unfortunate sweat patches.

“I wanted to ask you, last night, about our professor—Crane,” I said, trying to sound casual. “What’s he like?”

Joshua was glancing behind him at the group playing cornhole on the grass, a game involving tossing beanbags through a hole cut in a wooden board. I recognized a few of them as fellow international students from my master’s course.

Turning back to me, he smiled. “Crane’s cool.” I could tell that Joshua was trying to downplay his enthusiasm. But he spoke with something of the same exhilaration I was accustomed to hearing in Audrey’s voice when she talked about Crane. “I haven’t had a class with him before, so I’m excited to see him in action.”

“I heard he’s a bit of a character though, right?” I lifted my backpack onto my shoulder and walked with Joshua across the red-bricked path.

The law school was built around this central courtyard, classrooms, a library, and faculty offices all contained within the complex. A few streets over from the main campus, it was its own little world.

The door toward which we were headed looked as if it had been carved into the thick ivy covering the wall, and it was opening and closing continually as people cut through the courtyard to get to the classrooms on the other side. We reached it just as someone successfully punted a beanbag through the cornhole behind us, a cheer sounding from the grass.

Joshua held the door open for me and I slipped inside, the cold, filtered air immediately soothing my hot skin. “Yeah, like, he’s known as this, like, radical law professor with big political ideas.” He gesticulated while he spoke, his hands sweeping the air. “When he published his book, he said we should rip up the Constitution and start again, and that got picked up by Fox, and then made into this whole, you know, thing...” I had seen some of that controversy when I first researched Crane online. A polarizing figure, by all

accounts.

“I’m looking forward to meeting him,” I said, pulling on the sleeves of the plaid shirt and tightening it around my waist. “There’s a lot of hype.”

“Yeah, I guess there is. I’m a little nervous, honestly. I think Crane keeps the class small so there’s nowhere to hide from him.” Joshua laughed. “All that effort to get into the class and now I’m scared to actually go...”

To be chosen for the class, we had to write a short discussion paper on a topic of particular interest to us. I’m sure the other students had worked hard on theirs, but not like me. Arriving in Franklin, it was my top priority. I had flung myself into the writing of that essay as if my life depended on it. I bedded down in the library, absorbing every piece of academic research Crane had written in the previous decade. It was not always the focus of his work, but in almost everything Crane wrote, there was a deep skepticism of the legal system as the formal arbiter for justice. And it seemed as if he was angry about it, angry at the law’s own mythologizing, angry at the self-serving story it told itself. From his journalistic work, I had noticed an interest in the classics; the foundational Greek texts; the myths and rhetoric; the dramas and tragedies. Drawing this all together, I wrote an essay designed specifically to appeal to him, a piece about the tragedy of Antigone and the nature of justice. Personal conscience clashing with legal obligation, duties owed to the state versus those owed to higher principles, such as the gods, or even family.

But, to me, Antigone also spoke to something else, the story of the love between two sisters, and a loyalty that persisted, despite a gulf of miscomprehension between them.

For four days, I worked on that essay. The first at the library door in the morning, the last to leave at night, sustaining myself on processed snacks and strong coffee. The other students were propelled by ambition, by competitive zeal, maybe even by the enormity of their student loans, but I had something more powerful behind me. White-hot anger.

On the corridor, feet moved briskly around me, heading toward classrooms and lecture halls, the floors of the law school shining with fresh polish. To my right, light poured into the corridor from the floor-to-ceiling windows facing the courtyard, through which I could see the game of cornhole coming to an end. Beanbags scattered across the grass, lying crumpled where they had landed. I turned my eyes away and followed Joshua toward the library, at the back of which was Crane’s classroom, room 1.04B.

“What did you write about?” he asked me. “To get into the class, I mean.”

“Justice,” I said, after a long pause. “How we make it for ourselves. Rough justice, I guess.”

Joshua laughed. “Is that what you’re into, Jessie?!”

“Maybe.”

A set of steps led up to the library, the doors of which were paneled in glass. “That’s

kind of Crane’s thing too—law as power. I think he’s going to like you,” he said as we climbed, his hand on the brass railing nailed to the wall beside him.

“Well, that’s the goal. Isn’t it?” I replied. “That’s what everyone wants...to be Crane’s favorite student.”

His head jerked, and he watched me over his shoulder as he pushed the door open, holding it for me as I walked inside. “So you’ve heard about all that?”

Audrey had been his favorite once, recipient of special care, and particular attention. But it was in Philadelphia that I learned this was not a one-off sort of thing. A girl named Kyra, whose dorm room was three doors down from my own, had told me Crane was known for playing favorites with his students. If you found yourself chosen, all manner of advantages flowed your way: your pick of internships, clerkships, or an introduction to any of his many judicial, academic, and political contacts—catnip to the overachieving nerds and the legacy surnames filling the halls at Franklin. Rumor had it that he would whisper in the ear of the influential, telling those in power that you were special, a cut above the rest, someone deserving of every opportunity, someone like them.

Scanning my student card at the turnstile, I gave a small shrug. “Sure... I mean, as soon as people hear I’m in Law and Lit, they ask me about it. Seems like a bit of a fixation around here.” The metal spokes turned, making a mechanical sound as I pushed through.

Joshua pulled a face. “That’s probably true. A word of advice, Jessie? Some people are pretty cutthroat about all that favorite stuff. You might not want to get involved.”

I smiled but didn’t offer a response as he followed me through the turnstile. The competitive atmosphere at Franklin was more heightened than I was used to. Along the corridors, in the ladies’ restrooms, on the courtyard, I would catch snippets of conversations from the other students, the topics almost always of future plans, career ambitions, the summer associateships they were chasing, or the letters of recommendation they planned to collect from particular professors. Introductions needed, grades desired, achievements fueling hunger for more.

The persistent, weighty sensation of other people’s ambitions sat on me from that first day. But my own ambition was made of altogether darker stuff, and I passed through the corridors feeling like a wolf among sheep. Becoming one of Crane’s favorites was the obvious way to gain his trust and it would allow me to lure him closer without making him suspicious of my motives. He wouldn’t notice how I bent him to my will, how I tugged on a string and made his limbs rise, marionette-style, at my command.

In front of the librarian’s desk, I glanced at my watch. We were nearly at the hour. In a matter of minutes, Crane would enter my life. Everything depended on this first introduction. If he recognized anything of Audrey in me, my plan would be over before it began. All it would take was something small, my manner of speech, my posture, a turn of phrase, a facial expression we shared. Something subtle that could trigger a memory of my sister and then...well.

I had taken the precaution of enrolling as Jessica Mooney, dropping the Flynn from the double-barrel surname our parents had given us. Audrey and I usually went by Mooney-Flynn, or just Flynn for short. And since Crane had known Audrey Mooney-Flynn in Dublin,

I had to hope he wouldn’t suspect the Jessica Mooney who was about to show up in his class in Philadelphia. I couldn’t drop the name entirely, since Mooney was on my passport. It was a common name in Ireland, but it was, nevertheless, a risk I couldn’t avoid. I didn’t know what Crane might do if forced to protect himself.

With a deep breath, I tried to steel my nerves. All the years, all the planning, and all the effort could come to nothing. And then what would I do? What was left for me?

In the hush of the library, Joshua and I fell silent, the carpet underfoot muffling our steps. Fear was wrapped, like a metal cable, around my chest, squeezing ever tighter. Room 1.04B was just ahead, hidden away at the back of the library, on the other side of the bookshelves.

The moment had finally come. It was time to meet Crane. 

 

Chapter 3

I let Joshua lead the way past the students ensconced in their individual neat wooden kiosks. A few heads bobbed up from books and laptop screens, some eyes meeting mine briefly, then dropping again. They were wearing the same branded merchandise from the university bookstore, a uniform of sweats and shorts, hoodies and hats. Bodies emblazoned with the loud public message that we were part of a club, a higher echelon, specially chosen from all the others.

The door was plain and unassuming, a small metal plaque, the size of a business card, confirming it was room 1.04B. Without Joshua, I might have walked right past it, taking it for a storeroom or part of the library stacks.

“After you, ...