Page 14 of An Academy for Liars

“What John learned through the tutoring of these exceptional boys was that there are those among us who possess a particularly keen talent for the art of persuasion. In the same way that some newborns shriek louder than others, and some women possess more beauty than that which others are born to, John discovered that some human beings—whether blessed or cursed I cannot say—possess the rare and heightened ability to persuade the natural world into complying with their will.”

The slideshow flashed to the image of one of Drayton’s boys, hands outstretched as if conducting an orchestra. Three boys stood in front of him, limbs bent strangely but in a way that seemed to correspond with the placement of the first boy’s fingers.

“Through observing some of the most talented pupils at his school, John learned that this persuasive talent could be honed, allowing particularly gifted individuals to force their will not just upon other human beings, but in rare cases, upon matter itself.”

The slideshow flickered to the next photo, this one of a boy in a classroom with a small nub of chalk levitating a few inches above the palm of his hand.

“As you can likely imagine, this gift of persuasion attracted the attention of many forces far beyond the bounds of Drayton. John’s gifted boys became both a threat and a spectacle, and it seemed that everyone wanted to use the remarkable talents of his students to achieve their own ends. There was talk of war and money, rebellion and discord, demands and arrests and the kinds of threats that manifest in violence. So, to protect his boys, and the sacred forces they studied, John Drayton enlisted the help of one of his most prodigious pupils. A boy by the name of William Irvine.”

The slideshow changed to an image of the poorly dressed boy. He had wide eyes and a bleeding nose. He stood in a hallway so long that it looked almost infinite, and there were dozens of identical doors on either side. The door closest to the boy was half ajar, and it opened onto a beach, the sand dark and strung with seaweed. Just a few doors down from that, on the opposite side of the hall, another door opened out onto a snow-capped mountain range.

“William was the first and last student of Drayton with the ability to create entire worlds unto themselves, using his persuasive ability to open doors to new realities and close them to contain spaces, sequester them from the greater world at large. This is exactly what William did here, at the Twenty-Fifth Square. In what is perhaps one of the greatest feats of persuasion ever committed, he erased Drayton Square from the minds and memories of all who knew of it. Removed it from the historical record, and from reality itself. The only memories left intact were those of a handful of trusted pupils and the descendants of John Drayton himself, who were entrusted with protecting this secret and passing it down to future generations and classes of students.”

Here, Eileen turned quite grave. The slideshow flickered to a more recent photo of Drayton, taken in a wide corridor between moss-draped oak trees. “This powerful act of persuasion came with a cost. William died protecting this school—channeling all of the energy of his life and spirit into the task of raising the very walls that now fortify us today, within the long-forgotten and forever-hidden Twenty-Fifth Square of Savannah.”

The house lights flickered on. The movie screen retracted. Eileen stepped forward as the curtains behind her swept closed once more. There was a smattering of applause as she stepped to center stage. “Here, safe and in secret, we devote ourselves to the continuation of John Drayton’s legacy. The study of persuasion.”

After the assemblyadjourned, a handful of upperclassmen led the first years to Ethos College, the residential dorm where they’d be staying. They walked along a slate path, the tiles slippery with moss, cutting through the gardens and the breezeways that ran between buildings. Ethos College sat on a wide fog-washed green overlooking a grove of magnolia trees. It was composed of four conjoined townhomes with slanted tin roofs and tall stained-glass windows. Taking it in, Lennon felt as though she were walking through the trappings of a dream that wasn’t hers. It was an odd feeling, to have such a loose grasp on one’s own reality. Her thoughts seemed entirely scattered, a fistful of sand tossed to the wind.

The foyer of the college was empty, and dim to the point of being dark, but she was almost immediately greeted with the lively din of conversation, the mingling aromas of fresh bread and cigarette smoke. To the left was a welcome desk, with a girl about her age seated behind it, her face alight with the artificial glow of the computer monitor in front of her. The other students dispersed—heading to their dorms,presumably—leaving Lennon and the girl alone. She called out from across the hall, her voice echoing. “Your name?”

Lennon gave it, edging up to the desk.

The girl, whose name (according to the tag pinned to her lapel) was Allison, keyed something into the computer, her manicured nails clicking as they connected with the plastic buttons. “Welcome to Ethos College.”

What followed was a brief overview of the college. From Allison, Lennon learned that Drayton’s approach to housing was rather old-fashioned in that each of its colleges (except one) were separated by gender. Those who fell between (there were several genderqueer students among their cohort) were allowed to select the housing they felt most comfortable with.

There were, according to Allison, three residential colleges on Drayton’s campus: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, named after Socrates’s three rhetorical appeals. Logos was the smallest of the three, the only coed college and the most exclusive, as it housed only a handful of Drayton’s most promising students. It was a self-governing college and as such its inhabitants retained special privileges, like the ability to leave the campus when they wanted to. As a rule, nonmembers were forbidden from entering Logos without a formal invitation from a resident. As a result, few of those in Drayton had ever entered through the courtyard gates. Fewer still had been formally invited to live and study there.

The boys’ college, Pathos, was on the southern end of the Twenty-Fifth Square, whereas Ethos was on its northern end. Each of these residences was equipped with a kitchen and dining room, where students could take their meals at any hour of the day (meals at Drayton tended to occur at unusual times—breakfasts were often taken well past midday, lunch in the late hours of the night, and dinner often lapsed into the wee hours of the early morning).

All of the dorms of Ethos College were in the west wing of the building, on the other side of the greater common areas. Lennon walked past a large dining room, with wood-rafter ceilings and a long banquet table. In a small study just down the hall, a few students sat smoking and talking in hushed tones.

The residential wing of Ethos had a decidedly homey quality. Its wood floors were laid with plush Persian runners, the walls lined with well-stocked bookshelves. Allison showed Lennon to her room, at the end of a long corridor. It was sensibly furnished and entirely symmetrical: two beds, two desks, two overstuffed armchairs standing in front of a small hearth. There were even two oak wardrobes, filled with clothes (Lennon would later discover that all of them were tailored to her specific measurements).

Sitting cross-legged on the edge of the bed to the left was a girl that Lennon immediately recognized from the entry exam, the pretty one with the nose ring, which she’d since removed. She had long hair that fell in feathery layers about her shoulders. She was slim, with slightly vacant blue eyes, and she had a gap between her two front teeth that was just wide enough to slide a quarter through. Lennon imagined doing just that, imagined the girl swallowing down the coin, where, in the pit of her stomach, it would be digested.How might I assist you?the girl might’ve asked, in the cheery and robotic monotone of an AI helper.

Looking at her, Lennon thought that almost every girl who had ever lived—every teenager clawing through the bowels of the internet, every middle-aged woman armed with a diet plan and a prayer, every awkward girl who’d sat alone at lunch—had hoped to look like some iteration of her, if only because it would make life that much easier.

“I’m Blaine,” said the girl, her voice gravelly.

“And I’m Lennon.”

“From the entry exam. We sat across from each other.”

“I remember you,” Lennon said. Blaine wasn’t the type that anyone would easily forget. In fact, no one she’d met at Drayton was. Every person she’d encountered so far fell along the spectrum of peculiar, striking, or egregiously attractive, and she couldn’t help but think this was intentional.

“You looked like you knew what you were doing on that exam,” said Blaine.

“I have a decent poker face.”

Blaine laughed. “How’d you end up here?”

Lennon would come to recognize this question as the standard introduction among Drayton students and alumni, who relished trading stories about the strange and impossible ways they’d first come to the campus. Eager to share her story, Lennon told Blaine about the anachronistic telephone booth in the parking lot of the abandoned mall, about Benedict and the elevator that had carried her up to the eighth floor of his two-story house, how its doors had opened to Drayton.

Blaine, as it turned out, was a hospice nurse who worked at a facility in Chicago. She was French by birth but had grown up in the Midwest. She’d received news of her consideration via a call that came through late at night. The voice of her dead grandfather relayed a series of coordinates that led her to a diner just a few blocks from her apartment. There she was greeted by a woman. “She was old, my grandfather’s age, dressed too warm for the weather. Wearing all black. She was expecting me. Said I was late.”

Unlike Lennon’s interview with Benedict, Blaine’s interview was brief, and within fifteen minutes she passed and was ordered to board the L and get off at a stop that, according to Blaine, didn’t exist. At least, she thought it didn’t exist until the empty train cab stopped, abruptly, at an abandoned platform. When she took the elevator upto what she thought was street level, she found herself in Drayton instead. “I thought I was going insane.”

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