Page 18 of An Academy for Liars

She approached him with a drink that he accepted. “How’d you find your way here? To Drayton?”

He shrugged and downed his drink in a single large swallow, rosemary sprig, ice, and all. “I couldn’t have found my way anywhere else if I’d tried. I’m Ian.”

“Lennon,” she said, sipping her own cocktail.

Ian, as it turned out, was from Columbus, Ohio. He’d worked as a convenience store clerk and had received the call from Drayton while on the clock. Ian had high cheekbones, a protruding Adam’s apple, and a blurry diamond tattooed beneath his left eye that looked, suspiciously, like a coverup for a teardrop. He looked like the sort of boy that Lennon would’ve dated in high school to piss off her mom.

As she listened to Ian speak—in a kind of drunken ramble—Lennon recognized that he wasn’t particularly kind. He spoke with the sort of inflated self-assurance that most deeply insecure people do. She was especially drawn to him for this reason—she had always liked men who had a point to prove to themselves or to her or the whole world—and as Ian rambled, she found herself leaning closer, sipping the froth off the top of her cocktail, posing the unspoken offers people are apt to when they’re just drunk and brave enough. Eventually, he asked her a few questions about her past, clearly trying to confirm she was single. And Lennon obliged, offering up the story of her newly ended relationship with Wyatt.

They didn’t bother to go back to her room at Ethos, or his at Pathos. Instead, they found a secluded corner of some overgrown courtyard far from the noise of the garden party. Quickly, and in the midnight dark, they did what they had come there to do. There were no words exchanged, no discussion, and it was rough and quick, and Lennon spent the time she wasn’t on her knees with her chest pressed painfully to the moss-eaten bricks of the crumbling courtyard wall as Ian moved behind her. When they finished, only a few moments after they’d first begun, Lennon stripped off her sweater and used it to wipe her inner thighs, then she tied that same sweater around her waist (a little gross, but she didn’t know what else to do with it), pulled up her pants, and buttoned them.

“This was fun,” she said, because it seemed like the sort of thing she was supposed to say after an encounter like that one. In truth, Lennon hadn’t had many hookups at all. The ones she remembered she’d been too drunk to say much of anything after the deed was done. She wasn’t like Wyatt and Sophia. She didn’t know how to be the sort of person who formed hidden attachments behind a front of nonchalance, who kept sex secret and apart from everything elsein their lives. But she desperately wanted to be, if only to sever whatever threads still connected her and Wyatt. To prove—more to herself than anyone else—that she could do the same things he did. That she could hurt him too.

Ian broke into an easy smile, tucking himself back into his pants. He really was handsome, in his own way, and she could tell that he knew it. “See you around,” he said.

Lennon returned to the party and found that the atmosphere had turned strange and eerie in the brief time she’d been away. A fog hung low to the treetops. Students lay out on the lawn, stargazing and sipping green glasses of absinthe. The professors watched them, looking rather drunk themselves, cheeks ruddy from wine and the thick heat of the evening. In the tent, a few students were attempting to perform the Charleston with varying measures of success.

Several whiskey sours later, as fireworks erupted in the distance, and the last of the partygoers dispersed themselves to their dorms, Lennon stepped into one of the many phone booths scattered about the campus, all of them decidedly vintage, like the one she’d stumbled upon in the mall parking lot the night she’d received news of her acceptance. She dialed Wyatt’s number. It took her a few tries to get it right, as she could barely remember all of the digits. Like most people, she had come to rely on her cell phone to remember everything for her—phone numbers, dates, addresses, events. But she hadn’t seen a single working smartphone on campus. As far as she was concerned, it seemed like there was no service within the barriers of Drayton, no means for her to reach the world beyond it, apart from these strange black telephone booths. (At a later date, Lennon would realize just how lucky she was that her call had rung through at all. Most didn’t, and almost every other time she’d tried to make a call in one of these booths, the line had kept ringing and ringing with no answer, or she’draised the receiver to her ear in wait of a dial tone but had heard nothing but the roar of static.)

Lennon cradled the phone to her ear with her shoulder, picked anxiously at her nails as she listened to the dial tone ring. Through the windows, she watched the fireworks erupting in the distance, casting the thinning crowds into sharply contrasting shadows.

Wyatt picked up just as she was about to go to voicemail.

“Hello?” he said thickly, and his voice sounded like she’d woken him up out of a dead sleep. She wondered if she had. Wondered what time it was beyond the confines of Drayton. Did time move differently within the campus? She wasn’t sure.

“Did I wake you?” she asked, and she hoped she didn’t sound as drunk or as frightened as she felt.

There was a long silence. “Len?”

“Yes,” she said, and felt the hot pressure of tears in her throat. “It’s me.”

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m at school.”

Strangely, Wyatt didn’t ask the expected question—What school and where and what are you studying there?It was less that he didn’t think to, and more that he wasn’t allowed to. As though the words that he might’ve asked with had been suddenly revoked. “When are you coming home?”

“Maybe soon. Maybe never.”

She asked him about Sophia.

He didn’t answer.

So she asked him again. “I saw you two. In the bathroom together. Why won’t you just admit it?”

The static on the line thickened in response to her question.Wyatt didn’t say anything for a very long time. Lennon considered hanging up.

“Are you there?”

“I want you to come home,” said Wyatt. “We’ll try this all again.”

“Wyatt—”

“We’ll go to therapy.”

“I was already in therapy.”

“No, I mean together. We’ll go together, and we’ll find a way to fix all of this.”

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