Page 2 of An Academy for Liars

Lennon made herself smile.

Sophia was good at performing kindness (or maybe she was kind, and Lennon too bitter to admit it). The two of them had been friends once. Or something close to friends anyway. Sophia had transferred into the University of Colorado just after Wyatt joined the faculty. Sophia was married, but her husband often traveled for work and wasn’t around much, so in their early days in Denver, Sophia was a constant presence. Lennon hadn’t minded this, as she found that she liked Wyatt better when Sophia was there. He smiled more when she was around, and they quarreled less.

But things had changed over time. While Lennon cycled through therapists and endured brief stints at various hospitals and rehab facilities around the city, Sophia (a psychologist) went on to secure research grants, publish papers in well-respected journals, defend her dissertation, and secure a coveted internship at the University of Colorado Hospital, where she worked now.

The two fell out of touch. Wyatt was the only bridge between them at this point, but he seemed increasingly content to observe the separate spheres of his life with Lennon and his life at the university. So Sophia had become less their friend, and more Wyatt’s, specifically.The two confided in each other as colleagues, shared in the varying triumphs and miseries of their respective fields—Wyatt divulging the difficulties of his research, its lack of funding, the grants he’d wanted and failed to acquire, and Sophia sharing the rigors of her life as a clinician, struggling through the last half of her internship, pinning her hopes on the faculty positions that she hoped would open in neighboring colleges. Lennon was largely left alone.

The party settled for dinner on the back patio. Lennon and Wyatt sat at either end of a long banquet table. Over dinner, Lennon watched her fiancé through the faint tendrils of pot smoke that traced through the air between them. He had the kind of startling charisma she had always coveted, a certain thrall that drew people like moths to light and made everyone want to be known and loved by him. She could see it now, as he chatted among his peers, single-handedly commanding the table so that even those on the opposite end of it craned out of their seats and strained forward to catch his every word. They were the kind of people who mistook greatness for its shadow. As long as they were in the presence of brilliance, they too were brilliant by proxy. Lennon knew this about them because she was once the same—struck dumb with awe and utterly convinced that Wyatt’s presence alone was enough to elevate her above the murk of her own mediocrity.

Lennon had been a college freshman then—dewy-eyed and jejune—studying English literature at New York University. Wyatt had been a poet in residence at one of the neighboring colleges. She had attended one of his readings, and he’d taken an interest in her because, apparently, she looked like an actress from a French art house film he’d loved as a teenager. Lennon, for her part, had never watched it (and never bothered to either).

Nevertheless, they fell in love the way most people do—which is to say they felt as though they were experiencing love for the firsttime. It was all so fast and intense, and Lennon had the suspicion that this was the root cause of her unraveling. She had learned, at a young age, that change was her trigger. It could be change for better or for worse—it didn’t matter; her body interpreted the stimuli in the same way. So when the panic attacks first began, she wasn’t entirely surprised. What did surprise her, though, was their violence. The tears and the vomiting and the vertigo. She stopped counting how many classes she’d missed, lying naked on the bathroom floor, waiting for the waves of terror to subside.

By the end of that semester, the first of her sophomore year, she found herself in a psychiatric ward, where she would remain for eight weeks. Lennon dropped out of college shortly after she was discharged, on the recommendation of her psychiatrist and the urging of her family members and Wyatt, who by this time had become almost as close as family to her. Perhaps they all knew what Lennon only allowed herself to accept months later: she wasn’t fit to continue on at college. She was not brilliant in the ways that Wyatt, George, and Sophia were. She was neither an artist nor a scholar nor even a particularly promising college student. She was simply very, very sick.

Her parents urged her to move back home to their house in a Florida retirement community, which sounded like hell to Lennon. So, when Wyatt invited her to move to Denver, Colorado, where he had taken a job as a professor in the University of Colorado’s MFA program, Lennon decided to go with him. She moved into his house—carefully slotting herself into the empty spaces of his life—and became, officially, his live-in girlfriend. Or, unofficially, his housewife.

She was twenty.

Lennon plucked a smoking joint from the cinders of a nearby ashtray and toked. Bored, she shifted her attention down the table and noticed that Wyatt and Sophia were nowhere to be seen. This didn’tarouse her suspicion at first. It was a casual event; half of those in attendance had already finished their meals and dispersed to different corners of the house. A few professors puzzled over the contents of Wyatt’s bookshelves. Grad students stood around the koi pond smoking weed, watching the fish circle. A group of poets huddled together in the kitchen, gossiping over the rims of their cocktail glasses.

Twenty minutes passed. Sophia and Wyatt remained missing.

Lennon dragged on her joint once more and got up to look for them, a part of her knowing already what she would find when she did. She wasn’t sure what it was about this night that made her want to confirm her darkest suspicions. But it imbued her with a kind of bravery she had not known before. In the end, it didn’t matter what led her to find them together in the primary bathroom—Wyatt hunched over Sophia, his bare belly pressed hard to the small of her back—only that she did.

Sophia’s trousers were pooled about her ankles, her lace panties pulled taut between her straining thighs. She was smiling and saying the nice things that men like to hear when they’re inside you. The sorts of things Lennon could never bring herself to say about Wyatt, not because they weren’t true (though maybe they weren’t) but because she didn’t know how to say them in a way that made themseemtrue. But Sophia did, and Wyatt responded in turn. They moved together as one, and as Sophia pressed forward the edge of the countertop cut deep into her stomach and her breath fogged the mirror.

It was dark in the bathroom, so neither Wyatt nor Sophia noticed Lennon in the doorway, or the fact that her reflection disobeyed her once again, breaking the tether that bound likeness to master. It was the same eyeless aberration that had appeared earlier that evening, and when it met Lennon’s gaze, it grinned.

Lennon left theparty. She edged past the koi pond and the grad students who encircled it, down the long driveway, and stepped out into the street, where Wyatt’s car was parked parallel to the sidewalk a few houses down.

It was a silver Porsche 911, a hand-me-down gift from Wyatt’s father to commemorate his successful dissertation defense. Wyatt had never allowed Lennon to drive it. He didn’t trust her behind the wheel or with much of anything, really. To him, everything she did (unplugging the iron before they left to run errands) or said (“I love you, the way you deserve to be loved”) was cast in a hard shadow of uncertainty.

Lennon unlocked the doors of Wyatt’s car and climbed inside. The leather of the seat was cold against her bare thighs. She didn’t check the mirrors before slipping the key into the ignition. But her gaze flickered back to the house. Though she didn’t know it then, this was the last she’d see of it for some time.

She began to drive. Aimlessly at first—letting the car drift fromempty lane to empty lane—and then with purpose, pressing down on the gas pedal, picking up speed, the suburbs—the trim little lawns and tasteful houses, the organic grocery stores and Citizens Banks, the Mattress Firms and storage facilities—smearing past the windows in a blur. She thought a bit about the aberration she’d seen in the mirror of the bathroom. The girl with no eyes who was her but…not. And Lennon wondered what she wanted, or if she was some harbinger of bad fortune, or if not that, then the cause of it.

Her thoughts returned to Wyatt.

What she realized then as she sat in his car was that she had been so obsessed with trying to bridge the gap between them—to prove herself precocious and smart and worthy enough to be the recipient of his love—that she’d made the grave error of mistaking the want of closeness for closeness itself. But one was not a sufficient substitute for the other. Her love—or her yearning for it—was not, and would never be, enough, which is why Wyatt was with Sophia tonight, and not her.

By the time Lennon reached the abandoned mall on the cusp of the suburbs, she knew what she was preparing to do. There were blood thinners in the glove compartment, prescription strength. Wyatt kept them there after suffering a pulmonary embolism—years ago, before he met Lennon—that very nearly killed him. He’d warned her once to make sure that she never mixed them up with her antidepressants—the pills looked similar—because the blood thinners had no antidote. If you overdosed on them, there was nothing any doctor or hospital could do for you, apart from watch you slowly bleed out from the inside.

Surely, Lennon thought, downing a bottle would do the trick.

She decided she would find some bathroom stall or stockroom at the heart of the place where there would be no one to disturb her. No one to intervene, which should’ve been a good thing…but as Lennonstepped out into the deserted parking lot, intervention was exactly what she wanted. A sign, a symbol, the grasping hand of some meddling but benevolent god who would reach down through a break in the clouds and shake her senseless, until she was forced to believe—really and truly—that her life had meaning and that she was destined for something more than mediocrity. She wanted salvation and she found it in the form of a phone booth half-devoured by crawling ivy, standing in the flickering halo of one of the last streetlights in the parking lot that was still shining.

The booth was oak and old-fashioned with yellow stained-glass windows so thoroughly fogged that even if there had been a person within, Lennon likely wouldn’t have been able to see them. The leaves of the ivy plant that bound the booth stirred and bristled, though there was no wind that night. As Lennon stood staring, the phone began to ring, a shrill and tinny sound like silver spoons striking the sides of so many small bells.

Lennon decided, at first, to ignore this and started toward the mall with the pill bottle in hand, but the phone kept ringing, louder and louder, as if with increasing urgency. She stopped, turned to the booth, then walked toward it, reluctantly at first, half hoping the ringing would stop before she reached it. But it persisted.

Lennon drew open the collapsible doors of the phone booth, stepped inside, and closed them behind her. Its interior was oddly warm and humid, and there was a sulfurous scent thick in the air. The phone was an old black rotary. Its receiver quivered in its cradle with the force of the ringing. Lennon raised it to her ear. There was a sound like static on the line that Lennon recognized as the distant roar of waves breaking. Then a voice: “Do you still have your name?” it asked, as if a name were a thing that could be misplaced, like a wallet or a pair of keys.

She faltered, wondering if this was some sort of prank call or trick question. “It’s…Lennon?”

“Lennon what?”

She grasped for the rest of it, but it didn’t come. She was really high. “Who is this?”

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