Page 24 of An Academy for Liars

Lennon hurled a pillow at Blaine’s head, which she dodged with ease, laughing. “Shutup.”

Just then, there was the sharp rap of knuckles on wood. A tall blond boy nudged the door open. Lennon immediately recognized him as Kieran, one of the three students from Logos who’d been camped out in the waiting room outside of Dante’s office. Lennon wondered what he was doing in Ethos College. As a rule, the logicians kept to themselves. They were rarely spotted in the central dining hall, even though they had a table reserved for their use only.

Kieran’s gaze went to Blaine. “You still coming tonight? Emerson was asking.”

Blaine shrugged, noncommittal. “Can Lennon come too?”

Kieran’s gaze went to Lennon. “You’re Dr. Lowe’s advisee, right?”

“Yeah,” said Lennon.

“Bring her,” said Kieran to Blaine and then he shut the door.

The moment he was gone, Lennon turned on Blaine. “What the hell was that?”

“They’re throwing a party at Logos tonight,” said Blaine. “Invite only. I think it’s a way for them to scope out prospects.”

“I’m not going,” said Lennon, a little offended that she hadn’t received an invite. Not that she would’ve been expecting one. She knew she was solidly mediocre, if not less than that.

“Come on,” said Blaine, “have some fun for once. Don’t you want to know what’s going on in Logos?”

“Not really. Secret societies full of white people aren’t really my thing. Not a fan of the wholeEyes Wide Shutvibe.”

“It’s not like that.”

“How would you know?”

“I mean, first off, Adan’s a member.”

“Is that supposed to comfort me?”

“And secondly, Logos is primarily anacademicsociety. They take the best of the first years.”

“Did you read that in their welcome pamphlet?”

“I’m just saying it could be fun,” said Blaine, and she grabbed for the box of tissues on their shared nightstand, tossed it across the room to Lennon. “Clean yourself up. Let’s go out for once.”

Blaine convinced Lennon to put on an oversized white button-down, styled as a dress, over a pair of sheer black stockings. Somehow,she’d procured a tube of lipstick, which she used as blush, rubbing it furiously into Lennon’s cheekbones, and a pencil eyeliner, which she painstakingly smudged and blurred into Lennon’s waterline until she was satisfied.

“It’s really not fair,” said Blaine. “You look unreal.”

Lennon laughed her off. But when she turned to look at herself in the mirror, she saw that Blaine was right. There was something unreal about her. Something changed. A vacancy in the eyes that made her believe, for a split second, that her own reflection didn’t belong to her. That the girl in the mirror was not really her at all, but a replacement, like the aberration. But the reflection in the mirror had eyes, and when she smiled it smiled obediently back at her.

“That’s it,” said Blaine, grinning. “Now you’re ready.”

It was nearing midnight by the time the girls left Ethos College. Blaine, who linked arms with Lennon, adopted a fairly brisk pace because it was cold out and neither of them was wearing much. Eventually, they reached the deep of Drayton Square, which to Lennon looked less like a garden and more like a dense forest of moss-draped oaks and magnolias.

It was here that Lennon first laid eyes upon the notorious Logos House, standing in a small square clearing. The house was tall and narrow, its red bricks grown over with ivy. It had several large windows, lit from the inside, curtains drawn shut over all of them. The front door was painted with a crest, one Lennon remembered being embroidered on the pockets of the students whom she’d chatted with in the waiting room outside of Dante’s office: a snake eating its own tail with relish, one red eye open wide.

“I’ve seen this house before,” said Lennon. “In a dream.”

“If you’re developing psychic powers I’m going to need some lottery numbers. Quick,” said Blaine and she opened the front door andushered Lennon into a dim foyer with a high ceiling, and dark hickory floors. A pall of cigarette smoke hung blue on the air. For a party, it was surprisingly quiet, the sound of voices was muffled and hushed. From the adjacent sitting room, a record player loosed rambling chords of staticky jazz.

Blaine walked them through the house like she knew where she was going—past a parlor and dining room—and through to the kitchen, where it seemed like the bulk of the party was assembled. There were about twenty students there, some that Lennon recognized, others that she didn’t. Ian and Nadine were present, which wasn’t particularly surprising given their excellent performance in Dante’s class. Sawyer was there too, nursing a watery cocktail at the far corner of the kitchen, his back pressing into the cabinets in what seemed to Lennon a pitiful attempt to make himself small and ignorable.

But there was one person in particular who caught Lennon’s eye: Emerson O’Neill, the president of Logos, sitting cross-legged on the dining table. Her white shirt was fastened closed with two buttons, just above the navel, and offered a glimpse of her sternum, the hard plate of bone impressing itself from the underside of her skin, a fossil emerging from limestone.

When Emerson raised her gaze, Lennon would see—through the sharp glare of the glasses that sat perched on her nose—that one of her pupils looked like a pierced egg yolk, the black bleeding into the pale blue of her iris. She held a cigarette pinched between her knuckles and smoke hung on the air around her in tangled ribbons, like the threads of a torn spiderweb. As Lennon stepped into the room, they moved—wending and curling in on themselves—in such a way as to spell out a single word in cursive:limerence.

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