Page 25 of An Academy for Liars

Lennon watched, awed, as the word tore and faded, the hookedrthat held the word together tearing clean apart, the tatters of the other letters fraying, then fading until all that remained on the air was a faint haze where the word had hung just moments before.

Emerson stubbed out her cigarette on the edge of the table, where there were already a number of charred semicircles burnt into the wood. She flicked the butt into the kitchen sink with frightening precision. “You brought a plus-one?”

“Kieran said I could.” Blaine sidestepped out of the way, as if to show her off to the room. “This is Lennon.”

“I’m familiar,” said Emerson, and then to Lennon: “We share an advisor. Dr. Lowe. He told me about you.”

The idea that Dante had been talking about her sent a strange little thrill up her spine. “Good things, I hope?”

“Mostly,” she said, and any interest she had in Lennon must’ve died there, because she turned away and started chatting with Blaine. Feeling awkward—and a little abandoned—Lennon found her way across the kitchen to Sawyer.

“I didn’t think this was really your scene,” said Lennon, edging up beside him.

“It’s not. But I’m not above being courted.”

“Is that what this is?”

“Of course, can’t you tell? All the drinks and the drugs and the finger foods and finery. We’re all being thoroughly groomed,” said Sawyer, and then, thinking better of himself, frowned and said, “Well, maybe not you.”

It was a known fact that Lennon ranked low among her fellow first years. At Drayton, grades were posted publicly on a bulletin board in the lobby of Irvine Hall, and updated weekly at nine in the morning, just before classes began. Perhaps it was meant to bemotivating, but to Lennon it was nothing more than a weekly exercise in humiliation.

“At least you won’t have to deal with all of this,” said Sawyer bitterly. “All of us sycophants climbing desperately over the corpses of our lessers on the ascent to the top.”

“Poetic.”

“But sadly true. And it only gets worse with time. The competition. The desperation. I mean, look at them.” Sawyer gestured to the throng, milling around the dining table where Emerson sat, a few men engaging Blaine by the fridge. “They’re desperate and I can’t even blame them.”

When a fresh stream of students entered the room, Sawyer nodded toward the back door off the kitchen and Lennon followed him out into the courtyard, where the crowds were thinner.

On their way out, Kieran slipped something into Lennon’s hand: a small baggie filled with shriveled fungi. “On the house,” he said to her with a wink. “But if you want more, you know where to find me.”

They debated about whether or not to take the drugs. It had been a long time since Lennon had done any psychedelics, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to risk the headache of a bad trip. Ultimately, it was Sawyer who got them started with a whispered “Fuck it.”

He sprinkled a few of the shrooms into his mouth and chewed with a grimace. Then he held out the baggie to her. “Come on, don’t make me do it alone.”

“This is a bad idea,” said Lennon, but she took the shrooms anyway, chewing and swallowing as quickly as she could to get the bitter taste out of her mouth.

“How did you end up here?” Lennon asked, mostly to keep the new quiet between them from turning heavy and awkward.

“What do you mean?” Sawyer asked.

“Like how did you get invited to study at Drayton? And who were you before you did?”

“I worked as a librarian in Connecticut. And that’s where it happened for me…where I first found out I was being considered by Drayton. I was emptying the returns bin one morning, and on top of the stack of books there was an envelope, wax-sealed, with my name on it. Inside was a letter congratulating me on moving to the next round of my admissions process. I did my interview with Dr. Lowe, actually.”

“And how did that go?”

“Oh, it was brutal. He knew everything about me. Worse yet, I felt like he was taking things from me instead of just telling me about myself.”

“That’s how I felt when interviewing with Benedict,” said Lennon. “I became like an object. A box of junk—all these dreams and hopes and secrets—to be rifled through. It was horrible. It hurt.”

As they talked, they made slow laps around the courtyard. It was dark, but the waxy leaves of the magnolia tree were limned into brilliance by the moonlight, or maybe it was just the shrooms heightening everything. Walking with Sawyer, Lennon felt a kind of peace that she had only ever associated with being alone. It was as if Sawyer wasn’t a person at all, just an extension of her, or she of him. She felt delightfully less than real, like an airy figment conjured up from nothing, free of the horrible weight of being. In the garden she became like a fixture of the school—like the live oaks and the magnolias, the stone face of Irvine Hall half-hidden behind the trees. For the first time since arriving at Drayton, Lennon felt truly at home.

As the night dragged on, they traded stories about their childhoods. She learned that Sawyer had grown up in Connecticut, wherehis father ran a farm. His mother, a former rare bookseller, had immigrated from Taiwan. They were the only people in their rural town who were anything other than white. In turn, Lennon told Sawyer all about Wyatt and what she’d left behind in Colorado—an engagement and half-planned wedding and a life she was trying to make herself want.

“And what do you want now?” Sawyer had asked her, and his voice was husky, as if he was falling asleep or just waking up. When he laid down on the grass, Lennon laid down beside him, a slightly foolish decision given that the dirt around the green was thoroughly pocked with the hills of fire ants. But Lennon—made relaxed and romantic by the shrooms—did not think of that then. “Who did you come here to be?”

“I want…to be significant,” said Lennon, and even to her own ear, she sounded drunk. She wondered if she was even making any sense and decided that she didn’t care. “I just want to matter. But everyone who matters hurts people. It’s like you said…all of us tramping on the bodies of others to get to a place where we don’t actively hate ourselves.”

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