Page 4 of An Academy for Liars

“I’m not in any pain.”

“It’ll come,” said Benedict, and a sharp chill slit down her spine like the blade of a razor. Lennon wondered, shifting uncomfortably in her chair, if she was entirely safe in this strange house with this strange man who was supposed to be from Drayton. What if this was all some elaborate sex-trafficking scheme wherein the targets were “gifted and talented” kids who’d never received their magic school acceptance letters and grew up to become depressed, praise-starved, thoroughly gullible adults.

Benedict disappeared down the hall and into the kitchen. There was the clattering of pots and pans, water running and later boiling. Unsure of what to do, Lennon turned her attention to the strange portrait hanging over Benedict’s desk. The lower half of the painting was rendered in hyperrealistic detail, depicting a man dressed in aflesh-colored tweed blazer, and a crisp white shirt buttoned up to the throat. But the upper half of the image was distorted, as if the artist had—in a moment of great frustration—taken up a wet washcloth and viciously smeared the thick layers of oil paint, as if to wipe the canvas clean. There were stretched and gaping eye sockets, a ruined mouth, the twisted contour of what might have been a nose, but it was hard for Lennon to say.

“A former student painted it for me,” said Benedict. He stood in the doorway, holding a breakfast tray. On it: a delicately folded cloth napkin, a bowl of pasta, a glass of wine, and a small dish stacked with pale cookies.

Glancing at the spread he’d prepared, Lennon realized she must’ve been gazing at that painting longer than she’d realized. “It’s…compelling.”

“Quite,” said Benedict, and he set the tray down in front of her, taking a seat in the chair beneath the portrait. He nodded to the food. “Go on, then.”

Lennon ate. The pasta was herbaceous and a little too lemony.

“How do you like it?” Benedict inquired.

“It’s very good,” said Lennon, chewing mechanically. She hated eating in front of people, and strangers especially, but she didn’t want to appear rude.

“You grew up in Brunswick, Georgia,” said Benedict, watching her eat. His eyes were wide and grave. “Yours was the only Black family within your neighborhood, a half-built subdivision that went under in the last recession. The movers you hired warned your parents—as a kindness—that families like yours didn’t move into neighborhoods like that. Your father was a high school history teacher. He and your mother were both avid bird-watchers. Do you hold these facts to be true?”

Lennon faltered with the fork raised halfway to her mouth. “How did you know all of this? I don’t understand.”

“You don’t understand the mechanics of how a person on one side of the world can take a call from someone on the other. But you trust your own ears and you know that it’s true. This is no different. You don’t understand the mechanics of how you came to be here, but it is real, and it is happening, so all you need to do is trust that someone, or something, more informed than you must have made this happen.”

“So you’re saying this is all some type of magic?”

“May I remind you that I’m the interviewer,” said Benedict, not unkindly, though his tone was rather firm. “I ask the questions for now.”

Lennon fell silent.

“When you were young, you would often wake in the morning to see your father standing on the back porch of the house, peering into a pair of binoculars, bird-watching. One day, he spotted a nest of starlings in the branches of an oak tree. What did your father teach you to do to the starlings?”

“I don’t see how these questions relate to my admission.”

“You’re not meant to. Just answer them as best you can. What did he teach you to do to the starlings, Lennon?”

“Crush their eggs,” she whispered tonelessly, her cheeks flushed from the shame of it.

“And what about the starlings that had already hatched—the little ones huddled in their nests among a graveyard of cracked eggs? What did he teach you to do to them?”

“He told me to take their heads between thumb and pointer finger, and twist them, fast and hard, the way you’d turn a bottle cap.”

“And why did your father tell you to do this?”

“Because…because the starlings were a menace to other birds.They drove them away, stole their nests, and spread disease. He called them vermin and told me that it was imperative to sacrifice a few to save many.”

Benedict smiled, and it was an entirely different expression than the one he had welcomed her with at the door. So different, in fact, that Lennon considered the idea that this was the first moment he had been truly genuine. “You walk down a narrow lane. Someone walks toward you from the opposite direction. The path isn’t wide enough to accommodate both of you, standing shoulder to shoulder. Are you the one that steps aside?”

“I—I’m not sure.”

“This is a yes-or-no question. Are you the one that steps aside, Lennon?”

“Yes.”

Benedict appeared appeased. He nodded to her engagement ring, an heirloom that had belonged to the dead great-aunt of someone significant on Wyatt’s father’s side of the family. The center stone was nearly two carats, and the band was encrusted with other smaller stones that glittered brilliantly when the sunlight struck them. The first time she’d slipped it on her hand, it felt heavy. “You’re married?”

“Not yet,” or likely ever—on account of the fact that her fiancé was fucking one of her supposed friends—but she didn’t say that last bit out loud. “I got engaged over the winter.”

“To Wyatt Banks?”

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