Page 5 of An Academy for Liars

“Yes.”

“Tell me more.”

“About Wyatt?”

Benedict appeared, for a moment, disgusted. He waved her off with a flap of his hands. “We don’t need to waste any more time on that man. I know enough of the sob story—pretty little girl leaves herdreams and aspirations to become a bauble, an accessory to the life of a man she,wrongly, believes is more significant than she is. Does that about sum it up?”

Lennon felt like she’d been backhanded across the face. “W-well, I wouldn’t say I was an accessory. I mean, Wyatt and I are engaged—well, we were engaged.”

“What happened?”

“I found him with someone else. Just before coming here.”

“And how did that make you feel?”

It seemed like a stupid question. How would anyone feel when they watched the life they’d built for themselves unravel before their eyes? Lennon answered anyway. “I mean…I wanted to die. In fact, I planned to.”

“Was that the first time you’ve wanted to end your life?”

She shook her head. “I’ve had my…struggles before.”

Benedict nodded, knowingly, and with sympathy that seemed neither forced nor pitying. He produced a box of tissues and passed it to her across the desk. Lennon stared at them, confused for a moment, then realized she was crying. She never cried in front of strangers. Ever. The humiliation alone was enough to keep the tears from flowing. She hadn’t even cried when she’d discovered Wyatt with Sophia in the bathroom. But Benedict had…dismantledsomething deep within her; he’d given her the license to release—grieve, even.

“I want to let you know that you’re free to leave if this is too painful for you,” said Benedict, as Lennon hastily wiped her eyes. “This is an emotionally harrowing experience, and a painful one at that. Few make it this far, and most who do won’t graduate to the final step of the admissions process. If you choose to leave now, you’ll follow in the footsteps of many others. But I’ll warn you that the questions I ask you today are the same questions you’ll ask yourself tomorrow, andthe day after, and decades later, in the twilight years of your life. You’ll never escape them, which is not to say you’ll find answers for them either. But I’m of a mind that the difficult questions should always be asked, whether they can be answered or not. Do you agree?”

“Yes. At least I want to.”

The left edge of Benedict’s mouth twitched twice. “Then I’m happy to say you’ve passed the interview and may now proceed to the final step of your admissions process, the entry exam. Take the elevator in the foyer up to the eighth floor.”

“But this is a two-story house.”

“I’m well aware.”

Lennon stared at him blankly. Benedict stared back. “You’d better be on your way,” he said. “Drayton waits for no one.”

Lennon walked downthe hall, the floorboards groaning beneath her sneakers, and approached the birdcage elevator. It was old and rickety, with brass walls. She stepped into the cabin and dragged the collapsible door shut with a rattle. The buttons on the operating panel ranged from one to eleven. She punched the8with her knuckle and a second, inner set of doors sliced shut behind the grate of the birdcage and the elevator lurched into a shuddering ascent.

It was a relatively short trip. Within a few moments the elevator ground to a stop and its doors trundled open. Golden sunlight spilled inside. Lennon, shaking, stepped out of the cabin and into what she first thought was a cathedral. It was rather dim, but there were windows cut into the stone above, pale sunlight bleeding in through them, laying bright squares of daylight that trailed like stepping stones down a wide corridor where both floor and ceiling canted in opposite directions—the former sloping slightly up and the latter down.

To the left was a large wall mural that vaguely reminded Lennon of Picasso’sGuernica. It depicted a series of grotesque figures—twisted bodies, contused and warped and seemingly seized by the throes of some primal passion. It was rendered in the same spirit as that strange portrait that hung in Benedict’s study, and she wondered if they shared an artist.

Stunned, Lennon turned back to the elevator, only to find a wall of stone behind her.

“Welcome to Drayton.”

Lennon turned to see a spectacled woman seated behind a long, low desk opposite the mural. She was thumbing through an issue ofVanity Fairmagazine—just an ordinary human doing ordinary human things—and Lennon realized, with a great deal of relief, that the place was not entirely divorced from her former reality, though it was perhaps only distantly adjacent to it. The secretary lowered her magazine, folded it shut, and smiled.

“Your name?” Her accent, thick and husky, was decidedly southern.

“It’s Lennon Carter.”

The secretary nodded and keyed something into a wheezing brick of a computer that would’ve been sorely outdated more than a decade ago. Then she stood. “Do follow me.”

Together, they walked down a long corridor where a run of stained-glass windows offered distorted glimpses of the campus beyond. There was a large square, more than two miles across, densely overgrown with live oaks and magnolias, a few scraggly palms growing low to the dirt. Set around the square were a number of old buildings, townhomes and mansions mostly.

It took Lennon a moment to identify what she was looking at as a campus, composed of the square and tall brick townhomes set around it, all of them overgrown with ivy like the phone booth where she’dfirst received word of Drayton. The other buildings on the square reminded her of the early work of Frank Lloyd Wright, with flat roofs low-slung over wraparound porches. Paths—which seemed like piazzas under the dense canopy of the moss-draped oak trees—threaded across the square like arteries. People—students, Lennon presumed—gathered in the sprawling courtyards between the buildings. Their attire was varied enough to dispel any notion of a strictly enforced uniform, but they were all smartly dressed, in their tailored slacks belted at the waist, well-cut blazers and thick-rimmed glasses, tastefully wrinkled linen shirts with the sleeves rolled up to the elbows.

A few of those gathered on the lawn had spread out picnic blankets and kicked off their loafers, stuffed their socks into their shoes, opting to lounge barefoot across the plush grass that carpeted the courtyards, drinking in what little sunlight shone through the dense canopy of the trees. One girl—a pretty brunette in a dark wool pencil skirt—was in the process of peeling off a pair of stockings, like a snake shedding its skin.

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