Page 41 of An Academy for Liars

“So you’re saying I took a step in the right direction? That my getting high wasn’t useless, after all?”

He shrugged. “You tapped into something. If you can learn how to control that, to command it the way you do the mind of, say, a rat, you can learn to raise a gate on command.”

“You sound so sure.”

“You’ve done it before. You’ll do it again. But only when you believe you can.”

After Lennon was discharged from the hospital, the days passed steadily. Lennon dutifully attended her classes, managing the workload as best she could, staying up late in the evenings to finish lengthy required readings for metaphysics, sketching a series of crude and, at times, frightening self-portraits as homework for Art and Ego, and generally struggling to catch up and account for the time she’d missed while in the infirmary.

Early-morning meditation remained a grueling chore, persuasionwith Dante a challenge. Her days became a blur of classes, punctuated by sessions with Benedict in Utah that proved just as exhausting and thankless as they did before her overdose. If she achieved anything from that near-deadly trip, the rewards certainly weren’t obvious to her.

Lennon saw little of Blaine during these dreary weeks. Their schedules misaligned so that whenever Lennon was leaving for her classes in the morning, Blaine was dead asleep or only just returning. And whenever Lennon retired in the evening, Blaine was already gone, often not coming back until the wee hours of the morning, skulking and sneaking quietly into bed, like she was a teenager who’d been out past curfew. So it was something of a surprise when Lennon returned home after a particularly long and punishing session with Benedict to discover Blaine lounging on her bed.

“Where the hell have you been?” she inquired no sooner than Lennon kicked off her shoes. Blaine stared at her now, her brow creased with worry, like Lennon was a slip of tissue paper that could be blown away by the wind at any moment. Sawyer was just as anxious. Lennon often caught him watching her during the classes they shared, and every night he made a point to stop by her dorm and check in on her, as if he thought she’d die alone seizing in her bed if he didn’t.

Lennon couldn’t blame either of them, given what had happened. But their vigilance was a constant reminder of her own failure, just how stupid she’d been to risk her life to call an elevator that hadn’t even appeared, despite her best and most earnest efforts. And there was the guilt to contend with too. Guilt for what she’d put them through, for how scared they must’ve been that night on the green, when her heart had briefly stopped beating. She’d apologized several times, of course, but it still didn’t seem like enough.

“I’m not the only one who’s been out,” said Lennon, shirking thespotlight. “Where were you last night? And for that matter, the night before that too?”

“You answer first.”

“Studying, worrying, descending into complete and utter despair. Your turn.”

“I was hanging out with Kieran and Emerson,” said Blaine.

“Emerson?” Lennon raised an eyebrow, but in truth she wasn’t entirely surprised. It wasn’t uncommon to see Blaine dining with the members of Logos House, who seemed almost eerily drawn to her, like moths to a light in the night. So much so that Blaine once expressed to Lennon that it was difficult to befriend anyone else. “Logos is still courting you?”

Blaine gave a noncommittal shrug. “They really want me in.”

“But why?” Lennon blurted, and then—realizing just how rude and jealous that sounded—attempted to salvage the question. “I’m sorry, what I meant to say was—”

“That I’m not top of the class? It’s okay, Lennon. We all see one another’s grades. Nothing’s secret here. You can speak freely. I’m not hurt.” She said this last bit in a way that argued otherwise. But then she smiled forcibly. “Maybe they just fell prey to my charm.”

“Well, we can’t fault them for that,” said Lennon.

They carried their conversation out through the common area and to the communal bathroom they were all made to share, something that had taken Lennon several weeks to adjust to. Back in Denver with Wyatt, she’d had a large and luxurious primary bathroom with a claw-foot tub and infrared sauna. It was a jarring adjustment to go from that to a dorm lavatory, but Blaine’s company made the situation better.

Earlier in the semester, when they saw each other more regularly, they’d made a habit of doing their nightly wind-down together,meeting in the bathroom to perform their skin-care routines (the commissary on campus had a surprisingly good variety of products) and gossip about the goings-on of the day. Typically, they saved their most salacious topics of conversation for the shared shower stalls, where the hiss of the water made it impossible for anyone else to overhear.

But Blaine was uncharacteristically quiet that night. She turned to face the showerhead, her back to Lennon. She looked on the verge of tears.

“Are you all right?” Lennon asked.

Blaine tilted her head to the slick green bath tiles that covered the floor and walls. The water, burning hot the way she liked it, reddened her pale skin.

“I’m fine,” she said, turning the water off. It was a remarkably short shower for her, and Lennon had the suspicion she’d ended it early to avoid answering her question. She slipped out of the shower stall, taking her towel off a hook nearby. “It’s just…sometimes I feel so lonely here, you know?”

Lennon found this statement odd, given that Blaine was inarguably one of the most popular first years on campus. But it was also odd because Lennon felt so different. To her, Drayton was beginning to feel like…home almost.

Lennon said none of this to Blaine, wanting to avoid hurting her any more than she’d already been hurt (though by whom or what, Lennon didn’t know). It seemed to her that since the day they’d first met, Blaine had been carrying with her some heavy and invisible burden, as if wearing it strapped across her frail shoulder blades, perpetually stooped under the weight of whatever unspeakable thing it was that she refused to put down. And as time went on, either the burden had become heavier, or she had become weaker, or both.

Maybe, Lennon thought, it was the stress of their workloadgetting to her, the way it was getting to Ian and all of the first years, herself included. Or perhaps Blaine had some secret lover that was slowly breaking her heart—that seemed more likely, what with all the nights she’d disappeared from her bed. But that didn’t explain why she looked so sick and sad all of the time. Unless, of course…it did.

“Blaine, is someone hurting you?”

No answer.

Lennon frowned, finished rinsing away the last of the shaving cream beneath her armpits. “Blaine? Hello?”

---