Page 65 of An Academy for Liars

Those weeks leadingup to final exams were harried and miserable. It was unseasonably hot and the humidity was thick. Every time Lennon left Logos—to attend a class or study in the library—she became a feast for the swarming sand gnats that amassed in dense, buzzing clouds around the campus. She thought of Dante often and hated herself for it. After their almost kiss, he’d all but cut her off. He delayed their advisory meetings, which were supposed to occur every week. His office hours were postponed indefinitely. In class, he never made eye contact with her and always left the moment he was done lecturing, perpetually double-booked or late to some task that required his immediate attention. Every appointment Lennon tried to schedule with his secretary was promptly canceled. And once, Lennon had spotted him cutting across campus and had attempted to flag him down. But either Dante hadn’t seen her or, more likely, had intentionally chosen to ignore her, a slight that stung more than Lennon cared to admit.

But despite this abrupt and cruel shunting, Lennon’s feelings for him didn’t diminish.

Quite the opposite, actually.

As a rule, she had always despised the feeling of falling in love. Her experience with Dante was no exception to this, but her resentment toward him—a feeling so strong it could almost be called hatred—was an anomaly and she felt so stupid for allowing him to occupy so much of her headspace, especially now that it was so painfully obvious just how little she mattered to him.

Finals week began, and the campus buzzed with the building anticipation of a long holiday break. Everyone but Lennon seemed excited to return home to their families. Blaine would be yachting in the Maldives with hers (Lennon thought it was rather unfair that she got to be beautifulandrich, and told her as much). Sawyer would head back to Connecticut to spend the holiday with his father. Claude had been sent home prematurely, to recuperate with his family, and Emerson had plans to go to Europe with her girlfriend of the moment, Yumi. But to Lennon, the idea of folding herself back into a life and family she’d left behind felt strange and unbearable, like shoving her feet into boots several sizes too small and then being forced to go hiking in them.

Finals proved easier than Lennon suspected—almost suspiciously so. Most of her written exams were short, no more than six or seven questions long. Meditation was pass or fail, and based entirely on attendance and participation. Persuasion I concluded with a series of brief persuasive exercises that functioned as their final assessment. Thus, four days into finals week—Lennon was free as a bird. Her one and only test taken, her papers for metaphysics turned in. Her first semester at Drayton came to a soft close.

That same week, Lennon said goodbye to her peers at Logos House and left the school via a car parked in the staff parking lot. The driver was a handsome man who looked vaguely embalmed, as if a statue at a wax museum had been brought to life. He didn’t speak andLennon, dead tired from a string of late nights and early mornings, fell asleep before they’d even left the parking lot. When she woke, they were at the Savannah Airport, where a small jet was waiting to fly her down to Florida.

Apparently, the school didn’t trust her to travel there by elevator.

Three hours after boarding, Lennon landed at the Orlando airport, where her mother—Beverly—was waiting to pick her up. She was slight and tall and beautiful. Her face was very similar to Lennon’s, but their energy was unmistakably different—her mother soft in all the ways that Lennon was sharp, and warm in all the ways her daughter was cold. Upon seeing Lennon, she broke into a jog and pulled her daughter into a tight embrace. But she quickly pushed Lennon away, stepped back to get a real look at her. “You look different. Taller, maybe? Or thinner? I can’t tell. Have you been eating enough?”

It was a fraught question, but Lennon was happy to have a good and honest answer. “Three square meals a day.”

“I believe you,” said her mother. “You look…well.”

“I like to think I am,” she said, and meant it.

Lennon’s sister, Carly, was in the kitchen when they arrived at the house, her hair heaped atop her head and held fast with a large claw clip. Where Lennon favored their mother, Carly favored their father. She had his heavy-lidded eyes, full lips, and blunt brows that made her seem like she was always frowning a bit. But she was actually frowning when Lennon entered the kitchen that day.

“Hey,” said Lennon, that one word breaking the silence that had lapsed between them since their last argument. It had begun after Lennon had called Carly, drunk at 3:00 a.m., just a few days after her big move to Colorado, one that Carly had strongly advised against. Lennon had been crying about her life and all of the things that had gone wrong with it, and Carly had been silent on the line for sometime. But she would never forget the way her sister’s voice sounded when—ten minutes into the call—she finally spoke in a strained monotone: “You’re self-absorbed and annoying and at some point, you’ll have to accept the fact that at the center of all of yourmanyproblems is you. And making those problems everyone else’s problem isn’t the same as actually dealing with your shit.”

Lennon wasn’t sure if she’d hung up on Carly or if Carly had hung up on her, but they hadn’t spoken since.

“You’re smoking again,” she said to Lennon.

“No, I’m not,” Lennon snapped. But it was a half lie. She’d begun smoking socially a few weeks after she’d begun studying at Drayton, a bad habit she shared with most of the student body and faculty. “Not often anyway.”

Carly narrowed her eyes. She was a lawyer, gunning for partner at a big firm in New York, and as such, she was cutthroat, and smart in a way that often scared Lennon. Which is not to say she was unkind, but hers was a kindness that was packaged in a thick wrapping of brutal and incisive honesty. It kept Lennon in a state of perpetual tension, hanging on her every word, waiting for whatever truth would break her, because when it came to Carly, inevitably something that she said would.

“You know me and my nasty habits,” said Lennon, the self-deprecation itself a kind of olive branch.

Carly received it as such and dragged her into a tight hug, her bony shoulder cutting deep into Lennon’s windpipe. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said.

That night, they ate dinner on the patio off the kitchen, which overlooked a wide swath of lush, green golf course, and a murky pond with a fountain spitting in the middle of it. There wasan alligator sunning on its far bank, large and black and fat with possums or deer or the neighborhood dogs that had made the fatal mistake of venturing too close to the water’s edge.

Her mother beamed at the girls. “It’s nice to have the gang back together, isn’t it, Joseph?”

“Sure is,” said Lennon’s father. He was a quiet man—slight and furtive—but seemed even more ill at ease than usual in Lennon’s presence. Had they been apart long enough to become strangers, she wondered, staring across the table at him. Or had he always been so acutely uncomfortable in her presence, and time had just smoothed over the memory?

The questions about Lennon’s life came over dessert. They’d spent the whole meal stepping carefully around the elephant in the room that was the abrupt end to Lennon’s now-broken engagement and her subsequent enrollment at Drayton. But she’d known it was only a matter of time before her mother or Carly started fishing for details. What she hadn’t expected, though, was her father to ask first. “You said you were studying in Savannah?”

“Yep.”

“Studying where?” Carly inquired, eyes flickering up from her ice cream. “SCAD?”

“No. You know I suck at art.”

Her mother lifted a glass of wine to her lips. “Then where?”

“A place called Drayton.”

“Never heard of it,” said her father, frowning. He’d grown up in Brunswick, before moving north to Augusta for college. “Is that some sort of unaccredited for-profit thing…like that Griffin University or whatever it’s called?”

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