Page 75 of An Academy for Liars

“Oh my god. Who is this?”

“One of Drayton’s boys,” said Sawyer, visibly disturbed. Not looking at her. “First generation, most likely.”

“What the hell happened to him?”

Sawyer blinked quickly, recovered himself. He slid the drawer firmly shut. “Someone must’ve rearranged things over the summer. This cabinet isn’t even supposed to be here—”

“Sawyer.How did this happen to that boy? Was he beaten? Run over by something? I don’t understand—”

“He pushed himself too hard,” said Sawyer. “Or he was pushed.It’s hard to say. When persuasion is practiced incorrectly, the power of a person’s will can turn on their own body. It’s like an autoimmune disorder, almost, wherein the immune system attacks the—”

“I know how autoimmune disorders work. My mom has one. What I’m asking is how the hell did persuasion become this?”

“It was a seizure, probably. His muscles spasmed so tight around weakened bones and ligaments that they broke. There are records of Drayton’s earliest boys falling ill, their bones turning brittle from the effects of persuasion, so that when they seized—sometimes for days at a time—they suffered fractures and other injuries. In one case, a boy was said to have snapped his own neck in the throes of a days-long convulsion.”

“Is that like a worse version of what happened to me? The day I first came here?”

Sawyer shook his head. “Not quite. These boys were different. In a letter to his family physician, John Drayton wrote that one of the boys who’d died was still…moving.”

“What do you mean, ‘moving’? Like decomposing?”

Sawyer shook his head, looking drawn and pale. “It was just a few hours after his death, allegedly. John wrote that the room where he died echoed with the cracks of breaking bones. Even though he wasn’t alive, his will was still ravaging his corpse. Like it was possessed by something.”

“I thought John Drayton didn’t believe in ghosts?”

“But it wasn’t a ghost,” said Sawyer. “At least not in the conventional sense.”

“That’s horrifying,” said Lennon.

Sawyer didn’t disagree. “Look, that was then, and this is now. Over the years we’ve learned more about persuasion and how to practice it safely. No one dies like that anymore. No one is pushed that farbeyond their limit, or even allowed to push themselves that far. I would know. Student records are kept here in the library. I key them in myself. What happened to some of Drayton’s earliest students is tragic, but stuff like that just doesn’t happen anymore.” He said this as if to absolve himself.

They were quiet for a long time. The silence between them only broken when Sawyer pulled Claude’s file. “Here,” he said, and he handed over a thick leather folder.

Lennon flipped it open. Within, there were the expected things, birth certificates and scans of old passports, transcripts from high school and college. But it was the other things that surprised her. The extensive doctor’s notes dating back decades, the family photos, and faded Polaroids of Claude as a kid. There were even a few crude drawings in crayon, depicting a stick figure family, each person spaced oddly apart. An assortment of plane tickets and dividend checks and tuition statements and transcripts from a Catholic preschool somewhere in Mississippi. On the following page, therapy notes from a session years prior outlining Claude’s “antisocial tendencies” and “combative approach to discussion.”

Lennon stared down in awe and horror. It was an entire life flattened and put on paper. It felt wrong to even look at it.

“Do you keep one of these for each of us?”

Sawyer nodded. “We update them roughly once a semester to include final grades or new contact information in the event that someone graduates or leaves, like Claude did.”

Lennon paused to jot down Claude’s most recent address on a slip of paper. It was a residence somewhere in Manhattan, which surprised her. Given Claude’s rich southern accent, she’d been expecting to find him on a plantation somewhere deep in the south. “So you have one on me?”

“Of course.”

“What’s in it?”

“Why are you so sure I looked?”

“I know you looked. Why wouldn’t you?”

Sawyer rolled his eyes. “You’re not half as interesting as you think you are,” he said, which Lennon noted was decidedly not ano.

“What if I asked you to pull Dante’s file? Could you do it?”

“No. That information is…restricted.”

“Why? Because he’s a professor?”

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