An Academy for Liars

Chapter 5

Lennon suffered a series of four seizures in the hours that followed the entrance exam. The first, the worst of the four, on the floor of the classroom at Dante’s feet. The second in his arms as he carried her, thrashing, to the infirmary, where she suffered two more. Lennon, for her part, recalled next to none of this. What she did remember came in fractured dreams of scorched concrete and the sour aroma of trash left to rot in the summer sun. In her sticky hand, a thawing freeze cup popsicle, red juice leaking like blood through a crack in the Styrofoam rim. Across the street, in the fuzzy reflection of a car window, the aberration looked eyeless and unspeaking.

The dream changed again, homed in on the campus of Drayton, and she saw a boy, followed him as he walked barefoot across the lush lawn until he reached the porch of a fine house with shuttered windows. He raised a fist and knocked on the doors, over and over again, until his knuckles blackened and split, exposing a glimpse of white bone below.

When she woke the following morning, it was to an entirely different boy sitting upright in the hospital bed beside hers. He was much older than the boy she’d dreamed of, with eyebrows so thick they very nearly met above his nose and long brown hair, which he wore tucked behind both of his pink ears. Something in his manner reminded Lennon of a very malnourished mouse. There was an old book spread open in his lap; a plastic inhaler stuck out of the middle pages, a kind of makeshift bookmark.

“You’re up,” he said, without the vaguest trace of concern. “I was beginning to think you were dead. Or dying.”

Lennon squinted past him, her eyes slow to adjust to the sunlight. The space—a large room that reminded Lennon of the orphanage dormitories in historical films—had a run of wrought-iron cots, twelve on each side, facing one another. All of them empty. The ceiling domed into a large skylight, warm sun casting in through it.

On the far wall was a bowed oriel window that looked out onto an overgrown courtyard. There were flowers there, flocked with butterflies, and strange statues—the suggestion of a human body, rendered in tangled wire, glass-blown orbs that resembled animals…or perhaps organs.

“Where am I?” said Lennon hoarsely. Wincing, she dragged herself into a sitting position. Her body felt like one gigantic sprain. Every movement hurt, even breathing.

“You’re at Drayton,” said the boy, and he flipped the page of his book. She decided, reluctantly, that he was handsome, but it took some squinting to really see it because he looked so sick and pale. “The doctor will be back soon so you can ask him all of your pressing questions.”

Lennon swallowed with a grimace, tasting blood and sour spit. There was a glass of water on the table between the two beds and she reached for it. It had a mineral taste, and it was slightly carbonated, the bubbles burning a bit when she rinsed her mouth, gargled, and spit the water back into the glass. It was rusty with blood. She tested the raw wound on the inside of her cheek with the tip of her tongue and realized she must’ve bitten it while she was knocked out. “How long have I been out?”

“Not long,” said the boy, and he gave a rattling cough, tugged the inhaler free of the pages of his book, and pulled on the mouthpiece the way you’d smoke a pipe. He took a few hoarse breaths, recovered himself. “Dr. Lowe dumped you here last night after your seizure—”

“I had a seizure ?” That explained the body aches, at least.

“Four seizures, actually. You were out cold by the time you were admitted. I’m not surprised you don’t remember. You were in rough shape. But it’s nothing to be ashamed of. I had an asthma attack in the middle of my entry exam. Thought for sure I’d failed.”

“You’re a student here?” Lennon asked.

The boy nodded, didn’t look up from his book. “Sawyer. Second year.”

“Lennon,” she said. “Is there a bathroom around here? Someplace I can wash up?”

“You should really wait for the doctor.”

“Well, I’m not going to,” said Lennon, swinging her legs out of bed. “I feel like shit, and I smell even worse.”

Sawyer nodded to the other end of the room. “Down the hall to the right.”

The bathroom, like the infirmary, was empty. There was a run of wood-walled toilet stalls, basin sinks in sterile white porcelain. On a shelf near the showers were towels, disposable toothbrushes wrapped in plastic, crude-cut cubes of lye soap, and other toiletries. In the small mirror above one of the sinks, she caught her reflection. Apart from the blood crusted beneath her nose, she looked better than she’d expected to, given how badly her muscles ached. The bags that perpetually shadowed her eyes had faded considerably. The aberration with no eyes was nowhere to be seen.

Lennon stripped out of her hospital gown and limped into an open shower stall with a slick tile floor. She bathed with a rough washcloth and a heavy brick of lye soap that smelled like jasmine. As she washed, taking care to rinse the blood from beneath her nose, she felt she was slowly reassembling the pieces of her person, but differently than the way she’d been assembled before.

When she finished showering, she stepped out into the empty cavern of the bathroom. On the countertop were the same T-shirt, shorts, bra, and socks she’d been wearing yesterday, folded and freshly laundered. Her sneakers looked like they’d been replaced, the soles scrubbed clean with a toothbrush. Careful to avoid making eye contact with her own reflection, for fear of seeing the aberration, Lennon dressed quickly and returned to the infirmary to discover that Sawyer was gone. In his place was a doctor stripping the sheets off the cot that Lennon had been lying in. He was a willowy man but rather short; his lab coat brushed mere inches above the tiles as he crossed the infirmary and thrust out a hand by way of greeting. His fingers were long and bluish, sparsely furred, with gray hair between the knuckles. “Lennon, good to see you on your feet. I’m Dr. Nave.”

Lennon shook it. His grip was very firm.

“Sit, please.” He patted the freshly stripped mattress. “Let me have a look at you.”

Lennon obeyed, and the doctor took her vitals. He produced a glass thermometer from the ink-stained pocket of his lab coat and held it under her tongue for some time. It tasted slightly sweet, as though it had been dipped in simple syrup. He then pressed two cold fingertips into the soft hollow of her wrist and nodded along to the rhythm of her heart with his eyes tightly shut. “Do you still have your name?” he asked.

“It’s Lennon Carter.”

Dr. Nave released her wrist and opened his eyes. He held up a finger, just in front of her nose, moved it left. “Follow my finger.”

Lennon’s gaze tracked left, then cut right again, following Dr. Nave’s finger, only for him to move it to the left once again. She was beginning to feel a little dizzy. “You’re twelve years old standing on the shores of Edisto Beach, on the coast of South Carolina. What do you see in the distance?”

As he said this, the memory came to her. “A blue heron flying low over the water. It was sunset, I think, and its wings looked touched with fire.”

Dr. Nave smiled. He lowered his hand. “Good. Very good.”

“What happened to me yesterday?”

“You suffered a series of seizures. One of them a grand mal.”

“No, I mean before. When I was taking the entry exam. What was that?”

“From what I hear, you persuaded our Dr. Lowe to pick up a pig figurine. Quite an impressive feat indeed. Dr. Lowe is rather strong-willed—”

“But it was more than that. I made him pick it up.”

Dr. Nave smiled at her. “So you did.”

From the ink-stained pocket of his lab coat, he produced a small pen (pausing to tear the cap off with his teeth) and accompanying notebook and scribbled something indecipherable. “Vitals are good,” he said around the cap of the pen. “You’re free to go.”

“Go where, exactly?”

“Well…I’d imagine you’d want to make your way to the assembly. It’s mandatory, you know.”

Lennon did not, in fact, know. “Where is it? And when?”

The doctor capped his pen, folded his notebook, and slipped both of them back into his coat pocket. He checked his watch. “You’ll have missed the first part already. It started at two. But the auditorium is only a five-minute walk from here, so if you leave now you should make it in time to hear the bulk of it. You’ll want to take the stairway to the left down to the first floor. Hang a tight left and keep walking down the breezeway until you reach it. It’s big; you can’t miss it.”

Following the doctor’s instructions, Lennon left the infirmary and stepped into a crowded corridor. Opposite her was a run of floor-to-ceiling windows that looked out onto a lush campus crawling with students. She watched from above as two orientation leaders, dressed in loose slacks and tweed blazers, steered a swelling tide of incoming first years, clinging anxiously to crumpled maps and instruction pamphlets that must’ve been distributed when Lennon was out cold in the infirmary.

The orientation leaders were walking backward, pointing at different buildings, pausing to answer questions. Lennon wished she could hear them and wondered how much she’d missed during her stint in the infirmary. Classes hadn’t even started yet, and she already felt behind.

After a short walk, she arrived at the doors of the auditorium, which, to Lennon’s surprise, took the form of a large stone cathedral. Its interior was like that of an old and ornate movie theater. The seats were a dark and dingy velvet, and almost all of them were taken. The stale air smelled of popcorn and cigarette smoke. On a stage at the front of the room, with her back to the velvet curtains, was Eileen—the vice-chancellor, who had been at the entry exam. At the sight of Lennon, she broke into an easy smile. She was somehow even more beautiful up close. “Ms. Carter, so nice of you to join us.”

Dozens of gazes affixed themselves to Lennon.

“Do have a seat,” said Eileen. “We were just getting started.”

Lennon walked down the center aisle, to one of the only empty seats in the auditorium, about three rows down from the stage. She shuffled sideways past her peers and claimed a seat between two girls she thought she might recognize from the entry exam.

Once Lennon was seated, Eileen raised the microphone to her mouth. “We’ve prepared a short film for you to watch. Please give it your full attention.”

Eileen sidestepped. The curtains parted down the middle and pulled apart, revealing a large movie screen. The lights dimmed, then cut entirely, plunging the room into a darkness so complete Lennon couldn’t see her own hands shaking in her lap. An image appeared on the movie screen behind Eileen. It was a black-and-white photograph of Savannah, Georgia, which looked remarkably similar to the Savannah of modern day—though the oaks weren’t as large and the cobbled streets were crowded not with cars but horse-drawn carriages.

“There is a pervasive myth that the city of Savannah was built around twenty-four historic garden squares. But that fact is a careful warping of the true history. Savannah is actually home to twenty-five historic squares. Drayton Square, this school’s namesake, was not lost to time but carefully extracted from it.”

The slides switched to the image of a bearded white man with a well-waxed mustache.

“This is my great-great-grandfather and the founder of our school, John Drayton,” said Eileen in that clear baritone of hers that reminded Lennon vaguely of a transatlantic accent. “In the wake of the Civil War, after most of the south was razed down to the very stones of its foundation, John Drayton turned the mansion of Drayton Square into the Drayton All Boys School, a haven for war orphans.”

The slideshow skipped to the crude photo of a mansion overlooking a large garden green.

“A philosopher by trade, a Quaker by practice, and a tireless abolitionist”—Eileen delivered this part with a note of pride, the edges of her mouth curving into a small smile as she beamed up at the image of her grandfather—“John Drayton built his school with one goal in mind: he wanted his students to embody the Socratic ideal of a good man. The kind of man who could win the hearts of other men, and in doing so change the world for the better. Men whose great minds and charisma could negotiate peace in times of war, and usher us into a new golden age of liberty, pacifism, and fairness for all.” Here Eileen paused, gave the audience a wry smile: “Perhaps he was a little ambitious.”

There was a bit of laughter and Eileen changed slides again, this time to a series of grainy photos of the Civil War: raised muskets, fields dotted with bodies, the earth upturned and ravaged by artillery fire.

“To carry out this mission, John knew that he would need a handful of extraordinarily special boys. So, in the years that followed, John recruited what he called ‘exceptional specimens’ from across the Americas, Europe, and even the Caribbean. His recruits traveled far and wide, seeking young boys of, quote, ‘exceptional charisma, great intelligence, and formidable poise.’?”

There was a grainy photo of Drayton and his boys—knobby-kneed youths who stood with their hands behind their backs, eyes cut narrow against the sun. None of them appeared particularly charismatic or special. They stood in a line, shoulder to shoulder, unsmiling, like soldiers disguised as schoolboys. All of them were white except for one boy—fair-skinned with brown curls—who stood at the far end of the line, just apart from the others. Unlike his peers, he wore no uniform. His shirt—several sizes too large—looked moth-eaten, and his feet were bare.

“What John learned through the tutoring of these exceptional boys was that there are those among us who possess a particularly keen talent for the art of persuasion. In the same way that some newborns shriek louder than others, and some women possess more beauty than that which others are born to, John discovered that some human beings—whether blessed or cursed I cannot say—possess the rare and heightened ability to persuade the natural world into complying with their will.”

The slideshow flashed to the image of one of Drayton’s boys, hands outstretched as if conducting an orchestra. Three boys stood in front of him, limbs bent strangely but in a way that seemed to correspond with the placement of the first boy’s fingers.

“Through observing some of the most talented pupils at his school, John learned that this persuasive talent could be honed, allowing particularly gifted individuals to force their will not just upon other human beings, but in rare cases, upon matter itself.”

The slideshow flickered to the next photo, this one of a boy in a classroom with a small nub of chalk levitating a few inches above the palm of his hand.

“As you can likely imagine, this gift of persuasion attracted the attention of many forces far beyond the bounds of Drayton. John’s gifted boys became both a threat and a spectacle, and it seemed that everyone wanted to use the remarkable talents of his students to achieve their own ends. There was talk of war and money, rebellion and discord, demands and arrests and the kinds of threats that manifest in violence. So, to protect his boys, and the sacred forces they studied, John Drayton enlisted the help of one of his most prodigious pupils. A boy by the name of William Irvine.”

The slideshow changed to an image of the poorly dressed boy. He had wide eyes and a bleeding nose. He stood in a hallway so long that it looked almost infinite, and there were dozens of identical doors on either side. The door closest to the boy was half ajar, and it opened onto a beach, the sand dark and strung with seaweed. Just a few doors down from that, on the opposite side of the hall, another door opened out onto a snow-capped mountain range.

“William was the first and last student of Drayton with the ability to create entire worlds unto themselves, using his persuasive ability to open doors to new realities and close them to contain spaces, sequester them from the greater world at large. This is exactly what William did here, at the Twenty-Fifth Square. In what is perhaps one of the greatest feats of persuasion ever committed, he erased Drayton Square from the minds and memories of all who knew of it. Removed it from the historical record, and from reality itself. The only memories left intact were those of a handful of trusted pupils and the descendants of John Drayton himself, who were entrusted with protecting this secret and passing it down to future generations and classes of students.”

Here, Eileen turned quite grave. The slideshow flickered to a more recent photo of Drayton, taken in a wide corridor between moss-draped oak trees. “This powerful act of persuasion came with a cost. William died protecting this school—channeling all of the energy of his life and spirit into the task of raising the very walls that now fortify us today, within the long-forgotten and forever-hidden Twenty-Fifth Square of Savannah.”

The house lights flickered on. The movie screen retracted. Eileen stepped forward as the curtains behind her swept closed once more. There was a smattering of applause as she stepped to center stage. “Here, safe and in secret, we devote ourselves to the continuation of John Drayton’s legacy. The study of persuasion.”