An Academy for Liars

by Alexis Henderson

She had been in a bad way for months—unmoored, discordant, occupying her own body with a sense of unease, the way one might in an airport terminal or the lobby of a rent-by-the-hour motel. Her own flesh and bone a kind of liminal space.

“I just want to matter. But everyone who matters hurts people. It’s like you said…all of us tramping on the bodies of others to get to a place where we don’t actively hate ourselves.”

The expectations are higher when you’re not young anymore. You go from unusually bright to just…pretty smart, or not dumb or whatever, and then before you know it, you’re not remarkable anymore. You’re nothing special to them or to anyone else.”

“There’s a saying on campus: Good lies are rewarded with belief. Great lies are rewarded with conviction. In my experience, persuasion is a great lie, well told.”

Every one of us harbors a facet of ourselves that wants, desperately, to destroy us. A part of us that longs for our own annihilation. It tells you to jump when you stand beside a tall drop-off. It makes you want to put a knife through your own hand when you’re chopping vegetables for dinner. It is hungry and it is corrosive, and it will come for your soul and your sanity. Which is why all of us must work actively against it, or else it will succeed.”