“He’s going to hurt somebody,” he said. “Probably himself.”
“There’s some damage resistance built in. Strengthening the skin and the skeleton. He could put his fist through a wall and probably not break anything.”
“Probably. If he can, he will.”
Alice was even more quiet than usual. It wasn’t until they were deep in the twilight alleys of the Maze that Quentin saw that her face was slick with tears. His heart went cold.
“Alice. Alice, sweetheart.” He stopped and turned her to face him. “What is it?”
She pressed her face miserably into his shoulder.
“Why did she have to tell that story?” she said. “Why? Why is she like that?”
Quentin immediately felt guilty for having enjoyed it. It
was
a horrible story. But there was something irresistibly gothic about it, too.
“She’s just a gossip,” he said. “She doesn’t mean anything.”
“Doesn’t she?” She pulled back, fiercely wiping her tears with the backs of her hands. “Doesn’t she? I always thought my brother died in a car crash.”
“Your brother?” Quentin froze. “I don’t understand.”
“He was eight years older than me. My parents told me he died in a car crash. But that was him, I’m sure it was.”
“I don’t understand. You think he was that boy in the story?”
She nodded. “I think he was. I know he was.” Her eyes were red and rubbed with rage and hurt.
“Jesus. Look, it’s just a story. There’s no way she could know.”
“She knows.” Alice kept walking. “It all works out, the timing of it. And he was like that. Charlie—he was always falling in love with people. He would have tried to save her himself. He would have done that.” She shook her head bitterly. “He was stupid that way.”
“Maybe she didn’t know. Maybe Janet didn’t realize it was him.”
“That’s what she wants everybody to think! So you won’t realize what a howling cunt she is!”
Howling
was a big word at Brakebills that year. Quentin was about to keep defending Janet when something else clicked.
“That’s why you weren’t Invited here,” he said quietly. “It has to be. Because of what happened to your brother.”
She nodded, her eyes unfocused now, her relentless brain chewing away at this wrinkle, fitting other things into the bleak new picture it created.
“They didn’t want anything to happen to me. As if it would. God, why is everybody else in the world but us so fucking stupid?”
They stopped a few yards short of the edge of the Maze, in the deep shadow that pooled where the hedges grew close together, as if they couldn’t face the daylight again, not quite yet.
“At least now I know,” she said. “But why did she tell that story, Q? She knew it would hurt me. Why would she do that?”
He shook his head. The idea of conflict within their little clique made him uncomfortable. He wanted to explain it away. He wanted everything to be perfect.
“She’s just bitter,” he said finally, “because you’re the pretty one.”
Alice snorted.
“She’s bitter because we’re happy,” she said, “and she’s in love with Eliot. Always has been. And he doesn’t love her.”
She started walking again.
“What? Wait.” Quentin shook his head, as if that would make all the pieces fit together again. “Why would she want Eliot?”
“Because she can’t have him?” Alice said bitterly, without looking back at him. “And she has to have everything? I’m surprised she hasn’t come after you. What, you think she hasn’t slept with Josh?”
They left the Maze and climbed the stairs to the rear terrace, lit by the yellow light coming through the French doors and littered with premature autumn leaves. Alice cleaned herself up as best she could with the heels of her hands. She didn’t wear much makeup anyway. Quentin stood by and silently handed her tissues to blow her nose with, adrift in his own thoughts. It never failed to astonish him, then or ever, how much of the world around him was mysterious and hidden from view.
FIFTH YEAR
Then September came, and it was just Quentin and Alice. The others were gone, in a swirl of falling leaves and a crackle of early frost.
It was a shock to see them go, but along with the shock, mixed in with it like the liquor in a cocktail, was an even greater feeling of relief. Quentin wanted things to be good between them, to be better than good, to be perfect. But perfection is a nervy business, because the moment you spot the tiniest flaw it’s ruined. Perfection was part of Quentin’s mythology of Brakebills, the story he told himself about his life there, a narrative as carefully constructed and reverently maintained as
Fillory and Further
, and he wanted to be able not just to tell it to himself but to believe it. That had been getting progressively more difficult. Pressure was building up in some subterranean holding tank, and right at the end there things had begun to come apart. Even Quentin, with his almost limitless capacity for ignoring the obvious, had begun to pick up on it. Maybe Alice was right, maybe Janet really did hate her and love Eliot. Maybe it was something else, something so glaringly obvious that Quentin couldn’t stand to look at it directly. One way or another the bonds that held them together were starting to fray, they were losing their magical ability to effortlessly love one another. Now, even though things would never be the same, even though they’d never be together in the same way, at least he could always remember it the way he wanted to. The memories were safe, sealed forever in amber.
As soon as the semester began Quentin did something he had already put off for much too long: he went to Dean Fogg and told him what had happened to Julia. Fogg just frowned and told him he’d take care of it. Quentin wanted to climb across the desk and grab Fogg by his natty lapels for what he’d done to her by screwing up the memory spells. He tried to explain to Fogg that he had made Julia suffer in a way that nobody should ever have to suffer. Fogg just watched, neither moved nor unmoved. In the end the best Quentin could do was to make him promise that he would strain whatever the applicable regulations were to the breaking point to make things easier for her. It was all he could think of. He left Fogg’s office feeling exactly as bad as he had when he entered it.
Sitting at dinner, or strolling between classes through the dusty hallways full of sideways afternoon light, Quentin began to realize for the first time how cut off from the rest of the school he and Alice had been for the past two years, and how few of the other students he really knew. All the groups were cliques unto themselves, but the Physical Kids had been especially tight, and now he and Alice were all that was left of them. He still had classes with the other Fifth Years, and he chatted with them in a friendly way, but he knew that their loyalties and their attention were elsewhere.
“I bet they think we’re horrible snobs,” Alice said one day. “The way we keep to ourselves.”
They were sitting on the cool stone rim of the fountain known as Sammy, a knockoff of the Laocoön in Rome, serpents strangling the renegade priest and his sons, but with water squirting cheerfully out of everybody’s mouths. They had come out to try a piece of messy domestic magic for removing stains from a skirt of Alice’s, that was best performed outdoors, but they’d forgotten a key ingredient, turmeric, and weren’t ready to face the walk back yet. It was a beautiful fall Saturday morning, or really it was closer to noon, the temperature balanced precariously on the tipping point between warm and chilly.
“You think so?”
“Don’t you?”
“No, you’re probably right.” He sighed. “They probably do. Uncharitable bastards.
They’re
the snobs.”
Alice tossed an acorn overhand at the fountain. It ticked off one of the dying priest’s sturdy knees and into the water.
“Do you think we are? Snobs, I mean?” Quentin asked.
“I don’t know. Not necessarily. No, I don’t think we are. We have nothing against them.”
“Exactly. Some of them are perfectly fine.”
“Some of them we hold in the highest esteem.”
“Exactly.” Quentin dabbled his fingertips in the water. “So what are you saying? We should go out and make friends?”
She shrugged. “They’re the only other magicians our age on the continent. They’re the only peers we’ll ever have.”
The sky was burning blue, and the tree branches stood out sharply against it in the clear, shivering reflection in the fountain.
“Okay,” Quentin said. “But not with all of them.”
“Well, God no. We’ll be discriminating. Anyway, who even knows if they’ll want to be friends with us?”
“Right. So who?”
“Does it matter?”
“Of course it matters, Vix,” Quentin said. “It’s not like they’re all the same.” “Vix” was a term of endearment with them, short for vixen, an allusion to their Antarctic interlude,
vixen
being the word for a female fox.
“So who?”
“Surendra.”
“Okay. Sure. Or no, he’s going out with that horrible Second Year. You know, with the teeth. She’s always trying to make people do madrigals after dinner. What about Georgia?”
“Maybe we’re overthinking this. We can’t force it. We’ll just let it happen naturally.”
“Okay.” Quentin watched her study her nails with her intense, birdlike focus. Sometimes she looked so beautiful he couldn’t believe she had anything to do with him. He could barely believe she existed at all.
“But you have to do it,” she said. “If it’s me, nothing’s going to happen. You know I’m pathetic at that kind of thing.”
“I know.”
She threw an acorn at him.
“You weren’t supposed to agree.”
And so, with a concerted effort, they roused themselves from their stupor and embarked on a belated campaign to socialize with the rest of their class, most of whom they’d drifted almost completely out of touch with. In the end it wasn’t Surendra or Georgia but Gretchen—the blond girl who walked with a cane—who turned out to be the key. It helped that Alice and Gretchen were both prefects, which was a source of both pride and embarrassment to them. The position carried with it almost no official duties; mostly it was just yet another absurd, infantilizing idea borrowed from the English public school system, a symptom of the Anglophilia that was embedded so deeply in the institutional DNA of Brakebills. Prefectships were given to the four students in the Fourth and Fifth Years with the highest GPA, who then got (or had) to wear a silver pin in the shape of a bee on their jackets. Their actual responsibilities were petty things like regulating access to the single phone on campus, an obsolete rotary monster hidden away in a battle-scarred wooden phone booth that was itself tucked away under a back staircase, which always had a line a dozen students long. In return they had access to the Prefects’ Common Room, a special locked lounge on the east side of the House with a high, handsome arched window and a cabinet that was always stocked with sticky-sweet sherry that Quentin and Alice forced themselves to drink.
The Prefects’ Common Room was also an excellent place to have sex in, as long as they could square it with the other prefects in advance, but that usually wasn’t a problem. Gretchen was sympathetic, since she had a boyfriend of her own, and the third prefect was a popular girl with spiky blond hair named Beatrice, whom nobody had even realized was especially smart before she was named a prefect. She never used the room anyway. The only real trick was avoiding the fourth prefect, because the fourth prefect was, of all people, Penny.
The announcement that Penny was a prefect was so universally, gobsmackingly surprising that nobody talked about anything else for the rest of the day. Quentin had barely spoken to Penny since their infamous altercation, not that he’d gone looking for him. From that day on Penny had become a loner, a ghost, which was not an easy thing to be at a school as small as Brakebills, but he had a talent for it. He walked quickly between classes with a flat, frozen stare on his round frying-pan face, bolted his food at mealtimes, went on long solitary rambles, stayed in his room in the afternoons after class, went to bed early, got up at dawn.
What else he did, nobody knew. When the Brakebills students were sorted into groups by Discipline at the end of second year, Penny wasn’t assigned to a group at all. The rumor was that he had tested into a Discipline so arcane and outlandish it couldn’t be classified according to any of the conventional schemes. Whether it was true or not, next to his name on the official list Fogg had simply put the word INDEPENDENT. He rarely turned up in class after that, and when he did he lurked silently in the back of the room with his hands shoved in the pockets of his fraying Brakebills blazer, never asking questions, never taking notes. He had an air of knowing things other people didn’t. He was sometimes seen in the company of Professor Van der Weghe, under whose guidance he was rumored to be pursuing an intensive independent study.
The Prefects’ Common Room was an increasingly important refuge for Quentin and Alice because their old sanctuary, the Cottage, was no longer sacrosanct. Quentin had never really thought about it, but it was pure chance that last year nobody new had been placed in the Physical group, thus preserving the integrity of their little clique. But the drought was bound to come to an end, and it did. At the end of the previous semester no fewer than four rising Third Years had tested into Physical, and now, although it seemed wrong in every possible way, they had as much right to the Cottage as Quentin and Alice did.
They did their best to be good sports about it. On the first day of classes they sat patiently in the library as the new Physical Kids went through the ritual and broke into the Cottage. They’d debated long and earnestly about what to serve the newcomers when they came in, finally settling on a goodish champagne and—not wanting to be selfish, even though that was exactly how they felt—an obscenely expensive array of oysters and caviar with toast points and crème fraîche.