The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(15)

Fogg took out a pen and a fat sheaf of closely handwritten paper that looked like a treaty between two eighteenth-century nation-states.

“Penny signed yesterday,” he said. “Very quick Examination, that boy. What do you say?”

So that was it, that was the sales pitch. Fogg put the papers in front of him and held out the pen. Quentin took it, a fancy-looking metal fountain pen as thick as a cigar. His hand hovered over the page. This was ridiculous. Was he really going to throw everything away? Everything: everybody he knew, James and Julia, whatever college he would have gone to, whatever career he would have had, everything he thought he’d been getting ready for. For this? This bizarre charade, this fever dream, this fancy-dress role-playing game?

He stared out of the window. Fogg watched him impassively, just waiting for him to fall for it. If he cared one way or the other, he wasn’t letting on. The little floundering metal bird, having escaped its drawer, butted its head industriously against the wainscoting.

And then a vast stony weight suddenly lifted off Quentin’s chest. It felt like it had been there his entire life, an invisible albatross, a granite millstone holding him down, and all at once it just dropped away and disappeared without a splash. His chest expanded. He was going to bob up to the ceiling like a balloon. They were going to make him a magician, and all he had to do was sign. Jesus, what the hell was he thinking? Of course he was going to sign. This was everything he’d always wanted, the break he’d given up on years ago. It was right in front of him. He was finally on the other side, down the rabbit hole, through the looking glass. He was going to sign the papers and he was going to be a motherf*cking magician. Or what the hell else was he going to do with his life?

“Okay,” Quentin said evenly. “All right. On one condition: I want to start now. I want to stay in that room. I don’t want to go home.”

They didn’t make him go home. Instead, his things arrived from home in a collection of duffel bags and rolly suitcases, packed by his parents, who had, as Fogg promised, somehow been squared with the idea that their only child was suddenly matriculating in the middle of the semester at a mysterious educational institution they had never visited or even heard of. Quentin slowly unpacked his clothes and his books and put them away in the cabinets and cubbies in the little curved tower room. He didn’t even want to touch them now: they were part of his old self, his old life, the one he was molting away. The only thing missing was the book, the notebook the paramedic gave him. That was nowhere to be found. He’d left it in the exam room on the assumption that he’d be going back there, but when he finally did it was gone. Dean Fogg and the butler pleaded ignorance.

Sitting there alone in his room, his folded clothes around him on the bed, he thought about James and Julia. God only knew what they were thinking. Did sem;  margin-left:1.8em;  margin-right:1.8em;  text-align:justify;  text-indent:m by the he miss him? Now that he was gone, would she realize she’d had the wrong man all along? He should probably get in touch with them somehow. Though really, what the hell could he say? He wondered what would have happened if James had taken the envelope from the paramedic, too. Maybe he would have gotten to take the Exam, too. Maybe that was part of the test.

He let himself unclench a little. Just slightly, he stopped bracing for the blow from above, and for the first time he seriously considered the idea that it might not come at all.

With nothing else to do Quentin roamed through the huge house, unsupervised and rudderless. The Dean and the teachers were nice enough when he ran into them, but they had their own work to do and their own problems to deal with. It was like being at a fancy beach resort during the off-season, rattling around in a grand hotel with no guests, just empty rooms and empty gardens and empty, echoing hallways. He ate his meals alone in his room and loitered in the library—naturally they had the complete works of Christopher Plover—and luxuriously contemplated, one by one, in order, each of the problem sets and projects and papers he would never have to finish. Once he found his way up to the clock tower and spent an afternoon watching the huge rusty iron pendulum sway back and forth, following the massive gears and levers and catchments as they turned and meshed, carrying out their mechanical syllogism, until the glow of the setting sun shone through the tremendous backward clock face.

Sometimes he burst out laughing out of nowhere, for no reason. He was experimenting cautiously with the idea of being happy, dipping an uncertain toe into those intoxicatingly carbonated waters. It wasn’t something he’d had much practice at. It was just too f*cking funny. He was going to learn magic! He was either the greatest genius of all time or the biggest idiot. But at least he was actually curious about what was going to happen to him next. For the first time in he didn’t know how long he was actually following the action with interest. In Brooklyn reality had been empty and meaningless—whatever inferior stuff it was made of, meaning had refused to adhere to it. Brakebills was different. It mattered. Meaning—is that what magic was?—was everywhere here. The place was crawling with it. Out there he had been on the edge of serious depression, and worse, he had been in danger of learning to really dislike himself. He was on the verge of incurring the kind of inward damage you didn’t heal from, ever. But now he felt like Pinocchio, a wooden boy who was made real. Or maybe it was the other way around, he’d been turned from a real boy into something else? Either way the change was for the better. It wasn’t Fillory, but it would do.