The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(70)

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 it was impossible to tellorR” said Janet. Renaissance 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 Laoco?n 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.”em;  margin-left:1.8em;  margin-right:1.8em;  text-align:justify;  text-indent:m“It doesngo

“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 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.