The Magicians (The Magicians, #1)(74)

They had retreated to Aliceck with tears.





GRADUATION


IN A WAY it was a disaster of a vacation. They hardly even went outside except for a few walks (undertaken at a brisk trot) through the freeze-dried Urbana suburbs, so flat and empty it felt like at any moment they could fall off it into the immense white sky. But in other ways it was perfect. It brought Alice and Quentin closer together. It helped Quentin understand why she was the way she was. They didn’t fight once—if anything the terrifying counterexample of Alice’s parents made them feel young and romantic by contrast. And after the first week they’d finished all their homework and were free to lie around and goof off. By the time two weeks were up they were thoroughly stir crazy and ready to start their last semester at Brakebills.

They’d heard almost nothing from the others since last summer. Quentin hadn’t really expected to. Of course he was curious about what was going on in the outside world, but he had the idea that Eliot and Josh and Janet were busy ascending to some inconceivable new level of coolness, as far above Brakebills as Brakebills was above Brooklyn or Chesterton, and he would have felt let down if they’d still had the time and inclination to bother keeping in touch with him.

As far as he could deduce from their scattered reports, they were all living together in an apartment in downtown Manhattan. The only decent correspondent among them was Janet, who every couple of weeks sent the cheesiest I New York postcard she could find. She wrote all in caps and kept the punctuation to a minimum:

DEAR Q&A

WHAT IT IS WE 3 WENT TO CHINATOWN LAST WEEK 2 LOOK FOR HERBS, ELIOT BOUGHT A MONGOLIAN SPELLBOOK ITS IN MONGOLIAN DUH BUT HE CLAIMS HE CAN READ IT BUT I THINK IT’S MONGOLIAN PORNO. JOSH BOUGHT A LITTLE GREEN BABY TURTLE HE NAMED IT GAMERA AFTER THE MONSTER. HE IS GROWING A BEARD JOSH NOT GAMERA. U GUYS [the rest was in tiny, barely legible script over flowing vertically into the space for the address] HAVE GOT TO GET HERE BRAKEBILLS IS A SMALL SMALL POND AND NYC IS THE OCEAN AND ELIOT IS DRINKING LIKE A FISH STOP IT ELIOT STOP IT I KEEL YOU FOR THIS I KEEL YOU 1000 TIMES … [illegible]





SO MUCH LOVE


J

Despite widespread popular resistance, or possibly because of it, Dean Fogg entered Brakebills in an international welters tournament, and Quentin traveled to overseas magic schools for the first time, though he didn’t see much of them beyond the welters court, and once in a while a dining hall. They played in the emerald-green courtyard of a medieval keep in the misty Carpathiansem;  margin-left:1.8em;  margin-right:1.8em;  text-align:justify;  text-indent:s bS LATERvH5, and at a compound bushwhacked out of the seemingly endless Argentine pampas. On Rishiri Island, off the northern coast of Hokkaido, they played on the most beautiful welters court Quentin had ever seen. The sand squares were a searing white and perfectly scraped and leveled. The grass squares were lime green and clipped to a regulation twelve millimetres. The water squares steamed darkly in the chilly air. Frowning, uncannily humanoid monkeys watched them play, clinging to wiggly pine trees, their bare pink faces ringed with nimbi of snowy-white fur.

But Quentin’s world tour was cut short when, to Professor Fogg’s acute embarrassment, the Brakebills team lost all six of its first six matchups and exited the tournament. Their perfect losing record was preserved forever when they were crushed at home in the first round of the consolation bracket by a pan-European team captained by a tiny, fiery, curly-haired Luxembourgeoise on whom Quentin, along with every other boy on the Brakebills team, and some of the girls, developed an instant crush.

The welters season ended on the last day of March, and suddenly Quentin found himself staring at the end of his Brakebills career across a perilously slender gap of only two months of time. It was like he’d been wending his way through a vast glittering city, zigzagging through side streets and wandering through buildings and haunted de Chirico arcades and little hidden piazzas, the whole time thinking that he’d barely scratched the surface, that he was seeing just a tiny sliver of one little neighborhood. And then suddenly he turned a corner and it turned out he’d been through the whole city, it was all behind him, and all that was left was one short street leading straight out of town.

Now the most insignificant things Quentin did felt momentous, brimming over with anticipatory nostalgia. He’d be passing by a window at the back of the House, hurrying between classes, and a tiny movement would catch his eye, a distant figure trudging across the Sea in a Brakebills jacket, or a gawky topiary flamingo fussily shedding the cap of snow on its little green head, and he would realize that he would never see that particular movement ever again, or if he did he would see it in some future time as some unimaginably different person.

And then there were the other moments, when he was violently sick of Brakebills and everything and everyone in it, when it felt lame and pokey and claustrophobic and he was desperate to get out. In four years he’d barely even set foot off the Brakebills campus. My God, he was wearing a school uniform. He’d essentially just spent four extra years in high school! Students had a particular way of speaking at Brakebills, an affected, overly precise, quasi-British diction that came from all those vocal exercises, like they were just freshly back from a Rhodes scholarship and wanted everybody to know it. It made Quentin want to lay about him with an edged weapon. And there was this obsession with naming things. All the rooms at Brakebills had the same identical desk, a broad-shouldered black-cherrywood hulk that must have been ordered up in bulk sometime in the second half of the nineteenth century. It was honeycombed with little drawers and cubbies and pigeonholes, and each of those drawers and cubbies and pigeonholes had its own precious little name. Every time Quentin heard somebody drop a reference to “the Ink Chink” and “the Old Dean’s Ear” he rolled his eyes at Alice. Sweet Jesus, are they serious? We have got to get out of this place.