Lev Grossman - The Magicians

“All right, all right! I hope you don’t mind pasta,” he added, to Quentin. “It’s all I made. There’s bruschetta out there, or there was. At least there’s lots of wine.” He drained the pasta in the sink, sending up a huge gout of steam, and dumped it into the pan to finish in the sauce. “God, I love cooking. I think if I weren’t a magician, I’d be a chef. It’s just such a relief after all that invisible, intangible bullshit, don’t you think?

“Richard was the real cook around here. I don’t know if you knew him, he graduated last year. Tall. Total grind, made us all look bad in front of Bigby, but at least he could cook. Grab those two bottles there, would you? And the corkscrew?”

With a white tablecloth and two heavy silver candelabras and a wildly eclectic assortment of silverware, some of which bordered on light hand-to-hand weaponry, the table in the library almost looked like somewhere you could eat. The food was simple but not at all bad. He’d forgotten he was starving. Janet performed a trick — Quentin wasn’t sure whether it was magical or just mechanical — to shorten the long seminar table into a dinner table.

Janet, Josh, and Eliot gossiped about classes and teachers and who was sleeping with whom and who wanted to sleep with whom. They speculated endlessly about other students’ relative strengths as spellcasters. They maneuvered around one another with the absolute confidence of people who had spent huge amounts of time together, who trusted and loved one another and who knew how to show one another off to best advantage and how to curb each other’s boring and annoying habits. Quentin let the chatter wash over him. Eating a sophisticated meal, alone in their own private dining room, felt very adult. This was it, he thought. He had been an outsider before, but now he had really entered into the inner life of the school. This was the real Brakebills. He was in the warm secret heart of the secret world.

They were arguing about what they would do after they graduated.

“I imagine I’ll retreat to some lonely mountaintop,” Eliot said airily. “Become a hermit for a while. I’ll grow a long beard and people will come to me for advice, like in cartoons.”

“Advice about what?” Josh snorted. “About whether a dark suit counts as black tie?”

“And I’d like to see you try to grow a beard,” Janet added. “God, you’re self-centered. Don’t you want to help people?”

Eliot looked puzzled. “People? What people?”

“Poor people! Hungry people! Sick people! People who can’t do magic!”

“What have people ever done for me? People don’t want my help. People called me a faggot and threw me in a Dumpster at recess when I was in fifth grade because my pants were pressed.”

“Well, I hope for your sake there’s a wine cellar on your mountaintop,” Janet said, annoyed. “Or a full bar. You won’t last eight hours without a drink.”

“I will brew a crude but potent beverage from local herbs and berries.”

“Or dry cleaning.”

“Well, that is a problem. You can use magic, but it’s never the same. Maybe I’ll just live at the Plaza, like Eloise.”

“I’m bored!” Josh bellowed. “Let’s do Harper’s Fire-Shaping.”

He went over to a large cabinet full of dozens of tiny drawers, narrow but deep, that turned out to be a kind of miniature twig library. Each drawer bore a tiny handwritten label, starting with Ailanthus in the upper left-hand corner and ending with Zelkova, Japanese, in the lower right. Harper’s Fire-Shaping was a useless but extremely entertaining spell for stretching and leading a flame into elaborate calligraphic shapes that flared for a moment in midair and then disappeared. You did it with an aspen twig. The evening devolved into attempts to shape the candle flames into increasingly elaborate or obscene words and shapes, which in turn led, inevitably, to the curtains catching on fire (apparently not for the first time) and having to be extinguished.

A halt was called. Eliot produced a slender, dangerous-looking bottle of grappa. Only two of the candles had survived the fire-shaping, but nobody bothered to replace the others. It was late, after one in the morning. They sat there in the half darkness in contented silence. Janet lay on her back on the carpet staring up at the ceiling, her feet propped up on Eliot’s lap. There was a funny physical intimacy between the two of them, especially considering what Quentin knew about Eliot’s sexual appetites.

“So this is it? We’re full-fledged Physical Kids now?” The grappa was like a fiery seed that had drifted into Quentin’s chest and taken root there. The seed gave birth to a hot, glowing sapling, which grew and spread and unfolded into a big warm leafy tree of good feeling. “Don’t we have to be hazed or branded or, I don’t know, shaved or something?”

“Not unless you want to be,” Josh said.

“Somehow I thought there would be more of you,” Quentin said. “Of us.”

“This is it,” Eliot said. “Since Richard and Isabel graduated. There aren’t any Fifth Years. Nobody placed in. If we didn’t get anybody this year, Fogg was talking about merging us with Natural.”

Josh shuddered theatrically.

“What were they like?” Alice asked. “Richard and Isabel?”

“Like fire and ice,” Josh said. “Like chocolate and marzipan.”

“It’s different without them,” Eliot said.

“Good riddance,” said Janet.

“Oh, they weren’t so bad,” Josh said. “You remember when Richard thought he could bring the weathervane to life? He was going to make it move around by itself. He must have been up there for three days rubbing it with fish oil and I don’t even want to think about what else.”

“That was unintentionally funny,” Janet said. “Doesn’t count.”

“You just never got the point of Richard.”

Janet snorted.

“I got plenty of Richard,” she said, with surprising bitterness.

A tiny hush fell. It was the first false note of the evening.

“But now we have a quorum again,” Eliot said quickly, “an eminently respectable quorum. Physical Magic always gets the best ones.”

“To the best ones,” Josh said.

Quentin raised his glass. He was up in the lofty branches of his fiery tree, swaying in the warm alcoholic breeze.

“The best ones.”

They all drank.

The entire time he’d been at Brakebills, through First Year, the exams, the whole disaster with Penny, right up until the night he joined the Physical Kids, Quentin had been holding his breath without knowing it. He realized only now that he’d been waiting for Brakebills to vanish around him like a daydream. Even aside from the many and varied laws of thermodynamics that were violated there on a regular basis, it was just too good to be true. It was like Fillory that way. Fillory never lasted forever. Ember and Umber promptly kicked the Chatwins out at the end of every book. Deep down Quentin felt like a tourist who at the end of the day would be herded back onto some dirty, lumbering, snorting tour bus — with ripped vinyl seats and overhead TVs and a stinking toilet — and shipped home, clutching a tacky souvenir postcard and watching as the towers and hedges and peaks and gables of Brakebills dwindled in the rearview mirror.

But it hadn’t happened. And now he understood, he really got, that it wasn’t going to happen. He’d wasted so much time thinking, It’s all a dream, and It should have been somebody else, and Nothing lasts forever. It was time he started acting like who he was: a nineteen-year-old student at a secret college for real, actual magic.

Now that he was in among them he had some leisure to observe the Physical Kids up close. When he first met Eliot, Quentin assumed that everyone at Brakebills would be like him, but in fact that wasn’t the case at all. For one thing, even in this rarefied setting Eliot’s bizarre personal manner set him apart. For another, he was conspicuously brilliant in class — maybe not quite as quick as Alice, but Alice worked her ass off and Eliot didn’t even try, or if he did he hid it very, very well. As far as Quentin could tell he never studied at all. The only thing in the world that he would actually cop to caring about was his appearance, especially his expensive shirts, which he wore with cuff links, even though it cost him regular menial punishments for violating the dress code.