Lev Grossman - The Magicians

“At any rate I can see where you get your social skills,” he said.

“My point is, you don’t know what it’s like to grow up in a family of magicians.”

“Well, I didn’t know you had to wear a toga.”

“You don’t have to wear togas. That’s exactly the problem, Q. You don’t have to do anything. This is what you don’t understand! You don’t know any older magicians except our professors. It’s a wasteland out there. Out here. You can do nothing or anything or everything, and none of it matters. You have to find something to really care about to keep from running totally off the rails. A lot of magicians never find it.”

Her voice was strangely urgent, almost angry. He was trying to catch up to her.

“So you’re saying your parents didn’t.”

“No, they didn’t, despite their having had two children, which would have given them a minimum of two good options. Well, I think they might have cared about Charlie, but when they lost him, they lost their way completely. And here they are.”

“What about your mom and her fairy orchestras? She seems pretty serious about them.”

“That’s just to annoy my dad. I’m not even sure they exist.”

Suddenly Alice rolled over on top of him, straddling him, hands on his shoulders, pinning him down. Her hair hung straight down at him in a shimmering curtain, tickling his face and giving her the very authoritative appearance of a goddess leaning down from the heavens.

“You have to promise me we’ll never be like them, Quentin.” Their noses were almost touching. Her weight on top of him was arousing, but her face was angry and serious. “I know you think it’s going to be all quests and dragons and fighting evil and whatever, like in Fillory. I know that’s what you think. But it’s not. You don’t see it yet. There’s nothing out there.

“So you have to promise me, Quentin. Let’s never get like this, with these stupid hobbies nobody cares about. Just doing pointless things all day and hating each other and waiting to die.”

“Well, you drive a hard bargain,” he said. “But okay. I promise.”

“I’m serious, Quentin. It’s not going to be easy. It’s going to be so much harder than you think. They don’t even know , Quentin. They think they’re happy. That’s the worst part.”

She undid the drawstring on his pajama bottoms without looking and jerked them down, still staring directly into his eyes. Her robe was already open at the waist, and she had nothing on under it. He knew she was saying something important, but he wasn’t grasping it. He put his hands under her robe, feeling her smooth back, the curve of her waist. Her heavy breasts brushed against his chest. They would always have magic. They would have it forever. So what—?

“Maybe they are happy,” he said. “Maybe this is just who they are.”

“No, Quentin. They aren’t, and it isn’t.” She twined her fingers into his hair and gripped it, hard, so that it hurt. “God, you are such a child sometimes.”

They were moving together now, breathing hard. Quentin was inside her, and they couldn’t talk anymore, except for Alice just repeating:

“Promise me, Q. Promise me. Just promise.”

She said it angrily, insistently, over and over again, as if he were arguing, as if he wouldn’t have agreed to absolutely anything at that moment.

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 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 in all 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 overflowing 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

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 Carpathians, 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 12 mm. 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, zig-zagging 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.