“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,
“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.”
“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 both 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.
The announcement that Penny was a prefect was so universally, gobsmackingly surprising that nobody talked about anything else for the rest of the day. Quentin had barely spoken to Penny since their infamous altercation, not that he’d gone looking for him. From that day on Penny had become a loner, a ghost, which was not an easy thing to be at a school as small as Brakebills, but he had a talent for it. He walked quickly between classes with a flat, frozen stare on his round frying-pan face, bolted his food at mealtimes, went on long solitary rambles, stayed in his room in the afternoons after class, went to bed early, got up at dawn.
What else he did, nobody knew. When the Brakebills students were sorted into groups by Discipline at the end of second year, Penny wasn’t assigned to a group at all. The rumor was that he had tested into a Discipline so arcane and outlandish it couldn’t be classified according to any of the conventional schemes. Whether it was true or not, next to his name on the official list Fogg had simply put the word INDEPENDENT. He rarely turned up in class after that, and when he did he lurked silently in the back of the room with his hands shoved in the pockets of his fraying Brakebills blazer, never asking questions, never taking notes. He had an air of knowing things other people didn’t. He was sometimes seen in the company of Professor Van der Weghe, under whose guidance he was rumored to be pursuing an intensive independent study.
