BRAKEBILLS
HE DIDN’T LAUGH. Quentin would appreciate that later.
“Upstate?” Quentin said. “What, like Vassar?”
“I saw you come through,” the young man said. “Come on, you need to go up to the House.”
He snapped the cigarette away and set off across the wide lawn. He didn’t look back to see if Quentin was following, which at first Quentin didn’t, but then a sudden fear of being left alone in this place got him moving and he trotted to catch up.
The green wasem; margin-left:1.8em; margin-right:1.8em; text-align:justify; text-indent:s band sh winter enormous, the size of half a dozen football fields. It seemed to take them forever to get across it. The sun beat on the back of Quentin’s neck.
“So what’s your name?” the young man asked, in a tone that made sure that Quentin knew that he had no interest in the answer.
“Quentin.”
“Charming. From?”
“Brooklyn.”
“How old?”
“Seventeen.”
“I’m Eliot. Don’t tell me anything else: I don’t want to know. Don’t want to get attached.”
Quentin had to take a couple of double-time steps to keep up with Eliot. There was something off about Eliot’s face. His posture was very straight, but his mouth was twisted to one side, in a permanent half grimace that revealed a nest of teeth sticking both in and out at improbable angles. He looked like a child who had been slightly misdelivered, with some subpar forceps handling by the attending.
But despite his odd appearance Eliot had an air of effortless self-possession that made Quentin urgently want to be his friend, or maybe just be him period. He was obviously one of those people who felt at home in the world—he was naturally buoyant, where Quentin felt like he had to dog-paddle constantly, exhaustingly, humiliatingly, just to get one sip of air.
“So what is this place?” Quentin asked. “Do you live here?”
“You mean here at Brakebills?” he said airily. “Yes, I guess I do.” They had reached the far side of the grass. “If you can call it living.”
Eliot led Quentin through a gap in a tall hedge and into a leafy, shadowy labyrinth. The bushes had been trimmed precisely into narrow, branching, fractally ramifying corridors that periodically opened out onto small shady alcoves and courtyards. The shrubbery was so dense that no light penetrated through it, but here and there a heavy yellow stripe of sun fell across the path from above. They passed a plashing fountain here, a somber, rain-ravaged white stone statue there.
It was a good five minutes before they stepped out of the maze, through an opening flanked by two towering topiary bears reared up on their hind legs, onto a stone terrace in the shadow of the large house Quentin had seen from a distance. A breeze made one of the tall, leafy bears seem to turn its head slightly in his direction.
“The Dean will probably be down to get you in another minute,” Eliot said. “Here’s my advice. Sit there”—he pointed to a weathered stone bench, like he was telling an overly affectionate dog to stay—“and try to look like you belong here. And if you tell him you saw me smoking, I will banish you to the lowest circle of hell. I’ve never been there, but if even half of what I hear is true it’s almost as bad as Brooklyn.”
Eliot disappeared back into the hedge maze, and Quentin sat down obediently on the bench. He stared down between his shiny black interview shoes at the gray stone tiles, his backpack and his overcoat in his lap. This is impossible, he thought lucidly; he thought the words in his mind, but they got no purchase on the world around him. He felt like he was having a not-unpleasant drug experience. The tiles were intricately carved with a pattern of twiny vines, or possibly elaborately calligraphic words that had been worn away into illegibility. Little motes and seeds driftedwood-paneled bs go around in the sunlight. If this is a hallucination, he thought, it’s pretty damn hi-res.
The silence was the strangest part of it. As hard as he listened he couldn’t hear a single car. It felt like he was in a movie where the soundtrack had abruptly cut out.
A pair of French doors rattled a few times and then opened. A tall, fat man wearing a seersucker suit strode out onto the terrace.
“Good afternoon,” he said. “You would be Quentin Coldwater.”
He spoke very correctly, as if he wished he had an English accent but wasn’t quite pretentious enough to affect one. He had a mild, open face and thin blond hair.
“Yes, sir.” Quentin had never called an adult—or anybody else—sir in his life, but it suddenly felt appropriate.
“Welcome to Brakebills College,” the man said. “I suppose you’ve heard of us?”
“Actually no,” Quentin said.
“Well, you’ve been offered a Preliminary Examination here. Do you accept?”
Quentin didn’t know what to say. This wasn’t one of the questions he’d prepped for when he got up this morning.
“I don’t know,” he said, blinking. “I mean, I guess I’m not sure.”
“Perfectly understandable response, but not an acceptable one, I’m afraid. I need a yes or a no. It’s just for the Exam,” he added helpfully.
Quentin had a powerful intuition that if he said no, all of this would be over before the syllable was even fully out of his mouth, and he would be left standing in the cold rain and dog shit of First Street wondering why he’d seemed to feel the warmth of the sun on the back of his neck for a second just then. He wasn’t ready for that. Not yet.
“Sure, okay,” he said, not wanting to sound too eager. “Yeah.”
“Splendid.” He was one of those superficially jolly people whose jolliness didn’t quite reach all the way up to his eyes. “Let’s get you Examined. My name is Henry Fogg—no jokes, please; I’ve heard them all—and you may address me as Dean. Follow me. You’re the last one to arrive, I think,” he added.
No jokes actually came to Quentin’s mind. Inside the house it was hushed and cool, and there was a rich, spicy smell in the air of books and Oriental carpets and old wood and tobacco. The Dean walked ahead of him impatiently. It took Quentin a minute for his eyes to adjust. They hurried through a sitting room hung with murky oil paintings, down a narrow wood-paneled hallway, then up several flights of stairs to a heavy-timbered wooden door.
The instant it opened hundreds of eyes flicked up and fixed themselves on Quentin. The room was long and airy and full of individual wooden desks arranged in rows. At each desk sat a serious-looking teenager. It was a classroom, but not the kind Quentin was used to, where the walls were cinder block and covered with bulletin boards and posters with kittens hanging from branches with HANG IN THERE, BABY under them in balloon letters. The walls of this room were old stone. It was full of sunlight, and it Alice?”bs gostretched back and back and back. It looked like a trick with mirrors.