Julia’s expression didn’t change. Her eyes had never gone back to normal after the incident in the forest. They were still black, and they looked strange and ancient with her girlish freckles.

“I did not even notice we were moving,” she said.

CHAPTER 4

You have to go back to the beginning, to that freezing miserable afternoon in Brooklyn when Quentin took the Brakebills exam, to understand what happened to Julia. Because Julia took the Brakebills exam that day too. And after she took it, she lost three years of her life.

Her story started the same day Quentin’s did, but it was a very different kind of story. On that day, the day he and James and Julia walked along Fifth Avenue together on the way to the boys’ Princeton interviews, Quentin’s life had split wide open. Julia’s life hadn’t. But it did develop a crack.

It was a hairline crack at first. Nothing much to look at it. It was cracked, but you could still use it. It was still good. No point in throwing her life away. It was a perfectly fine life.

Or no, it wasn’t fine, but it worked for a while. She’d said good-bye to James and Quentin in front of the brick house. They’d gone in. She’d walked away. It had started to rain. She’d gone to the library. This much she was pretty sure was true. This much had probably actually happened.

Then something happened that didn’t happen: she’d sat in the library with her laptop and a stack of books and written her paper for Mr. Karras. It was a damn good paper. It was about an experimental utopian socialist community in New York State in the nineteenth century. The community had some praiseworthy ideals but also some creepy sexual practices, and eventually it lost its mojo and morphed into a successful silverware company instead. She had some ideas about why the whole arrangement worked better as a silverware company than it had as an attempt to realize Christ’s kingdom on Earth. She was pretty sure she was right. She’d gone into the numbers, and in her experience when you went into the numbers you usually came out with pretty good answers.

James met her at the library. He told her what had happened with the interview, which was weird enough as it was, what with the interviewer turning up dead and all. Then she’d gone home, had dinner, gone up to her room, written the rest of the paper, which took until four in the morning, grabbed three hours of sleep, got up, blew off the first two classes while she fixed her endnotes, and went to school in time for social studies. Mischief managed.

When she looked back the whole thing had a queer, unreal feeling to it, but then again you often get a queer, unreal feeling when you stay up till four and get up at seven. Things didn’t start to fall apart till a week later, when she got her paper back.