But she stopped walking. A sparkly blue muscle car sat parked by itself at the curb, a snouty, low-slung vehicle with a turbo hood in front and a rear spoiler. Some rich douche bag’s sixteenth birthday present. Julia looked around for a minute, then stepped onto the lawn, where a landscaper had laid down a row of head-sized boulders. She picked one up like a medicine ball, hefting it surprisingly easily in her stick-thin arms, and half threw, half dropped it through the muscle car’s driver-side window.

Quentin didn’t even have time to offer advice or an opinion—something along the lines of, don’t throw the rock through the car window. It had already happened.

It took two tries to get it all the way through—the safety glass starred and stretched before it gave way. The alarm was deafening in the suburban stillness, but incredibly no lights came on in the house. Julia reached through the hole and deftly popped the door open, then heaved the rock back out onto the asphalt and slid herself into the black vinyl bucket seat.

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he said.

She picked up a shard of glass and nicked the pad of her thumb with it. Whispering something under her breath, she jammed her bloody thumb-tip up against the ignition.

The alarm stopped. The car rumbled into life, and the radio came on: Van Halen, “Poundcake.” She lifted up her ass and brushed the rest of the glass off the seat underneath her.

“Get in,” she said.

Sometimes you just have to do things. Quentin walked around to the other side—for form’s sake he really should have slid across the hood—and she peeled out before he even had the door closed. They drove away from his parents’ block at speed. He couldn’t believe nobody had called the police, but he didn’t hear any sirens; it was either really good magic or very dumb luck. She didn’t turn the Van Halen off, or even down. The gray street poured along underneath them. It beat a carriage, anyway.

Julia rolled down what was left of the broken window so that it didn’t look so broken.

“How the hell did you do that?” he said.

“You know about hot-wiring?” she said. “That is ‘not-wiring.’ That is what we used to call it, in the old days.”

“In what old days did you go around stealing cars? And who is ‘we’?”

She didn’t answer, just took a corner too fast, so that the car heeled over on its ridiculously too-bouncy suspension.

“That was a stop sign,” Quentin said. “I still think we should go to Brakebills.”

“We are going to Brakebills.”

“You changed your mind.”

“It happens.” Her thumb was still bleeding. She sucked it and wiped it on her pants. “Can you drive?”

“No. I never learned.”

Julia swore. She turned up the radio.