Plum was president of the League, unelected but undisputed, and also its founder. In enlisting the others she had presented the League as a glorious old Brakebills tradition, which it actually wasn’t, though since Brakebills had been around for something like four hundred years it seemed very likely to Plum that there must have been another League at some point in the past, or at any rate something along the same general lines.

You couldn’t rule out the possibility. Though in actual fact she got the idea from a P. G. Wodehouse story.

The thing was this: Wharton was behaving badly, and in the judgment of the League he would have to be pranked for it. Then maybe he would cut it out, or behave a little less badly, or at least the League would have the satisfaction of having caused Wharton to suffer for his crimes. You couldn’t call it innocent, but you had to admit it was pretty understandable. And anyway, was there even any such thing as an innocent prank?

Plum loved Brakebills. It was November of her senior year and she still wasn’t sick of it, not a bit. She loved its many and varied and intricate traditions and rituals and mythologies with an unironic and boosterish love that she refused to be embarrassed about. If anything she thought there should be more of them, which was one reason she started the League.

They met after hours in a funny little trapezoidal study off the West Tower that as far as Plum could tell had fallen off the faculty’s magical security grid, so it was safe to break curfew there. She lay full length on her back on the floor, which was the position from which she usually conducted League business. The rest of the girls were scattered around the room on couches and chairs, limp and spent, like confetti from a successful but exhausting party that everybody was kind of relieved was now all but over.

Plum made the room go silent—it was a little spell that ate sound in about a ten-yard radius. When Plum did a magic trick, everybody noticed.

“Let’s put it to a vote,” she said gravely. “All those in favor of pranking Wharton, say aye.”

The ayes came back in a range of tones: righteous zeal, ironic detachment, sleepy acquiescence. From Plum’s vantage point on the floor, with her eyes closed, her long brown hair splayed out in a fan on the carpet, which had once been soft and woolly but which had been trodden down into a shiny hard-packed gray, it sounded more or less unanimous.

She dispensed with a show of nays. They were doing this. Wharton’s crime was not a matter of life and death, but a stop would be put to it, this the League swore.