“Yeah?” Quentin said. “Really? How’s that working out for you?”

“It was just a little Scotch, for Christ’s sake. My parents sent me a bottle of Lagavulin for my birthday. Eliot’s the lush around here, not me.” Josh looked up at him with his crafty, stubbly monk’s face. “Relax, I know what I can handle.”

“Yeah, you’re handling the hell out of it.”

“Oh, who gives a shit!” Josh was turning nasty. If Quentin was going to get mad, he would get madder. “You were probably hoping I wouldn’t show up and blow your precious game for you. I just wish you had the balls to admit it. God, you should hear Eliot do you behind your back. You’re as much of a cheerleader as Janet is. At least she has the tits for it.”

“If I wanted to win,” Quentin said coldly, “I would have left you in the library. Everybody else wanted to.”

He waited in the doorway, furious, arms folded, while Josh rifled through his clothes. He snatched his coat off the back of a desk chair, causing the chair to fall over. He let it lie there. Quentin wondered if it was true about Eliot. If Josh was trying to hurt him, he certainly knew where to stick the knife in.

They set off down the hall together in silence.

“All right,” Josh said finally. He sighed. “Look, you know how I’m kind of a fuck-up, right?”

Quentin said nothing, stone-faced. He didn’t feel like playing into Josh’s personal drama right now.

“Well, I am. And don’t bother with the self-esteem lecture, it’s gone so far beyond what you even want to know about. I’ve always been a smart guy, but I’m a low-grades/high-test-scores kind of smart guy. If it wasn’t for Fogg they would have kicked me out after last semester.”

“All right.”

“Look, all the rest of you can go around playing Peter Perfect, and that’s fine, but I have to work my ass off just to stay here! If you saw my grades—you guys don’t even know the alphabet goes that high.”

“We all have to work at it,” Quentin said a little defensively. “Well, except Eliot.”

“Yeah, okay, fine. But it’s fun for you. You get off on it. That’s your thing.” Josh shouldered his way through the French doors, out into the late-autumn morning, shrugging his way into his heavy overcoat at the same time. “Fuck, it’s cold. Look, I love it here, but I’m not going to make it on my own. I just don’t know where it comes from.”

With no warning he grabbed the front of Quentin’s coat and pushed him up against the wall of the House.