The Prefects’ Common Room was also an excellent place to have sex in, as long as they could square it with the other prefects in advance, but that usually wasn’t a problem. Gretchen was sympathetic, since she had a boyfriend of her own, and the third prefect was a popular girl with spiky blond hair named Beatrice, whom nobody had even realized was especially smart before she was named a prefect. She never used the room anyway. The only real trick was avoiding the fourth prefect, because the fourth prefect was, of all people, Penny.

The announcement that Penny was a prefect was so universally, gobsmackingly surprising that nobody talked about anything else for the rest of the day. Quentin had barely spoken to Penny since their infamous altercation, not that he’d gone looking for him. From that day on Penny had become a loner, a ghost, which was not an easy thing to be at a school as small as Brakebills, but he had a talent for it. He walked quickly between classes with a flat, frozen stare on his round frying-pan face, bolted his food at mealtimes, went on long solitary rambles, stayed in his room in the afternoons after class, went to bed early, got up at dawn.

What else he did, nobody knew. When the Brakebills students were sorted into groups by Discipline at the end of second year, Penny wasn’t assigned to a group at all. The rumor was that he had tested into a Discipline so arcane and outlandish it couldn’t be classified according to any of the conventional schemes. Whether it was true or not, next to his name on the official list Fogg had simply put the word INDEPENDENT. He rarely turned up in class after that, and when he did he lurked silently in the back of the room with his hands shoved in the pockets of his fraying Brakebills blazer, never asking questions, never taking notes. He had an air of knowing things other people didn’t. He was sometimes seen in the company of Professor Van der Weghe, under whose guidance he was rumored to be pursuing an intensive independent study.

The Prefects’ Common Room was an increasingly important refuge for Quentin and Alice because their old sanctuary, the Cottage, was no longer sacrosanct. Quentin had never really thought about it, but it was pure chance that last year nobody new had been placed in the Physical group, thus preserving the integrity of their little clique. But the drought was bound to come to an end, and it did. At the end of the previous semester no fewer than four rising Third Years had tested into Physical, and now, although it seemed wrong in every possible way, they had as much right to the Cottage as Quentin and Alice did.