“Maybe they are happy,” he said. “Maybe this is just who they are.”

“No, Quentin. They aren’t, and it isn’t.” She twined her fingers into his hair and gripped it, hard, so that it hurt. “God, you are such a child sometimes.”

They were moving together now, breathing hard. Quentin was inside her, and they couldn’t talk anymore, except for Alice just repeating:

“Promise me, Q. Promise me. Just promise.”

She said it angrily, insistently, over and over again, as if he were arguing, as if he wouldn’t have agreed to absolutely anything at that moment.

GRADUATION

GRADUATION

In a way it was a disaster of a vacation. They hardly even went outside except for a few walks (undertaken at a brisk trot) through the freeze-dried Urbana suburbs, so flat and empty it felt like at any moment they could fall off into the immense white sky. But in other ways it was perfect. It brought Alice and Quentin closer together. It helped Quentin understand why she was the way she was. They didn’t fight once—if anything the terrifying counterexample of Alice’s parents made them feel young and romantic by contrast. And after the first week they’d finished all their homework and were free to lie around and goof off. By the time two weeks were up they were thoroughly stir crazy and ready to start their last semester at Brakebills.

They’d heard almost nothing from the others since last summer. Quentin hadn’t really expected to. Of course he was curious about what was going on in the outside world, but he had the idea that Eliot and Josh and Janet were busy ascending to some inconceivable new level of coolness, as far above Brakebills as Brakebills was above Brooklyn or Chesterton, and he would have felt let down if they’d still had the time and inclination to bother keeping in touch with him.

As far as he could deduce from their scattered reports, they were all living together in an apartment in downtown Manhattan. The only decent correspondent among them was Janet, who every couple of weeks sent the cheesiest I ❤ New York postcard she could find. She wrote in all caps and kept the punctuation to a minimum:

DEAR Q&A

WHAT IT IS WE 3 WENT TO CHINATOWN LAST WEEK 2 LOOK FOR HERBS, ELIOT BOUGHT A MONGOLIAN SPELLBOOK ITS IN MONGOLIAN DUH BUT HE CLAIMS HE CAN READ IT BUT I THINK IT’S MONGOLIAN PORNO. JOSH BOUGHT A LITTLE GREEN BABY TURTLE HE NAMED IT GAMERA AFTER THE MONSTER. HE IS GROWING A BEARD JOSH NOT GAMER A. U GUYS [the rest was in tiny, barely-legible script overflowing vertically into the space for the address] HAVE GOT TO GET HERE BRAKEBILLS IS A SMALL SMALL POND AND NYC IS THE OCEAN AND ELIOT IS DRINKING LIKE A FISH STOP IT ELIOT STOP IT I KEEL YOU FOR THIS I KEEL YOU 1000 TIMES . . . [illegible]

SO MUCH LOVE