THE PHYSICAL KIDS

Six months later, in September, Quentin and Alice spent the first day of their Third Year at Brakebills sitting outside a small square Victorian outbuilding about a half mile from the House. It was a piece of pure folly architecture, a miniature house, white with a gray roof, complete with windows and gables, that might at one time have been servants’ quarters, or a guest cottage, or a largish garden shed.

There was a weathervane on top, wrought iron and shaped like a pig, that always pointed somewhere other than where the wind was blowing. Quentin couldn’t make out anything through the windows, but he thought he heard snatches of conversation coming from inside. The cottage stood on the edge of a wide hayfield.

It was midafternoon. The sky was blue and the early autumn sun was high. The air was silent and still. A rusted-out old piece of farm machinery stood half drowned in the same long grass it used to mow.

“This is bullshit. Knock again.”

“You knock,” Alice said. She released a convulsive sneeze. “I’ve been knocking for twenty . . . for twenty . . .”

She sneezed again. She was allergic to pollen.

“Bless you.”

“Twenty minutes. Thank you.” She blew her nose. “They’re in there, they just won’t open the door.”

“What do you think we should do?”

Quentin thought for a minute.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe it’s a test.”

Back in June, after finals, all twenty members of the Second Year had been marched through the Practical Applications room one at a time to be assigned their Disciplines. The sessions were scheduled at two-hour intervals, though sometimes it took longer; the entire process lasted three days. It was a circus atmosphere. Most of the students, and probably the faculty, were ambivalent about the whole idea of Disciplines. They were socially divisive, the theory behind them was weak, and everybody ended up studying pretty much the same curriculum anyway, so what was the point? But it was traditional for every student to have one, so a Discipline every student would have. Alice called it her magic bat mitzvah.

The P.A. lab was transformed for the occasion. All the cabinets were open, and every inch of the counters and tabletops was crammed with old instruments made of wood and silver and etched brass and worked glass. There were calipers and bulbs and beakers and clockwork and scales and magnifying glasses and dusty glass bulbs full of wobbling mercury and other less easily identifiable substances. Brakebills was largely dependent on Victorian-era technology. It wasn’t an affectation, or not entirely; electronics, Quentin was told, behaved unpredictably in the presence of sorcery.

Professor Sunderland presided over the circus. Quentin had avoided her as much as possible since that horrible, dreamlike period when she tutored him during his first semester. His crush on her had faded to a faint but still pathetic echo of its former self, to the point where he could almost look at her and not want to fill his hands with her hair.