Now that he was in among them he had some leisure to observe the Physical Kids up close. When he first met Eliot, Quentin assumed that everyone at Brakebills would be like him, but in fact that wasn’t the case at all. For one thing, even in this rarefied setting Eliot’s bizarre personal manner set him apart. For another, he was conspicuously brilliant in class—maybe not quite as quick as Alice, but Alice worked her ass off and Eliot didn’t even try, or if he did he hid it very, very well. As far as Quentin could tell he never studied at all. The only thing in the world that he would actually cop to caring about was his appearance, especially his expensive shirts, which he wore with cuff links, even though it cost him regular menial punishments for violating the dress code.

Josh always wore the standard school uniform but managed to make it look like he didn’t—his jacket never quite fit his wide, round build, it was always twisted or rumpled or too narrow in the shoulders. His whole personality was like an elaborate joke that he never stopped telling. It took Quentin a while to figure out that Josh expected people not to take him seriously, and he enjoyed—not always kindly—the moment when they realized, too late, that they’d underestimated him. Because he wasn’t as self-absorbed as Eliot or Janet he was the group’s sharpest observer, and he missed very little of what went on around him. He told Quentin that he’d been waiting for Penny to snap for weeks:

“Are you kidding? That guy was a mystery wrapped in an enigma and crudely stapled to a ticking fucking time bomb. He was either going to hit somebody or start a blog. To tell you the truth I’m kind of glad he hit you.”

Unlike the other Physical Kids Josh was an undistinguished student, but once he’d mastered a skill he was an exceptionally forceful spellcaster. It was a full six weeks into his first year at Brakebills before he was able to move his marble by magic, but when he finally did—as Eliot told the story—it shot through a classroom window and buried itself six inches in the trunk of a maple tree outside, where it probably still was.