The Magician King_ A Novel - Lev Grossman [67]
Julia, though. Julia had the stones for it. She was a flight risk, no strong ties to the community. When she heard that the Coldwaters had sold up and moved to Massachusetts, she pulled up stakes and followed them. Even a suburban cultural sump like Chesterton had Internet connections and temp agencies—no, especially a suburban cultural sump like Chesterton—and that was all she needed to get by. She rented a room over a garage from a retired guy with a janitor mustache who probably had a Web cam hidden in the bathroom. She bought a beat-up Honda Civic with a wired-shut trunk.
She didn’t hate Quentin. That wasn’t it. Quentin was fine, he was just in the way. He had gotten it so easy, and she had it so hard, and why? There was no good reason. He passed a test, and she failed it. That was a judgment on the test, not on her, but now her life was a waking nightmare, and he had everything he ever wanted. He was living a fantasy. Her fantasy. She wanted it back.
Or not even that. She wasn’t going to take anything away from him. She just needed him to confirm that Brakebills was real, and to open a chink in the wall of the secret garden just wide enough for her to squeeze through. He was her man on the inside. Though he didn’t know it yet.
So here’s how it worked: every morning before work she drove past the Coldwaters’ house. Every night around nine o’clock she drove by again, and got out and quietly walked the perimeter of the lawn, looking for traces of her quarry. A McMansion like that, all double-glazed picture windows, broadcast the goings-on inside it out into the night like a drive-in movie. It was summer again, and the summer nights smelled like murdered grass and sounded like crickets fucking. At first all she learned was that Mrs. Coldwater was a predictable but technically sound amateur painter in a sadly dated Pop art mode, and that Mr. Coldwater had a weakness for porn and crying jags.
It wasn’t till September that the beast showed himself.
Quentin had changed: he’d always been lanky, but now he looked like a skeleton. His cheeks were sunken, his cheekbones jagged. His clothes hung on him. His hair—cut your fucking hair already, you’re not Alan Rickman—was lank.
He looked like shit. Poor baby. Actually what he looked like was Julia.
She didn’t approach him right away. She had to psych herself up for it. Now that she had him where she wanted him, she was suddenly afraid to touch him. She quit taking temp assignments and went fulltime on Quentin. But she stayed under the radar.
Around eleven every morning she watched him slam out of the house in a brown study and whiz into town on a hilariously antique white tenspeed. She followed him at a distance. Good thing he was completely oblivious and self-obsessed or he would have noticed a red Honda with a death rattle shadowing his every move. There he was, the living, breathing forensic trace of everything she’d ever wanted. If he couldn’t help her, or wouldn’t, it would be over. She’d have given two years of her life for nothing. The fear of finding out paralyzed her, but every day she waited the risk that he would vanish again grew and grew. She would be back to square zero.
All Julia could think was that if it came right down to it she would sleep with him. She knew how he felt about her. He would do anything to sleep with her. It was the nuclear option, but it would work. No risk. It was her ace in the hole. So to speak.
Who knows, it might not even be so bad. Different, doubtless, from James’s smartly paced gymnastic exhibitions. She didn’t even know anymore why she was so determined not to like Quentin. Maybe he’d been right, maybe he was the one for her after all. It was hard to know anymore, it was tangled up with everything else, and she was out of practice at having feelings for other people. At this point it had been