The Magicians - Lev Grossman [104]
“Then walked away with it burning behind us in the background, like in a movie.”
“End of an era. End of an epoch. Which one? Era or epoch? What’s the difference?”
Quentin didn’t know. They would have to find something else, he thought mazily. Something new. Couldn’t stay here anymore. Couldn’t go back. Only forward.
“Do you think we were ever like this?” Quentin asked. “Like these kids?”
“Probably. I bet we were even worse. I don’t know how the others put up with us.”
“You’re right,” he said. “You’re right. God, they were so much nicer than we are.”
That winter Quentin didn’t go home for the holidays. Around Christmastime-real—world Christmas—he’d had the usual conversation with his parents about Brakebills’ unusual schedule, which he had to remind them about every year, lounging inside the old phone booth under the back stairs with one foot braced up against the folding wooden door. Then by the time Brakebills-calendar Christmas rolled around, it was already March in the real world, and it didn’t seem like such a big deal not to go back. If they had asked him—if they’d put it out there for an instant that they were eager to see him, or that they would be disappointed if he didn’t come—he might have caved. He would have, in a second. But they were their usual blithe, oblivious, glassine selves. And besides, he got an independent feeling from coolly informing them that he had other plans, thanks very much.
Instead Quentin went home with Alice. It was her idea, though as it got closer to the holidays Quentin wasn’t exactly sure why she’d invited him, since the prospect obviously made her suicidally uncomfortable.
“I don’t know, I don’t know!” she said when he asked her. “It just seemed like the kind of things boyfriends and girlfriends do!”
“Well, whatever, I don’t have to come. I’ll just stay here. Just say I had a paper to finish or something. I’ll see you in January.”
“But don’t you want to come?” she wailed.
“Of course I do. I want to see where you come from. I want your parents to know who I am. And God knows I’m not taking you back to my parents’ house.”
“All right.” She didn’t sound any less anxious. “Do you promise to hate my parents as much as I do?”
“Oh, absolutely,” Quentin said. “Maybe even more.”
The opening of the portals home for vacation was always a complicated and tedious procedure that inevitably led to huge numbers of Brakebillians backed up with all their luggage in a ragged line that wound down the dark, narrow corridor leading to the main living room, where Professor Van der Weghe was in charge of getting people where they needed to go. Everybody was relieved that exams were over, and there was always a lot of giddy pushing and shoving and shrieking and casting of minor pyrotechnic spells. Quentin and Alice waited together in silence with their packed bags, solemnly, side by side, Quentin looking as respectable as he could manage. He hardly had any clothes anymore that weren’t part of his Brakebills uniform.
He knew Alice was from Illinois, and he knew Illinois was in the Midwest, but he couldn’t have pointed to the precise location of that state within a thousand miles. Apart from a European vacation in junior high he’d barely ever been off the East Coast, and his Brakebills education hadn’t done much to improve his grasp of American geography. And as it turned out he hardly saw Illinois anyway, or at least not its exterior.
Professor Van der Weghe set up the portal to open directly into an anteroom inside Alice’s parents’ house. Stone walls, flat mosaic floors, post-and-lintel doorways on all sides. It was a precise re-creation of a traditional bourgeois Roman residence. Sound echoed in it like a church. It was like stepping past the red velvet rope at a museum. Magic tended to run in families—Quentin was an exception in that respect—and Alice’s parents were both magicians. She had never had to sneak around behind their backs the way he had to with his parents.
“Welcome to the house that time forgot to forget,” Alice said sulkily, kicking her bags into a corner. She