The Magicians - Lev Grossman [44]
He wondered what time it was.
“What about you?” he said numbly. He wasn’t so sure he was willing to make nice just yet. “Did you get hurt?”
“I cut open my forehead on your tooth. And you broke my nose when you head-butted me. They fixed it with a Pulaski’s Mending. I’ve never seen it done like that before, at least not on a human being. She used goat’s milk.”
“I didn’t even know I head-butted you.”
Penny was quiet again. Quentin counted thirty ticks of the clock.
“Do you have a black eye?” Penny said. “I can’t see.”
“Huge one.”
“Thought so.”
There was a glass of water on the bedside table. Quentin gulped it gratefully and fell back on the pillow. Hot veins of pain flashed through his head. Whatever the paramedic had done, or whoever she was, he still had some healing to do.
“Penny. Why the hell did you hit me like that?”
“Well, I think I had to,” Penny said. He sounded a little shocked that Quentin would even ask.
“You had to.” Maybe he wasn’t too tired after all. “But I didn’t do anything.”
“You didn’t do anything. Oh, that’s right. You didn’t do anything.” Penny chuckled woodenly. His voice was oddly cool, as if he’d rehearsed this speech, his closing argument, many times. Behind it Quentin could hear that weird manic anger ramping back up. “You could have talked to me, Quentin. You could have shown me a little respect. You and your little girlfriend.”
Oh, God. Was this really how it was going to be?
“Penny, who are you even talking about? Are you talking about Alice?”
“Oh, come on, Quentin. You sit there, you give each other little looks, you laugh at me. Openly. Would you believe I actually thought it was going to be fun? That we were all going to work together? Would you believe I actually thought that?”
Quentin recognized Penny’s aggrieved tone. Once his parents had rented out the parlor floor of their brownstone to an apparently sane little man, an actuary, who had left them increasingly high-handed notes requesting that they stop videotaping him every time he took out the trash.
“Don’t be an ass,” Quentin said. He didn’t see this as a rise-above-it situation. What, was Penny going to come over and give him another concussion? “Do you even know what you look like to the rest of the world? You sit there with your big-ass punk attitude, and you expect people to come around begging to hang out with you?”
Penny was sitting up now.
“That night,” he said, “when you and Alice went off together. You didn’t apologize, you didn’t ask me, didn’t say goodbye, you just walked right out. And then, and then,” he finished triumphantly, “you passed? And I failed? How is that fair? How is that fair? What did you expect me to do?”
So that was it. “That’s right, Penny,” Quentin said. “You definitely should have hit me in the face because you didn’t pass a test. Why don’t you go hit Professor Van der Weghe, too?”
“I don’t take things lying down, Quentin.” Penny’s voice was very loud in the empty infirmary. “I don’t want trouble. But if you come after me, I swear to you that I will get right back in your face. That’s just how it works. You think this is your own private fantasy world? You think you can do whatever you want? You try to walk all over me, Quentin. I’m going to come right back at you!”
They were both talking so loudly that Quentin didn’t even notice when the infirmary door opened and Dean Fogg came in, dressed in an exquisitely embroidered silk kimono and a Dickensian nightcap. For a second Quentin thought he was holding a candle before he realized it was Fogg’s upraised index finger that was softly glowing.
“That’s enough,” he said quietly.
“Dean Fogg—” Penny began as