He did an abrupt about-face.
“Hang on,” he said. “Gotta get my quidditch costume. I mean uniform. I mean welters.”
“We don’t have uniforms.”
“I know that,” Josh snapped. “I’m drunk, I’m not delusional. I still need my winter coat.”
“Jesus, man. It’s not even ten o’clock.” Quentin couldn’t believe he’d been worried. This was the big mystery?
“Experiment. Thought it might relax me for the big game.”
“Yeah?” Quentin said. “Really? How’s that working out for you?”
“It was just a little Scotch, for Christ’s sake. My parents sent me a bottle of Lagavulin for my birthday. Eliot’s the lush around here, not me.” Josh looked up at him with his crafty, stubbly monk’s face. “Relax, I know what I can handle.”
“Yeah, you’re handling the hell out of it.”
“Oh, who gives a shit!” Josh was turning nasty. If Quentin was going to get mad, he would get madder. “You were probably hoping I wouldn’t show up and blow your precious game for you. I just wish you had the balls to admit it. God, you should hear Eliot do you behind your back. You’re as much of a cheerleader as Janet is. At least she has the tits for it.”
“If I wanted to win,” Quentin said coldly, “I would have left you in the library. Everybody else wanted to.”
He waited in the doorway, furious, arms folded, while Josh rifled through his it was impossible to tellha0">The v with clothes. He snatched his coat off the back of a desk chair, causing the chair to fall over. He let it lie there. Quentin wondered if it was true about Eliot. If Josh was trying to hurt him, he certainly knew where to stick the knife in.
They set off down the hall together in silence.
“All right,” Josh said finally. He sighed. “Look, you know how I’m kind of a fuckup, right?”
Quentin said nothing, stone-faced. He didn’t feel like playing into Josh’s personal drama right now.
“Well, I am. And don’t bother with the self-esteem lecture: it’s gone so far beyond what you even want to know about. I’ve always been a smart guy, but I’m a low-grades/high-test-scores kind of smart guy. If it wasn’t for Fogg they would have kicked me out after last semester.”
“All right.”
“Look, all the rest of you can go around playing Peter Perfect, and that’s fine, but I have to work my ass off just to stay here! If you saw my grades—you guys don’t even know the alphabet goes that high.”
“We all have to work at it,” Quentin said a little defensively. “Well, except Eliot.”
“Yeah, okay, fine. But it’s fun for you. You get off on it. That’s your thing.” Josh shouldered his way through the French doors, out into the late-autumn morning, shrugging his way into his heavy overcoat at the same time. “Fuck, it’s cold. Look, I love it here, but I’m not going to make it on my own. I just don’t know where it comes from.”
With no warning he grabbed the front of Quentin’s coat and pushed him up against the wall of the House.
“Don’t you get it? I don’t know where it comes from! I do a spell, I don’t know if it’s going to work or not!” His normally soft, placid face had worked itself into a mask of anger. “You look for the power and it’s just there! Me, I never know! I never know if it’s going to be there when I need it. It comes and it goes and I don’t even know why!”
“Okay, okay.” Quentin put his hands on Josh’s shoulders, trying to calm him down. “Jesus. You’re hurting my man-boobs.”
Josh let go of him and stalked off in the direction of the Maze. Quentin caught up with him.
“So you thought Lovelady could help.”
“I thought he could … I don’t know.” Josh shrugged helplessly. “Give me a little boost. Just make it so I could count on it a little more.”
“By selling you some trash he got off eBay.”
“You know, he has interesting connections.” Just like that Josh was finding his good humor again. He always did. “They act all superior when we’re watching, but some of the faculty buy from Lovelady. I heard a couple of years ago Van der Weghe bought an old brass door knocker off him that turned out to be a Hand of Oberon. Chambers uses it to cut down trees around the Sea.
“I thought he could sell me a charm. Something to bring my grades up. I know I act like I don’t care, but I want to stay here, Quentin! I don’t want to go back out there!”
He pointed off in the general direction of the outside world. The grass was wet and half frozen, and the Sea was misty.Alice?”b respectv with
“I want you to stay, too,” Quentin said. His anger was going. “But Lovelady—Jesus, maybe you are an idiot. Why didn’t you just go to Eliot for help?”
“Eliot. He’s the last guy I’d talk to. Don’t you see how he looks at me in class? A guy like that—okay, he’s had it tough, in lots of ways, but this isn’t the kind of thing he understands.”
“What did Lovelady try to sell you?”
“Bunch of old dust bunnies. Bastard told me they were Aleister Crowley’s ashes.”
“What were you going to do with them anyway? Snort them?”
They pushed their way through the scrim of trees around the field. It was a grim scene. Eliot and Janet were huddled at one end of the board looking bedraggled and thoroughly chilled. Poor Alice was out on the board, squatting on a stone square and hugging herself miserably. The Natural Magic group was at the other end; despite the Physical Kids’ shortfall, they had chosen to field the full five players. Not very sportsmanlike. It was hard to see their faces—in an effort to intimidate their opponents they wore hooded druid robes that somebody had sewn together out of green velvet curtains. They weren’t made to get wet.
The Physical Kids gave a ragged cheer when Josh and Quentin appeared.
“My heroes,” Janet said sarcastically. “Where did you find him?”
“Somewhere warm and dry,” Josh said.
They were being beaten badly, but Josh’s surprise reappearance revived their fighting spirit. On his first turn Josh went for the silver square, and after five solid minutes of Gregorianesque chanting he improbably brought into being a fiery elemental—a slow-moving, woodchuck-size salamander that looked like it was constructed out of glowing orange embers, and which went on to laconically capture two adjacent squares for good measure. It then settled down on its six legs to smolder and watch the rest of the match, raindrops sizzling and skating off its charred scales.
The Physical Kids’ comeback had the unfortunate effect of lengthening the game beyond all possibility of enjoyment. It was the longest game they’d played all season; it was shaping up to be the longest welters game anybody could remember. Finally after another hour the handsome, Scandinavian-looking captain of the Natural team—whom Quentin was pretty sure Janet used to date—toed the edge of the sand square he stood on, gathered his wet velvet robe around him regally, and caused an elegantly twisted little olive tree to curl up out of a grass square in the Physicals’ home row.
“Suck it!” he said.
“That’s the win,” Professor Foxtree called from the judge’s chair. He was visibly catatonic from boredom. “Unless you Physicals can match it. If not, then thislled the thing