EMILY GREENSTREET
ONE AFTERNOON ALL five of them were sitting cross-legged in a circle in the vast, empty middle of the Sea. It was a baking-hot summer day, and they had gone out there with the intention of attempting a ridiculously elaborate piece of collaborative magic, a five-person spell that, if it worked, would sharpen their vision and hearing and increase their physical strength for a couple of hours. It was Viking magic, battlefield magic designed for a raiding party, and as far as any of them knew it hadn’t been tried in roughly a millennium. Josh, who was directing their efforts, confessed that he wasn’t completely sure it had ever worked in the first place. Those Viking shamans did a lot for empty boasting.
They had started drinking early, over lunch. Even though Josh said everything was ready at noon—done deal, good to go, let’s hook it up—by the time he actually gave them their handouts, spiral-ring pages of Old Norse chants scratched out in ballpoint in Josh’s neat, tiny runic script, and prepared the ground by pouring out a weaving, branching knot in black sand on the grass, it was almost four. There was singing involved, and neither Janet nor Quentin could carry a tune, and they kept cracking each other up and having to start over.
Finally they got all the way through it, and they sat around staring at the grassAbsolutely notbvesperate he got and the sky and the backs of their hands and the clock tower in the distance, trying to tell if anything was different. Quentin jogged to the edge of the forest to pee, and when he got back Janet was talking about somebody named Emily Greenstreet.
“Don’t tell me you knew her,” Eliot said.
“I didn’t. But remember I roomed with that cow Emma Curtis during First Year? I was talking to her cousin last week when I was home; she lives near my parents in L.A. She was here then. Told me the whole story.”
“Really.”
“And now you’re going to tell us,” Josh said.
“It’s all a big secret, though. You can’t tell anybody.”
“Emma wasn’t a cow,” Josh said. “Or if she was, she was a hot cow. She’s like one of those wagyu cows. Did she ever pay you back for that dress she threw up on?” He was lying on his back, staring up into the cloudless sky. He didn’t seem to care if the spell had worked or not.
“No, she didn’t. And now she’s gone to Tajikistan or something to save the vanishing Asiatic grasshopper. Or something. Cow.”
“Who’s Emily Greenstreet?” Alice asked.
“Emily Greenstreet,” Janet said grandly, savoring the rich, satisfying piece of gossip she was about to impart, “was the first person to leave Brakebills voluntarily in one hundred fifty years.”
Her words floated up and drifted away like cigarette smoke in the warm summer air. It was hot out in the middle of the Sea, with no shade, but they were all too lazy to move.
“She came to Brakebills about eight years ago. I think she was from Connecticut, but not fancy Connecticut, with the money and the Kennedy cousins and the Lyme disease. I think she was from New Haven, or Bridgeport. She was quiet, sort of mousy-looking—”
“How do you know she was mousy-looking?” Josh asked.
“Sh!” Alice whacked Josh on the arm. “Don’t antagonize her. I want to hear the story.” They were all lying on a stripy blanket spread out over the ruins of Josh’s sand pattern.
“I know because Emma’s cousin told me. Anyway, it’s my story, and if I say she was mousy, then she had a tail and she lived on Swiss fucking cheese.
“Emily Greenstreet was one of these girls that nobody ever notices, who are only friends with other girls nobody notices. Nobody likes or dislikes them. They have weak chins, or chickenpox scars, or their glasses are too big. I know I’m being mean. But you know, they’re just sort of at the edge of everything.
“She was a good student. She kept busy and got by in her boring little way until her Third Year, when she finally distinguished herself by falling in love with one of her professors.
“Everybody does it, of course. Or at least the girls do, since we all have daddy complexes. But usually it’s just a crush, and we get over it and move on to some loser guy our own age. But not our Emily. She was deeply, passionately, delusionally in love. Wuthering Heights love. She stood outside his window at night. She drew little pictures of him in class. She looked at the moon and cried. She drew little pictures of the moonwood-paneled b shufflingg in class and cried at them.
“She become moody and depressed. She started wearing black and listening to the Smiths and reading Camus in the original whatever. Her eyes became interestingly pouchy and sunken. She started hanging out at Woof.”
All groaned. Woof was a fountain in the Maze; its official name was Van Pelt, after an eighteenth-century dean, but it depicted Romulus and Remus suckling from a she-wolf with many dangling wolf-boobs, hence Woof. It was the chosen hangout of the goths and the artsy crowd.
“Now she had a Secret, capital S, and ironically it made her more attractive to people, because they wanted to know what her Secret was. And sure enough, before long a boy, some deeply unfortunate boy, fell in love with her.
“She didn’t love this boy back, since she was savin’ all her lovin’ for Professor Sexyman, but he made her feel pretty damn good, since nobody had ever been in love with her before. She strung him along and flirted with him in public in the hope that it would make her real love interest jealous.
“Now we turn to the third point in our little triangle of love. By all rights the professor should have been completely impervious to our Emily’s charms. He should have had an avuncular little chuckle over it in the Senior Common Room and then forgotten about it. She wasn’t even that hot. Maybe he was having a midlife crisis, maybe he thought a liaison with Ms. Greenstreet could restore to him some of his long-vanished youth. Who knows. He was married, too, the idiot.
“We’ll never know exactly what happened or how far it went, except that it went too far, and then Professor Sexyman came to his senses, or got what he wanted, and he called it off.
“Needless to say our Emily became even gothier and weepier and more like a Gorey drawing than she already was, and her boy became even more besotted and brought her presents and flowers and was Supportive.
“Maybe you knew this, I don’t know, I didn’t, but Woof used to be different from the other fountains. That’s why the doomers started hanging out there in the first place. You wouldn’t notice what was off about it, at first, but after a while you’d realize that when you looked into it, you wouldn’t see your own reflection, just empty sky. And maybe if the sky was cloudy on that particular day, the sky in the fountain would be blue, or the other way around. It definitely wasn’t a normal reflection. And every once in a while you’d look into it and you’d see other faces looking up at you, looking puzzled, as if they were looking into some other fountain somewhere else and were weirded out because they were seeing your face and not their own. Somebody must have figured out a way to switch the reflections in two fountains, but who did it and why, and how, and why the Dean didn’t change them back, I have no idea.
“You have to wonder, too, if it was more than just the reflections—if you could dive down into one pool and come up in the other one, in this world or some other world. There’s always been something off about those fountains. Did you know they were here before Brakebills? They built the school to be near them, and not the other way around. Or that’s what people say.”
Eliot snorted.
“Well, that’s what people say, darling. Anyway,” Janet went on, “the thing is, Emily started spending a lot of time at Woof, just smoking and hang it was impossible to tellha0boging out, and I guess mooning over her little affair. She spent so much time there that she started to recognize one of the faces in the fountain. Somebody like her, who was spending a lot of time at the other fountain, the one in the reflection. Let’s call her Doris. After a while Emily and Doris got to noticing each other. They’d acknowledge each other, a little wave, you know, just to be polite. Probably Doris was a little mopey, too. They got to feeling like kindred spirits.
“Emily and Doris worked out a way to communicate. Again, the exact details have eluded your intrepid correspondent. Maybe they held up signs or something. They must have had to be in mirror writing, to make sense as reflections, or am I getting that wrong?
“I don’t know how things worked in Woofland, where Doris lived; maybe magic is different there. Or maybe Doris was fucking with our Emily. Maybe she was sick of hearing Emily whine about her love life. Maybe there was something really wrong with Doris. Maybe she was something genuinely evil. But one day Doris suggested that if Emily wanted her lover back, maybe her appearance was the problem, and she should try changing it.”