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 a long time since anybody had even touched her. Not since the zookeeper in the bathroom at the party, and that was mostly just spastic overclothes pawing, entirely clinical in its intent. The patient struggling under the knife, while she performed the operation. She felt out of touch with her body, with pleasure of any kind. Doctor Julia noted, purely for the record, that it was scary how unloving she’d become, and how unlovable. She’d locked all that stuff away and melted down the key for scrap.

It was in a cemetery behind a church, whither Quentin had retired for more sulking, that she sprang the trap. Looking back on it she was proud of herself. She could have lost it but she didn’t. She got it out. She said her piece, and hung on to her pride, and showed him that she was every bit as good as he was. She made the case. She even showed him the spell, the one with the rainbow trails, which she’d gotten down pat over the previous six months. Even those murderous hand positions, even the one with the thumbs, she had hit with icy precision. She’d never shown it to anybody before, and it felt great to finally unveil it for an audience. She took that beach like a goddamned Marine.

And when it came down to the nuclear option, when the red phone rang in the war room, Julia hadn’t flinched. Oh, no. She took that call. If that’s what it took, she would go there, sister.

But here was the thing: he wouldn’t. She hadn’t counted on that. She’d offered, as plainly as she knew how. She’d run herself through with the hook and dangled herself before him, pink and wriggling, but he hadn’t taken the bait. Julia knew she’d let herself go a bit lookswise, but still. Come on. It didn’t add up.

The problem wasn’t her, it was him. Something or someone had gotten to him. He wasn’t the Quentin she remembered. Funny: she’d almost forgotten people could change. Time had stopped for her the day she’d gotten her social studies paper back from Mr. Karras, but outside the dark, musty interior of her room, time had gone on hurtling forward. And in that time Quentin Makepeace Coldwater had managed to get a boner for somebody else besides Julia.

Well, good for him.

When he left she lay down on the cold, soft, wet grass of the graveyard. It rained on her and she let it. It wasn’t that she was wrong. She’d been right. He’d confirmed everything that she’d ever suspected, about Brakebills and magic and everything else. It was all real, and it was extraordinary. It was everything she wanted it to be. Her theoretical work had been admirably rigorous, and she had been rewarded with full experimental validation.

It was just that there was nothing he could do for her. It was all real—it wasn’t a dream or a psychotic hallucination—but they weren’t going to let her have it. There was a place out there that was so perfect and magical that it had made even Quentin happy. There wasn’t just magic there, there was love too. Quentin was in love. But Julia wasn’t. She was out in the cold. Hogwarts was fully subscribed, and her eligibility had lapsed. Hagrid’s motorcycle would never rumble outside her front door. No creamy-enveloped letters would ever come flooding down her chimney.

She lay there thinking, on the rich, wet graveyard grass, before the tomb of some random parishioner—Beloved Son, Husband, Father—and what she thought was this: she’d been right about almost everything. She’d gotten nearly full marks. A minus again. Blew only one question.

Here’s the one thing I got wrong, she thought. I thought that they could never wear me down.