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BOOK I

BROOKLYN

Quentin did a ic trick Nobody noticed

They picked their way along the cold, uneven sidewalk together: James, Julia, and Quentin Jas were now The sideasn’t quite wide enough, so Quentin trailed after them, like a sulky child He would rather have been alone with Julia, or just alone period, but you couldn’t have everything Or at least the available evidence pointed overwhelly to that conclusion

“Okay!” Jay”

Ja to feel sorry for hiht after him

“Nice fir comfortable, you hit him with a chair and I’ll break his password and e-mail Princeton”

“Just be yourself, Q,” Julia said

Her dark hair was pulled back in a wavy bunch Somehow it made it worse that she was always so nice to him

“How is that different from what I said?”

Quentin did the ain It was a very sht with a nickel He did it in his coat pocket where nobody could see He did it again, then he did it backward

“I have one guess for his password,” James said “Password”

It was kind of incredible how long this had been going on, Quentin thought They were only seventeen, but he felt like he’d known James and Julia forever The school systeether, then separated the ridiculously brilliant ones froether, and as a result they’d been buional Latin exams and tiny, specially convened ultra-advanced math classes since elementary school The nerdiest of the nerds By now, their senior year, Quentin knew James and Julia better than he knew anybody else in the world, not excluding his parents, and they knew hi to say before they said it Everybody as going to sleep with anybody else had already done it Julia—pale, freckled, dreamy Julia, who played the oboe and knew evento sleep with Quentin

Quentin was thin and tall, though he habitually hunched his shoulders in a vain atte froically hit the tall people first His shoulder-length hair was freezing in cluym, especially with his interview today, but for so ray sky threatened snow It see up special little tableaux of misery just for hi shit, windblown trash, the corpses of innu desecrated in innumerable ways by innumerable vehicles and pedestrians

“God, I’m full,” James said “I ate too much Why do I always eat too much?”

“Because you’re a greedy pig?” Julia said brightly “Because you’re tired of being able to see your feet? Because you’re trying to make your stomach touch your penis?”

Jaers in his wavy chestnut hair, his camel cashhtily Cold never bothered him Quentin felt cold all the time, like he was trapped in his own private individual winter

Ja Wenceslas” and “Bingo”:

In olden times there was a boy

Young and strong and brave-o

He wore a sword and rode a horse

And his name was Dave-o

“God!” Julia shrieked “Stop!”

Jao for ait; by now they all knew it by heart Julia shoved hie can, and when that didn’t work she snatched off his watch cap and started beating him over the head with it

“My hair! My beautiful interview hair!”

King Jaht Le roi s’amuse

“I hate to break up the party,” he said, “but we’ve got like two minutes”

“Oh dear, oh dear!” Julia twittered “The duchess! We shall be quite late!”

I should be happy, Quentin thought I’ood friends I have two reasonably intact parents—viz, Dad, an editor of medical textbooks, and Mo a painter I am a solid her than most people even realize it is possible for a GPA to be

But walking along Fifth Avenue in Brooklyn, in his black overcoat and his gray interview suit, Quentin kneasn’t happy Why not? He had painstakingly asseredients of happiness He had performed all the necessary rituals, spoken the words, lit the candles, made the sacrifices But happiness, like a disobedient spirit, refused to come He couldn’t think what else to do

He followed Jaas, laundromats, hipster boutiques, cell-phone stores li, past a bar where old people were already drinking at three forty-five in the afternoon, past a brown-brick Veterans of Foreign Wars hall with plastic patio furniture on the sidewalk in front of it All of it just confirmed his belief that his real life, the life he should be living, had been h some clerical error by the cosmic bureaucracy This couldn’t be it It had been diverted somewhere else, to somebody else, and he’d been issued this shitty substitute faux life instead

Maybe his real life would turn up in Princeton He did the trick with the nickel in his pocket again