Quentin didn’t spend any time in Brooklyn that summer because his parents didn’t live there anymore. Abruptly and without consulting him, they’d sold off their Park Slope town house Well why should they consult Q? They don’t have any kind of relationship with him. Also, Q, you are a whole-ass adult at this point. If…

Q gets into Fourth Year and all of a sudden we find out that all the Fourth Year students disappear for a semester and come back haggard and no one knows what happens when they go. Just…some out of the blue knowledge for you. We haven’t heard about it before, because there is no wider…

The rest of Quentin’s Third Year at Brakebills went by beneath a gray watercolor wash of- wait. The whole rest of the year? So we’re skipping first year because testing or whatnot, skipping second year because they spent all of that just trying to get into second year, and now skipping third year because (reason…

The entire time he’d been at Brakebills […] Quentin had been holding his breath without knowing it. He’d realized only now that he’d been waiting for Brakebills to vanish around him like a daydream. Even aside from the many and varied laws of thermodynamics that were violated there on a regular basis, it was just…

Later in the day, after being punched by Penny for no reason, Q passes out. When he comes to, the paramedic from the first chapter is taking care of him. She spouts some portentious stuff about death (the guy who died was just a coincidence, apparently) and how the manuscript will come back to him…