The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff Page B

telephones out in the windswept Alaskan wilderness, and though I had had a few beautiful long letters from her, I hadn't spoken to her all this time. I was afraid because I could always tell immediately from her voice how she was doing, and I didn't think I could bear to hear if she weren't doing well that day. If, in her voice, I detected more weakness than should be expected from a sick thirty-year-old girl, I wouldn't be able to handle it, not in the state I was in. I sat on my bed with the princess telephone in my lap and watched it, unmoving, for a long while.
    CLARISSA AND I had met at our small liberal arts college on the first day of fall semester my freshman year, when I arrived twenty minutes early to the French class I was hoping to get into, on the creaky top floor of an old observatory. I opened the door, to my dismay, into an apparent tete-a-tete between the professor and a girl I imagined was his daughter. She had corkscrew blonde hair and the birdlike bone structure of a dancer, and her clothes were bright and mismatched, reds and pinks and plaids and paisleys, all mixed up. From the door, I believed she was ten, no older. They were speaking together but turned as I came in.
    And then the little girl said in a surprisingly deep and throaty voice, "Holy crap. Scared the pants off me. Well, come on in, and make yourself at home." The professor grinned at her, tickled.
    It was only when I approached and saw the girl's quick and mischievous eyes, and the way she held herself, that I knew that she was far older than I had at first imagined. "This is Professor Serget, and I'm Clarissa Evans," she said. "We were talking about George Sand. A minor writer, in my opinion, but we're reading Indiana this semester. Yet again," and she twinkled at the professor, who gave a little chortle. Then Clarissa smiled kindly at me and said, "And you're a freshman. Come sit next to me and I'll let you crib my notes."
    Instead, though, I sat opposite her and scowled. "Willie Upton," I said as coldly as I could manage. "I'm sure I can hold my own."
    She nodded and her face lit up. "Aha," she crowed as the door opened and other students began to trickle in, "spunk! Now that's what I like to see," and she winked at me.
    Clarissa's ideas were excellent but her French reprehensible, and even the professor couldn't help but swallow a grin when she opened her mouth and in her incongruous voice started attacking something new. When I walked home from the class that day, she walked beside me. We must have looked ridiculous, I with my lanky height and tiny little Clarissa, like an egret striding alongside a chain-smoking parakeet.
    From then on, and even though she was a junior, we did everything together. I took higher-level classes with Clarissa, ate meals at the dining hall with her and her friends, all quick-witted types. I even moved into her suite when one of her dorm mates was kicked out for selling pot. Clarissa amazed me: she could do endless keg stands and quote Nietzsche; she could hike for eight hours without complaint and give a better manicure than a beautician; she left red lipstick rings around her cigarettes, and scattered the stubs behind her like flower petals. She walked away from nastiness, from gossip, but loved her friends so much she mimicked them endlessly, and you always felt pleased she was making fun of you. She had the worst taste in jokes, was the most puntastic person I'd ever met, had the unique talent to always make me laugh and wince simultaneously; when she at last snagged a guy she liked, Sully Bird, she grinned at me, saying one Bird in the hand, and left me to supply the rest. As the coxswain for the men's crew team she made herself heard up and down the river, shouting at her boys, "Come on, you bitches, pull," and, because she was Clarissa, they pulled. They would win for her at Little Threes; they'd place second that year at the Head of the Charles.
    The day I was going back to Templeton for Thanksgiving,