Free The Monsters of Templeton by Lauren Groff

champagne back and stood. "I'll be okay. Let's find Heather and skeedaddle," she said. "I need to go to bed."
    I didn't see Clarissa all the next week, but when we met up for brunch on Sunday, she seemed tinier than she already was and was blinking rapidly in the bright light slanting into the cafe. She also had a strange red rash across her face that looked so perfectly delineated it seemed almost fake. I gave Clarissa a hug, and without sitting down, I said, "Don't order anything. I'm taking you to the doctor. Right now," I said.
    "Don't bother," she said. "I went to my dermatologist Friday and he said he thought it was my face wash."
    "You went to your dermatologist?" I said. "Clarissa, what if it's...," but Clarissa waved her tiny hand and coughed juicily and quieted me. "I just want my pain au chocolat," she said. "I just want a huge vat of coffee and my best friend to make me laugh and then I will go home and take a hot bath and finish my story that was due three days ago and then I want to go to bed. Sorry, Willie," she said. "But everybody's been annoying me about this, and I've had enough."
    "Fine," I said, sitting down. "You tiny little fascist."
    "My body," she said, "my fascia," and her laugh sounded so much like the old Clarissa's that I smiled, too, hoping, and ordered my omelet.
    Clarissa disappeared for a few weeks after that. I called but she never answered or returned my calls. All the times I stopped by her apartment, though, nobody ever answered the buzzer, and so I assumed she was better, out interviewing people for one of her stories. One night, I went on a date with an amazingly geeky law student to a little tapas place in Menlo Park, and after an hour was jittery with boredom. I loved Sully for calling; I answered my phone, rudely, at the table. But there was worry in Sully's soft voice when he said, "Willie? Clarissa's acting strange. How soon do you think you can get here?"
    "Twenty minutes," I said, then smiled at my date as he tipped his wineglass up into the air and extended his tongue to lap up the very last drops. "Strike that," I said. "Eighteen."
    When I arrived at their apartment, Clarissa was bug-eyed and standing atop their glass coffee table in a tank top with no underwear on. There were strange raised rashes on her arms and legs, now, in addition to the red masklike one on her face, and in her hands were fronds from the great potted palm tree that was her pride, the only thing, she ever said, she could keep alive. She was shaking them rhythmically at the ground, breathing something that sounded like gibberish to me.
    "Clarissa?" I said, but she didn't hear me, so I stepped closer and whispered in her ear. "Clarissa? What are you doing, honey?"
    "Ants," she breathed between incantations. "Armies of ants trying to climb on me."
    I turned to Sully and threw him my keys. "Pull the car up," I said. "Now," and I wrestled Clarissa off the table and forced her into underwear and a skirt and slippers, and carried her shouting over my shoulder into the car, where Sully sat at the wheel, white-knuckled, his face looking as if he had been slapped repeatedly.
    At the hospital they didn't make us wait long. The weary attending came out of Clarissa's room and held our hands with her two moist, fat ones. "I'm sorry to tell you," she said, "but it seems pretty clear to me that your friend has an advanced case of lupus erythematosus. The rashes, the psychosis, the joint-swelling, the fever, all parts of the disease. Two weeks more and she would have had total system failure. Even now, it's attacked her kidneys and the lining of the lungs. Her brain, too." Sully crumpled into a chair, and put his head in his hands.
    "Lupus, right? That's okay, right?" I said. "It's not a horrible disease. It's not like AIDS or anything. Right? It's curable."
    "It's not curable," said the doctor. "And it is an autoimmune disease. But with steroids and antipsychotics and antidepressants and maybe even some advanced treatments