Pamela Dean by Tam Lin (pdf) Read Free Book Online Page B

said reluctantly, "That doesn't mean anything to Tina. It should be something we'll all remember."
    Christina, still delving around in her sewing basket, gurgled suddenly and said,
    "Pink curtains."
    Molly rolled her eyes. Janet said to her, "Will you remember?"
    "How could I forget?"
    "All right, then. I swear."
    "And I," said Molly.
    "Me, too," said Christina.

CHAPTER 3

    Registration was held on a Thursday. It was raining, which meant that anybody with the slightest worry about getting into a particular class stood in long lines, outside the old gymnasium where Registration took place, and became damp and disgruntled. Janet got into all her classes.
    Out of what she could only view as the College's customary perversity, said classes began the next day, instead of waiting decently until Monday. She had Fencing first.
    Two-A felt earlier than she had hoped it would; to get up at nine-thirty was not so dreadful, but to be up and dressed and fed by then left her still a little bleary, and not inclined to physical effort. She supposed that, after the class, she would feel invigorated but not inclined to intellectual effort, just in time for her first class in the philosophical problems of classical science.
    It was, of course, since everybody was fated to spend it indoors, the most beautiful of autumn days, full of cloud shadows and piercing blue sky and the hope that some of those maples might hold on to their leaves long enough to turn them red before they fell. "Do it, trees," said Janet softly to the nearest clump, which held two healthy young maples and a rather straggly ash
    Janet dodged out of the chilly shadow of the decaying Student Union and went along past the chapel and the Music and Drama Center, trying to walk briskly and feeling like a film that somebody had slowed down. She turned her head away from the reflecting glass of the M&D Center, and looked across the little natural amphitheater in which, next week, the Classics Department would be staging
    Lysistrata. They would do so in the shadow of Olin Hall, a nondescript brick building trimmed with metal strips that made it look like a radiator.
    That was where Molly and Christina would be spending most of their time for the next four years. Janet turned away from that, too, wandered down the middle of the asphalt road between the M&D Center and the north end of Ericson, and moved a little more quickly for the Women's Phys Ed Center. There were enough people heading for it that the time must be close to nine-thirty.
    Somewhere to her right, a husky tenor sang, "'I have heard the mermaids singing, each to each. I do not think that they will sing for me.'"
    Janet stopped short. She was, just for a moment, annoyed. Like to see you do that with Murder in the Cathedral, she thought grumpily. Then, as the voice performed a great leap into some other tune entirely and sang, "'I have lingered in the chambers of the sea,'" she became wildly intrigued. Why shouldn't he sing T. S. Eliot? And where, oh, where, had he gotten the music?
    She stood waiting, and though the song stopped, a small and wiry young man with wild curly hair emerged suddenly from the shrubbery, his arms full of books that looked as if they had already seen four years' use, and plunged past her in the direction of the Women's Center.

    "Excuse me," called Janet, sprinting after him. He turned, looking alarmed. He had huge blue eyes, behind a lopsided and dilapidated pair of horn-rimmed glasses, and a blunt face decorated with mild acne. "Hello?" he said.
    "You were singing 'The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,'" said Janet, falling into step beside him. He had begun walking again as soon as she caught up to him.
    "A point for you, lady," he said.
    "Where'd you get the music?"
    "I wrote it."
    Janet experienced a treacherous upwelling of instant adoration, and quashed it violently. "May I hear it sometime?"
    "When it's done," he said.
    "Have you put a lot of poetry to music?"
    "Not really—look, I have to