Read The Most Fun We Ever Had for Free Online Page B

Evanston’s social elite, when one of her boys was school age and the other was heading there fast.
    “Listen, Viol,” Wendy said, “there’s—kind of a situation.”
    “So you said,” Violet murmured, feeling spacey and discarnate. “You being a harbinger of change and all.”
    “That’s me,” Wendy said, but her voice got serious. Eli appeared on the landing of the stairs, squinty with sleep, clutching his stuffed platypus. She waved him over and he crawled into her lap. “It’s this—South America thing,” Wendy continued, because of course there was a South America thing, because of course there was no such thing as normalcy when it came to her sister, because of course she wasn’t entitled to a post-naptime snuggle with her baby boy, not as long as Wendy was around to light fires and push her buttons.
    She was stroking her son’s back while she forced herself to listen to her sister—rhythmically, ritualistically, like children who comforted themselves by rocking.

1975
    The Behavioral Sciences Building was a place where people got routinely, ludicrously lost. The floor plan looked like a genome; the exterior resembled something made from gingerbread; inside, students wandered, wide-eyed, blunted by the windowlessness, looking for classrooms, for bathrooms. All these people getting turned around, dizzied by the double helix of the staircases, yet Marilyn Connolly had just begun to find herself. It was her second semester as a commuter student at the UIC Circle Campus, and though she returned each evening to the house on Fair Oaks, where she lived quietly with her widowed father, during the day she was free to do as she wished.
    She quickly mastered the layout of BSB, and there was a particular set of stairs she liked, one that led to a locked classroom between the second and third floors, cold to the touch even beneath layers of clothing, murder on the back, acoustically risky. She was outspoken in her classes, valued and deferred to in a way that she’d never before experienced. Her professors laughed at her jokes; her classmates whispered to her confidentially during lectures. She became, suddenly, very attractive to those around her, not for her ability to hold her head up in domestic crises when her father had had too much scotch or to iron his Oxford collars, but for her mind—and, in the dark corners of this hideous building, her body.
    Which was how she ended up on those stairs. Men now looked at her like she was an adult, capable of anything, and it both scared and intrigued her. And she enjoyed the physical part—the deviancy, the feel of the concrete steps beneath her back, the pleasurable filling-in of space that happened with fellow English majors between her legs, their mouths on her neck, her breasts; stuffy Joyce devotee Dean McGillis taught her, somewhat unpleasantly, how to execute a blowjob. Perhaps it was a form of greed, or overcompensation: she’d been deprived for so long—her mother dead, her father broken and firmly opposed to her communing with the opposite sex—of love, of autonomy, of the electric pleasure of another person’s hands on her body, and it seemed only fair that she take advantage of the host of willing undergraduates at her disposal.

    An unexpected complication showed up one day in March, a bespectacled complication in a raincoat who entered the building when she was hoping to catch one of the TAs from her Theories of Personality class. She knew only the handwriting of the teaching assistants from the feedback they provided on essays: there was Barely Legible Blue Ballpoint, Left-Slanted #2 Pencil, and—her least favorite—High-Pressure Red Pen, whose comments sometimes tore through the paper. She studied the man. His posture was delicate and tense, almost apologetic despite his stature—over six feet, thin but broad-shouldered. She wondered which handwriting was his.
    “Excuse me?” She rose from the stairs—a lower and more visible flight, serving,