Wild Abandon Read Online Free

shower curtain, attached to a rail, translucent enough to tell when adverts had finished, but misty enough to hide their content.
    “I thought it’d be good to teach them how to understand adverts,” Patrick said, watching Don’s eyes narrow, “what they’re trying to achieve—and, as a result, remove their power.”
    Both men knew that Don, with dirt on his forearms, grit in his T-zones, had the authority. “
Whatever
experiences we have—no matter how we try to mediate them—affect us,”Don said, putting his hand on top of Albert’s head, “and particularly young minds in ways we
can’t
comprehend.”
    Isaac watched, looking back and forth as they spoke.
    “But at some point they’re going to have to face seeing adverts,” Patrick said. “They should know how to deal with them.”
    “That’s just it, Pat—that’s an assumption I’m not willing to make. Everything we see is a choice.”
    A vein forced its way to the surface of Patrick’s neck. There were still another six adverts on the tape. He had planned the lesson so that, at the end, there would be a couple of funnies to lighten things up: one about a talking sloth and another about an army of dancing bacteria.
    Kate’s first class was history. Leanne—they used tutors’ first names—was a large lady who kept her gray hair in a neat plait and wore local artists’ brooches in trapezium and rhomboid shapes. Her teaching style was to speak for the entire hour, with the implicit understanding that students were free to tune in and out, at will. Today she was talking about Von Stauffenberg’s failed assassination attempt on Hitler. When she talked about a briefcase with a bomb in it, she lifted up her own briefcase to help the class understand. When she read Nazi propaganda, she allowed herself an accent.
    Kate’s mind kept drifting, trying to puzzle out the memory of her mother at the typewriter, writing a letter to someone who was in the same room.
    Later, at lunch, she realized she had left her packed lunch in the fridge. Blaming Albert, she wished him a painful, head-led landing on the bottom step. Knowing that her sandwiches,unclaimed for a whole morning, would now be under communal jurisdiction, she made her way to the canteen. That was where she had first met Geraint. On that occasion also, it had been her brother’s fault: as part of his campaign to make her terminally late for college, he had hidden all Tupperware and plastic wrap. It was a pleasing irony that her brother’s attempts to sabotage her life had led to her meeting her boyfriend.
    She remembered that day: it was not only her first time in the canteen, but her first time in
any
canteen. Her initial impressions of it had been largely as expected: blue trays and yellow food—chips, garlic bread, breaded turkey burger. The only hot vegetarian option had been cauliflower cheese, so she had picked that, with waterlogged carrots. After paying, she looked for somewhere to sit, realizing that she knew this moment too—this awkward searching for a seat, peering around half-casually. There was something comforting about finally taking part in mainstream rituals. No one had invited her to join them. The only other person sitting on their own had been Kit Lintel, well known in college though not well liked; Kit practiced parkour, or as he called it,
the art of movement
, around the blocky college parking garage stairwells and could often be seen standing neatly on the corner of a high wall with his arms out like Christ the Redeemer. She sat at an empty table.
    She had trouble cutting through the cauliflower’s toupee of cheese. It looked bad but, once she got it in her mouth, there was no denying some talent at work. Was she imagining nutmeg? She made semiconscious
mmm
ing sounds. The cauliflower cheese’s deliciousness was the point at whichthe actual canteen had parted ways with the canteen of her imagination. And that’s when she had found her boyfriend-to-be standing over her