Mazes and Monsters Read Online Free Page B

particularly ever since that night his brother ran away again and never came back. After that night Robbie could never look up at the stars without wondering where his brother was and if he was looking at them too, and if they looked the same where he was … or if he was still alive.
    His parents were victims of history. Strangers when they married each other way back in the Fifties; his mother just out of Vassar, his father all excited about his first job in an architectural firm; his older brother, Hall junior, born just ten months later—they were a whole family before his parents even got to know each other. His mother had told him that story a million times. In those days people didn’t live together before they got married. Other people’s parents who Robbie knew had gotten married the same way, and had kids, and they got along fine. But his parents fought and yelled, when they spoke to each other at all; endlessly recriminating each other about the past, their wasted lives, their unfulfilled dreams. Yet they would never leave each other. Something held them together, some need “to make it work.” Make what work? His mother had been an alcoholic as long as he could remember. In the suburbs alcoholics have one of two choices: drive their kids to the things they have to do and risk getting killed, or become housebound and trapped. When his mother stopped driving him Robbie was relieved.
    Now his father was the head of his own architectural firm, with a big office in New York, and his designs were featured in international magazines. As a symbol of his success, his father had had a different Cartier watch for every day of the week, until his mother got mad and smashed them all, the night his brother left. She’d smashed ten thousand dollars worth of watches in one night. That wasn’t the only thing that had been smashed in one night—their lives had, all of their lives … but he wasn’t going to think about that now.
    Three weeks after he’d started at college Robbie was enjoying himself more than he’d anticipated, and almost as much as he’d hoped. He still didn’t know what he wanted to major in, or what he wanted to do with his future, so he had registered for the mandatory courses to get them over with and had tried out for and gotten on the swimming team. He’d met quite a few people in his dorm and some in his classes, and gone to bed with a few Freshman girls who seemed overwhelmed with the headiness of living in a coed dorm and didn’t seem to care if they never saw him again. At first he thought it was because he hadn’t done something right, but then he realized they had just been let out of some uptight all-girls school, or some strict home, and were making up for lost time. Some of the guys were the same way. They all seemed to be Freshmen. The upperclassmen had already gotten over the novelty of living in a candy store and were leading normal lives. He had written only one letter to his parents, and it had taken him an hour to think of anything to say. He supposed his mother would be too drunk to read it and his father wouldn’t care what he said as long as he wasn’t in trouble.
    Meals were served in the dorm dining room, which was like an enormous cafeteria. First you went into the kitchen, where you stood on line and served yourself from a bewildering array of food to suit any fad or dietary cult. Most of it turned out to be greasy junk anyway. Then you went into the dining room and sat at a table with people you knew, if you could find them, or else with strangers. You were really aware of how big the dorm was when you saw the crowd at mealtime. Some of the people just propped up books in front of their plates and didn’t talk to anyone at all. Because of swimming practice, Robbie usually arrived at dinner late and had to sit wherever there was still room. It forced him to speak to people he didn’t know, which was scaring him less now that he was beginning to know his way