The End of Everything by Megan Abbott Read Free Book Online

blue blazer,
     wispy brown hair, a pen in his hand, holding it like he’s not sure what it is or how it got there. And then he’s gone.
    Or no, no, another time, walking by and seeing him standing, hands on hips, looking out the window as he talks soundlessly
     to someone, his mouth moving but the rest of his face still.
    Or there, there, over on, what street is it? Huntington? Washing that maroon car in his driveway, golf shirt spattered, his
     son, Pete, the one in Dusty’s class, twisting a big golden sponge, Walkman cord dangling, and Mr. Shaw, face so plain, arms
     pale, chin faintly shadowed.
    “ I ’ve never talked to him,” I tell the detectives. “I never saw Evie talk to him.”
    Why would Evie ever talk to him? It all seems so impossible. Like it’s a big mistake, and somewhere up north Mr. Shaw is stiff-backed
     in some convention room chair, doing whatever people at conventions do, unaware of all the wretched scenarios spinning around
     him.
    But elsewhere in my head, I seem to know something, or guess at it. The look I’ve been seeing on Evie’s face, behind her eyes.
     But I don’t talk about that. I don’t tell them about Evie’s face and what it carries because it’s just a guess, a feeling,
     because I know Evie so blood-thick. I know her so well that I know when I no longer know everything.
    And Evie, in showing me those cigarette stubs, was showing me something private, mysterious, a slippery secret, which is what
     we did. Mouth to ear, we shared everything. Until we didn’t.
    M y mother sits me down at the kitchen table. She quit smoking after the divorce, when she started taking aerobics and got the
     lemony highlights in her hair. But there is a cigarette flaring in her hand now, slipped from that Benson & Hedges pack she
     keeps wedged under the leg of one of the lawn chairs on the back patio.
    “Lizzie, how well do you know Mr. Shaw?”
    It seems a funny way to ask it. I tell her I don’t know him at all, which is true. I know him like I know anyone’s dad. They’re
     all dads.
    She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “It’s so terrible. I don’t know how Annie is managing. Either of them. I don’t
     know at all.”
    “It’s okay, Mom.” I can’t think of what else to say. This is not the way she usually talks to me and it seems like if I say
     the wrong thing, it will make her more nervous.
    She looks at the cigarette in her hand, turning it like she doesn’t recognize it.
    “Do you think he’s hurt her?” I finally ask. I don’t think I’ve let the idea really cross my mind until that moment.
    “No,” my mother says, jerking up suddenly, face set, eyes on me. “No, honey. It’s a mistake. It’s all a crazy mistake.”
    Her lie is somehow meaningful and I can feel the weight of it.
    No one is saying it, but everyone seems to be so sure. Why would Mr. Shaw take Evie if he didn’t mean to touch her, to do
     things to her?
    But no one’s actually saying it, no adults can say the words aloud. And I fight the ideas in my head, shake them off. They’re
     ugly things, and I don’t even know where they’ve come from. They’re like choppy collages, pieces pulled from cable movies
     caught late at night, hand-wringing school assemblies, leering reenactments on news shows, and snapshotted Evie in her soccer
     jersey, clipped in, her face pasted on bodies nude and scandalized.
    I go to my room, pull out a stack of old, gold-spined horse books, and read them for hours.

Six
    M r. Shaw. He’s the one. The way they talked at school, the way everyone had been talking, you’d think it had to be some lurching
     drifter, claw for a hand, living out of his truck.
    But it’s Mr. Shaw.
    A hundred times, you would see him paying the newspaper boy, or filling his gas tank, and he was just a man, and now he’s
     the one who took Evie in that Buick. He has taken her away and has maybe done things to her and done, done, done.
    A hundred men like him in the five blocks on