The End of Everything by Megan Abbott Read Free Book Online Page A

either side, and I never noticed one.
    I t’s that night, the third night. It’s after the emergency PTA meeting, my mother’s on the phone all night with parents, the
     phone ringing all the time, and my brother is walled up in his room, TV on, stereo on, everything on, and the vibrations,
     when I press my hand to the door, thunder through me. It’s like some booming, screeching spell struck across the threshold
     to keep me out.
    So I walk from room to room. It’s like I think I’ll find Evie there, crouched under the window seat, twined in the shower
     curtain, and she’ll be laughing, laughing that we all cared so much.
    “Harold Shaw,” my mother says, standing in the doorway of my room. “It doesn’t seem possible. It really does not.” She shakes
     her head.
    I don’t say anything, but I turn off the light on my bedside table and she drifts away down the hall.
    There’s a picture in my head of my mother at one of those Memorial Day picnics, stringing up fairy lights with Mr. Shaw, asking
     him to help her off a ladder. Did it really happen, and did she giggle girlishly when he lifted her and set her daintily on
     the ground? And that makes me think of all the parents at block parties when we were kids, the way they would huddle with
     one another’s spouses, sneaking off for smokes like teenagers, dancing too close, dropping beer bottles and tripping across
     lawns. Like married people love to do. And they love to make their husbands, their wives, act the knuckle-rapping parents
     all day so they can play the wayward kid. Is being young so magical that they must conjure it up again, can’t help themselves?
     I don’t see any magic in it at all.
    T hat night, in bed, I picture the way it was. Twice a day, five days a week, all school year long, Evie and I walking, running,
     biking past the big windows of the All-Risk office, with Mr. Shaw there. Mr. Shaw always there. Looking out with those gloomy
     eyes of his.
    He looks so sad,
Evie said once. Oh, the sudden remembering of it now brings on a shiver.
    He’s so sad,
she said. We were looking at the sign in the window: LIFE INSURANCE, FIRE INSURANCE, FLOODS.
He must hear sad stories all day long.
    He always looks like his dog died,
she said, and I laughed, but Evie didn’t.
    L ast night’s emergency PTA meeting, and everything’s changed. There are many announcements, from teachers, from the gravely
     voiced principal across the PA. The new rules.
    “It’s lockdown,” Joannie groans.
    Trapped in the gym, with the windows covered with GO, CELTS! in streaks of swampy green paint, we all wait.
    My legs are still shaking from practice, that aching, stretchy feel that’s so delectable, like my body being pulled in five
     ways and sprung back strong and magnificent.
    It never lasts.
    Some days, Evie and I lie on the soccer field and take turns pulling each other’s legs as hard as we can, pulling until we
     feel torn in two. I have two inches on Evie and she says it’s because she’s stronger and could pull harder and I owe those
     two inches to her.
    To escape the noise from the boys doing basketball drills, the bunch of us girls nest up in a corner of the bleachers and
     do not acknowledge their hoarse-voiced, bare-limbed, flaunting presence.
    Intermittently, we play Flame, a folded-paper game of mammoth complexity, where you add up the vowels in your name and some
     boy’s and get a number and then count the letters in F-L-A-M-E, crossing out “hits” until you have one letter left. It tells
     you your future with the boy: F equals “Friends,” L equals “Lovers,” A equals “Affair,” M equals “Marriage,” and E equals
     “Enemies.”
    We talk about the difference between an affair and being lovers. Tara says that affair means one-time sex. Joannie says affair
     means sex any number of times, only with not caring. I can’t decide, but I shake my legs out and wonder where the stretching
     feeling went. My whole body’s gone