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

tight, pleated inside.
    Most of the time, though, we talk about Evie.
    “She’s probably in some basement somewhere,” someone chirps, “tied to a pipe.”
    “Pete Shaw wasn’t in school today.”
    “He’d better not be. They’d swing him from the goalposts.”
    Everyone seems to know that Mr. Shaw is, as Joannie keeps putting it, the “prime suspect,” and there’s much talk of my seeing
     the car, which can only have come from Tara, with her assistant prosecutor dad. It has made me tremendously popular.
    “It might’ve been you, Lizzie,” Joannie says, pointing at me with her curving dolphin pen with the finned tip. “It just might
     have been you.”
    The thought had not come to me. Now it rockets around in my head. Could it be true? If I’d been the one left alone, the one
     on the empty street in front of the emptied-out school? What if it had been me yanked from everything to some dark place?
     Could Mr. Shaw have—
    “No way,” Tara says, shaking her head definitively. “He had his target in his sights.”
    I remember the cigarette stubs, and I know she’s right. It was never me.
    With that, the furtive shimmers that shimmered briefly in my head snuff out.
    I see him, when my eyes are shut, standing under the dark boughs of the pear tree, standing in the middle of the yard, waiting.
     What did he see in spindly Evie, her big rain-puddle eyes, her jumpy little body, the way she sucked her teeth when thinking,
     hard, over algebra, the way she picked the frilled edges off her spiral notebook, one by one?
    This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof
     with three torn shingles and a pretty birdbath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs. Shaw, her hair tied back with a scarf,
     cleaning with a dainty skimmer.
    How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl’s backyard, and then, smoking
     and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to her bright magic?

Seven
    M y brother, Ted, picks me up after school. His eyes lost behind sunglasses, he is confident and impressive as he flicks the
     steering wheel to and fro, his long limbs poking from every corner of the front seat, his hair long over his ears.
    As he rounds corners, I pinball back and forth in my seat. The streets look so empty, like it’s Christmas. All those packs
     of raucous kids, all that rabid energy, gone. I picture all of them in their family rooms, their dens, staring at TV screens,
     their parents lurking in the doorframe, standing guard.
    We drive by the All-Risk office, heavy-metal guitars crunching on the car radio, Ted with his enormous basketball-player hand
     fisted over the gearshift.
    The office is dark, the red watch face on the CLOSED sign grinning from behind the smoked glass.
    “Sick motherfucker,” Ted shouts as we pass. The car windows are closed, but he shouts anyway.
    Something about it makes me want to laugh. Ted heaves the steering wheel, and we charge down our street, the bass tickling
     in my thighs, my hands fast on the door handle, holding on tight. I hear my backpack fling across the backseat.
    The screech when we roil up the driveway jolts me and I seethe blinds sway in Mrs. Darlton’s next-door window, her tsk-tsking face thrusting through.
    “Listen,” Ted says, turning down the music as I gather my books, fanned across the floor of the backseat, “you lock everything
     up. I have to be someplace. You can’t leave, though, or Mom’ll kill us both.”
    “Okay,” I say.
    It’s the longest exchange I have had with him since he taught me how to fill my bike tire in the fourth grade.
    I open the car door and climb out. We both stare at the house, which looks so very still. From the corner of my eye, I see
     the Ververs’ screen door, the way it puckers out and you can peek in, but now the heavy front door is closed and the curtains
     drawn across all the front windows, like