Free The End of Everything by Megan Abbott Page A

him,” Joannie says, and we all look at her. “Maybe it really is just a coincidence.”
    “So where the hell is he, then?” Tara says, clicking her retainer definitively. “My dad says there is no such thing as a coincidence.
     Coincidences are for bored housewives and defense attorneys.”
    There are things grinding in my head, chugging mercilessly…
    The icky mysteries the Shaw house was expected to hold, the darkening rumors, none of this is in my real imagining. I don’t
     believe any of it.
    Didn’t I know they wouldn’t find a thing? It’s not about a rancid need for all girls, any girl. It’s about Evie and love.
     Standing in her yard…
    Blood-thick: I know it’s nothing’s like what they think. They’ve all got it wrong. I just don’t know how, yet.
    T he sobbing upstairs is loud, helpless, as if to rattle the windows and shake the pillars.
    “Dusty wasn’t feeling up to school today,” Mr. Verver says, and I can tell from his T-shirt and jeans at three thirty in the
     afternoon that he never made it to work either.
    I’m there to deliver the trophy Dusty won at the end-of-year ceremony at the high school. MVP, which is a very big deal, especially
     for a junior. Ted brought it home, was asked to deliver it to Dusty. (“I can’t go over there,” he whispered. But I could.)
    Mr. Verver smiles at the golden figurine of the ponytailed field hockey player as he turns the walnut base over in his hand.
     He brings the face close to his eyes, his brows knitted. “She doesn’t look nearly fierce enough,” he says, staring hard into
     the gold-plated eyes.
    I can’t fight the grin and he sees it and grins too.
    “Shall we put it in a place of honor?” he asks, and for a second he feels like Mr. Verver from before, the way he made everything
     an adventure, even having to get our shots before school started, or the time Mrs. Verver was sick and he took Evie and me
     to the Roberto Salon for haircuts, the way he sat in one of the lilac chairs and tried to read
Woman’s Day,
and the way all the stylists preened and cooed over him, and one gave him a free cut and rubbed creamy coconut-smelling lotion
     into his scalp and we could all smell it for hours, in the car, in the rec room when we played table tennis.
    I thought of how the coconut scent must have sunk into his pillow that night.
    Once, last summer, Mr. Verver, he pulled up the fallen strap of my bathing suit with one long finger. I still remember the
     tickly-achy feeling, a feeling I never felt before.
    We walk down the basement stairs to the rec room. This is where the Verver kid parties were held, and, for a while, weekly
     poker night with Mr. Verver and some of the neighborhood dads. And the adults come down here a lot during the block parties
     and the Verver Fourth of July party to get away from the kids and to smoke. There are family pictures and some German beer
     posters. An old velvet poster that said, “Mott the Hoople,” which I always thought was a Dr. Seuss book.
    The floor is hard and when we were little Evie and I practiced tap down here.
    “Me and My Shadow,” step-shuffle-back-step, step-shuffle-back-step.
    Behind the bar, there’s a long, thickly varnished shadow box where all the trophies are, except Evie’s, which are in her room,
     because they are always too big for the case—puffy, padded soccer ball sculptures, and Dusty always says they look like cartoons
     of trophies, not trophies themselves.
    Mr. Verver shoves the new trophy into the center, and a fog ofdust puffs out at us. When I cough Mr. Verver slaps me hard on the back and makes a funny Three Stooges sound.
    The room always smells like laundry, the soft gust of fabric softener. I see a few empty beer bottles on the barrel-slat coffee
     table and think sadly of Mr. Verver down here, his mournful wife and daughter crying mercilessly in separate bedrooms upstairs,
     and there’s nothing he can do.
    It is so terrible.
    In the corner of the shadow box,