Free The End of Everything by Megan Abbott Page B

which stretches the full length of the leather-padded bar, there’s a small trophy I don’t
     remember noticing before, a green-gold musical note propped on top of a tiny marble stand.
    “What’s this?” I say, reaching out for it.
    Mr. Verver smiles, yanking it from the shelf and handing it to me.
    I see the gold lettering half dissolved, as if even setting my fingers on it could erase the rest:
    STA E MUS C COMPE T ON—2 P CE
    “It’s so old,” I say, and Mr. Verver laughs.
    “Centuries past. Ice ages have come and gone.”
    I feel an impish smirk on me. “This is yours,” I say.
    “Yeah,” he says, taking it gently from my hand and turning it around to look at it.
    “What did you play?” I ask, even though I know. I remember him telling Evie and me before. I remember how he got so excited
     when he talked about it.
    “Piano,” he says. “Keyboards. I played at the state finals. This big theater by the Capitol Building. One of those old-time
     movie palaces with pipe organs that seem to hit the sky. I remember coming onstage and there was this heavy gold curtain,
     the tallest I’d ever seen. And the lights. It was like stepping into the sun.”
    He laughs softly. “It was a lot to take for a scrawny kid like me. But I played my heart out.”
    I picture Mr. Verver, hunched over a gleaming baby grand, over a silver piano like in an old movie, over a shambling upright
     piano in a dimly lit bar, his eyes soulful and brooding.
    “I bet you were amazing,” I say, nearly cringing at myself.
    “Not amazing, exactly,” he says, “but it got the girl. Annie. Mrs. Verver.”
    I’ve never seen Mrs. Verver listening to music. Whenever I hear stories about Mrs. Verver, it’s always like this. They’re
     always old stories, like she’s someone everyone used to know. Stories about how when we were little Mrs. Verver and Mrs. McCann
     smoked pot behind the garage at the Fourth of July party, or how, back in high school, she played Ado Annie in
Oklahoma!
and flipped her skirt so high everyone saw her underwear, which was midnight blue lace.
    These stories seem impossible and I don’t believe them. It’s like there was this Mrs. Verver once and now there’s someone
     else, tired and bone-skinny, who works evenings at the VA and who reads while watering the garden, one hand on the hose and
     the other clawed around a yellowing novel from the rummage sale. I wonder if that other Mrs. Verver is somewhere else, like
     San Francisco or Mexico, doing wild things and never looking back.
    “She heard me play at a club,” he says. “We were just out of college.”
    “You were in a band?” I ask, feeling myself lift up onto my toes, leaning over the bar as his head lolls back in reminiscence.
    “That’d be a generous way to put it,” he says, his eyes glimmering and doing wonderful things. “She was in the back hallway
     with a guy she thought she was in love with, this cool guy with long sideburns and a ring on every finger. But then she heardme playing and she couldn’t stop herself. She left the poor fella and made a beeline straight across the club to the front
     of the stage.”
    My head goes crazy with thoughts of Mr. Verver, age twenty-one, a mop of dark hair and a boy’s body lurched fast over the
     keys. Did his collarbones jut, his Adam’s apple bob? Did he have that awkward slouch of boys who grew so fast they themselves
     seemed bewildered by it, faintly dazed in their own skin?
    And I could see it so clearly, Mrs. Verver, hair long and sunny, like in that old photo on the fireplace mantel, hips twisting,
     eyes fixed, walking toward him, hypnotized.
    And what if Mr. Verver was, and I bet he was, just as confident, just as cool and easy as he is now? How could she stop herself
     from walking toward him?
    “What were you playing?” I ask.
    “I don’t remember,” he says, but the way he says it, I know it’s on the tip of his tongue. And sure enough, as he rotates
     the trophy in his hand,