The End of Everything Read Online Free PDF Page A

I couldn’t fathom it. I had things too, new things twisting under my skin,
     but I didn’t know what they were. It felt like she knew her own zigzagging heart, and I was just killing time.
    “ H e’s b-a-a-c-k…” That’s what Kelli Hough says at school, a group of us ribboned around her locker. I’d missed the first three
     periods, talking to the police, and I feel unsteady, somehow lost. And there is Kelli, shrill-mouthed, French braids tight
     enough to pop veins.
    “Corrine Willows,” someone whispers. It’s the name sizzling through the halls, behind locker doors, in the steaming cafeteria
     line. We were all in second grade and Corrine was two years ahead of us. Someone had climbed into her bedroom window during
     a slumber party, grabbed her, and disappeared into the night. The details, you remembered them. The Strawberry Shortcake sleeping
     bag, the shiny purple nightgown, the finger splint on her left hand, from when she jammed her finger in gym class. There were
     search parties. They dragged the lake and the Milky River.
    “Willows was a nine-year-old kid,” Tara Leary says, ruddy-faced and imperious. “It’s not the same.” Tara’s father works for
     the district attorney. “Besides, all the cops know it was her dad, a custody thing. They just couldn’t prove it.”
    It all made sense, but you didn’t feel that kind of truth in your gut, so stories flew, knocked around, shimmied back, that
     it wasn’t the father at all but someone in our very town, a child killer in our midst, who had hid Corrine’s lifeless body
     in some place it would never be found, like under the floorboards of the high school gymnasium or the ice rink at the community
     center.
    That whole day, and on buzzing phones that night, all the girls hiving around me, saying the child killer has struck again.
     There is a breathlessness about it.
    “White slavery. That’s what my mom says. She saw it on TV.Evie’s probably been sold to some sheiks, is on her way to the Arabs now.”
    “It’s a perv. And they always kill them in the first twenty-four hours.”
    It’s what the kids are saying, in tight little knots in hallways all through the school, they are giddy with it, with the
     fever of Evie being gone. But I don’t believe them. I would know if Evie were dead. Something would hollow out in my chest
     and I would know. She’s not gone, not gone like Corrine Willows, a name more than a girl, a bloody stitch we like to wedge
     our nail under and poke. Corrine Willows is only a hiss-whisper, an eerie blankness. That could never be Evie. We might not
     be body-close like we were, but we are close enough for me to know this: Evie never stops moving, her legs pumping, her smile
     fanning—
that
girl, I know. That girl I know better than me.
    I n bed that night I let my mind go anyplace but to Evie, to what might have happened.
    I put my face to the window screen and look down at the furred night lawn.
    Thinking of things, pondering in the dark. There’s something nagging at me and I grapple for it. I’m not even sure what I’m
     tugging at, what that speck is in the corner of my head.
    It’s one thirty and everyone is asleep, or trying to be. I tiptoe down the stairs, my nightshirt twining between my legs,
     key chain flashlight curled in my hand.
    The front door is right there, but I know its epic creak, like the sliding patio door, the way it squeaks open, then rattles
     after. Instead, I lift the half-open window in the family room, and crawl up on the sill, my knees wedging hard into the grooves.
    I wish the pain weren’t so pleasing, searing into my knees like that. I hate it when it feels like that, so solid I want to
     put my mouth to it. These are things too embarrassing to say. Only Evie would…
    Tucking the flashlight in my mouth, I slip out the other side, my feet landing lightly on the grass, itching between my toes.
     Darting across the Verver driveway, I feel like a ghost.
    There’s a