The End of Everything Read Online Free PDF

deliciousness to it, like so many times with Evie, our Brownies tent in the backyard, mouths and fingers sticky
     with marshmallows, rolling in nighttime grass, jittery with every sound, every echo, every katydid rubbing toothy wings, just
     for us.
    There’s something.
What it is, I can’t place it.
    I press my palm to the brick wall because I feel like I might fall.
    There was something here, something that might mean something. Something found, something that put an aha catch in my throat,
     but I can’t reckon it now. I can’t hold the ends together and lift it to my eyes.
    I stumble around to the back of the house, stubbing my toe three times, the last time feeling a hot push of blood under my
     toenail.
    Something’s there, wedged beneath my foot.
    I bend down and look upon it.
    The fluorescent bend of the garden hose, the spike from its hard nozzle.
    But it reminds me. It puts form to that hovering thought.
    Three weeks, a month ago, Evie and I running our bikes to the back, out of the way for the gutter man to come with this big
     telescoping pole, raining down a spray of pinecones, twigs, and silt. Shake, shake like maracas, and there’s more, more. Once
     a nest of baby sparrows came down, all dead, and since then Mrs.Verver stays in her room with a cold washcloth on her forehead until it’s over. “Who wants to see it all?” she said. “Who
     wants to see what’s up there?”
    We leaned our bikes against the pear tree in the center of the lawn, and that is where Evie shows me.
    I remember thinking it was funny how little time we spend in the far reaches of the lawn now. When we were little we spent
     all our time there, bitty hands gnarled around the bark of the pear tree, clattering our way up to the top.
    Evie crouched, her hands resting on the garden hose, which we are supposed to twine up on the big wheel for Carl, the gutter
     man.
    “Do you want to see something?” she asked, and I settled down eagerly, always expecting such wonders, like a five-leaf clover,
     a two-headed worm, a piece of pottery from ancient times.
    We hunkered down together, but all I saw were three cigarette stubs, spent matches curled upward. The word “Parliament” wraps
     around one of the white tips.
    “Your sister?” I asked, although I can’t picture Dusty—all those doll curls, her scrubbed face and smooth barrettes—sneaking
     smokes.
    “No,” she said, although I didn’t know how she could be sure. I went to poke one with my finger, but she stopped me.
    “My dad quit,” she said, and I remembered Mr. Verver telling us how he did it, chewing on coffee stirrers, pipe cleaners,
     and bendy straws until he almost choked in the car one day, ran up over a curb.
    “Maybe,” I said, and I grinned at her. “Maybe not.”
    It would be fun, and then I could tease him about it, like Dusty, like she teased him when his friends came by to play cards
     and they left a pile of beer cans and she called him a degenerate. Icould never say such things, but Dusty used marvelous words, and laid them forward, like a ladies’ fan, spread. And Mr. Verver
     loved it, and wouldn’t it be wonderful to make him smile, just for you?
    Evie peered down at the grass, the papery stubs.
    There was something in her face, a graveness. She was thinking, and I couldn’t see my way into it. Charging through the back
     of my head came that thought:
It’s happening again. More and more, Evie isn’t exactly Evie any longer
. Something hung heavily, moody, behind her eyes, and I wanted to see. Like she had a weight hanging behind there and I could
     tap on it, swing it back and forth, but it wasn’t mine.
    How dare she keep it from me?
    I gave her shoulder a shove. She, kneeling, toppled over backward, catching herself with her spindled arms.
    I laughed, but it sounded wrong, a retchy laugh like Tara Leary’s when she saw my sad little training bra.
    Evie looked hard at me, weighing things, and said, “Sometimes, at night, he’s out