The End of Everything Read Online Free PDF Page B

here.”
    The words plucked a quiver in me. I couldn’t think what she must mean.
    “You mean your dad,” I said.
    “No, another man.”
    “What man?” I said, my voice slow, confused. “A boy, you mean, one of Dusty’s boys?”
    She shook her head and looked up at her bedroom window, and I turned and looked up at it too. Dusty’s window faces the front
     of the house, while Evie’s faces the back. From where we were kneeling, you could see into Evie’s room, the slant in the ceiling,
     the soccer ball mobile.
    “What man, Evie?” I repeated.
    And she pressed her palm flat on the cigarette butts. “I guess it was a dream. I guess it’s all confused, like a dream.”
    She rubbed the side of her head and smiled, a goofy smile with all her teeth, and her arm darted out and shoved me too and
     I keeled back fast, my head sinking into the grass, and Evie was on top of me and laughing, and we were both laughing until
     Mrs. Verver shouted out for us to unlatch the gate for Carl.
    A nd now here I am. And there are four cigarette butts, two pressed flat and two like curved seashells. You could put your ear
     to them and hear the sea.
    They are there.
    “ H i, Lizzie,” Mr. Verver says. It’s the third day. His eyes are threaded red and his stubble is thick like it was the time Dusty
     had to go to the emergency room, her appendix popped like a balloon.
    “Hi,” I say. “My mom said you wanted me to come over.”
    It all feels so funny because, having grown up with eyes always lifted to Mr. Verver, I can barely remember ever getting to
     talk to him without Evie there, except that time when we were seven and he took us to the Halloween Harvest at the county
     fairgrounds. Everyone wanted to go into the Haunted Hollow, where ghouls with pitchforks were supposed to chase you through
     a maze of corn. Clangs and screams thudded from the speaker behind the spook house door and I didn’t want to go inside. Bantam
     Dusty spurred Evie on, and the two of them went, terror roistering up their faces, while Mr. Verver stood outside with me
     and assured me that haunted houses were for kids anyway. Hebought me a sack of candy corn and showed me how to toss them high and catch them in my upturned mouth.
    Later, he told Dusty I was shaking the whole time, tugging on his belt, eyes wide and mouth rigid. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t
     scared at all. That wasn’t what it was.
    “Lizzie,” he says now, his voice cracked and stretched, “Evie needs your help. I need your help. We all do. You can tell me
     anything.”
    He reaches out and taps two fingers on my hand and makes me look straight in his eyes.
    “No one’s in trouble,” he says. “You’re not in trouble. But you may know something, even if it doesn’t seem important. You
     were the one—” And he leans toward me and I can see the crinkles in his shirt and feel all the tiredness on him.
    “You were the last one to see her. You’re the closest link we have to what happened.”
    I can’t pretend it doesn’t startle me, the jangling look on Mr. Verver’s face. I’ve never seen it on him before. It’s not
     a look you see on adults, least of all Mr. Verver, who always carries himself so lightly, who runs on glimmers and grins and
     ease, laying his hands on things—broken bicycle handles, split hockey sticks, your arm so he could see the bug bite—as though,
     if he turned them just so, he could heal them, without even so much as a squint. Just by his hands.
    But here he is, with the jangling look—and it disarms me.
    My head feels clogged and I try and try.
    There is something else, too, another faint, smoky smudge in the corner of my head, but I can’t make it real.
    Upstairs, I hear a lot of clomping and I know it’s Dusty because Mrs. Verver never makes any noise. My mother told me, in
     her confidential tone, that Mrs. Verver had been throwing up forhours. I keep picturing it now. Once, after my dad left, my mom drank pink wine all night at the