The End of Everything (6 page)

T
hat night, in bed, I picture the way it was. Twice a day, five days a week, all school year long, Evie and I walking, running,
biking past the big windows of the All-Risk office, with Mr. Shaw there. Mr. Shaw always there. Looking out with those gloomy
eyes of his.

He looks so sad,
Evie said once. Oh, the sudden remembering of it now brings on a shiver.

He’s so sad,
she said. We were looking at the sign in the window:
LIFE INSURANCE, FIRE INSURANCE, FLOODS.
He must hear sad stories all day long.

He always looks like his dog died,
she said, and I laughed, but Evie didn’t.

L
ast night’s emergency PTA meeting, and everything’s changed. There are many announcements, from teachers, from the gravely
voiced principal across the PA. The new rules.

“It’s lockdown,” Joannie groans.

Trapped in the gym, with the windows covered with
GO, CELTS!
in streaks of swampy green paint, we all wait.

My legs are still shaking from practice, that aching, stretchy feel that’s so delectable, like my body being pulled in five
ways and sprung back strong and magnificent.

It never lasts.

Some days, Evie and I lie on the soccer field and take turns pulling each other’s legs as hard as we can, pulling until we
feel torn in two. I have two inches on Evie and she says it’s because she’s stronger and could pull harder and I owe those
two inches to her.

To escape the noise from the boys doing basketball drills, the bunch of us girls nest up in a corner of the bleachers and
do not acknowledge their hoarse-voiced, bare-limbed, flaunting presence.

Intermittently, we play Flame, a folded-paper game of mammoth complexity, where you add up the vowels in your name and some
boy’s and get a number and then count the letters in F-L-A-M-E, crossing out “hits” until you have one letter left. It tells
you your future with the boy: F equals “Friends,” L equals “Lovers,” A equals “Affair,” M equals “Marriage,” and E equals
“Enemies.”

We talk about the difference between an affair and being lovers. Tara says that affair means one-time sex. Joannie says affair
means sex any number of times, only with not caring. I can’t decide, but I shake my legs out and wonder where the stretching
feeling went. My whole body’s gone tight, pleated inside.

Most of the time, though, we talk about Evie.

“She’s probably in some basement somewhere,” someone chirps, “tied to a pipe.”

“Pete Shaw wasn’t in school today.”

“He’d better not be. They’d swing him from the goalposts.”

Everyone seems to know that Mr. Shaw is, as Joannie keeps putting it, the “prime suspect,” and there’s much talk of my seeing
the car, which can only have come from Tara, with her assistant prosecutor dad. It has made me tremendously popular.

“It might’ve been you, Lizzie,” Joannie says, pointing at me with her curving dolphin pen with the finned tip. “It just might
have been you.”

The thought had not come to me. Now it rockets around in my head. Could it be true? If I’d been the one left alone, the one
on the empty street in front of the emptied-out school? What if it had been me yanked from everything to some dark place?
Could Mr. Shaw have—

“No way,” Tara says, shaking her head definitively. “He had his target in his sights.”

I remember the cigarette stubs, and I know she’s right. It was never me.

With that, the furtive shimmers that shimmered briefly in my head snuff out.

I
see him, when my eyes are shut, standing under the dark boughs of the pear tree, standing in the middle of the yard, waiting.
What did he see in spindly Evie, her big rain-puddle eyes, her jumpy little body, the way she sucked her teeth when thinking,
hard, over algebra, the way she picked the frilled edges off her spiral notebook, one by one?

This girl, this girl, and he a man with a business and a secretary and a house with a furnace and bills and a son and a roof
with three torn shingles and a pretty birdbath made of stone that I sometimes see Mrs. Shaw, her hair tied back with a scarf,
cleaning with a dainty skimmer.

How does this man, a man like this, like any of them, come to walk at night and stand in a girl’s backyard, and then, smoking
and looking up, suddenly feel himself helpless to her bright magic?

M
y brother, Ted, picks me up after school. His eyes lost behind sunglasses, he is confident and impressive as he flicks the
steering wheel to and fro, his long limbs poking from every corner of the front seat, his hair long over his ears.

As he rounds corners, I pinball back and forth in my seat. The streets look so empty, like it’s Christmas. All those packs
of raucous kids, all that rabid energy, gone. I picture all of them in their family rooms, their dens, staring at TV screens,
their parents lurking in the doorframe, standing guard.

We drive by the All-Risk office, heavy-metal guitars crunching on the car radio, Ted with his enormous basketball-player hand
fisted over the gearshift.

The office is dark, the red watch face on the
CLOSED
sign grinning from behind the smoked glass.

“Sick motherfucker,” Ted shouts as we pass. The car windows are closed, but he shouts anyway.

Something about it makes me want to laugh. Ted heaves the steering wheel, and we charge down our street, the bass tickling
in my thighs, my hands fast on the door handle, holding on tight. I hear my backpack fling across the backseat.

The screech when we roil up the driveway jolts me and I see
the blinds sway in Mrs. Darlton’s next-door window, her tsk-tsking face thrusting through.

“Listen,” Ted says, turning down the music as I gather my books, fanned across the floor of the backseat, “you lock everything
up. I have to be someplace. You can’t leave, though, or Mom’ll kill us both.”

“Okay,” I say.

It’s the longest exchange I have had with him since he taught me how to fill my bike tire in the fourth grade.

I open the car door and climb out. We both stare at the house, which looks so very still. From the corner of my eye, I see
the Ververs’ screen door, the way it puckers out and you can peek in, but now the heavy front door is closed and the curtains
drawn across all the front windows, like wintertime when we’d frost the glass with spray snow from a can.

It’s all closed up, and our house too. It’s like coming back from a week at the shore and pulling up the drive and thinking,
Is this our house? Could this really be our house? It’s like the doors and windows shut and shuttered themselves, tucking
themselves within.

Ted clears his throat, and I see that I’m still holding onto the open car door, my fingers tight on it.

“We’re okay, right?” he asks. I can see myself in his sunglasses and I think I look thick and monstrous, with a grave line
furrowed across my forehead.

“Yeah,” I say, and I watch myself say it, and we both turn and look at the house again.

Inside, it’s so quiet and lonely and I wish I could knock the soccer ball around in the yard, but I don’t want the Ververs
to see me.

Walking from room to room, feeling like a burglar, I poke in
errant places, touch my fingers to the peach-skinned covers of
Hustler
on the floor of Ted’s closet, the womens’ mouths so open and red, and the way their legs open so redly. It makes me touch
my hand to my neck and the dizziness comes fast.

Ted, who’s likely buried at this moment in a swirl of his girlfriend Nina’s white blond hair, her fingernails always painted
lilac, her fingers always clawed over Ted’s denimed knee.

In my mother’s room, I finger her bottle of Je Reviens, screwing off the gold-tone top and running the dauber along my wrists
like when I was seven years old and would stare at the box: “Recommended for romantic wear” in foil script.

The room is orderly, hushed, and my socks spark on the carpet. It’s a room I’ve hardly been in since the first few weeks after
Dad left and she’d ask me to crawl into bed with her and, phone cord wrapped around us both, call him and ask him how he could
do this to us and did he mean to destroy the family.

Later, she made me promise to forgive her for all that because she should never have been so weak and she meant to set a good
example of self-proud womanhood. But she could say it and say it and say it, yet I wondered if I’d ever see that tender-soft
way about her again, the way she’d put on her special silky wine-colored dress for Dad and the Je Reviens daubed on the bow
in the middle of her bra—a secret mother passed to daughter, even as she blushed to tell it. I was nine and it was the most
enticing slip of adulthood that had ever passed through my fingers.

It’s with a stub of my toe now that I nearly trip and my eye catches something peeking out from under the creamy doily-edged
duvet on my mother’s bed. Leaning down, I see it, a man’s dark sock curled on the floor like a bat wing. Plucking it between
thumb and forefinger, I lift it, turning it around.

I think imaginative thoughts of him, her nighttime guest, her
Dr. Aiken, tripping down the hallway, like a man on fire, hurtling out the front door, bare foot to gas pedal in his silver
Lincoln before he realized what he’d left behind.

My tour landing me in my own room, I pull my new graduation dress from the closet, still in its plastic bag, slickery silver.
The cabbage roses blare grotesquely. It didn’t seem that way in the store at all. Turning fast in the dressing room mirror,
shaking off my mother’s barks (“Pull your hair off your face, Lizzie”), I’d surveyed myself and felt glamorous, the roses
spread across my chest, sprouting there, the illusion of full-flower breasts, and across my hips the illusion of curves and
womanliness, or teen-girlness at least. On my bare tiptoes, battered shins hidden by starchy folds, I was nearly Dusty, if
you squinted, from far away.

I think about how, while I was spinning, ballerina style, before the trifold department store mirrors, it was all happening.
Evie, gone in the blink of an eye. Did he blindfold her and shove her in his backseat? Or worse, like in that TV movie, was
she locked in the trunk where she might, if canny, disconnect the brake-light wire? We’d watched that movie, together, hadn’t
we, lying on the family room floor? Maybe Evie remembered the way the girl had been so smart and kicked out the taillight
and pushed her arm through the broken plastic and waved and waved until the handsome police officer spotted the arm, the white,
waving arm. Dusty, wry on the couch above us, saying it must be an old movie because all trunks have emergency releases now,
but Evie wasn’t so sure and I wasn’t either.

Thinking of Evie trapped in some dark space like that, it makes me want to tear and tug, and I pull at the silvery plastic
dress bag until the plastic pops over my knuckles and the dress slides from its padded hanger to the floor and I kick it into
the back of the closet.

I slam the door and the mirror on it rattles, and I feel very
dramatic: this is what you do when your best friend has been taken, it’s what you do. You fear for her and feel for her and
slam doors and sob.

But there is something creeping in the back of me, and it makes me know things. Like that Evie was never in Mr. Shaw’s trunk.
This, I know. I don’t know how, but I do. Like I know too that she is not dead, not buried in three feet of dirt, not coated
in pearly lime. No, she is not dead, she is lost, lost. Missing. Gone. There’s lots of things behind those words, and I can’t
look at them now. But I feel them.

T
he next day, I wake up, and I don’t know what I think, but I guess it was that there’d be news. That all those police skittering
across the state would surely have found the breadcrumb trail. But my mother, hand perched on the kitchen radio, keeps shaking
her head.

“… Verver girl… Police have received more than two hundred calls on the tip line, but have nothing to report…”

What I thought was this: I’d given them what they needed, hadn’t I? The cigarette stubs, the car? What was stopping them now?
Couldn’t they just hurl out their long hook and pull him—both of them—in?

T
ed picks me up again, but he forgets his Spanish book and we have to go back to the high school.

While he’s inside, I wait in the parking lot, kicking at one of the curbs and looking out to the hockey field, thinking of
things, dreaming things into their right places, versus how they are, so broken and askew.

I see someone running, a green flicker. I find myself reaching for the car door, but when I spin around again, the flicker’s
not there and instead it’s Dusty, in uniform and a thick runner’s turtleneck, stopping now, wrapping her stick with tape,
her knee raised high on a wood bench, her shin streaked with dirt.

I start to say something and stop myself, but she hears me, lifting her head and looking at me through the blond disarray,
her fulsome bangs loose from her tight, toothed headband.

“You want me to drill you?” she says.

I think of walking by the Verver stairwell, hearing her crying upstairs.

“I didn’t know you were in school,” I say as she stands upright.

“Here I am,” she says, composed, but, for a second, something hitches in her face. How could it not, even as serene as she
is, so serene and poised.

“Get midfield,” she says, picking up one of the composite sticks left behind after practice and handing it to me. “I’ll shadow.
See what you learned last week.”

I don’t know what to say, but I don’t see how it can be no, so I take the stick and breathe in hard, hard as I can, because
I feel like she’s going to pitch everything at me, just to get it off herself, lift it from her shoulders, and I need to be
ready. Before I can think, the ball whistles toward me like a battle shell and I drop to the ground to stop my face from splitting
in two.

I keep trying spin dodges, but she’s everywhere all at once, her arm like a scythe, and I wonder if my brother will arrive
to save me from certain death.