The End of Everything (21 page)

I picture Evie on a white sheet, a set of probes, like some steel claw, poised between her legs. I start to feel sick.

Tara takes a long sip from her pop, then says, “She’s clean.”

Leaning against the wall, Joannie seems to slump a little.

“But, confidentially, girlies,” Tara says, her mouth twisting over her straw, “he did it. He did it all.”

“What did he do?” I ask, my jaw aching with it.

“He tore her in two,” she says, with a knowing tilt of her head that makes me want to smack her.

“Tore her…,” Kelli says, her voice tiny, her mouth hanging open. “Tore her…”

“Probably did it to her five times a day,” Tara says. “Ripped her all up down there.”

She leans backward and jiggles her fingers in front of her hips. I feel my skin go to tingly ice.

“But she’s okay,” I say, wondering how Tara could know all this. Could she?

Tara rolls her eyes. “How okay could she be? He ruined her.”

When she says it, it sounds old-fashioned, like something from an old book, one of those big hardcover ones my grandma would
read with blooming roses and silvery script on the cover, or a black-and-white movie where all the women speak in high, elegant
voices and the piano music sweeps up every time a scene ends.

But it also sounds true. It sounds true.

E
vie’s in the hospital two days. Much longer than they’d first said.

My mother says it’s probably to deal with “emotional consequences,” but time seems to inch.

I’m not supposed to leave the house, and no one seems to know what the rules are. Should parents be afraid of Mr. Shaw, on
the loose? Is there something to be afraid of? The second day, my mother makes Ted take me to his job, and I sit in the air-conditioned
clubhouse, watching him cut tree branches in the hot sun.

We have lunch together in the staff cafeteria, peeling plastic wrap from gluey tuna sandwiches.

I can’t eat anything, but Ted eats both sandwiches, a carton of milk, and two bananas.

I ask him why he thinks Evie’s still in the hospital.

He shrugs, then stretches his golden arms wide. They are thatched with little twig cuts, like those pictures of saints. It
makes me think of something.

“She’s probably getting sewn up,” he says, eyes wandering past me, watching the girls in the pool, on the other side of the
glass.
They all have string bikinis this summer, with beads on the tassels. They click-click when they walk.

He’s watching them, but all I can think of is Evie and a long needle, like with Nurse Stang. But down there. Down there.

“Sewn up,” I say, barely a whisper.

“Yeah,” Ted says, eyes back on me. He picks up a piece of plastic wrap, still slick with mayonnaise, and stretches it taut.

“Hold it tight,” he says.

I reach my hand out and stretch the plastic, pinched between my fingers.

“It’s like this,” he says, and he pokes his finger through the plastic. A vicious hole clean through.

“So she’s probably getting all healed up,” he says, pulling small clots of plastic from his finger. “And then she’ll be fine.”

B
ut they’re all wrong, aren’t they? It couldn’t be like that. Because I know. Because Dusty said it too, even if she can’t
understand it.

Mr. Shaw waited, hoped, dreamed his way into Evie’s night-lit room and he couldn’t have done all that just to hurt her, but
instead to take all the hurt in the world away.

At the window night after night, Evie’s hand pressed against the screen, eyes on the pear tree, glowing greenly in the dark.
Seeing him there.

Evie felt Mr. Shaw’s love, and what girl wouldn’t eventually sink into that love, its dreamy promise? He, a man three times
her age who’s seen the world and known things and knows most that she is the most special girl of all? She is everything and
he would tear down his life for her. He would tear it down because just one downward glance from her would heal him, save
him. She has that power. What girl wouldn’t want that power?

I
t’s seven o’clock at night and the Ververs are finally home. Mr. Verver calls my mother and says if I’d like to come see Evie,
he’d appreciate it.

My mother makes me wait while she bakes a batch of brownies from a mix that’s been sitting on top of the refrigerator since
Halloween.

I carry them in the heavy glass casserole dish. Mrs. Verver answers the front door, holding it open for me with her foot.

“Hi, Lizzie,” she says, her voice a scrape.

It’s so unusual to see her, and I can’t think of a thing to say.

“Hi,” I sputter, handing her the dish.

She takes it in her bony fingers, and we both look down at the brownies, crackled on top like a peeling ceiling.

“How is…,” I say, and then it just goes away.

My eyes drift to the staircase behind her, that furred blue carpet I know so well. Two doors down to Evie’s room.

When I turn back to Mrs. Verver, she’s already halfway down the hall to the kitchen.

We’re grateful for you,
I think I hear her say, her voice half swallowed by the quiet of the house.

I place my foot on the bottom step. The house is so still. I hear Mrs. Verver drop the casserole dish on the counter with
a clunk.

I wonder where Mr. Verver is, and I bet he’s with the police again.

I take a breath, then creep up the steps.

All the doors are closed and I stand in front of Evie’s.

I stand there, my foot slipping from my flip-flop, my toes kneading the carpet. I stand there and I stand there and I stand
there, my heart like a cannon. I feel it shaking the walls of the house. I feel it might tear the whole house down.

I knock.

“Come in,” a voice says, and, my God, it’s like a thousand other times, and it’s like no other time.

This is the part that can’t be imagined. If I pause at all, I won’t be able to do it, the moment too large, the largest of
my life.

I open the door.

I open the door, and as I do, all kinds of hectic pictures flash through my head, and I somehow expect to see a scene like
those from the center pages of one of those true-crime books at the drugstore. I expect to see Evie splayed there, bloody
sheets and thermometers and sanitary napkins and cotton balls and the stench of girl-ruin in the air.

But I open the door, and all I see is the tidy room I know so well, the soccer mobile swaying in the breeze, the bed made
tightly, hospital corners, the swing-arm lamp craned over the desk.

And Evie.

No longer the specter, the haunted vision.

Evie, leaning over her desk, pencil in hand, pink eraser top bouncing as she writes.

If it weren’t for the strangeness of the hair, those glaring wheat-colored tufts yanked into a high ponytail, it would be
like nothing had happened at all.

“I’m so behind,” she says, and then looks over at me. She’s wearing her old jeans from elementary school, now too small, and
one of Dusty’s jerseys, which hangs down nearly to her knees. “I think they’ll still graduate me if I just take the final
tests. When did we get to polynomials?”

For a second, I think I’ve lost my mind, or she has.

But then something clicks and shutters in me, and everything big and momentous—I shove it all aside. I feel like she wants
me to, and suddenly I want it too.

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say, and I sink down onto her bed, trying
to make it like any day, any day Evie missed school on account of the flu, a stomachache.

“It’s hard to concentrate,” she says, rubbing the eraser tip back and forth on her lower lip. “They gave me these pills.”

“Does it hurt?” I say, my eyes on her neck, the faint yellow smudges there, like she’d run a highlighter across her throat.

She twirls the pencil. “Nothing hurts,” she says, and there’s a wince in her eyes and I want to stop it, I want to keep us
going.

“You look good,” I say. “For a feeb.”

She grins and I grin back. I can feel myself relaxing, I can feel time itself swiveling back.

“I bet you can eat whatever you want,” I say. “And watch TV all night.”

She nods, smiling. “Everyone’s afraid to say boo,” she says. “And no chores, no practice, no nothing. Like I got mono.”

“Give me a kiss, then,” I say, reaching out with my foot to kick her leg, “so I can lie around all day too.”

She looks at me, and everything changes. Her knuckles go white around the pencil.

“I feel like I want to die,” she says. “I want to die.”

W
e’re lying on her bed, staring at the ceiling.

The crickets are so loud, like they’re in the room with us, but I can tell she’s glad to hear them.

“You’ll sleep over,” she says, and I say yes.

She slips her hand in mine, our fingers braided tight.

I keep waiting for her to tell me.

I wait and I wait.

But she just lies there, breath uneven, legs jerking, and says nothing.

I
wake up very early, but Evie’s already gone.

I have that split second of sureness that she’s gone forever.

Then, lying there, looking up at her mobile, the familiar water crack in the ceiling corner, I start to feel like I’ve dreamed
myself into Evie, that she’s gone because I’m here, and if I look in the mirror, I’ll see her stony face.

But then I hear the churning of water, and the din of feminine voices. Tugging on my shorts, I make my way down the hall.

Through the flush of steam from the half-open bathroom door, I see Mrs. Verver with kitchen gloves on, brown slicked, the
Clairol box torn open on the floor.

Evie’s on her knees, curled over the bathtub, that pale hair covering her face, like a thatch of birch bark.

I stand there, so quiet, one palm on the wall, and watch as, water rushing from the tub spout, Mrs. Verver, on her knees now
too, plastic bottle in hand, sluices the brown dye into Evie’s hair. Evie’s hands covering her face, her eyes, Mrs. Verver
curls herself behind Evie, pressed against her back.

Mrs. Verver’s body is shuddering and I can’t see her face, hidden by Evie’s wet wall of hair, but I know she is crying. She
is holding Evie’s back, her browned gloves splayed, and crying.

The water gurgling endlessly, I see Evie turn her head, and she looks at me, she does.

She looks at me and I see her face, and all the weariness there. The weariness of someone who’s lived a century or more in
a few weeks, who’s seen everything and has already stopped being surprised by any of it.

Evie’s face, it’s filled with words, and I see what it’s saying:
Make her stop. Make her stop. Why won’t she stop?

W
e spend the whole day together, Evie and I. I put her hair in long braids. The color is brown, but it’s not really Evie’s
brown, and the texture is still funny, soft and pilly like doll’s hair. But with the braids in, she looks more like Evie and
she starts to feel like Evie.

Mr. Verver takes us to the pool. He keeps saying how he’s not supposed to, that he’s supposed to take Evie back to the therapist,
but that we need some rest, some fun—don’t we? We nod, both of us, in unison.

He can’t stop talking in the car, and Evie smiles at him, even shows him her teeth. It’s almost like he can’t believe it’s
her, the way his head keeps darting over to look at her, to check on her. She’s smiling so much it starts to hurt my face.
I know that smile, it’s the school portrait smile, the team photo smile. And I know Mr. Verver must see that too.

He says he’d rather we didn’t go through the women’s bathhouse to get to the pool. That he’d rather we just skip the shower,
even though it’s against the rules.

It’s just as well. Enough people are looking already, out by the pool. Not everyone, I’m sure. They can’t all know Evie, recognize
her from among the other girls there, cocoa butter slicked. But it feels like they do.

We don’t care, though. We float on our rafts, our hair filled with chlorine, our skin sweating it. My face presses against
the plastic, cool water gathering in small puddles where my head dips into the raft. Reaching behind, I stretch my green shiny
one-piece farther over my bottom, skin clammy beneath my suit.

I look over at Evie, whose eyes are hidden behind large zebra-frame sunglasses. Her lips are slightly parted. Her white two-piece
glares. She’s lying on her stomach and floating, floating. I can’t tell if she’s looking at me, or is asleep, or is just thinking.

My eyes flutter, time and again, to Mr. Verver, who sits on a pool chair and never takes his eyes off us, not even to look
at the newspaper in his hand.

He watches us and I bet he thinks we’re talking. I bet he thinks Evie’s telling me things. But Evie tells me nothing.

I want to let her know it’s okay. That she can tell me anything and I’ll understand. But it’s the kind of thing, if you say
it, it no longer seems true.

It’s only an hour and we have to leave. Mr. Verver is on the pay phone by the bathhouse and he keeps saying, “I know, I know.
We’re leaving now. I just—I just—”

Mom,
Evie mouths at me.

She asks Mr. Verver if we can shower in the bathhouse first. He looks at her a long time and I know he wants to say no, but
he says yes.

In the showers, we stand under one of the communal spouts and frothy shampoo skates over our bathing suits and collects in
our jelly sandals.

We still have our sunglasses on because we like how we look in them, we like how everything looks, tinted pink.

We stand there quietly and let the water run across us. Evie
sighs, looking down at her feet, down at the brownish swirl at her feet, some of the dye still slipping off.

She’s looking down, staring so hard into the drain at our feet. She has those sunglasses on, so I can’t guess what she’s thinking.

I
n the car on the way home, we’re in the backseat and Mr. Verver’s talking again, like before. Talking about summer plans and
neighbors who are painting their house salmon pink and field hockey tryouts. He can’t stop.