The End of Everything by Megan Abbott

Author:Megan Abbott
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: FIC031000
ISBN: 9780316175098
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2011-07-07T05:00:00+00:00

Fourteen

My head filled with thoughts of the yearnings of Bobby Thornhill, I slink back in through the patio door. The kitchen is pitch-black, and my bare feet skid hard on the linoleum. I stumble, and there is a feeling of softness, like I’ve slid into a basket of laundry, but I haven’t, and I see the flash of eyeglasses, and it’s Dr. Aiken, shirttail hanging out, arms holding me up, in our kitchen.

I feel the half scream from my mouth and I stop it fast with the heel of my hand.

“Lizzie,” he whispers, loudly, and tries to keep me upright, hands on my jerking arms.

“I don’t know you,” I say, and the light flashing on his glasses, I can’t see his eyes.

“I’m a friend of your mother’s. I was just leaving—”

That’s when the hall light streams across us and I see my mother whirl around the corner, tying her kimono fast around her.

“Lizzie,” she hisses, and her eyes fix on the open patio door and my grass-stained feet.

“Lizzie, what were you doing outside?” Her hand claws over my wrist. “Were you out there? By yourself outside, with everything that’s happened?”

Her hand on me so tight, and she has so much nerve, and I raise my chin and the words jump from me. “I can do what I want,” I bellow. “Don’t you?”

Like that, her hand leaps to my face, a slap that sings.

“Diane,” Dr. Aiken says, and he reaches out. “She wasn’t outside. I was the one who opened the door. She must’ve heard something and come downstairs. We just surprised each other.”

I look at him, my cheek throbbing. I look at him, listen to him save my lily-white skin, but all I can see is the light on his glasses and I don’t say anything.

At breakfast, my mother wants to reach out to my face, I can see it on her. Ted’s started his summer job at the country club and it’s just the two of us. There’s been no talking about anything, and I slept dreamlessly, waking to the sound of her on the phone, whispering plaintively, her voice rising once, saying, “I don’t know what to say. I don’t know what to say.”

I scrape the black off my toast mercilessly. She tries to start conversations. She says pained, half-embarrassed things, all without saying anything.

There’s something wobbling in her and her hands shake and all the heat and tingliness she usually has after he has been over are gone. She raps her knuckles on the newspaper and sighs and slathers a dishrag this way and that and swivels noisily around the kitchen.

And finally she leaves for work too.

I wander the house, lingering in the doorway to my mother’s room. I don’t go in, I just can’t, but I see the bed’s unmade and I can almost feel the pocketed warmth in the center.

Does she think, now that he’s seen what he’s seen, her doctor will be gone forever?

Fleeing, nights, late, the closeness of his house, the wifely claws snaring him.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.