There's Evie, and there's Lizzie. And there's Lizzie-and-Evie, almost inseparable best friends since before either one can remember, who constantly come and go in each other's houses and who know each other's secrets. Then one day after school, Lizzie looks back and Evie is gone; she does not return home. And everyone assumes the worst—except Lizzie. Lizzie is certain she would know if Evie were no longer alive.

The story opens in May as the girls are looking forward to eighth-grade graduation with a whole summer before them. Come fall they will enter high school where Dusty, Evie's stunningly beautiful seventeen-year-old sister, is captain of the field hockey team. Lizzie, whose father left several years ago, spends much of her time at Evie's house across the street where Mr. Verver, Evie's father, serves as the perfect father substitute. Jovial and welcoming, he clearly loves being the center of feminine attention both at home and in public. His daughters mean everything to him and Lizzie, as Evie's closest friend, shares in his attention and affection. So when Evie disappears, Lizzie (as the last person to see Evie that day) becomes the hope he leans on. He wants her to remember anything—anything!—that will help them find Evie. And Lizzie aches to find Evie too, and to help Mr. Verver, who now seems so isolated and lonely. She desperately wants and needs her world restored to its former shape and substance. To that end, she begins her own stumbling investigation with the bits and pieces she can remember: the car the girls saw just before Lizzie left with her mother that day, the cigarette butts in the back yard Evie had shown her several weeks before, a memory of a cigarette lighter in someone's hand years earlier. But there are things she thinks she knows too, things she holds back because she doesn't understand how they fit the picture she holds of herself and Evie, of her own family and the Ververs, and of the cocooning neighborhood in which she's grown up. All of it is a tumble of memories mixed with the strange hormonal rush of puberty. And now she doesn't even have Evie to help her put the pieces together.

The End of Everything by Megan Abbott is a powerful story about friends and siblings, fathers and daughters, men and women, and how they all fit together. It's also a story about memories: how they shape who we are, how we bend them over time to fit us in the here and now, and how they can shatter in a moment of unexpected conversation, ending and reforming the past as we knew it. Although the actions of the two girls sometimes show a maturity and daring beyond the norm for their age, Abbot's writing is so captivating any momentary disbelief in the events as they happen is quickly extinguished by the overall truth of Evie and Lizzie as we come to know them. This is a story that is hard to put down and even harder to forget.