The Girl in the Well Is Me (5 page)

The town stinks all the time, not as badly as this well, but pretty bad. Making beer is not a process that makes good smells. Robby calls the stink “beer farts.” That's about what it smells like. It's terrible.

But the worst thing about Nowheresville is that there is no skating rink. Skating was my favorite sport. I was going to compete this year. I had a routine and everything. I was ready. But I guess it's just too bad for me. Anyway, now my skates are too small and I can't afford new ones and maybe leaving New Jersey and ice skating and horseback riding and things that I was good at behind is what happens when your dad is the bad guy. No more sit spins for me. No more axels or toe loops or salchows. That's fine, I guess. It just wasn't meant to be. I'm OK with it. Some dreams are dumb, anyway. Not everyone can win Olympic gold medals. Not everyone can be the very best at everything they ever do. Probably pretty soon, I would have gotten bad at skating. Eventually other kids would have been better and I would have quit. So it's fine that it happened this way. Really.

The main street in Nowheresville has “everything we need” according to Mom, which means there is a supermarket and a library and a bank and a really gross diner and a gas station and a Dunkin' Donuts. The record store is the best thing in the whole town. It's the coolest. Dad would love it, because the owner also likes old vinyl records. It's like there are two types of people in the world who love vinyl: guys like my dad who just like to own stuff, and hipsters like Record Store Dave who for real believe the music sounds better that way.

It makes me happy that we have this great record store and Dad can't shop there, which is mean, but I can't help it. He doesn't deserve to. The store sells regular CDs and stuff, too. Plus random things, like bobbleheads of pop stars and old concert posters. It has speakers outside that pour music onto the sidewalk, thick as a milkshake, filling up the air with all those bubbles of sound. There are chairs where you can sit and just listen, which I've done five or six times now, pretending that I'm not nervous to do it, pretending that I don't look as small as a six-­year-­old in those big chairs. Sometimes I like sitting there, and sometimes I don't. Mostly I do.

Record Store Dave sometimes comes out and sits next to me, sort of like Mr. Thacker, but he doesn't make me talk. He's kind of great. I like him. If I could make any wish in the world come true, I would wish for my mom to go in there one day and to fall in love with Record Store Dave. I want her to marry Dave. I want Dave to be my dad because Record Store Dave is every bit of the man that Dad is not. He's honest, for one. I want him to fill up our ugly trailer with his music that he actually listens to instead of just collecting it in boxes so he can say, “Yeah, I own one of only ten copies of that super-­famous Beatles record whatever whatever.” What's the point of music you don't listen to?

Dave always smiles like nothing could ever be wrong. I'd never say that out loud. I'm only mentioning it now because I'm in a well and I might probably die—of starvation, if nothing else—so why not? If this is a wishing well, I can make a wish on myself. I can be the lucky penny. If I was going to make two more wishes, I would wish to be out of this well, obviously, and I would also wish for a cheeseburger with a side of fries and a huge chocolate shake made from real ice cream. I am so hungry I could practically eat the dead thing that's below me, but, actually, no. I'm not
that
hungry. Now I feel sick and hungry at the same time, which is a pretty terrible combination.

We ate at the diner once and I was sick for a week. I had meatloaf and macaroni because Mom used to make that stuff and even if I hated it then, I missed it now. That dinner came out both ends for days. It wasn't even good going in, so you can imagine what that week was like. Afterward, I felt like my legs were made of elastic bands.

Up until Dad did what he did, I don't remember ever feeling like my legs were going to let me down. They'd always done everything I'd ever asked of them, pushing me off the ice and twirling me around on it and all of that. I guess that my strength is just one more thing Dad took, along with all that money.

The school is partway out of town on the highway and we have to walk to it, whether or not our legs are too weak for the job. It's not like the town was really planned; the warehouses were just built there because the land was cheap, and the town came up next to them so the workers would have a place to live. I'd ride my bike to school, but we don't have bikes anymore, and we're too close for the bus, and besides, I hate school buses with the heat of a thousand Texas suns. Everything bad that goes on at school goes on with a thousand times more intensity on a school bus. Trust me.

Mom had to sell the car when we got here so we could pay rent on our new house, which isn't even a house, it's a trailer. I try to pretend that we're camping, like it's practically a camper, and everyone knows that campers are fun. We went camping the summer before Dad got caught. We rented a motor home that had a bunk above the driver's seat. That was fun. It was the best. I'm good at pretending, but not that good. No one would
camp
in this ugly trailer park. It's too gross. There's nowhere to go swimming or anything fun to do. Everyone smokes and has dogs and shouts a lot inside their trailer walls. At night, I lie awake and listen to glass breaking and too-­loud laughter and trying-­to-­be-­quiet crying. In the morning, I'm always surprised that the ground isn't covered with shards of glass, ankle deep, surrounding us like a dangerous flood that has risen overnight, slicing perfect letter J's into our bare toes.

Robby and I have to share a room now. Not much could be worse than that. He'll maybe be happy when I die in this well and he gets that ugly orange room all to himself. The place came furnished and even the curtains are orange. The carpet, the bedspreads that smell like some other kids' farts, the paint on the walls. I don't know for sure, but I'm pretty certain that orange is the official color of despair.

And carrots.

The Girls have been gone for a long time. I'm trying not to think the worst, which makes me think the worst. Mr. Thacker and I talked a lot about how trying not to think of a thing makes you think of a thing. Well, I am definitely not trying to think about how I AM GOING TO DIE HERE ALONE AND THEY AREN'T COMING BACK.

I start to cry again. In case you thought I was crying that whole time, I should say that I stopped for a while and now I've started up again. No one can hear me, but I don't care, I can't really help it. Crying because you're sad is unstoppable; it just happens, even if you close your eyes, it leaks out of you. Sadness makes you holey, like a sieve, and nothing can be held in. I'm sad that I'm going to die. I'm mourning myself.

I wonder what I would have been when I grew up if I'd lived. I bet I would have had a smart job, like a scientist or someone who reads the news on TV. I bet I could have been in the Olympics after all, skating or horseback riding or even both. I'd definitely have won a few Oscars for being a movie star, or at least an MTV award. I might have even been President. I mean, why not? It's about time there was a girl in that job. Women are just as good as men. Everyone knows
that
, it's just that some men are scared of that truth so they claw their way to the top and push women down whenever they can, keeping the top spot for themselves.

Jerks.

I wonder where The Girls ran to and who they are getting to come and help. The police? The firemen? The dads are all still at work, I guess, although I don't know what time it is—my stomach and the fading blue of the sky make me think it's definitely after four, maybe even five—but it doesn't matter, because everyone works shifts and no one's dads ever seem to be home.

The closest house is Amanda's. Her mom doesn't have a job, she's the only mom who doesn't. She vacuums all day. Their carpet is purest white—not a grape juice stain in sight—with this soft, long pile, so that where she's vacuumed, it leaves a pattern like a freshly mown lawn.

I miss having a lawn. When we had a lawn, we would run through Dad's automated sprinkler system, jumping on the sprinkler heads and sometimes accidentally breaking them so that the water sprayed out every which way but the right way. Afterwards, when we were shivering from all that water, we'd eat popsicles that were so cold they stuck to our tongues. Only then would we lie in the sun to warm back up, slathered in suntan lotion to block out everything about the sun except the heat, of course. No one wants cancer. I mean, duh. Although here in Hell, no one seems to care like they did at home. Here, a lot of people smoke. Here, wearing sunscreen isn't really a thing.

That dumb sprinkler makes me think of Dad driving away in that patrol car, nose pressed to the glass, his breath fogging it up. “Nostalgia is a terrible thing,” Grandma used to say, and I think I finally get what she means. She means that remembering stuff stinks. It's maybe even the worst. Not as bad as dying in a well, but close.

The fading sky is now pretty undeniably unblue. It's definitely the dull gray of past dinnertime and now I'm sure The Girls aren't coming back. Someone's mom or dad had to have been home by now. At least one of them. Kandy's dad is a supervisor, he works normal-­ish hours. He's always home by dinner, at least.

I'm crying super softly now because I really don't want to trigger an asthma attack. I've only ever had one, once, and that's when I found out that I'm allergic to goats. But you never know. Maybe the dead thing down there is a goat. Maybe a whole herd of goats trampled onto the entrance to this well and fell down, one by one, and then one day someone just threw a board over the top because they were tired of losing their goats. Maybe this is going to be the ironic thing, after all, that goats will be what kill me in the end.

I wish I wasn't dizzy.

I wish I could breathe.

I wish those girls would come back and hurry and hurry and hurry.

5

A
drift

I'm drifting and fading. I've come loose from myself and I'm floating down instead of up, a slow sinking, a darkness falling. I don't think I'm scared now, but maybe I am. No one is coming. I keep saying it to myself:
No one is coming
. But I can't hear me. Something is sniffing and scuffling. I look up and see the darkening sky through my round window on the world. The branch moves back and forth, and back and forth.

Snuffle, scuffle, sniff.
I hope it isn't a coyote, but even if it is, it can't get to me in the well, unless maybe it falls down too. I guess the silver lining to that would be that I wouldn't be alone anymore. Maybe the coyote is silver. Maybe silver coyotes eat goats. I'm almost sure they do. Silver linings are everywhere. Maybe this whole well is lined with silver. Maybe if I shined a light at the walls, they'd shimmer like tinfoil. I'm the potato, wrapped in the foil, about to get tossed on the campfire. Except there's no fire and I'm so cold and silver is my least favorite metal. I like gold better, and bronze even better than that.
That's just like you
, Robby would say,
to like the color that means third place. You're such a loser, Loser.

You're a loser,
I'd say back.
You're Prince Loser of Losertown, Lord of Losertania.

And he'd be like,
That isn't even funny, it's just dumb, Dumbo. Queen Dumbo of Dumboland.

Robby would be able to use his boy-­strength to get out of this well without a rope. That's the kind of thing he does. He gets out of trouble. I fall into wells. When I finally get out, he'll probably say, “Why'd you stay down there so long? Are you retarded?”

And I'll say, “Don't use that word, you freak.”

And he'll say, “Don't call me a freak, you jerk.”

And then I'll probably punch him or maybe do that thing where I push in the back of his knees and he falls over. And then he'll probably punch me back or sit on me and spit onto my face, that long gob of saliva dangling over my lips. And then I'll probably throw up.

I miss Robby and all his gangly strength and the way he hops up and down from foot to foot when he's waiting for something to happen, like he has too much energy to actually contain in his human body.

“Help,” I say, just to see if my voice still works or to see if the silent silver has stolen my sounds away. I sound croaky, like a frog. A hopping frog. Robby, the jumping frog. Dad used to say Robby was frogging when he hopped from foot to foot. “Stop frogging, Robb-­o,” he'd say. “You're making me tired.” And Robby would stop frogging. Dad had that kind of power. I'd say, “Stop frogging, Robb-­o,” and he'd say, “Zip it, Skippy,” and he'd frog even more. Frog, frog, frog.
Ribbit, ribbit
.

“Woe is me,” I croak to the imaginary silver coyote that's fallen on my head. Then in a French accent, “Vat did ve do to deserve this,
mon ami
?
Zut alors! Au secours!
”

No one in Nowheresville speaks French, except for
le coyote d'argent
, naturally. Animals know either all languages or none, I forget which. I learned French the summer before last at camp. It was French or canoeing, and I don't like the water any more than I like the fish that lurk around in it, looking hungrily at all that skin on your bare, kicking legs.

“
Je ne sais pas
,” my imaginary head-­coyote says. “
Je t'aime. Ou est la salle de bain?
”

Then we're quiet for a while because that is all the French I know, and I guess it's the limit of his vocabulary, too. Maybe if I knew the real French word for coyote, we'd be better friends and he'd save me, knitting me a rope ladder to the top out of his silky fur.

“
Au revoir
,” I say to him, and then he's gone in a shivery blink.

I hear more footsteps.

“Croak, croak,” I croak and the animal barks,
Le woof! Le woof!
He is also
français
!
Mon dieu!
Maybe it is Lassie, this time! Lassie is a dog from an old TV show. Robby and I, we watched all of those shows. After a while, they were boring, but there was something good about them, too. They were like the hand-­knitted afghans that you cover yourself with at your Grandma's house. Boring, safe, slightly annoying. Lassie was a bit like that, but she also always saved the day. No one was ever left to die. Not in one single episode.

“Lassie!” I shout. “I am in the well! I mean,
Je suis
in the well!
Dans
the well!
Dans LE
well!”

We never used to watch dumb old shows like
Lassie
back in New Jersey. We watched reality TV, like
The Singer
with Mom and Dad on the massive TV in the living room, which is one of the many things that is now gone gone gone into a huge underground storage tank at the bank where they keep the things stolen by wrongdoers. The TV. The living room. Our life. I picture it all down there, set up just how it was, maybe with Monopoly out on the table and me and Robby frozen in place, wrestling over who gets to be the racecar. Mom used to think game nights were “healthy.” We were the only kids I knew who actually played board games with their parents once a week. I liked it. I'd never tell anyone that, though. I'd just roll my eyes and pretend it was dumb. It wasn't dumb. It was the best.

Back in the day, me and Robby would lie on the carpet and
The Singer
would come on and Mom and Dad got the couch because that's just how it was: kids on the floor, parents on the furniture. Sometimes I'd put my face so close to the TV that Dad said that I'd go blind and then we'd all laugh and hoot and howl because not one kid ever in history went blind from sitting too close to the TV and besides, it was plasma. We were a family of laughers. We liked to laugh. I'd be interested to meet that kid, if it ever happened that their fancy TV blinded him. Maybe his seeing-­eye dog would look like Lassie.

Parents are programmed like robots to say “Don't sit so close!” and “No talking back!” since the old days when maybe you
could
have gone blind from sitting too close to the TV. When you don't want to eat your disgusting kale-­and-­tofu “scramble,” they automatically say, “There are starving children in Africa!” as if you can just either eat the sludge or get yourself to Africa and start sharing like a kindergartener who is trying to earn a gold star sticker.

It occurs to me right at this exact moment that it's possible children could be raised by robots
better
than by actual people because robot dads are unlikely to go to prison for embezzling. And then robot moms would not have to take on more than one job stuffing boxes full of all the future garbage that people who haven't gone to jail yet for stealing buy on the Internet with a
click-­click
of their mouse, their credit cards burning up from all that spending.

“It's difficult,” Mom says, “when you see what people buy. It's so
much
, that's all.” I know what she means. But then again, Dad used to do that, too. So it's hard to fault them, all these faceless strangers with the toys and socks they buy on the Internet, along with diapers and a new watch and the whole series of
My Family of Giants
on DVD.

Back then, when we used to watch
My Family of Giants
, Mom would say, “Your head makes a better door than a window!” which both Mom and Dad thought was hilarious and they'd fall onto the sofa laughing. And Dad would choke out, “If you're a window, open the blinds!” and they would literally scream with laughter.

OK, that only happened once. But I could see it happening again and again, if nothing had changed. Mom and Dad were the kind of people who liked to really get their money's worth out of a joke. Or, I guess, Dad would steal the money to buy the joke and then the bank would reclaim it.
Ba-­dum cha
.
That
was a joke. I'm trying to find it reassuring that, even though I'm in a well and my entire body hurts and is possibly purple, I can still find humor in things. Laughter is the best medicine! That's another Grandma-­ism. Sadly, it is not enough medicine to help me actually feel any less scared, or any less hurt.

I close my eyes for a second, like that might help me forget where I am, but I have to open them again really fast because closing them makes me feel like I'm spinning. Feeling like you are spinning while also being pinned in place in a well is very disconcerting. I curl my tongue and take a breath in through it, like it's a straw. That's a yoga thing that Mom once tried to teach me, back when she used to do yoga because she had time for stuff like that. You're also supposed to swallow your breath, but I try that, and it hurts really bad all the way down, and then I get the hiccups. It really doesn't get much better than this—hiccupping, bruised, bleeding, and trapped. Seriously, this is pushing the limits of how life isn't fair into a whole other thing. I don't know what I mean by that. My head feels strange.

Anyway, Lassie was always saving people from wells back when dogs did that sort of thing. If you think about it, it couldn't happen now because everyone's dog is on a chain or locked up in a yard. If they run free, then everyone starts a petition about vicious dogs, and the dog is picked up by the dog catcher and accidentally put to sleep in a “shelter,” leaving the family to weep their bitter tears all over their faces. That happened once last year when Mark Fleetman's dog escaped from his electric fence. The dog was a pit bull named Macy. She was the sweetest, nicest dog ever, but I guess the dog catcher didn't agree, because one day she was there and the next—gone.

Of course, now that I'm actually
in
a well, I know that
Lassie
was not a very realistic show, because when they pulled the kid out of the well on
Lassie
, the kid was just dirty, not all scraped up and bloody and croaking like an asthmatic frog who smokes and is allergic to dead goats. TV is another thing that is all a lie. For example, Kandy, Mandy, and Sandy can't seriously believe that they will one day win one of the following two shows:
The Singer
or
Fashion's Best Face
. Ha freaking
ha
. That's just plain dumb! When you take those girls out of Nowheresville, Texas, they're just ordinary. They are only special here because there aren't very many people. It's not hard to climb to the top of a pile of 50 kids if you've got the money to buy the best clothes and stuff. It's a lot harder to scale a heap of, say, a million. Or more.

The number of people who believe the World's Biggest Lie is depressingly huge. It's like, all of them. Everyone believes that you can do anything you want to do. You can be anyone you want to be. Seriously. WRONG. The number of people who have figured it out is one. And that one person is me. But I'm going to take all that knowledge with me when I die in this well. That's not even ironic, it's just too bad for me and for all of mankind. One day all those people are going to be mightily disappointed. And by “all those people,” I mean Mandy, Kandy, and Sandy. And secretly, I'm glad.

I hope they grow up to be sorry.

I sigh hard and choke on the silver dust and Lassie does not come for me and no one barks in any language and I'm alone in a well and I'm going to die. Well. Well, well, well, I'm in a well.

Something is crawling on my foot.

I scream, scream, scream, because of the something that is crawling on my foot. The screaming makes me cough and splutter, silver spraying everywhere around me in a shower of metallic rainbows. A spider! A spider! I can't see it, but it's
probably
a spider. Or a crab. How would a crab get into a well? Of course it's a spider! Not a crab. There aren't crabs in wells. Or in Texas at all, as far as I can tell. Not this part of it anyway. Maybe at the shore. I've never been to a Texan beach, but I guess there's such a thing, there must be. We live in the dry part where there are snakes withering inside their see-­through skins, and truck-­driving men with mustaches and plaid shirts, and girls with fancy clothes who think it's OK to trick you into falling down a well, and spiders with pointy crab feet, scuttling. Here, even the sky is thirsty, and now it's a wanting kind of flat gray, like it's yearning for blackness to fill it up, to saturate it.

Texas ain't all it's cracked up to be, Grandma would say. You'd think she talked a lot more than she really did. She was actually a quiet person. Maybe that's the secret: to not say very much, but to make sure everything you do say is quotable later by people who have fallen down old wells.

It doesn't get worse than being a Grandma-­quoting well-­bound girl in Texas with a crabby spider on your foot, unless you're in a well full of water and fish. Fish are worse. That's comforting, except not really. I try to flick my foot against the wall to knock the spider crab off, but then I can't tell if it is gone or not, or if it has bitten me or not, or if, after all, it's just that my foot is asleep due to the circulation having been cut off to my poor old blackened and bleeding legs. But let's not overlook the terrifying possibilities, OK? Maybe it is a black widow!

I start to sweat. Sweating is one of the symptoms of black widow bites, so clearly I am not only right, I am also dying. We watched a terrible video about spiders last year at school. It was all about seeping skin and black laughing arachnids. Actually, now that I think about it, sweating might have been a symptom of a different spider bite. I think black widows paralyze you so you can't breathe.

Coincidentally, I can't breathe.

“I don't want to die!” I say out loud, like the well can hear me and will save me, maybe by spitting me out in a shimmering shower of lights, like dancers bursting out onto a stage during a Rory Devon concert, fireworks included, the fireworks of me.