The Girl in the Well Is Me by Karen Rivers Read Free Book Online

don’t make water beds like that anymore. They just stopped existing, at least for now. But maybe they’ll be like the old vinyl records that hipsters love. (I love the word hipster because it’s basically just like hippie, but newer and better and with blacker glasses and tidier beards.) Hippies are hipsters now but records are still the same old big, flat, black plastic discs that Dad had a collection of and nothing to play them on, that we weren’t allowed to touch, not ever. I guess we left those behind, too. Well, Dad deserves that.
    I tip my head up and take a deep breath and hold it. I imagine that a piece of the blue sky and the wispy white clouds floating by are pulled into my lungs, that it’s blue inside me somehow. A fading blue, but warm. Above my well-­top window, there is a tree. The wind keeps pushing the branch back and forth. I don’t know what kind of tree it is. I’m not good at that kind of stuff. Nature is dirty and there is way too much nature around here. It’s the kind with leaves, small, dusty-­looking ones. I try to think of that shadowy branch as a loving arm that’s reaching over to save me, but it isn’t and I’m scared.
    I’m so scared.
    When I was little, I used to sleep with this stuffed cat named Ratty Catty. I would do just about anything to have Ratty Catty right now, tucked up under my chin, smelling like me and something else, something warm. Something safe. Smelling like a place where I haven’t been for a long time and can barely even really remember.
    Thinking about being scared makes me scareder still and I wish one of the girls had stayed up there, and what if they don’t tell anyone after all, and what if they leave me here to die and go home to watch TV instead? Maybe right now they are perched on their couches, in front of TV tables, swallowing forkfuls of barbecued steak, rushing to get to the brownie or apple pie that their moms baked for dessert.
    I miss fresh food. Mom-­food. When we used to eat like that, I thought it was terrible. I wanted pizza pastries and instant everything. But we eat frozen stuff pretty much all the time now: meatballs and lasagna and weirdly salty single-­serving rice and orange chicken. Now the inside of my mouth always tastes like freezer burn and I’ve forgotten why those dumb dinners ever looked good to begin with.
    My stomach churns and growls.
    No one is coming
, it says.
No one is coming
, it growls.
No one is coming
.
    â€œThey are so,” I say, maybe out loud, maybe not.
    My heart is galloping in my chest like Maximilian, the black horse I used to ride on Saturday mornings back when we had money for that kind of stuff, for real food and for riding lessons and for a house with an actual lawn. I miss Maximilian. I miss my bed and the house and the lawn. I miss everything.
    But mostly, I miss not being stuck in a well.
    My chest hurts so hard, it makes me sweat. I don’t have my inhaler, which is a puff of medicine that opens me up inside like an envelope that you steam open over a kettle on the stove. I can’t keep breathing this sharp air! My lungs are gluey. I’m crying now. Again. More and more. I can’t not! It’s ugly crying, with snot and gagging sounds. I haven’t cried like this since Grandma’s funeral last July. I think Dad going to jail is what killed her, so if you’re wondering why I hate my dad so much, that’s reason number one or two or maybe three. All the reasons are big and compete with each other for the top spot.
    If I die in this well, I wonder if Dad will be let out of the slammer to come to my funeral. I guess Mandy and Kandy and Sandy will be there, not letting on that it was their fault, dressed in matching black with their hair in some agreed-­upon style. I bet they’ll weep their little heads right off. I’ll bet they’ll act like we were best friends. My dad will give them a hug and