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

they’ll get to breathe in that smell of him, cigarettes and the Rory Devon cologne that I gave him for Father’s Day last year that he insists on wearing even though I hate Rory Devon and his stupid cologne now. (I only liked him for, like, five minutes!) And Juicy Fruit gum. Dad always chews that. I wonder if The Girls will cave then and admit to him that they were the ones who told me to jump onto the well in the first place. I wonder if they’ll confess that they laughed when I first fell in. I wonder if they knew the boards were rotten. I wonder if they meant for it to happen.
    But mostly, I wonder if my dad will know that it’s just one more thing that is all his fault, after all.

4
    L uck
    My dad went to jail on June 6.
    I know that it was June 6 because it was my birthday and that’s the kind of detail you don’t forget. If it had been any other day, maybe I wouldn’t know if it was the 4th or the 5th. But when your dad goes to jail on your birthday, that sticks.
    What happened was that Robby and I were lying on the waxy yellow floor of the rec room playing Xbox. We lay on the floor a lot after school that hot June because the floor in there was always cold. The Xbox was mine—I’d unwrapped it that morning at breakfast—but Robby was already a pro at it and kept telling me what to do. He is always so quick to become an expert. It’s the kind of thing that makes me hate him if I think about it too much, the way everything is easy for him and he’s just good at it without trying. It’s partly because he was 13. I guess stuff gets easier when you’re older. There was something wrong with that TV, that’s why it was in the basement, in our “playroom” that we called a rec room so we didn’t sound like babies. Sometimes the screen would freeze, the pixels all squaring up and then going back to normal in waves, like it wasn’t quite sure what it was doing. While we played, we talked or fought but mostly both. Talking to Robby then was like having a really long argument that no one ever won.
    Good luck was just one of the billion things that we always debated furiously. Claiming it on my birthday made sense. Birthdays are your power days. They are the days when you get to choose. And it made sense that if one of us got good luck, the other one necessarily wouldn’t, so it was important to call it. We battled about it all the time, birthday or not: who saw the first star at night and who won when we pulled wishbones after chicken dinners and whether or not the knife made an unlucky clinking noise when we cut the first piece of birthday cake. The last thing either of us wanted was bad luck, but one of us was always stuck with it, and it was usually me. Robby was a luck hog.
    â€œI call the good luck. It’s going to be all mine, I guess,” I said airily. “Sorry, unlucky one.”
    Robby laughed right in my face, up close. His breath stunk like tuna fish. He said that everyone knows that 6-­6-­6 is the number of the beast, so having my birthday on the sixth day of the sixth month was basically a curse. “Who do you think is gonna be unlucky?” he said. “You were born on Satan Day, basically.”
    I had this terrible sinking feeling in my stomach because I knew he was right, so I pinched him hard on the arm to get him back, twisting as I pinched. He threw his controller on the floor and he’d just grabbed my arm and pulled it up behind my back in that way that feels like it’s about to snap clean in two when Mom opened the door with a bang and said in a really weird voice, “It seems like your father might be in trouble with the law.” It sounded like something she’d rehearsed: all stiff and fake, like it was written down and she was being forced at gunpoint to read out loud, like a hostage on CNN.
    â€œWhat?” I said. “Mom, what?”
    Mom didn’t answer. She was smoking. The