The Girl in the Well Is Me (3 page)

I was wrong.

Mom would say, “Oh, honey, those girls aren't your people.” And I know it. I knew it all along. But Mom isn't exactly around much now to give advice, and I didn't ask anyway. I didn't have to ask. I knew—I just didn't care. Or maybe I wanted new people.

My
people would never have laughed at me. Not even Tracy Kelliher. Not even after she stopped talking to me. She was never that kind of mean. Not Mandy-­mean. Not let-­me-­fall-­down-­a-­well mean. Not even close to that. Their meanness is multiplied by three because it's like if one person feels a certain way, then automatically the other two do, too. They are practically the same girl, but times three. Three times better. Three times prettier. Three times meaner. Kandy, Amanda, and Sandra. Kandy, Mandy, and Sandy. At first, I wished my name could be shortened to something that ends with an _andy, but now I'm glad it's not.

It took me five whole days to work up the nerve to go up to Kandy at recess and say, “Can I hang out with you guys?” I practiced first, trying to make it sound like I didn't care, like I was tougher and cooler than her. When I finally said it, I stared at a tree behind her, watching a bird hop from one branch to another. Scrunched my juice box up in my hand, casually tossed it in the garbage can behind her. Kept my eyes off her face. The bird was small and brown. The juice box went into the can like a three-­pointer in basketball. I swept my hair out of my eyes. I was busy and this was just a question and it wasn't the most important thing I'd ever asked anyone, like I didn't stay awake all night the night before, practicing the ask.

Out of the corner of my eye, I watched as she looked at me, up and down really slowly, and said, “Soooooorry, but we're all full. Like, you know, we have a blonde. A brunette. And a redhead.” As if it was obvious that all clubs had one girl with each hair color.

“You don't have a black girl,” I drawled back, improvising, talking slowly and deliberately.

Kandy said, “You aren't black!” Her eyes widened. Then she looked suspicious.

“That's true,” I said. “But my grandmother on my mom's side was.” I made that up, but Kandy didn't know anything about me yet. I squinted up at the sun.

“You're just another brunette,” said Kandy. “And we don't
really
have room for you.” But I could tell she was hesitating.

“Please?” I said.

If I could go back in time and erase anything, it would be that
please
. I showed weakness. I could tell by the way her back straightened up and she stared me down. She sucked all the power back from me through her eyes. Then she giggled.

I should have walked away and started hanging out with someone else. There were plenty of kids who wanted to be with me! I was the new girl! The mysterious new girl! Or I could have done what I got good at in my old school, which is to pretend to be really into my book and to not look up until the bell rang to go back inside. To be a secret inside myself. To stay away from everyone and anyone who could hurt me.

I could have kept myself safe that way.

But I
wanted
. I totally wanted to be with them. To
be
them. It's so lame, now that I think about it. It's so dumb.
I'm
so dumb to have ever wanted anything to do with them.

But I couldn't help it.

It had to do with the way they moved through the school like sharks, and the other students moved to the side. The way the kids stared at the three of them, like they were movie stars or just famous for being famous. And they have this clubhouse—an actual
clubhouse
, like in a movie or a book—that is to die for. Amanda's dad had built it just for them, in their yard, right out front so everyone could see it. Her house was on the small hill behind the school, so no one could miss it, perched up there like it was special, the most special house in town.

Inside the clubhouse, there was real furniture and curtains and a white shag rug and even an Internet connection so they could watch movies in there on the Xbox. Out front, there were three chairs painted in different colors, one for each of them, and a pot of geraniums the color of fireworks. It had everything. I wanted to live in that clubhouse. I wanted to put my posters of Rory on the walls. I wanted to lie on the bed in there and read Harry Potter books over and over again and never ever have to leave.

“Maybe you can be the one with short hair,” Sandra said. “Like, um, we've already got a normal blonde, brunette, and redhead. I mean, I
guess
you can. If you have to join.” She looked at Kandy. “What?” Sandy said. “She could pull it off! She's, you know.” Sandy smirked. “Boyish.” She shrugged. “I'm just saying.”

“I can do that,” I said.

I don't know why I said that. My hair was the only thing in my life that was any good. It came down to my shoulders and I could make it do loose curls without even really trying. I could make it look like I'd spent the day at the beach. I could straighten it and make it shine like a crow's feathers. I could do any kind of braid you can even make up. I was good at braiding. Maybe even better than they were.

“Really?” Sandy said. “OK. Good! Great. It will be, like, your test.
Part
of it. We'll have other tests. But the first one is cutting your hair. Mandy will do it. She's awesome at hair cutting and stuff like that.”

I should have known that their stupid club was going to land me exactly where I am, about to die in a well with a terrible haircut that Amanda did with her mom's kitchen scissors, the blades all sticky from who-­knows-­what, little patches of rust changing the usual
snip-­snip
scissor noise to something more like Styrofoam rubbing against itself. Amanda, who had
never
had a haircut herself, not ever, like that made her a better person than everyone else. Why did I think
she
could do it? When she started cutting, I wasn't scared. Not really. It felt OK, the weight of my hair falling in clumps onto her kitchen floor. The other girls were oohing and aahing. “You are soooooo talented,” Kandy said. “You could be a hairdresser when you grow up! You totally should do that.”

“Maybe even for movie stars,” said Sandy.

“Maybe even for Talia,” said Mandy.

The girls sighed. They loved Talia. She was their favorite singer, but I didn't like her. She was too big. Not big, like fat or tall, but
big
, like
in your face
. I like people who stay gently where they are, a little bit behind what they are doing. They just
sing
. You think of the song first, because it's so good, before you think of the person doing the singing. And then you find yourself looking at them because they are so good at the thing they are doing, not because they are flapping their tongue in your face and screaming and all half-­naked and stuff. Too much.

When I grow up, I'm going to be one of the
gently present
people. (Grandma used to say that it was better to be gently present than to announce yourself, and I know exactly what she meant by that. Talia could have used a few lessons from Grandma, that's for sure.) I'm going to be someone who makes you look, slowly, over to where I am. I mean, if I ever turn out to be good at anything.

I felt pretty, the way they were staring at me when they cut my hair. But now that I think of it, it was like I was showing off, sitting there letting them hack off all my hair.
I
was Talia.
I
was being bigger than I am, all LOOK AT ME. IN YOUR FACE. But I liked it. That's the confusing part. I liked that they were looking. I guess I have a bit of Talia in me, after all. I guess that's another bit of me that I don't like so much.

Grandma wouldn't like it either.

After it was done, I got up from that stool and I felt lighter, better, prettier. But then I
looked
. I saw myself in the bathroom mirror, and I almost threw up my peanut butter and jelly sandwich all over the sink, which had toothpaste spit clumped by the drain. I swallowed just in time. In the mirror, I looked pale and sick and weirdly exposed. Hairless, like some kind of newborn animal that should be cute but isn't. My freckles stood out on my white skin like flecks of blood on paper. My bangs were so high up on my forehead that I looked like someone who had just got some super-­surprising news. There were clumps and bits of hair sticking out and even one patch above my ear that looked bald.

“Wow,” I lied. “It's so awesome and, like, sick.” I'd never said that word out loud before to mean “good,” and it felt dumb and wrong in my mouth. But then again, my hair looked dumb and wrong on my head. I looked dumb and wrong in the mirror. And everything about my life was totally dumb. And totally wrong. And totally sick, not in a good way.

I forced a grin at myself in the glass, which didn't make me look happy, it just made me look crazy. I made my smile look real by crinkling my eye corners. “Smize,” like that woman on TV always says. “Smile with your eyes.” My eyes stung with tears.

“I love it,” I said again and I
almost
believed me. I loved the way it felt, that wasn't a lie. My head was so light. Without hair, I kind of did feel like a boy, strong and wiry, in some way I hadn't known before. “I'll fix it at home,” I said when Amanda tried to smooth down a cowlick on my crown with her palm, like my head was suddenly her property, OK for her to touch. I dodged out from under her hand. “I know how,” I lied. “I have good hair . . . stuff.” I rubbed my fingers along the soft fraying at the hem of my shorts. It made me feel safe, like I was still me, standing there in my favorite shorts.

I pulled my socks up to my knees and stood up. “What's next?” I said, grinning, like I was having fun and not like I was about to puke or faint or both. I pretended not to see Kandy and Sandy whispering to each other. I pretended not to notice how they were giggling.

I bet my socks are now covered with blood. I can't see them, but they must still be there. I bet they are filthy and wrecked.

Everything is filthy and wrecked.

My shorts, my socks, me. My so-­called life.

I try hard to not cry again. What's the point? Mom's a crier and it never got her anywhere. When those girls cut my hair, my biggest worry (other than how awful I looked) was how hard Mom would cry when she saw it. “Your hair,” she'd say. “What did you do?” She
loved
my hair. Even now that she was working all the time and could barely stay awake when she wasn't, she liked to brush my hair while we watched TV together, me leaning back on the couch and her standing behind, brushing and brushing and brushing. We haven't watched anything for a while, actually. We haven't done it since we moved here. We haven't seen a single episode of our favorite show,
The Singer
, since Dad went to prison. Maybe it's not even on anymore. I wanted to ask The Girls, but I thought they'd laugh at me. Maybe watching
The Singer
isn't cool anymore either.

“Here,” Kandy said. She reached over and sprayed something onto my head. Right away, my lungs almost slammed shut. I gasped and coughed.

“It's just hairspray,” she laughed. “Settle down.”

The hairspray smelled like plastic and disinfectant, like everything I've ever regretted doing, like that time I put salt in Robby's Coke as a joke but I used too much. I didn't know that he was going to just gulp it down in one swallow like that. Who does that? Anyway, he drank it all and had to go to the hospital because something bad happened to his kidneys. I knew I was the worst person in the world when he was loaded into the back of the ambulance and his skin was the color of snow. The smell of the hospital made me gag and he said, “Stop making this about you!” and his eyes were all red from crying and I was so embarrassed and sad for both of us that I pretended to get mad and I ran out to the parking lot and waited by the car for Mom and Dad to finally come out. Robby had to stay the night.

“Oh, ooops,” Kandy shrieked. “That's not hairspray! It's, um, cleaner stuff. Lysol? Is that for toilets? Ha ha! Sorry!”

I shrugged, like it didn't matter. And I guess it didn't.

None of that matters now.

Now
I'm stuck in a well. And if Mom finds out about
this
, I'm pretty sure that she's going to be so brokenhearted that she'll collapse. She might not be able to stop crying, not if she starts for real. She's been holding it in for a while now, come to think of it. She hasn't cried at all since we moved to Texas. And if
I'm
the one who breaks her down, I will die. I won't be able to stand it. On the bright side, if I'm dead, I guess she won't be so disappointed about my hair.

She'll just be sad, period.

Sometimes I feel like Mom has all this stuff in a big bag she has to carry around—everything about Dad and Texas and her two jobs and us—and she has to be brave about it. But just putting one more thing in it will make her drop it, and it could crush her completely, like in a cartoon. She'll be as flat as a piece of paper, freckled with a sprinkling of blood.

And it will be my fault.

But at least I won't know about it, if I'm dead and all that.

3

A
lone

I think about crying some more, but I decide not to. There's no one close enough to hear it, for one thing. If a girl cries in a well and no one hears it, is she really crying? That sounds like a question that Dad's only friend, our old neighbor Mr. Thacker, would ask and then I'd have to think about the answer for a long time and we'd talk about it over a big plate of fried fish. He said he liked talking to me. He said our philosophies were the same. I didn't know what he meant, but he was OK. I liked it when he came over. He'd talk and I'd listen and watch the long hairs in his nose move when he got really excited, like cat whiskers. When he started to shout, they got especially wild, brawling in his nostrils. Sometimes he made me do all the talking. I didn't have nose hair though, so it wasn't the same. When I got excited, I just waved my hands around more. Once I knocked over the whole plate of that fish. Hayfield was the happiest he'd ever been.

Mr. Thacker and I already answered, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?” We talked about that one a lot, him shouting and whisker-­waving, me not-­shouting and waving my hands. I could tell he thought I was smart. Sometimes after I talked to Mr. Thacker, I
felt
smart. I felt like even my blood thrumming through my veins was smarter, like he'd cracked open my cells and poured in something extra intelligent. We decided that of course the tree would make noise. Did the person who asked the question ever go into the forest? Forests are full of animals and birds and stuff. Just because there's no person there to hear something doesn't mean that
nothing
heard it. Something is always alive in the woods. Humans really do think they are soooooo special, like hearing a tree falling over makes it so. I said that and Mr. Thacker agreed. He said that he wished his students thought about things from the same angles that I thought of them. I said, “You mean from really low down because I'm so small?” And he laughed, which made me feel both funny and smart. In other words, it was the best.

Mr. Thacker was always coming over to talk, bringing those plates of fried fish. He said fish would make me grow tall and strong. I don't know what kind of fish it was. Mostly I ate it to be polite. I certainly didn't grow. The truth is, I don't care any more for eating fish than looking at them. Mr. Thacker also said his students were a new breed of hippies. Hippies who listen to bad music, he said, and laughed. It was weird because Dad always called Mr. Thacker a hippie and when I asked why, he shrugged and said, “long hair, guitar-­strumming, overthinker.” The new ones, I guess, aren't like that.

The man who runs the music store in Nowheresville is a long-­haired, guitar-­strumming overthinker, too. He's younger than Mr. Thacker. I wonder what Mr. Thacker would say about Dave. He listens to
good
music. He says I have good taste, music-­wise. He says that it doesn't matter what you listen to, as long as it moves you inside, that it's not about being cool or doing what everyone else does, it's about what makes you
feel
. He says that music is poetry that has a tune that you hear with your soul. I guess I like those deep-­thinking hippies, too, who make me feel like more than I am. People like Mr. Thacker and Record Store Dave.

Anyway, if Mr. Thacker was here, I bet he could deeply think of a way to get me out of this well.

I think Mr. Thacker is right about most things, but wrong about this one thing we talked about once, which was whether or not all people see colors the same way. He said no, or at least that we couldn't know. I think we can know. I mean, we all know that a carrot is orange. The weird thing is that when you ask someone that question, if all people see colors the same way, then you say, “Think of orange, for example,” almost everyone thinks of a carrot. Like carrots are the only orange thing. It's like they have a universal orangeness that everyone just understands, without thinking about it.

The air in this well is orange. The air in this well is a carrot. But not a real one, a super dried out one, one that's shriveled in the bottom of the vegetable drawer for months before anyone notices it down there, looking like a mummy's old finger.

It sounds like my breaths are scraping in and out against the walls, like I'm breathing out not carbon dioxide, but broken glass. One time Robby threw a glass of milk at me in the kitchen, the whole glass, and it flew through the air, whistled past my face, and smashed against the wall. We were both super surprised by that even though he had said he was going to throw it and we both know that glass breaks. I helped him pick up all the pieces before Mom and Dad saw. One shard slipped cleanly into the skin on my thumb and made a perfect letter J. I wrapped it in a Band-­Aid. It was only afterward that it started to hurt. The hurt was so deep, it felt like it was aching in my bone. That's how my lungs feel now, cut like that.

I'm glad I can't see my knees in the dark. I know they are skinned. They burn and sting. Skinned knees are always worst when you see them for the first time, with their hanging-­off skin and your very own blood dribbling out of you in red ribbons. When I learned how to ride a bike, it was Robby who showed me how. It was Robby who held the seat while I pedaled furiously. It was Robby who let go and left me flying down the hill, before I ended in a terrible knee-­first crash that left my knees permanently scarred. I wonder if the well wall has scraped that scar right off. I wonder if I'll get a new scar or if my skin will just give up and stay open, the shiny white saucer of my kneecap glowing there for all the world to see.

I guess that story makes it seem like I'd be mad at Robby for that, but I wasn't mad. Mom would never have let go, she'd never have had the nerve. And Dad? Well, Dad wasn't much into teaching kids how to ride bikes, I guess. Dad didn't seem to want the chance. But Robby did. Robby used to always be there for me, for stuff like that. All the spaces Dad left unfilled, he just stepped into. Dad's always been leaving spaces unfilled. He tried to fill them with nice presents and junk we didn't need. Now he's left too big of a space to even try to fill at all. At least, he doesn't try. He doesn't even send e-­mails. I check at the school library and my account, [email protected], just keeps filling up with junk mail and group e-­mails to all the kids who used to take skating classes at the arena uptown. Reading those skating e-­mails makes me miss home like an ache.

Speaking of aches, my legs are cramping like growing pains but worse. I usually like growing pains, not because I'm a freak, but because I like the
fact
of them, the proof that I'm actually growing, even when it happens for me in the slowest of slow motion and sometimes not at all. We used to have a measuring wall where we wrote the date and made a mark for our heights. Robby's was an inch away from the last mark each time, but mine got all crammed together, all my measuring dates sharing that same tiny inch. I don't miss that. It was just a reminder of how I wasn't any good at growing, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how long I hung upside down hoping gravity would help.

I try to relax and breathe and not think, which somehow makes me slide farther down and down, as if relaxing shrinks me like Alice in the Alice in Wonderland movie. I scrabble at the walls as much as I can with my arms still stuck against my sides. My fingertips sting. Maybe after this, I won't have fingerprints. I'll be smooth all over, like the fresh skin you get under a scab.

My arms are as useless as seal flippers, which wouldn't be so useless if I was actually a seal, but I'm not, thank goodness. I mean, think of all those fish I'd have to see in that scenario.

I slide a little bit more. Then more.

What if?
I think. What if? What if this is forever? What if this well has no bottom?

What if I
die
?

“Help!” I say. I know no one is there.
I'm
the tree in the forest, falling and falling, and I can't even prove that I'm here. This is Texas, so it's pretty much been abandoned by the animals even. It's too hot. So with no one listening, maybe I didn't make a sound. Maybe I don't exist, after all.

I slide a tiny bit more.

I'm going to die in a well.

My heart speeds up, squishing blood through its chambers so fast that it might just collapse and burst, like that might fuel me up and out of here. I cry harder, which hurts more and more—my lungs, my skinned knees, my eyes, everywhere.

I hurt, so I must be here.

I must exist.

I should have introduced myself to the
nice
girls. The freaks and weirdos. Mom always said that weirdos were the best people. “Fly your freak flag high,” she'd say. “Find your people.”

“But
I'm
not a freak,” I'd say.

And she'd laugh and say, “Sure you are, honey, we all are. Some of us just know that better than others.”

“You're wrong,” I'd say. “You're weird.
You're
a freak. But me? I'm normal. I'm not
you
.”

“No,” she'd say. “You're not me. If you were, you'd know that ‘weird' is better. ‘Weird' is the best.”

“Don't worry,” Robby would say. “Kammie's the biggest freak of them all.”

Then I'd throw a punch. That's the thing with Robby: He's big and strong but I'm fast. If I can land a blow before he knows it's coming, it's basically the same as winning.

But the dumb thing is that Mom was right. Again. I should've looked to see who was wearing the worst-­fitting clothes, which kid had the ugliest hair or the worst crooked teeth, or maybe the one with the awkward walk. I bet those kids would have been kind. I bet they never would have said, “Sing a song on this rotting board that's covering an old well!” I bet they never would have laughed when I fell.

I wonder if Heaven is real. I hope so. If it's not, this whole life is going to have felt like a major rip off. “God?” I say, “sorry for everything I ever thought or did that was bad, like that thing with the salt.”

I slide a few more inches, my peeled-­back skin rubbing even more on the gritty wall. I'm being peeled. I'm
meat
. Or a potato.

“Shit,” I swear. I'm not allowed to swear, so I never have, but now is as good a time as any to start. The
shit
feels strong and like I really mean it. “This is shit,” I say, my voice shaking like a baby's. Crying again, still crying.

Then finally, my foot sticks on something that's poking through the well wall, a rock maybe or a really deep tree root. It makes me feel SO MUCH better, having that place to stand. I'm saved. I'm saved! I murmur thanks to God, just in case it was Him who did it. If not, it doesn't hurt to say it, right?

“Glory, glory, hallelujah!” I sing and my voice echoes in a muffled hum. It's pretty much the only hymn-­like thing I know, outside of Christmas songs. We aren't religious. Dad says God is dead. I don't know if he's right. He read it on a T-­shirt one day when we were on the train going into the city and acted like it was a message from God himself. But God wouldn't send messages if he was dead, so I just rolled my eyes and ignored him and looked out the window at New Jersey whooshing by. The thing is, if God is dead, who is looking after us? Not
Dad
, that's for sure. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that God is better at message-­sending than Dad is, and God doesn't even have an e-­mail address.

“I'm OK,” I say out loud. It comes out thick. My throat is also shrinking, along with the rest of me. My throat is a well and the words are me. Stuck. “I'm stuck,” I say, then I stop, because it hurts. I try to bend myself so that I'm more comfortable, but wells just aren't built for comfort, not like new cars or couches or water beds.

I had a water bed at our old house. I loved how it sloshed underneath me when I rolled over. I miss that bed, except for when it used to leak and I'd wake up screaming from bad dreams where fish were brushing by my legs with their spiky fins and hungry mouths. Robby thought that bed was hilarious. “Hey, Kammie,” he'd say. “1980 called! It wants its bed back.”

“So funny,” I'd say. “So funny that I forgot to laugh.”

Then he'd come and lie next to me on that bed. He'd slam his body up and down to make waves and I'd giggle until I thought I'd pee my pants. It was more fun than it sounds.

The bed was Mom's bed in college. When I closed my eyes on that bed, I'd imagine what it was like to be her, living alone, moving to a new state all by herself, starting her real life. I'd wonder how much she cried on that bed, missing Grandma. Grandma may have been an old liar, but she was pretty nice to be around. I bet she was a good mom. She sure made good cookies.

I was more than a little sad to leave that bed behind. “It's just a bed,” Mom said, but she was wrong. It was more than that.

Besides, even if we
could
afford it, they 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.