The Girl in the Well Is Me (4 page)

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
.

“They 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 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.

“I 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.

“What?” I said. “Mom, what?”

Mom didn't answer. She was smoking. The cigarette was dangling there on her Mary Kay coral-­lipsticked lips like a fly stuck in flypaper. Mom sold Mary Kay back then. Every morning, she tried a different look, so she knew what she was selling. She doesn't sell it anymore because she doesn't have the time. She says it didn't make enough money to count. But way back then was still Before. When Dad was the smoker, not Mom. Not usually, anyway. I'd hardly ever seen her with a cigarette, even though I knew she sometimes stunk like smoke. The only other time I remembered seeing her smoke was when Grandma had a heart attack and had to go to the hospital to have a stent put in. The cigarette looked weird and wrong, like she'd come into the room wearing Dad's clothes.
Incongruous
is the word, I think. I don't know why I know that word, why I remember that, when I don't remember more important stuff, like (usually) my locker combination.

Then she burst into tears.

“Oh, eff,” said Robby, even though we weren't allowed to swear, or even come close to swearing. I gasped. I thought she was going to light into him. I thought she was going to yell at him for sure. But she didn't. She just stood there, staring at us, but like she couldn't even see us. Her eyes didn't blink. I thought about zombies. I was deciding whether or not to be scared.

I looked out the window through the mesh curtains, and saw the flashing red and blue lights on the police car in the driveway. My dad was being led toward it by two policemen who were talking in loud voices, yelling at him. He'd been mowing the lawn in the back, which was a big slope that was great for sledding but stunk for mowing. It was hard work, I guess. His concert T-­shirt was soaked with sweat. He had handcuffs on and his shiny bald head was hanging low, like someone guilty on CNN.

“I didn't do it!” he shouted to us as we stood there, gaping, on the front lawn where we had somehow found ourselves. They shoved him into the back of the cruiser like he was a bag of potatoes. Rotten ones. “I didn't do it,” he screamed. He was forgetting his right to remain silent, it seemed like.

Even then, I didn't believe him. The sprinklers were on and they sprayed us with water as they twirled around like skaters on the newly cut lawn. Dad always started at the front and mowed it on the diagonal to look like diamond shapes. But none of us moved. We just got wet instead. The car started up and drove away with my dad in the backseat, his face pressed against the window, watching all of us standing there in the rainbow prisms of the water, right there on the perfect patterned grass. Mom's cigarette eventually got so soggy it broke right in half. Then I guess we went in. I don't remember much past that cigarette, dropping down onto the wet green lawn.

I haven't seen Dad since. Mom saw him a lot during the trial, but she said we couldn't go because kids weren't allowed. She said he looked “fine.” She said he was sooooo sorry he'd done it. She said that if he had to go to prison, he knew he deserved it and when he got out, everything would be OK again. She said he'd make it up to us.

I didn't believe that. I still don't. You can't ever believe liars. They lie.

The trial went on for a long time. Eventually, Mom stopped talking to us about it at all. She tried so hard to make it “normal” that it was anything but. Like who cared what happened at school at lunch time? What difference did it make what I got on my times tables quiz? I asked her stuff about court and Dad and she asked me stuff about school, and neither of us answered anything and I stood in her room and ironed her clothes for her while she sat on the edge of the bed and rubbed her feet. I don't know why her feet hurt so much. It was like all the pain in her heart had just sunk down her legs and got stuck there.

I liked ironing. I especially loved the smell of hot clothes but not so much when they weren't clean, when the iron brought out the burnt cigarette stink of them. It was hard to know if I should mention how terrible it was that she suddenly loved to smoke those disgusting cigarettes. Everyone knows it kills you! Why would you start something that you know is terrible? Who does that? That's when I got scared. That's when I got mad.

After I ironed, I'd lie down next to her on the bed and turn on the TV. I'd pretend I didn't hate her.

Hating both your parents is really exhausting, but it's not like I had a choice.

When Dad was sentenced, it was all over the news and the Internet. People went crazy for the story because it was so terrible. What he did, I mean. People gobbled it up, cackling, like they couldn't believe anyone would do anything so purely vile. The picture they used was one from his job, the one that was on his ID badge. It made him look sneaky and smug, like someone who had been caught with his hand in the cookie jar (which I guess he was), but who had gotten away with it (which he didn't). I think someone photoshopped what was left of his hair to make it look the tiniest bit like devil horns. I wondered if, even while he grinned for the picture, he was planning to do what he did. I'll never ask him, so I guess I'll never know.

Marianne Singleton read that stupid article, the one basically everyone read, out loud in her high, clear voice in the afternoon during Current Events class. That was a class we had where you had to Google something interesting and then print out what you found and share it with everyone, if by “share it,” I mean “read it out loud.” I hate reading out loud. I am the tiniest bit dyslexic. Sometimes words trip my tongue. Marianne wasn't dyslexic, not even a little. Worse, she had details I hadn't found out yet.

I hadn't been on the computer. Mom had told me not to, and seriously, I just didn't want to know. That morning, she'd handed me a printed-­out story about someone robbing a bank up in Canada somewhere and escaping with a team of sled dogs. “For Current Events,” she said. “I thought you'd like this one.” I used to
love
sled dogs. Any kind of dog, but especially the ones with the ice-­blue eyes. I'd felt happy and special, like she'd been thinking of me, taking care of me, even if she was slowly killing herself at the same time. I guess she'd been protecting me so that I didn't see my dad, grinning guiltily out at me from my home page.
His
ice-­blue eyes, I could live without.

Before Marianne started to read, she shot me a sympathetic smile, which I could tell she thought was really nice. It looked fake. Then she cleared her throat and went for it. I couldn't believe that Mr. Johnson let her read it! That he didn't jump out of his orange chair and shout, “STOP!” He just listened. He just watched. When she was finished reading, there was a terrible, awkward silence and then, just like that, everyone in fifth grade at Huntington Elementary swiveled their heads around on their necks like a whole parliament of owls to stare at me, suddenly stuffed full of the knowledge that my dad was guilty of embezzling and was going to prison for six years.

Of course, then I had to hate them, too. For knowing. For staring. For all of it.

I sat there at my desk and did the math on a piece of scrap paper where I'd written half of a “Hi!” note to my best friend, Tracy, who had been ignoring me since the trial started, but who I was hoping to win back with smileys and nice notes. I'd gotten as far as “Hi!” and then had run out of things to say. So I crossed it out and wrote 11 + 6 = 17. I could have done it in my head, but I didn't want to. Writing it down made me feel busy. I would be 17 when he got out! I would be a completely different person. He was going to miss everything! My heart broke in two like a cereal bowl that's been dropped off the counter, splashing milk and cornflakes everywhere, much like mine had this morning. (I should have known it was going to basically be the worst day of my life, so far.)

I scribbled out the equation with my pencil so that soon it was just a charcoal-­gray blur. Then I put my head down on my desk. I covered the back of my head with my hands, like we were on an airplane and it was about to crash. I pretended to be invisible. I almost believed I was until I opened my eyes and saw that everyone was still staring at me.

Then the kids started putting up their hands and asking questions. Mr. Johnson asked if I wanted to leave the room and I shook my head, my forehead pressed down on the paper, because no, and because I couldn't stand up anyway because my knees were shaking too bad to use as supportive-­limbs-­that-­hold-­up-­a-­body. He talked about how my dad had taken all this money from his work and put it into his own bank account instead. Was that wrong, boys and girls? Yes, it was.
Duh
. He talked about how my dad was going to prison and how he would eat all his food there and sometimes play basketball for recreation. My dad hated basketball. He was terrible at it. I groaned.

To be honest, up until then, I didn't really know that
embezzling
meant stealing money. I thought it was something to do with hair. The word sounds like fuzz escaping from braids that you've slept in. All at once, my forehead pressed so hard against my desktop that it was getting bruised, I understood how we had money for riding lessons and a big house and a really nice SUV and more than one plasma TV, when Alice's dad had the same job as Dad and they had to live in an apartment and take the bus because they couldn't afford a car. Up until that moment, I had just assumed Alice's dad was really bad at his job, sort of like how Alice is terrible at gymnastics, baseball, and everything else. I had thought my dad was just a superstar. I guess I thought I was, too. I could do a cartwheel and roundoffs and smash a baseball into left field without even really trying.

When I got home from school, a purplish bruise marked my forehead like an ugly tattoo, right next to the shiny gray splotch that I got from putting my head on my scribbles. I hid it with my bangs, not that anyone was asking, but because I guess I wanted to hide it from myself.

The bruises that I have now, I couldn't hide from anyone, especially not from me. I don't know what I look like, but everywhere that my body is pressed up against this stupid dusty brick hurts, exactly like my forehead hurt that day when I pressed it with my finger. I close my eyes and imagine my arms and legs purpling up, black and green and yellow and all the rainbow colors that my forehead was, like ink slipping around under my skin.

It's not fair
, that's all I can think.
It's not fair, it's not fair, it's not fair
. “Life isn't fair,” Grandma used to say. And she's right, it's not,
especially
when you are stuck in a well, purpling up like a grape juice spill on a white carpet. My old room had white carpet. My old room had a grape juice spill that looked just like Australia that I hid under a potted plant beside my desk.

Not long after Dad went to jail, the bank took our house and all the stuff in it, including that stained old white carpet, and we moved to Hell, which is in Texas. The town isn't really called Hell, but that's what Robby calls it and I don't think he's wrong. It's not even really a town. I call it Nowheresville. It's sort of like a patch of scrubland with a couple of big warehouses plonked down on it that store stuff that people buy on the Internet. There is also a brewery. Everyone's parents basically work in the warehouse or at the brewery. Mom works at both.