The Girl in the Well Is Me (2 page)

“Kandy,” says Sandy, in a whisper so loud it echoes down into my ears and rubs up against them, Styrofoam-­sinister. “What if we can't get her out?”

“I can hear you,” I say. My arms prickle with goose bumps. Whispering makes me think of wool that you are rubbing on your tongue. I want to spit but I can't, because it would just land on me.

“Um, OK,” Kandy says. “We've got to go.” She says it like she's leaving a conversation, as if it's yesterday afternoon and we're talking on the phone and I'm just going to sit here with the telephone pressed against my ear, waiting for her to come back. We have a landline now. Mom gave up her cell phone. It's like we didn't just move, we traveled back through time to 1975. In the kitchen, there's a patterned, squishy floor with gold flecks. There's a spot where you can sit where the sun comes in the window and makes a rectangle of sparkling light on the floor. That's where I was sitting yesterday, tracing patterns on the gold bits, when Kandy called to say that I could join her club if I passed the
initiation
.

This is the initiation.

I guess I'm not going to pass.

The heads disappear again. My own head hurts. My own head wants to disappear into the warm sunshininess of the Texan blue sky, to melt in the heat like a candle in a flame. But instead, my head's an ice cube, shivering and clattering away on top of my neck, my teeth rattling from the cold. My ears are ringing like they did after the Rory Devon concert that Maria Potts' parents took ten of us to for her birthday last May. Rory was so amazing. We were in the front row and we could see the sweat on his face. We could even feel it freckling our own faces like a creepy but awesome drizzle when he danced. It was basically the last time in my life that I was truly happy, even if for three days afterwards, my ears wouldn't stop ringing. I didn't shower for a week.

I swallow down some more crying and nearly choke to death on my own spit, which would actually be a sort of ironic way to die in a well, if
ironic
means what I think it means, which is “so pathetic that it's almost funny, but is actually tragic.”

A bunch of pebbles and loose dirt come raining down onto my face and shoulders. Mandy's face appears. “Oh! You're still there,” she deadpans, like maybe while they were gone, I just climbed out and went home.

“Yes, I am,” I say. Where else would I be? I sneeze three more times. I can't not sneeze in groups of three. It's a thing of mine. But there is not enough room in here to both breathe and sneeze. My eyes hurt, my nose hurts, my throat hurts, and my lungs hurt, like I'm really for sure going to have an asthma attack and die.

“We've been talking and we've decided that . . . well, just get out of there,” says Mandy, like that's it. It's up to me.

“HOW?” I yell. “I don't know HOW! I can't. I CAN'T.”

“Wiggle,” Mandy says impatiently, leaning in so far that I can smell the perfume that she says she stole from Walgreens. I bet she just took it from her mom's bathroom. It smells like something too sweet combined with cough medicine. Then her gum falls out of her mouth and lands in my hair. IN MY HAIR. I can't reach it, for obvious reasons. “My gum! Oopsy!” She laughs. “So, um, wiggle back up now.”

“Wiggle
up
?” says Sandy, and then she giggles. “Did you just spit your gum on her?”

The gum smells like spearmint and drool. I can see it out of the corner of my eye, sitting there above my left eye on a crooked overhang of bangs. Mandy yelps with laughter. Then I hear, “What?” Then I hear, “In her
hair
.” Then I hear Kandy's manic bellow of laughter. She roars like nothing has ever been funny before and this is the funniest thing that humanity will ever achieve. I'm glad none of them have phones because if they did, they'd be filming this and turning it into something that goes viral on the Internet and the whole world would be laughing at me at the same time. Gum in her hair! Hold me! OMG! So funny! LOL

I try to ignore them. I'm the one in the snake-­filled well with a gob of spitty spearmint gunk in my hair. I
wiggle
. I hold my breath and squish my arms in even tighter and I move my hips back and forth, just a bit, because just a bit is all I can do. As it turns out, wiggling is a bad idea because my body doesn't wiggle up, it slides down.

And down.

And down.

How deep is this well?

I think I'm screaming, but I might not be screaming. I might be holding my breath. I might be dead. I might be sleeping somewhere in New Jersey, in my old water bed, and any second now, I'll wake up and everything will have been a dream. A terrible dream. Texas. Mandy, Kandy, and Sandy. The well.

All of it.

When I come to a stop, I'm shaking all over. I hope I don't shake myself loose and fall farther still. When I first crashed down here, I was close enough to the sky to feel like I could maybe, just about almost possibly somehow climb out. Now I'm not even close. The sky-­hole is so far away it looks as tiny as a saucer, and I am way bigger than a teacup.

“Help,” I whimper, even though I know there is no way they can hear me without shouting. Not now.

The skin on my elbows and knees has rubbed off on the well walls. I am raw. I feel as pinkish red as a lump of ground raw meat. All of my skin hurts and burns like a bad sunburn that's been scraped dry by a sandpapery towel.

“Please help,” I say.

“ARE YOU AT THE BOTTOM OF THE WELL?” one of The Girls yells.

“No!” I answer. “I mean, I don't know! No. I guess not.”

I wish I could see down. I wish I could see the bottom to know how much farther I might go, how much more air is under my feet before they might finally touch down on something solid, something real, something to hold me up.

2

E
rased

I can't see myself at all, partly because it is dark in the well and partly because I can look up and I can look straight ahead, but the rest of my body is all stuffed down below my shoulders like a sausage in a skin. I feel as if I've been erased from the neck down, like my body is not really here with me. I'm just a head, alone. My body is separate from me, but it can still send me messages. Messages like
OUCH
. All the parts that hurt, all the parts that are dangling, all the parts that are wedged, those parts are all messaging me at the same time so that my brain just feels white, fuzzy, painful noise.

I take a deep breath and hold it, and it feels like a whole army of tiny samurai soldiers are stabbing into my non-­existent sides. I can feel it, but at the same time, it feels like it isn't happening to me. When I shift my weight, my leg throbs like a giant heart, sending the pain up through my veins. My body is the Internet and my brain is my e-­mail and it's receiving the news.
Ouch, ouch, ouch.
Love, [email protected], e-­mailing me from the black nothing below.

Black, like a black hole, like we learned about in science, just waiting to pull everything in and unravel it into a backward explosion. I don't get how that works, how things can
implode
, but I didn't put up my hand to ask. At school, I'm invisible. It's part of the plan. I didn't want anyone to really notice me until I was part of the Mandy, Kandy, Sandy alliance. Until I was safe, in a group of friends. Until I was one of The Girls.

Ha.
Ha
.

I'm such an
idiot
.

I should have picked someone else. Anyone else. That kid with the purple glasses! That girl with the birthmark that leaks down her face onto her neck! The BFFs who wear their long blond hair in matching headbands every day! I could have made that work. I could have been whoever they wanted me to be, I guess.

But now, where am I? Down a well. Totally alone. In the dark.

Some pretty bad things that have happened to me in the dark include: 1. Accidentally stepping on our old dog, Hayfield, and breaking his back leg. 2. Slipping down the stairs when I took a wrong turn to the bathroom at a sleepover at Molly Fortin's house in second grade. 3. Being stuck in a well.

“Where are you?” I yell. “YOU GUYS. Don't leave me!”

“Don't get hysterical!” says Sandy. I have to stretch my hearing to the max to even catch what she's saying. Her now-­tiny face blocks the distant light for a second. Then it disappears. I blink and blink. My eyes are starting to adjust. My heart slows back down a tiny bit. I can see the well wall. I can see the outline of bricks.

“Help!” I yell again. “HELP HELP HELP HELP HELP.”

“Stop yelling!” yells Kandy, appearing, her teeth shining like tiny flashlights. We ARE helping. DUH!” She's starting to sound a whole lot less caring and a whole bunch more annoyed, like this is something I've done to her, like I've really inconvenienced her. My insides curl up and pinch.

“I can see your teeth!” I yell.

“No kidding,” she says, and disappears again.

Then Sandy appears, scowls, and vanishes. I wish Sandy was the one who had fallen down the well. I wish
she
was the one who was small enough to fit. Or maybe I just wish another well would open up next to this one and she would go shooting down it like a waterslide and land in the big ball of lava in the center of the earth, or maybe past that, maybe in China.

If I could actually fall that far, it might be pretty cool, if only the tunnel was just a bit wider and smooth as marble and all my skin didn't get rubbed off on the way. No one welcomes a kid without skin when they suddenly pop up in the middle of a busy intersection in Shanghai or someplace else that is Chinese. They'd probably scream. They'd probably run. Maybe they'd think I was a ghost or a monster, risen from the sewers. If a Chinese person with no skin suddenly fell up here and appeared from the sewer at the corner of Main and First, the people in this podunk town wouldn't exactly be giving them a warm hug and a Dr. Pepper. They'd call the sheriff. They'd have that person in the slammer before you could say, “Are you OK?” You'd have people calling CNN, posting that an alien had landed, taking selfies with the poor thing. Someone would declare that the zombie apocalypse had started. And then, before you knew it, the whole town would probably drive to Dallas in a mass evacuation, in their big dusty pickup trucks, kids hanging out of the back with hunting rifles, ready to shoot the undead.

I can't hear the girls anymore so I remind them I am here by yelling some more. My voice is getting tired and heavy, and trying to use it is like trying to lob a bowling ball uphill. I can't hear their voices but I'm sure I can still hear giggling. “It's not funny!” I say, but they must think it is because they don't stop. “I'm bleeding!” I shout, my voice as scratchy as an old smoker's. “I'm scared,” I add in a quieter voice. I'm glad they can't hear me because admitting it would just make them laugh harder. Mom once told me that I take everything too seriously, and maybe this is one of those things. Maybe it is funny? I force a laugh, but the thing is, it isn't funny. Not even a bit.

“Oh, sorry!” says Mandy, suddenly face-­first back in the hole, her braid hanging down like Rapunzel's, just like Kandy's did before, but nowhere even close enough to reach. Mandy has the longest hair. She has never had her hair cut. Not even once. When she sits down, she can tuck the end of it under her butt. “We were just talking about, like, something else? You know? But now we're going to save you!”

“Kandy,” I say. “I mean,
Mandy
. Come on! HURRY! I'm going to die!”

“It's AMANDA,” she says, snottily, before dis­appearing again. “We told you, you have to be in the club to call us by our
good
names.”

I don't think I've ever hated anyone as much as I hate her right now, and that's the truth.

“Grrr,” I say, low down in my throat, but the vibration makes my ribs hurt, so I stop.

It smells bad down here, like farts and rotting fruit. I remember hearing once that even if you've never smelled something dead, when you do smell something dead, you know right away and will say to yourself, “Oh,
that
is the smell of something dead!” Like it's programmed into our cells to recognize death. Well,
I
smell something dead. There is something dead underneath me, somewhere between me and China. Maybe the dead thing is the last person who fell down the well, the last person who tried to join their stupid club and stood on the board to sing the national anthem. Maybe the whole well is full of dead kids! My heart starts to pound really hard.

“Seriously, hurry!” I yell. “You guys have to get me out! There's something dead in here!”

“What is it?” Kandy yells, like it matters.

“I don't know,” I shout. “I can't see anything.”

“Is it a zombie?” Sandy says, unhelpfully.

“That is NOT FUNNY,” I yell.

“Calm down,” calls Amanda in a sing-­songy voice. Then, “BOOO!” Her laugh echoes around me. I want to plug my ears so bad, but I can't. I can't do anything but listen. “BOOO!” she can hardly even say it, she's laughing too hard.

I've decided now for sure that Amanda is my least favorite. She has red hair and white skin, and freckles crawl all over her face like amoebas. Her teeth look like Chiclets wedged crookedly into her gums, or they would if she brushed them often enough to keep them white. Sandra (Sandy!) is blonde and has braces already because her uncle is an orthodontist. Kandy is a brunette. (No one calls Kandy anything except Kandy. I don't even know what else to call her!) Her teeth are totally perfect naturally. Everything about how she looks is totally perfect naturally. That's why she makes all the big decisions. She's the leader. I didn't even know them yet when I figured that out. You can just tell. It's something about the way she walks and the way she dresses and the way the other girls are trying to walk like her and dress like her, but they aren't quite as good at it. They just look like imitation-­Kandy, not the real thing. They look like they want so bad to be the real thing that they would do anything, like sell their soul to the Devil maybe, if he made those kinds of deals.

Like drop the new kid down the well, even.

And laugh about it.

I said they were the popular girls, but I left out the part where they are also the meanest girls in the whole sixth grade. But, obviously, popular and mean are tied together so tight they're like those knots that just tighten and tighten no matter how hard you try to untangle them. Mean is where they get their power. The thing with mean girls is that everyone knows that if you aren't one of them, they're going to destroy you, tiny bit by tiny bit. And I'm not going to lie, I've been destroyed enough for this year, for this whole life even.

When you move somewhere new, you get to
be
someone new. I was ready. What was left of me was ready to be Kammie Summers, Mean Girl #4.

I didn't have anything to lose.

“Kandy!” I yell. “Get a rope! Pull me out!”

She leans into the well again. The opening is a whole lot bigger at the top than at the part where I am wedged. The well gets narrower as it descends. For a second, she looks so friendly up there that I remember why I like her. She's so pretty! She's so normal! She's so happy! She's never had so many bad things happen to her at once that she's done the worst thing you can do. She's never been broken and sloppily put back together with paste and scars.

“There's no rope,” Kandy yells, and at first I think she's said, “There's no hope,” which also sounds true. “Stop screaming!” she adds. “I can't think. I'm, like, trying really hard to think of something, you know.” Then, “Ew, it
stinks
in here. We'll have to just . . . go get someone, I guess. Stay there.”

“Where else would I go?” I yell back weakly, but she's already disappeared from view. And then, just like that, I hear the whisper-­crunch sound of their feet stepping away from me, leaving me alone. It's as if all the sound has been sucked away with them, into a vacuum. “Implode,” I whisper. This is what it sounds like in outer space, I'll bet, your ears filled up with its emptiness, nothing but the whole universe all around you. We just learned in science class that space is a vacuum, but if that's true, then why aren't we all sucked clean away? Or, at the very least, why can't I be sucked up out of this well? Why doesn't gravity push us up instead of pulling us down?

Kandy is probably shaking out her hair while she runs in her slightly gallop-­y way, trying to get the well-smell off her. In my head, this happens in slow motion, the sun throwing a shower of golden sparkles into her hair, which is maybe now freed from its braid, bouncing perfectly like in a shampoo commercial.

I wonder how long it will take
me
to get clean after this. I'll probably never be clean again. Ten years from now, I'll scratch my ear and dust will fall out. If I live that long, I guess. We don't even have a bathtub in our new place, only a really terrible, rust-­dripping shower that smells like cat pee and broken hearts. I used to love to take baths with a million bubbles, so many that they were like a blanket that I could hide under. My favorite bubbles smelled like chewing gum and had a pink girl on the bottle. She had boobs the size of watermelons and her face was permanently frozen in a half-­creepy smile, but the bubbles smelled like happiness and birthday parties and dancing and vanilla cake and everything good.

I guess the bank reclaimed those bubbles, too. I hope those bankers love them. I hope they go home and take off their expensive-­looking blue shirts and striped ties and then climb into a bath full of sweet pink bubbles. I hope they say to themselves, “Gosh, I'm so great! I stole these from an 11-­year-­old girl who never did anything wrong. I'm a good guy! Love these bubbles!”

Jerks.

I hope they get a rash.

In the dark, I am starting to see things like underwater coral and moving shapes that I know aren't really there; they are just shadows on my eyeballs or things floating past my retinas. I blink hard. Staring at the hole where the light shines in has left a stamp on my eyes, so even if I close them, I see a round, lighter patch that's still out of reach, even though it's
there
on my eyelid. It's inside me, but I'll never reach it, like how stuff in 3-­D movies can look real enough to touch. That sounds like a metaphor for something important, but I don't really get what it is. Metaphors and similes make my head hurt, picking apart those sentences in Language Arts, making all those words fall away from their sentences and separating them into gerunds and modifiers and whatevers. It's like sentence massacres, those poor words bleeding sadly all over the page. I don't know why school has to take every­thing good and turn it boring and painful and bad. If I ran a school, I'd make it fun. I'd make it better. I don't know how, but I would.

Speaking of bleeding, my leg is wet and kind of sticky, and I just know that's blood, coagulating down there. Gross. Even the word
coagulating
is gross. It's a word that coagulates in your throat when you whisper it in the dark. “Coagulating,” I whisper, then I cough hard, clearing it away.

Anyway, I wish I hadn't worn these shorts, my favorites, cutoffs that are the exact perfect length and don't gape out at the waist, like most jeans do on me. I bet they are ruined. I bet holes tore right through them while I was falling. I'll have to throw them out. I'll never get another pair. We just don't have money for that anymore, and shorts this good don't show up at the Goodwill.

Once they found out that we shop at the Goodwill, The Girls would've kicked me out anyway. I should never have tried to join Kandy's stupid, awful club. It's ruined everything. I might even die! I thought I was going to be someone different here in Texas. I thought I was going to be someone tough and happy and sparkly and untouchable, like they are. I thought I could do that, just start over in a different way.