The Girl in the Well Is Me (7 page)

“Helllloooooo!” shouts the voice from the top of the well.

“Hello,” I say back, in a normal voice. I have dropped two or three more feet. Three feet is a lot when you are only four feet tall.

“I can't hear you!” he shouts.

“HELLO,” I scream, snappily, like it's his fault that I'm trapped in a well that now stinks of my own pee. I'm dumb. I am the dumbest. I am captain Dumb on the S.S.
Dumb
and I've sunk into the Sea of Dumb, where I am dumbly drowning
in my own pee
. “I AM IN HERE!” I scream. “GET ME OUT! HELP ME!”

“WE ARE GOING TO SAVE YOU!” shouts the man. I can't tell who it is because it's so dark up there. I don't want to be in this well in the dark. Where is my mom anyway?

“WHERE IS MY MOM?” I yell. “I WANT MY MOM.”

“I'M KANDICE'S DAD,” he says and it takes me a minute to figure out that Kandice is Kandy. I've never met her dad. I knew he existed and he worked at the warehouse, I just never really bothered to complete the picture. I liked imagining her dadless and momless, raising herself, tough and not bothered by details like parents or homework.

Kandy's dad's head disappears and the pool of inky blue sky settles back into its job of filling up the space. It's my favorite shade of blue, that darkest blue of evening, right before the sky lets go of all color and sinks into holey blackness, the holes letting the stars shine through. This blue is the color of fireworks about to start.

Then Kandy's dad is back. “SOMEONE IS GOING TO CALL YOUR MOM! SHE'S COMING!” he says. “WE ARE GOING TO LOWER A ROPE!” He is talking very slowly, leaving big spaces between his words like I must need that pause so that I can figure out what each word is, one at a time, adding them all up at the end like a math problem to get to the sum.

“OK!” I yell. “OK! OK.”

All this yelling is tiring me out so much that even though it seems like a pretty awkward time to take a nap, I close my eyes. The dark blue of the sky pulls a blanket over the silver of my bad dream and freckles me with stars. Something twinkles. “Oh, hello,” I say, in my sleep. An animal jumps up and down in front of me, tugging my sleeve with its mouth. “Stop,” I say. The goat eats my sleeve. His lips feel soft and strange against my cut-­up arms.

And then,
bam
, the rope hits me squarely on the head.

“GRAB THE ROPE!” Kandy's dad shouts.

“I CAN'T,” I shout back, my voice still thick from the dream, and from being clonked on the head. “MY ARMS ARE STUCK.”

The rope stays where it is, resting on my head like an old man's hand. I preferred the coyote, but it helps that he wasn't real so didn't weigh anything. Also, he was better company.

“CAN YOU GRAB IT WITH YOUR MOUTH?” he says.

“WHAT?” I yell, even though I heard him. With my
mouth
? I saw that in the circus once, a girl swinging from a rope with her mouth. Though actually maybe that wasn't a rope, maybe it was her hair, and she wasn't holding on with her teeth, her hair was just really long and was attached to something at the other end. My hair would be useless for that now that it's not attached to my head, and it wouldn't be long enough anyway. Then I yell, “NO! I CAN'T.”

“HANG ON, KIDDO!” he yells. There is a scuffling sound at the top of the well and the rope disappears.

“Bye rope,” I whisper.
“Au revoir!
” I'm nervous to look up in case he drops it again and it lands in my eye, but I do anyway and I see Kandy peering back at me. She is so tiny and far away, like I'm seeing her with binoculars that I'm looking through backwards.

“HEYYYYYYYYYY!” she says. “UM, HI! HOW'S IT GOING?”

“WHAT?” I yell. “WHERE WERE YOU?”

“ARE YOU OK?” she shouts.

“NO,” I shout back.

“OH,” she says. “SORRY, IT'S JUST THAT I HAD TO HAVE DINNER. MACARONI. UGH.”

“YOU HAD DINNER?” I yell. “YOU HAD MACARONI?”

“I HAD TO!” she says. “MY MOM SAID I HAD TO EAT! THEN I SAID, MOM, SERIOUSLY, KAMMIE FELL INTO A WELL! AND SHE KEPT LAUGHING, LIKE I WAS JOKING! AND I WAS LIKE, I AM NOT JOKING! AND SHE WAS LIKE, EAT! ORPHANS ARE STARVING IN OTHER COUNTRIES! THERE ARE HUNGRY PEOPLE IN AMERICA, TOO, YOU KNOW! THE 99%! AND I WAS LIKE, MOM, WE ARE IN THE 99%. AND SHE GOT MAD SO I ATE AND THEN I HAD HOMEWORK! I HAD TO DO IT! THEN I WAS LIKE, YOU KNOW, FREAKED OUT THAT YOU WERE GOING TO DIE SO I STARTED TO CRY AND MOM SENT ME TO MY ROOM! AND THEN MANDY'S MOM CALLED MY MOM AND SAID THAT MANDY SAID THAT YOU WERE IN THE WELL AND THEN THEY CALLED SANDY'S MOM AND SHE ASKED SANDY AND SANDY WAS LIKE, YES, KAMMIE IS IN THE WELL! AND THEN THERE WAS ALL THIS RUNNING AROUND! AND SHOUTING! MOM WAS SO MAD BUT I TRIED TO TELL HER! SHE HADN'T HEARD OF YOU! SHE THOUGHT I MADE YOU UP! BUT IT ALL WORKED OUT BECAUSE NOW MY DAD AND ME ARE GOING TO RESCUE YOU!”

Her words tumble down onto me like pellets of hail, and dance in my hair like fleas having a circus on a dead goat. I try to sort them all out into sentences and then paragraphs so that I know what she means, what she's saying. My brain is humming more slowly than usual; it's like a lullaby with one note, slow and sad. It's hard to rev up when you're crushed under the weight of performing fleas in a cloud of noxious dead-­goat fumes.

“I FEEL FUNNY,” I shout and it's suddenly really true, like I feel like my head and body aren't quite attached properly and something is wrong, my batteries are winding down and my voice comes out squished and twisty as a soft ice cream. My skin has opened up where my freckles used to be and stars are shining out. They've probably been waiting in me all this time, and the dullness of them was just their shutters being closed. Now they are open, just like me. Kandy's face is gone from the dark blue hole and the stars float up and stick there, waving good-­bye.

The smell is worse. The air is gone. I'm breathing something that isn't air. I can feel my lungs turning yellow and spongy, melting toffee-­thick into some gaseous poison. I cough, but nothing happens, just a
whoof whoof
of air, leaving me. I'm dizzy. I'm so dizzy. She ate macaroni? My brain is macaroni, orange and overcooked, disintegrating on the plate of my skull. Macaroni is the food of despair and the color of wrinkled carrots and thin air.

“Star light, star bright, first star I see tonight, I wish I may, I wish I might, have the wish I wish tonight,” I say or I think or both. I close my eyes and float my wish up there, blowing on it like a flea riding on a dandelion seed, wishing, of course, that I am not in a well.

“KAMMIE?” shouts a man's voice, which is coming from the floating head of Kandy's dad. “ARE YOU STILL OK?”

“I'm dreaming in a thickly dream,” I try to yell, but it comes out quiet, like you'd expect when the air is curdled yogurt. Suddenly, the walls of the well are as cool as sheets that you slide your feet into after a hot day and find a patch that hasn't already been scorched by your sleeping heat.

The goats are rustling underneath me, so maybe after all, they aren't zombies. They would like to come out. Probably they dream of being Moroccan tree goats, climbing up to eat all those Argan seeds so they can poop them out again to make oil for shining hair. The Argan goats are the envy of the goat world. “
OU EST MOROCCO
?” I say to them, all slow motion, with the wrong syllables and things. They make goat sounds in return. They sound like tiny horses. I don't know what goats sound like. Do they whinny?

“
Non, non
,” they say. “
Ou est la salle de bain?
”

“OK,” I tell them. “Fine. Be that way.” I think they are mad that I brought up Morocco, the land of tree goat dreams. I think they are making fun of me for peeing in my shoe. “There is no bathroom here,
mes amis
,” I add, for good measure.

I want to tell Kandy's dad's floating face in the distance about the animals down here who all speak gently in French, but it feels like it doesn't matter now. I'm sleepy and I'm being rescued, so maybe it would be OK if I just closed my eyes again and so I do, I close them, and the dream folds over me like layers of paper being creased perfectly by a teacher's hands, and pretty soon it's going to be a peace dove and I'm going to fly away on it to our sister city in Japan. I wish I didn't feel so funny, but it's just part of the dream, after all, and I really miss my dad, that's not even a lie, raisin-­souled liar that he is.

7

D
reams

I wake up, stiff and sore and still in the well. It's been five minutes or five hours or five years. Maybe I am fifteen now. Is it over?

“Dad?” I say.

And then from down deep below me, I hear my dad's voice saying, “Sugar Peanut Pie, you're going to have to wake up.” Which is when I realize that Dad has tunneled out of jail using salsa to melt the metal bars and a spoon for digging, and he's going to crawl up and save me. We saw that on
Mythbusters
once, Dad and me, lying on the couch in the living room, me upside down, and him the right way up. Him saying, “If I'm ever in the slammer, I'll know what to do!” And me saying, “Salsa gives me a rash.” And him laughing. And me laughing because neither of us ever imagined he'd be in prison, except he must have, because how could he not? He knew what he was doing.

“Au secours, Papa!”
I whisper. “Help me!” and my whisper gets bigger as it falls down the well, until it is as big as a paper airplane, swooping into Dad's eye.

“Ouch!” he says. “Careful, sport.”

A dog barks. It's nice that Dad has a dog, who is Lassie. “
Le woof
,” says the dog and I smile beatifically, which is a way of smiling that is very holy and nearly biblical and then, once again, something hard and heavy lands on my head. I have to swim through water and thick fog to get to the top of my own head, much like in the book
James and the Giant Peach
where they eat their way to the surface of the peach, only to find they are on the ocean. I eat my way to the surface of me. On my head, there is a tube that is blowing cold air.

“
Zut alors, Papa!
” I say. “Lassie,
quelle heure est-­il?
”

“
Le woof
,” says the dog sadly.

Dad says, “Do you hear music? I love this song.”

“But you have terrible taste,” I say. “What song is this?”

“It's that kid,” he says. “Rory Darren? The one with the bad hair.”

“He doesn't sing, mostly he just meows,” I say. “And it's
Devon
.” My dad laughs because I'm the funniest and my head is blocking the TV and no one can see whether the thing about the salsa is a myth or if it's really going to work next time one of us needs to bust our way to freedom.

I look up at the hole at the entrance to my freedom, which is bruised with night now, black and final, an abyss or a black hole or both. There are two new faces up there, both wearing large red hats. Santa! No, wait, they are cartoon firemen, which must mean it is Saturday morning and I am on the rec room floor with Robby, arguing over which cartoon to watch, but where are my Froot Loops?

“THIS IS UNACCEPTABLE!” I shout, which isn't what comes out of my mouth, but never mind.
Glarg, glarg
. Words mean more than you want them to most of the time, or less, but never the right amount.

“KAMMIE,” shouts a man in a red hat with a light on it, which is the light at the end of the tunnel, which means he is probably God or maybe a coal miner. If so, he took a wrong turn. This is a warehouse town! No one mines anymore. Or if they do, they don't do it here. They must. Somewhere, someone is a miner, down there in the tunnels in the dark. Poor man.

“KAMMIE,” says the man again. I bet he wishes he'd taken a job at the warehouse instead, even though those jobs are terrible and Mom's feet are lumpy with raw blisters from all the walking and running she does all day long to meet the one-­day delivery promises made by the company. “KAMMIE, YOU HAVE TO TRY TO ANSWER.”

My name, Kammie, is very strange. Listen to the two syllables:
Kam. Me
.

“AMEN!” I mumble-­shout because that sounds like the password into Heaven. How do dying people remember what to say? I hope Dad can come, too, and his little French lass, Doggie, and even the goat zombies, who are now like brothers to me, I call them Robby Robby and Le Robby-­Robby.

“ROBBY!” I say, which is also not really a winner, being
Rob
and
Bee
.
I went on a robbing bee, and I took all the money.
You have to sing it with money having three syllables instead of two. Like mu-­uh-­nee. Try it.

“KAMMIE,” the man shouts again. “THIS IS SERIOUS. WE THINK YOU MIGHT BE RUNNING OUT OF OXYGEN DOWN THERE AND THE TUBE ON YOUR HEAD HAS OXYGEN. YOU NEED TO GET IT INTO YOUR MOUTH AND THEN TRY TO BREATHE ONLY THROUGH YOUR MOUTH. DO YOU UNDERSTAND? IT'S LIKE DRINKING FROM A STRAW.”

I hear, “Oxygen oxygen oxygen.” Everyone wants me to put things in my mouth. Haven't they heard of hygiene? Hygiene and oxygen are both words that are made of silk yarn. My brain tries to weave that into a scarf. It doesn't work. Why? It's a straw! This hatted man-­angel, unemployed coal miner must think I'm very dumb, but he doesn't know I have the brain power of all of us in the well. I am pulling more and more power in through my one bare foot, which is sadly now being nibbled by a crab who would prefer peaches. We can't all be a peach. My name is Kammie. Kammie is peachy keen. I like saying peachy keen. I think I used to say it all the time. Tracy would say, “Do you like my new haircut?” And I'd say, “It's so peachy keen.” This book is peachy keen. This show is peachy keen. How was school? Peachy keen. It's an old fashioned thing to say. Grandma loved saying peachy keen. Her cookies were peachy keen. I need Grandma's Peachy Keen Cookie Recipe! How else will I bring Grandma back?

I am bringing
peachy keen
back, lovingly wrapping the words up and dropping them carefully into modern times like the past itself is lobbing gifts into the future, through me.

The man keeps saying, “KAMMIE! YOU HAVE TO PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH. YOU HAVE TO BREATHE IT IN.”

The man is magic! He isn't a god or an angel! He's a
magician
. Little white rabbits are pouring out of his hat and landing on my head with the fleas and the silver coyote. This could be an emergency, but the man is right that I am so thirsty. My mouth is sand and dirt, like the rest of this state. I sip from the straw, but there isn't anything in the straw! It's a joke. A terrible joke.

I try to breathe through the straw because the man is getting upset. His frustration is alive, a tiny fish, flicking its fins at me. It feels pleasantly weird to drink from it! Try it if you can. I'm drinking silver air. I thought I didn't like silver, but maybe I do because it tastes cold and smooth, like something blended with ice and mixed with clouds. Bronze air would taste like gravy. I hang for a while, dangling, the crab still clinging to my foot, drink-­breathing all that metallic wonder and after a few minutes I start to remember that I am stuck in a well. Worse, my dad is gone. He was here! Except he wasn't here. My dad is in jail, miles away, saving up his salsa. Are they allowed to watch
Mythbusters
in prison?

The man in the hat is a fireman.

“KEEP BREATHING,” he calls. “YOU'LL FEEL BETTER IN A FEW MINUTES.”

He's right, I do feel better. I also feel worse. I can feel the cuts on my arms and legs, the plink-­plonk of bleeding coming from somewhere on my shin. It feels burned and black, like charred toast. The blood is the jam. I'm hungry. I'm thirsty. I'm freezing. My goosebumps have goosebumps, like those drawings of stairs that just go up and up and up forever, they're like that, goosebumps with no end. I'm vibrating with cold. Record players work because the needle reads the vibration of the grooves on the vinyl disc. That's a cool fact, told to me by Record Store Dave. The needle is made from a real diamond crystal.

“Are you cold?” I want to ask the goats, but I can't. My voice is gone in a grain of sand that's fallen out of my mouth and landed on a beach.

Up above me, I can hear lots of voices now, more and more, like there is a parade or a party.

“KAMMIE,” someone shouts.

It's Robby, so I let the straw fall out of my mouth and scream, “DON'T YOU DARE SPIT!” Nothing comes out. Oh well. What I meant was, “Robby! Help me!”

Robby and I used to be really good friends. When we were little, we used to do everything together. We made up games. We pretended to be everyone and everything that wasn't us and sometimes climbed trees. We built a tree house in our old backyard out of scrap lumber that the guy at Home Depot gave to us. The tree house was crooked. If you sat on one side, you practically tipped right out of the tree. The danger is what made it fun, we agreed. Mom and Dad did not agree and forbade us from going into it. Dad was going to “tear it out of there before someone gets killed.” Well, he didn't do it. He often forgot to bother with following up. Robby and I used it all the time anyway. From up there, we could see into everyone else's backyards. We could see Tommy Hennessy picking his nose and eating it. We could see April and Tawny Smythe pretending to be runway models wearing bedsheets and wigs from their mom's hair place. We could see all the people who we were glad not to be. Back then, it was good to be Robby and me, me and Robby, in our safely dangerous house in the tree.

Then Robby turned 14 and got annoyed with everyone and everything. “Stop being annoyed,” I'd say, and he'd say, “I'm not annoyed, I'm really mad. I'm mad at you.” He knew I hated it when anyone was mad at me, but it didn't matter because he was 14 and straight-­up always mad. Not just at me, but at everyone and everything. Sometimes he was so mad, his face erupted with white pustules of bad moods, waiting to be burst, leaving gross marks on the mirror. When those zits are all gone, I figure he'll be Robby again. The nice one, not the luck hog. Not the great debater. Not the door-­slamming, Kammie-­hating, Dad-­defender who he is now. He defends Dad all the time. He says, “Dad is a good person who made a mistake, Kammie.” He says, “It's sort of your fault. You kept asking him for more stuff.”

“KAMMIE,” he yells right now at this exact minute, to me in the well. “GET OUT OF THE WELL. GET OUT OR I'M GOING TO BE MAD AT YOU.”

“Ha ha,” I say, which comes out like this, “Haaaaa.”

“MADE YOU LAUGH,” he booms.
Boom, boom, boom.

“It's Dad's fault.” I feel like somehow Robby can hear me, even though I didn't really say that.

“He didn't mean to,” Robby says, as if he is speaking inside my head. “He only wanted the best for you. You kept asking for more stuff! All those American Girl dolls!”

“I don't even like them!” I try to say, but my voice is being absorbed by my coyote friend. “I just liked the catalogue. Stop saying this stuff to me. It isn't my fault.” I start to cry.

“KAMMIE,” he bellows. “I WON'T BE MAD IF YOU GET OUT OF THE WELL.”

“I can't,” I say or don't say. “That's not fair. I'm frogging in the well's throat.” This makes perfect sense to me, but he can't hear it. I don't have a microphone. So
boom, boom, boom
to you, too.

Then he spits. I hear it. I think I hear it. Maybe he doesn't. I think he does. My hair is already so full of fleas and spiders and Mandy/Kandy/Sandy's gum. I've forgotten whose gum it is. It doesn't matter. All three of them are the same jaw, chewing.

“YOU SPAT IN MY HAIR!” I try to yell, but still nothing. Maybe something. Air. Silver air. Leaking up the mine shaft into his eyes.
Boom
. Take that. His eyes, frozen by my airy words, land on my head like Ping-­Pong balls and then bounce back up again to his face. My poor head. My poor hair. Poor me, all over.

“SHE SEEMS OK TO ME,” he yells. “AT LEAST SHE'S FINALLY SHUT UP FOR TWO MINUTES IN A ROW.” He makes a raspberry sound and shout-­whispers into the microphone, “WE HAD CHICKEN FOR DINNER AND I GOT THE WISHBONE, DUMBO. IT WAS REAL CHICKEN. LIKE, A ROTISSERIE ONE.”

And so I'm like, “THAT'S JUST LOVELY, JERK­FACE.” Still nothing. (Or maybe a whisper, a bone that's stuck in my throat, a rasping gate. Dying is such a quiet thing. I'd have thought it would be noisier.)

Then he's gone and Mom is up there. “Kammie?” she says, like we're talking on the phone. “Hello?” Mom doesn't like talking into things. Once Dad used his iPhone to record us on Christmas morning opening our presents. She nearly went nuts. She kept starting to say things and freezing up and panicking because it was being filmed.

“Oh, this is so lovely! It's just so . . . oh, I forgot that thing was on. Is it on?” The video is full of Dad pointing the phone at her and asking, “What present did you just open? Who was it from?” And her ducking her head with her wet-­wool whispers, “I can't! I can't!” Then you see me grinning and hear me squealing about my new skates, and you hear Robby going, “Cooooool” when he opens his electric guitar.

That was a good year. It was the last good year. It snowed all day and all night, and we spent the whole week between Christmas and New Year's sledding down the back lawn and skating on the few inches of ice in the bottom of the pool that Dad called a homemade rink. “Think of all that money we could save if you just skated here instead of at the rink, kiddo,” he said to me. “Think of it!” I'm thinking of it now. I wonder how much he stole to pay Coach Martine to teach me how to do a camel spin, which I hated doing. The spins made me dizzy. I didn't ever want to tell anyone that though. It sounded ungrateful. Skating lessons were expensive. “Future Olympian,” Dad called me, on those early mornings when we drove to my extra lessons, my breath steaming up the window enough that I could make smileys with my finger on the glass.

“Mommy,” I say, like someone asleep, murmuring out of a dream. I don't call her Mommy. Not ever. Well, maybe when I'm sick. “Mom.”

She raises her voice just a bit. “TALK TO ME, HONEY!” she says. “ARE YOU OK?”

“OF COURSE NOT!” is what I want to say, full blast, blowing her out of the opening and up into the night sky. “NO!” I say, but what comes out of my mouth is more like the sound of something quiet, trying to hide in a shadow under a door. A mouse. The word
mouse
comes from a word in another language, I forget which one, that means “thief.” Mice are thieves. My dad is a mouse. I fish around with my mouth for the straw again and concentrate on drinking air. It blows wind into my mouth, which is a desert, which creates a sandstorm, which makes me wheeze.