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

scared of that truth so they claw their way to the top and push women down whenever they can, keeping the top spot for themselves.
    Jerks.
    I wonder where The Girls ran to and who they are getting to come and help. The police? The firemen? The dads are all still at work, I guess, although I don’t know what time it is—my stomach and the fading blue of the sky make me think it’s definitely after four, maybe even five—but it doesn’t matter, because everyone works shifts and no one’s dads ever seem to be home.
    The closest house is Amanda’s. Her mom doesn’t have a job, she’s the only mom who doesn’t. She vacuums all day. Their carpet is purest white—not a grape juice stain in sight—with this soft, long pile, so that where she’s vacuumed, it leaves a pattern like a freshly mown lawn.
    I miss having a lawn. When we had a lawn, we would run through Dad’s automated sprinkler system, jumping on the sprinkler heads and sometimes accidentally breaking them so that the water sprayed out every which way but the right way. Afterwards, when we were shivering from all that water, we’d eat popsicles that were so cold they stuck to our tongues. Only then would we lie in the sun to warm back up, slathered in suntan lotion to block out everything about the sun except the heat, of course. No one wants cancer. I mean, duh. Although here in Hell, no one seems to care like they did at home. Here, a lot of people smoke. Here, wearing sunscreen isn’t really a thing.
    That dumb sprinkler makes me think of Dad driving away in that patrol car, nose pressed to the glass, his breath fogging it up. “Nostalgia is a terrible thing,” Grandma used to say, and I think I finally get what she means. She means that remembering stuff stinks. It’s maybe even the worst. Not as bad as dying in a well, but close.
    The fading sky is now pretty undeniably unblue. It’s definitely the dull gray of past dinnertime and now I’m sure The Girls aren’t coming back. Someone’s mom or dad had to have been home by now. At least one of them. Kandy’s dad is a supervisor, he works normal-­ish hours. He’s always home by dinner, at least.
    I’m crying super softly now because I really don’t want to trigger an asthma attack. I’ve only ever had one, once, and that’s when I found out that I’m allergic to goats. But you never know. Maybe the dead thing down there is a goat. Maybe a whole herd of goats trampled onto the entrance to this well and fell down, one by one, and then one day someone just threw a board over the top because they were tired of losing their goats. Maybe this is going to be the ironic thing, after all, that goats will be what kill me in the end.
    I wish I wasn’t dizzy.
    I wish I could breathe.
    I wish those girls would come back and hurry and hurry and hurry.

5
    A drift
    I’m drifting and fading. I’ve come loose from myself and I’m floating down instead of up, a slow sinking, a darkness falling. I don’t think I’m scared now, but maybe I am. No one is coming. I keep saying it to myself:
No one is coming
. But I can’t hear me. Something is sniffing and scuffling. I look up and see the darkening sky through my round window on the world. The branch moves back and forth, and back and forth.
    Snuffle, scuffle, sniff.
I hope it isn’t a coyote, but even if it is, it can’t get to me in the well, unless maybe it falls down too. I guess the silver lining to that would be that I wouldn’t be alone anymore. Maybe the coyote is silver. Maybe silver coyotes eat goats. I’m almost sure they do. Silver linings are everywhere. Maybe this whole well is lined with silver. Maybe if I shined a light at the walls, they’d shimmer like tinfoil. I’m the potato, wrapped in the foil, about to get tossed on the campfire. Except there’s no fire and I’m so cold and silver is my