Free The Girl in the Well Is Me by Karen Rivers

room. Our life. I picture it all down there, set up just how it was, maybe with Monopoly out on the table and me and Robby frozen in place, wrestling over who gets to be the racecar. Mom used to think game nights were “healthy.” We were the only kids I knew who actually played board games with their parents once a week. I liked it. I’d never tell anyone that, though. I’d just roll my eyes and pretend it was dumb. It wasn’t dumb. It was the best.
    Back in the day, me and Robby would lie on the carpet and
The Singer
would come on and Mom and Dad got the couch because that’s just how it was: kids on the floor, parents on the furniture. Sometimes I’d put my face so close to the TV that Dad said that I’d go blind and then we’d all laugh and hoot and howl because not one kid ever in history went blind from sitting too close to the TV and besides, it was plasma. We were a family of laughers. We liked to laugh. I’d be interested to meet that kid, if it ever happened that their fancy TV blinded him. Maybe his seeing-­eye dog would look like Lassie.
    Parents are programmed like robots to say “Don’t sit so close!” and “No talking back!” since the old days when maybe you
could
have gone blind from sitting too close to the TV. When you don’t want to eat your disgusting kale-­and-­tofu “scramble,” they automatically say, “There are starving children in Africa!” as if you can just either eat the sludge or get yourself to Africa and start sharing like a kindergartener who is trying to earn a gold star sticker.
    It occurs to me right at this exact moment that it’s possible children could be raised by robots
better
than by actual people because robot dads are unlikely to go to prison for embezzling. And then robot moms would not have to take on more than one job stuffing boxes full of all the future garbage that people who haven’t gone to jail yet for stealing buy on the Internet with a
click-­click
of their mouse, their credit cards burning up from all that spending.
    â€œIt’s difficult,” Mom says, “when you see what people buy. It’s so
much
, that’s all.” I know what she means. But then again, Dad used to do that, too. So it’s hard to fault them, all these faceless strangers with the toys and socks they buy on the Internet, along with diapers and a new watch and the whole series of
My Family of Giants
on DVD.
    Back then, when we used to watch
My Family of Giants
, Mom would say, “Your head makes a better door than a window!” which both Mom and Dad thought was hilarious and they’d fall onto the sofa laughing. And Dad would choke out, “If you’re a window, open the blinds!” and they would literally scream with laughter.
    OK, that only happened once. But I could see it happening again and again, if nothing had changed. Mom and Dad were the kind of people who liked to really get their money’s worth out of a joke. Or, I guess, Dad would steal the money to buy the joke and then the bank would reclaim it.
Ba-­dum cha
.
That
was a joke. I’m trying to find it reassuring that, even though I’m in a well and my entire body hurts and is possibly purple, I can still find humor in things. Laughter is the best medicine! That’s another Grandma-­ism. Sadly, it is not enough medicine to help me actually feel any less scared, or any less hurt.
    I close my eyes for a second, like that might help me forget where I am, but I have to open them again really fast because closing them makes me feel like I’m spinning. Feeling like you are spinning while also being pinned in place in a well is very disconcerting. I curl my tongue and take a breath in through it, like it’s a straw. That’s a yoga thing that Mom once tried to teach me, back when she used to do yoga because she had time for stuff like that. You’re also supposed to swallow your