Free The Girl in the Well Is Me by Karen Rivers Page A

breath, but I try that, and it hurts really bad all the way down, and then I get the hiccups. It really doesn’t get much better than this—hiccupping, bruised, bleeding, and trapped. Seriously, this is pushing the limits of how life isn’t fair into a whole other thing. I don’t know what I mean by that. My head feels strange.
    Anyway, Lassie was always saving people from wells back when dogs did that sort of thing. If you think about it, it couldn’t happen now because everyone’s dog is on a chain or locked up in a yard. If they run free, then everyone starts a petition about vicious dogs, and the dog is picked up by the dog catcher and accidentally put to sleep in a “shelter,” leaving the family to weep their bitter tears all over their faces. That happened once last year when Mark Fleetman’s dog escaped from his electric fence. The dog was a pit bull named Macy. She was the sweetest, nicest dog ever, but I guess the dog catcher didn’t agree, because one day she was there and the next—gone.
    Of course, now that I’m actually
in
a well, I know that
Lassie
was not a very realistic show, because when they pulled the kid out of the well on
Lassie
, the kid was just dirty, not all scraped up and bloody and croaking like an asthmatic frog who smokes and is allergic to dead goats. TV is another thing that is all a lie. For example, Kandy, Mandy, and Sandy can’t seriously believe that they will one day win one of the following two shows:
The Singer
or
Fashion’s Best Face
. Ha freaking
ha
. That’s just plain dumb! When you take those girls out of Nowheresville, Texas, they’re just ordinary. They are only special here because there aren’t very many people. It’s not hard to climb to the top of a pile of 50 kids if you’ve got the money to buy the best clothes and stuff. It’s a lot harder to scale a heap of, say, a million. Or more.
    The number of people who believe the World’s Biggest Lie is depressingly huge. It’s like, all of them. Everyone believes that you can do anything you want to do. You can be anyone you want to be. Seriously. WRONG. The number of people who have figured it out is one. And that one person is me. But I’m going to take all that knowledge with me when I die in this well. That’s not even ironic, it’s just too bad for me and for all of mankind. One day all those people are going to be mightily disappointed. And by “all those people,” I mean Mandy, Kandy, and Sandy. And secretly, I’m glad.
    I hope they grow up to be sorry.
    I sigh hard and choke on the silver dust and Lassie does not come for me and no one barks in any language and I’m alone in a well and I’m going to die. Well. Well, well, well, I’m in a well.
    Something is crawling on my foot.
    I scream, scream, scream, because of the something that is crawling on my foot. The screaming makes me cough and splutter, silver spraying everywhere around me in a shower of metallic rainbows. A spider! A spider! I can’t see it, but it’s
probably
a spider. Or a crab. How would a crab get into a well? Of course it’s a spider! Not a crab. There aren’t crabs in wells. Or in Texas at all, as far as I can tell. Not this part of it anyway. Maybe at the shore. I’ve never been to a Texan beach, but I guess there’s such a thing, there must be. We live in the dry part where there are snakes withering inside their see-­through skins, and truck-­driving men with mustaches and plaid shirts, and girls with fancy clothes who think it’s OK to trick you into falling down a well, and spiders with pointy crab feet, scuttling. Here, even the sky is thirsty, and now it’s a wanting kind of flat gray, like it’s yearning for blackness to fill it up, to saturate it.
    Texas ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, Grandma would say. You’d think she talked a lot more than she really did. She was