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

actually a quiet person. Maybe that’s the secret: to not say very much, but to make sure everything you do say is quotable later by people who have fallen down old wells.
    It doesn’t get worse than being a Grandma-­quoting well-­bound girl in Texas with a crabby spider on your foot, unless you’re in a well full of water and fish. Fish are worse. That’s comforting, except not really. I try to flick my foot against the wall to knock the spider crab off, but then I can’t tell if it is gone or not, or if it has bitten me or not, or if, after all, it’s just that my foot is asleep due to the circulation having been cut off to my poor old blackened and bleeding legs. But let’s not overlook the terrifying possibilities, OK? Maybe it is a black widow!
    I start to sweat. Sweating is one of the symptoms of black widow bites, so clearly I am not only right, I am also dying. We watched a terrible video about spiders last year at school. It was all about seeping skin and black laughing arachnids. Actually, now that I think about it, sweating might have been a symptom of a different spider bite. I think black widows paralyze you so you can’t breathe.
    Coincidentally, I can’t breathe.
    â€œI don’t want to die!” I say out loud, like the well can hear me and will save me, maybe by spitting me out in a shimmering shower of lights, like dancers bursting out onto a stage during a Rory Devon concert, fireworks included, the fireworks of me.
    The well is an animal that’s holding me in its throat, thinking about swallowing me down all the way. I pat its wall. “Please don’t hurt me,” I say. “I won’t hurt you.” Maybe the well is just misunderstood like sasquatches and monsters always are in books. Or maybe there is no air down here and my brain is just mashing up a bunch of crazy lies and making them seem real and true, like grapes turning to wine under the bare feet of some hairy Greek men. There actually isn’t any air down here. The goats took it all. Goats are greedy and take take take. My dad is a goat. I’m thirsty like a dried-­out snake. Maybe this isn’t an air problem, but a water problem. Who says there is a problem?
    My foot is itchy now but I can’t reach it, and that’s when I realize that my shoe must have fallen off because it’s definitely not on my foot, protecting it from snakes and dead goat zombies and rampaging, well-­dwelling spiders and crabs. Everyone knows that socks are useless as armor. They are soft and flop at the first sign of danger. I can’t even tell if they are still on me, but the shoe is definitely gone. They were new shoes! I used all of the money that I had left in my bank account to buy them. I wore my regular old shoes to school on my first day at Nowheresville Middle School and a boy named Brendan Wilson said that they looked like shoes I had stolen from a bum. Actually, what he said was, “What hobo did you rumble to grab those lame sneaks?” I feel like I need a decoder ring to understand what Brendan Wilson is saying. Luckily, he rarely talks to me.
    â€œThey’re just dirty!” I said.
    â€œHa,” he said. “Gruesome twosome.”
    â€œWhatever that means,” I said, being the new tough-­cool-­version of myself.
    â€œDid your mom steal them from the warehouse?” he said.
    â€œNo,” I said, and punched him in the stomach. He bent in half like grass in the wind and walked away, all bent over. I don’t know why I did that. I don’t know why he didn’t tell. I don’t know why I didn’t think to get Mom to order those stupid shoes from the warehouse’s website. They probably would’ve been half the price.
    I could have even just put the old shoes in the washing machine at the Laundromat. They have one of those big ones that you could put anything in: shoes, blankets, your brother. (I wish.) But I really