Read The Girl in the Well Is Me for Free Online

said that and Mr. Thacker agreed. He said that he wished his students thought about things from the same angles that I thought of them. I said, “You mean from really low down because I’m so small?” And he laughed, which made me feel both funny and smart. In other words, it was the best.
    Mr. Thacker was always coming over to talk, bringing those plates of fried fish. He said fish would make me grow tall and strong. I don’t know what kind of fish it was. Mostly I ate it to be polite. I certainly didn’t grow. The truth is, I don’t care any more for eating fish than looking at them. Mr. Thacker also said his students were a new breed of hippies. Hippies who listen to bad music, he said, and laughed. It was weird because Dad always called Mr. Thacker a hippie and when I asked why, he shrugged and said, “long hair, guitar-­strumming, overthinker.” The new ones, I guess, aren’t like that.
    The man who runs the music store in Nowheresville is a long-­haired, guitar-­strumming overthinker, too. He’s younger than Mr. Thacker. I wonder what Mr. Thacker would say about Dave. He listens to
good
music. He says I have good taste, music-­wise. He says that it doesn’t matter what you listen to, as long as it moves you inside, that it’s not about being cool or doing what everyone else does, it’s about what makes you
feel
. He says that music is poetry that has a tune that you hear with your soul. I guess I like those deep-­thinking hippies, too, who make me feel like more than I am. People like Mr. Thacker and Record Store Dave.
    Anyway, if Mr. Thacker was here, I bet he could deeply think of a way to get me out of this well.
    I think Mr. Thacker is right about most things, but wrong about this one thing we talked about once, which was whether or not all people see colors the same way. He said no, or at least that we couldn’t know. I think we can know. I mean, we all know that a carrot is orange. The weird thing is that when you ask someone that question, if all people see colors the same way, then you say, “Think of orange, for example,” almost everyone thinks of a carrot. Like carrots are the only orange thing. It’s like they have a universal orangeness that everyone just understands, without thinking about it.
    The air in this well is orange. The air in this well is a carrot. But not a real one, a super dried out one, one that’s shriveled in the bottom of the vegetable drawer for months before anyone notices it down there, looking like a mummy’s old finger.
    It sounds like my breaths are scraping in and out against the walls, like I’m breathing out not carbon dioxide, but broken glass. One time Robby threw a glass of milk at me in the kitchen, the whole glass, and it flew through the air, whistled past my face, and smashed against the wall. We were both super surprised by that even though he had said he was going to throw it and we both know that glass breaks. I helped him pick up all the pieces before Mom and Dad saw. One shard slipped cleanly into the skin on my thumb and made a perfect letter J. I wrapped it in a Band-­Aid. It was only afterward that it started to hurt. The hurt was so deep, it felt like it was aching in my bone. That’s how my lungs feel now, cut like that.
    I’m glad I can’t see my knees in the dark. I know they are skinned. They burn and sting. Skinned knees are always worst when you see them for the first time, with their hanging-­off skin and your very own blood dribbling out of you in red ribbons. When I learned how to ride a bike, it was Robby who showed me how. It was Robby who held the seat while I pedaled furiously. It was Robby who let go and left me flying down the hill, before I ended in a terrible knee-­first crash that left my knees permanently scarred. I wonder if the well wall has scraped that scar right off. I wonder if I’ll get a new scar or if my skin will just