Read The Girl in the Well Is Me for Free Online Page A

give up and stay open, the shiny white saucer of my kneecap glowing there for all the world to see.
    I guess that story makes it seem like I’d be mad at Robby for that, but I wasn’t mad. Mom would never have let go, she’d never have had the nerve. And Dad? Well, Dad wasn’t much into teaching kids how to ride bikes, I guess. Dad didn’t seem to want the chance. But Robby did. Robby used to always be there for me, for stuff like that. All the spaces Dad left unfilled, he just stepped into. Dad’s always been leaving spaces unfilled. He tried to fill them with nice presents and junk we didn’t need. Now he’s left too big of a space to even try to fill at all. At least, he doesn’t try. He doesn’t even send e-­mails. I check at the school library and my account, [email protected], just keeps filling up with junk mail and group e-­mails to all the kids who used to take skating classes at the arena uptown. Reading those skating e-­mails makes me miss home like an ache.
    Speaking of aches, my legs are cramping like growing pains but worse. I usually like growing pains, not because I’m a freak, but because I like the
fact
of them, the proof that I’m actually growing, even when it happens for me in the slowest of slow motion and sometimes not at all. We used to have a measuring wall where we wrote the date and made a mark for our heights. Robby’s was an inch away from the last mark each time, but mine got all crammed together, all my measuring dates sharing that same tiny inch. I don’t miss that. It was just a reminder of how I wasn’t any good at growing, no matter how hard I tried, no matter how long I hung upside down hoping gravity would help.
    I try to relax and breathe and not think, which somehow makes me slide farther down and down, as if relaxing shrinks me like Alice in the Alice in Wonderland movie. I scrabble at the walls as much as I can with my arms still stuck against my sides. My fingertips sting. Maybe after this, I won’t have fingerprints. I’ll be smooth all over, like the fresh skin you get under a scab.
    My arms are as useless as seal flippers, which wouldn’t be so useless if I was actually a seal, but I’m not, thank goodness. I mean, think of all those fish I’d have to see in that scenario.
    I slide a little bit more. Then more.
    What if?
I think. What if? What if this is forever? What if this well has no bottom?
    What if I
die
?
    â€œHelp!” I say. I know no one is there.
I’m
the tree in the forest, falling and falling, and I can’t even prove that I’m here. This is Texas, so it’s pretty much been abandoned by the animals even. It’s too hot. So with no one listening, maybe I didn’t make a sound. Maybe I don’t exist, after all.
    I slide a tiny bit more.
    I’m going to die in a well.
    My heart speeds up, squishing blood through its chambers so fast that it might just collapse and burst, like that might fuel me up and out of here. I cry harder, which hurts more and more—my lungs, my skinned knees, my eyes, everywhere.
    I hurt, so I must be here.
    I must exist.
    I should have introduced myself to the
nice
girls. The freaks and weirdos. Mom always said that weirdos were the best people. “Fly your freak flag high,” she’d say. “Find your people.”
    â€œBut
I’m
not a freak,” I’d say.
    And she’d laugh and say, “Sure you are, honey, we all are. Some of us just know that better than others.”
    â€œYou’re wrong,” I’d say. “You’re weird.
You’re
a freak. But me? I’m normal. I’m not
you
.”
    â€œNo,” she’d say. “You’re not me. If you were, you’d know that ‘weird’ is better. ‘Weird’ is the best.”
    â€œDon’t worry,” Robby would say. “Kammie’s the biggest freak of them all.”
    Then I’d