The Girl in the Well Is Me Read Online Free PDF Page B

disinfectant, like everything I’ve ever regretted doing, like that time I put salt in Robby’s Coke as a joke but I used too much. I didn’t know that he was going to just gulp it down in one swallow like that. Who does that? Anyway, he drank it all and had to go to the hospital because something bad happened to his kidneys. I knew I was the worst person in the world when he was loaded into the back of the ambulance and his skin was the color of snow. The smell of the hospital made me gag and he said, “Stop making this about you!” and his eyes were all red from crying and I was so embarrassed and sad for both of us that I pretended to get mad and I ran out to the parking lot and waited by the car for Mom and Dad to finally come out. Robby had to stay the night.
    â€œOh, ooops,” Kandy shrieked. “That’s not hairspray! It’s, um, cleaner stuff. Lysol? Is that for toilets? Ha ha! Sorry!”
    I shrugged, like it didn’t matter. And I guess it didn’t.
    None of that matters now.
    Now
I’m stuck in a well. And if Mom finds out about
this
, I’m pretty sure that she’s going to be so brokenhearted that she’ll collapse. She might not be able to stop crying, not if she starts for real. She’s been holding it in for a while now, come to think of it. She hasn’t cried at all since we moved to Texas. And if
I’m
the one who breaks her down, I will die. I won’t be able to stand it. On the bright side, if I’m dead, I guess she won’t be so disappointed about my hair.
    She’ll just be sad, period.
    Sometimes I feel like Mom has all this stuff in a big bag she has to carry around—everything about Dad and Texas and her two jobs and us—and she has to be brave about it. But just putting one more thing in it will make her drop it, and it could crush her completely, like in a cartoon. She’ll be as flat as a piece of paper, freckled with a sprinkling of blood.
    And it will be my fault.
    But at least I won’t know about it, if I’m dead and all that.

3
    A lone
    I think about crying some more, but I decide not to. There’s no one close enough to hear it, for one thing. If a girl cries in a well and no one hears it, is she really crying? That sounds like a question that Dad’s only friend, our old neighbor Mr. Thacker, would ask and then I’d have to think about the answer for a long time and we’d talk about it over a big plate of fried fish. He said he liked talking to me. He said our philosophies were the same. I didn’t know what he meant, but he was OK. I liked it when he came over. He’d talk and I’d listen and watch the long hairs in his nose move when he got really excited, like cat whiskers. When he started to shout, they got especially wild, brawling in his nostrils. Sometimes he made me do all the talking. I didn’t have nose hair though, so it wasn’t the same. When I got excited, I just waved my hands around more. Once I knocked over the whole plate of that fish. Hayfield was the happiest he’d ever been.
    Mr. Thacker and I already answered, “If a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a noise?” We talked about that one a lot, him shouting and whisker-­waving, me not-­shouting and waving my hands. I could tell he thought I was smart. Sometimes after I talked to Mr. Thacker, I
felt
smart. I felt like even my blood thrumming through my veins was smarter, like he’d cracked open my cells and poured in something extra intelligent. We decided that of course the tree would make noise. Did the person who asked the question ever go into the forest? Forests are full of animals and birds and stuff. Just because there’s no person there to hear something doesn’t mean that
nothing
heard it. Something is always alive in the woods. Humans really do think they are soooooo special, like hearing a tree falling over makes it so. I