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

thing to say. Grandma loved saying peachy keen. Her cookies were peachy keen. I need Grandma’s Peachy Keen Cookie Recipe! How else will I bring Grandma back?
    I am bringing
peachy keen
back, lovingly wrapping the words up and dropping them carefully into modern times like the past itself is lobbing gifts into the future, through me.
    The man keeps saying, “KAMMIE! YOU HAVE TO PUT IT IN YOUR MOUTH. YOU HAVE TO BREATHE IT IN.”
    The man is magic! He isn’t a god or an angel! He’s a
magician
. Little white rabbits are pouring out of his hat and landing on my head with the fleas and the silver coyote. This could be an emergency, but the man is right that I am so thirsty. My mouth is sand and dirt, like the rest of this state. I sip from the straw, but there isn’t anything in the straw! It’s a joke. A terrible joke.
    I try to breathe through the straw because the man is getting upset. His frustration is alive, a tiny fish, flicking its fins at me. It feels pleasantly weird to drink from it! Try it if you can. I’m drinking silver air. I thought I didn’t like silver, but maybe I do because it tastes cold and smooth, like something blended with ice and mixed with clouds. Bronze air would taste like gravy. I hang for a while, dangling, the crab still clinging to my foot, drink-­breathing all that metallic wonder and after a few minutes I start to remember that I am stuck in a well. Worse, my dad is gone. He was here! Except he wasn’t here. My dad is in jail, miles away, saving up his salsa. Are they allowed to watch
Mythbusters
in prison?
    The man in the hat is a fireman.
    â€œKEEP BREATHING,” he calls. “YOU’LL FEEL BETTER IN A FEW MINUTES.”
    He’s right, I do feel better. I also feel worse. I can feel the cuts on my arms and legs, the plink-­plonk of bleeding coming from somewhere on my shin. It feels burned and black, like charred toast. The blood is the jam. I’m hungry. I’m thirsty. I’m freezing. My goosebumps have goosebumps, like those drawings of stairs that just go up and up and up forever, they’re like that, goosebumps with no end. I’m vibrating with cold. Record players work because the needle reads the vibration of the grooves on the vinyl disc. That’s a cool fact, told to me by Record Store Dave. The needle is made from a real diamond crystal.
    â€œAre you cold?” I want to ask the goats, but I can’t. My voice is gone in a grain of sand that’s fallen out of my mouth and landed on a beach.
    Up above me, I can hear lots of voices now, more and more, like there is a parade or a party.
    â€œKAMMIE,” someone shouts.
    It’s Robby, so I let the straw fall out of my mouth and scream, “DON’T YOU DARE SPIT!” Nothing comes out. Oh well. What I meant was, “Robby! Help me!”
    Robby and I used to be really good friends. When we were little, we used to do everything together. We made up games. We pretended to be everyone and everything that wasn’t us and sometimes climbed trees. We built a tree house in our old backyard out of scrap lumber that the guy at Home Depot gave to us. The tree house was crooked. If you sat on one side, you practically tipped right out of the tree. The danger is what made it fun, we agreed. Mom and Dad did not agree and forbade us from going into it. Dad was going to “tear it out of there before someone gets killed.” Well, he didn’t do it. He often forgot to bother with following up. Robby and I used it all the time anyway. From up there, we could see into everyone else’s backyards. We could see Tommy Hennessy picking his nose and eating it. We could see April and Tawny Smythe pretending to be runway models wearing bedsheets and wigs from their mom’s hair place. We could see all the people who we were glad not to be. Back then, it was good to be Robby and me, me and Robby, in our safely dangerous house in the tree.
    Then Robby