The Last Secret You'll Ever Keep by Laurie Stolarz (summer reads txt) 📕

“Yeah, she’s actually pretty cool. We hung out at a party last weekend and your name came up. Who knew, right?”

Who knew? He knew. Because I’d told him. Because I’d cried on his shoulder—for two hours straight—after Hannah had called me a liar and brought up that stuff about my parents.

“I should let you go,” I say once again.

Felix sits up straighter, wearing the T-shirt he bought last fall in Onion Square: the one with the camouflaged unicorn. It’s the only thing I recognize.

“Don’t go yet,” he says. “It’s been too long.”

I’ve been too damaged.

Too much time has passed.

“I really have to go,” I tell him. “I’ve got a bunch of stuff I need to do.”

“At five thirty in the morning?”

I peer over my shoulder at absolutely nothing. “I just wanted to say hello.”

“Well, hello back, and I’m really glad you did. It was good to talk to you, Terra Train.”

“Yeah, you too.”

I shut the phone off and fold into the bed with my old bedroom doorknob pressed against my chest. Seeing how evolved Felix seems just makes everything worse: much more stifling, totally and completely isolating. Why do he, Jessie, and Hannah get to move on and be normal, while I’m stuck here?

Alone.

And crazy.

THEN

21

In the well, using the point of a rock as my crayon, I drew pictures on the walls: murals to feed my brain and keep me distracted. It didn’t matter if the light wasn’t on, I still drew: flowers, faces, abstract designs with diamonds and stripes …

The walls felt smooth beneath my fingertips, the dirt compacted like studio clay, turning my skin orange and brown. Sometimes I made up stories to go with the pictures, flashing me back to the quiet room with Charley, freshman year, and the storyboarding we used to do with markers on whiteboards. I pretended my drawings were like ancient hieroglyphics, weaving tales of princesses being punished for lying or stealing and stuck in a root cellar for days on end. I role-played that I was the princess and that the servants would let me out just as soon as they got the okay from the queen.

One time, so proud of my work, I didn’t want to erase it. And so I lay down on the ground in the center of my creations and closed my eyes, imagining I had long princess hair and an apron-covered dress, hoping the story would continue in my dreams. And continue it did, because later, when I felt something pelt the side of my face, I thought it was one of the servant boys tossing stones into the well to taunt me. It wasn’t until a larger, heavier stone struck my eyelid that I startled awake.

I sat up, shielding my face, peeking out between my fingers, able to see: There were no stones.

The lid was open.

Rain hurled down against the walls of the well, over my mural and over me.

I tilted my head back and opened my mouth wide as the droplets dripped over my dried-apple lips, my sandpaper tongue, and down my desert throat.

More.

More.

More.

I wanted so much more, and so I drew up my sleeves, peeled off my socks, and rolled up the bottoms of my sweats, exposing my bare skin, and suddenly remembering.

The water-well book.

Where was it?

I snatched it from the ground, wiped it with the blanket as dry as I could, and set it on a ledge two feet above the earth to protect it from the rain.

The rain. How long would it last? How high would the well fill? The ground didn’t seem to be absorbing the droplets completely. Instead, they were beading up in places. Was the dirt too dry, too compact? Would I be able to preserve any of the water?

Using the pointed rock as the blade of a shovel, I dug into the ground. My shoulder ached with every drag of the rock, but still I kept going, sculpting a bowl of sorts, about six inches deep and eight inches wide: my makeshift sink, my own personal well. I lined it as best I could with a few of the fallen leaves, the ones that weren’t too brittle. I also made a channel to feed the well, one that sloped down from the wall.

After several moments, rainwater started collecting inside the hole—not a lot, but at least it was something—and I moved to higher ground, a patch that angled upward, and sat back on my heels. My skin had thoroughly pruned. My teeth wouldn’t stop chattering. I rotated my shoulders back in an effort to stretch.

That was when I spotted something about eight feet up, positioned on a ledge. What was it? I stood up to get a better look.

A colorful figure, like a tiny doll. I grabbed a rock and threw it at the figure over and over again, like a carnival game.

Finally, I hit it. Bull’s-eye. The figure toppled from its spot and fell to the ground.

I picked it up. It was the size of my thumb. A squishy, rubber troll-like doll, with a flash of white hair, a long bushy beard, and a scrunched-up face …

Chills ripped up my skin as I made the connection. It was William, the character from the water-well storybook, the minder of the Wishy Water Well. The figure’s eyes were wide and gaping just like in the book. It appeared that someone had painted on the clothes: the green-and-white-striped suit, the same one William wears.

Why was it here?

Had it been there all along, from the start? Wouldn’t I have noticed? Or had someone placed it on the ledge somehow, while the light was out, when the blanket came down?

I squeezed the rubber belly. The eyes bulged even more, bugging out of its face. I rolled it over in my hand; it looked practically new. I gazed upward, desperate to see something, to find some answer. “Hello?” I called.

No one answered.

Nothing happened.

Meanwhile, the rain pelted against a spot on the wall, where the water had washed away a