Chapter Forty-Four. Ingrid Whitmore
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
INGRID WHITMORE
The high school auditorium is dim except for the spotlight illuminating the glamour of beautiful young contestants.
Ingrid Whitmore stands amid the finalists, pain radiating up her leg.
Her talent portion was a last-minute change of plans, a gymnastics routine she’d previously scrapped after suffering an ankle injury three days prior. Still, she smiles.
Squinting past the lights, she can make out the table of judges, and the first few rows of the audience. Her parents, who sit front and center. The empty chair beside them. Something begins crawling its way through the folds of Ingrid’s brain.
She was meant to do a magic trick tonight, a vanishing act with her sister. One twin disappears from one end of the stage—a bit of theater, a puff of smoke, the ripple of silky fabric—and the other “reappears” on the far side, as if she had teleported.
But Isabelle never showed. And behind Ingrid’s bright eyes, a worm folds and wedges its way through her skull.
Earthworms breathe through their skin, through the cuticle, a thin, moist layer that protects the worm’s body while allowing for gas exchange.
It must be worming its way through her hypothalamus now, or maybe curling itself around her brain stem, because the dark thoughts she’s been trying to keep at bay now pulse through her nervous system, and begin to overtake her.
There is a chill in the air. Ingrid can see her mother clutch at the front edges of her cardigan.
In the wing, she notices a few of the tech theater kids, who designed and painted the grand backdrop behind the contestants.
They pull a blanket tight around their shoulders and watch.
Goose bumps rise on her own bare arms. A cold hand reaches out and grips hers tight, and she can feel the eager energy of her fellow contestants, an electric pulse of anticipation.
But the connection is severed. She feels none of this excitement herself.
Feels only the dark, wriggling thoughts.
Still, she smiles.
Her sister has, in fact, disappeared. And when she finally reappears so many years later, there will be no applause. There will be only worms.