Body Double

NINETEEN

NOBODY LIKES ME, everybody hates me, think I’ll go eat worms.

Worms, worms, worms.

Stop thinking about that!

Mattie closed her eyes and gritted her teeth, but she could not block out the melody of that insipid children’s song. It played again and again in her head, and always it came back to those worms.

Except I won’t be eating them; they’ll be eating me.

Oh, think about something else. Nice things, pretty things. Flowers, dresses. White dresses with chiffon and beads. Her wedding day. Yes, think about that.

She remembered sitting in the bride’s room at St. John’s Methodist Church, staring at herself in the mirror and thinking: Today is the best day of my life. I’m marrying the man I love. She remembered her mother coming into the room to help her with the veil. How her mother had bent close and said, with a relieved sigh: “I never thought I’d see this day.” The day a man would finally marry her daughter.

Now, these seven months later, Mattie thought about her mother’s words and how they had not been particularly kind. But on that day, nothing had dampened her joy. Not the nausea of morning sickness, or her killer high heels, or the fact that Dwayne drank so much champagne on their wedding night that he fell asleep in their hotel bed before she’d even come out of the bathroom. Nothing mattered, except that she was Mrs. Purvis, and her life, her real life, was finally about to begin.

And now it’s going to end here, in this box, unless Dwayne saves me.

He will, won’t he? He does want me back?

Oh, this was worse than thinking about worms eating her. Change of subject, Mattie!

What if he doesn’t want me back? What if he was hoping all along that I’d just go away, so he can be with that woman? What if he’s the one who…

No, not Dwayne. If he wanted her dead, why keep her in a box? Why keep her alive?

She took a deep breath, and her eyes filled with tears. She wanted to live. She’d do anything to live, but she didn’t know how to get herself out of this box. She’d spent hours thinking about how to do it. She had pounded on the walls, kicked again and again against the top. She’d thought about taking apart the flashlight, maybe using its parts to build-what?

A bomb.

She could almost hear Dwayne laughing at her, ridiculing her. Oh right, Mattie, you’re a real MacGyver.

Well, what am I supposed to do?

Worms…

They squirmed back into her thoughts. Into her future, slithering under her skin, devouring her flesh. They were out there waiting in the soil right outside this box, she thought. Waiting for her to die. Then they would crawl in, to feast.

She turned on her side and trembled.

There has to be a way out.