At first, Hayley assumed the wriggling strands growing out of her legs were worms. Annoying, she thought, but fine—worms had ends, which meant this was temporary and they would eventually crawl out and no one at school would see her disgusting legs. Except her gym class’s swimming unit started tomorrow, and the worms were getting longer.
Hayley’s parents chuckled at her predicament, but tried to help. Her mom showed her how to use a razor without nicking her knee. Her dad gave her a machete. The razor stretched and snapped the shadowy worms like rubber bands against her skin. The machete severed them with ease, but as soon as Hayley lifted the blade from her flesh, they returned longer and more wriggly than before.
This is when Hayley began to suspect that these weren’t worms, but the tendrils of something much larger living inside her.
This much larger thing rested in the pouch between Hayley’s hips, incidentally where the bottoms of her two-piece swimsuit already bit into her flesh. It roiled and turned, gnawed and groaned, and yet it could not escape. If that’s what it even wanted. Maybe it was trying to eat her. She honestly wished it would—before school, please, if possible! Yet only its limbs broke free, each tendril coiling and uncoiling around her legs as if attached to a dog’s mottled mouth.
In the locker room the next day, Hayley dressed in a stall while the other girls giggled and felt each other’s velvet-smooth calves. Her new swimsuit was so cute: bubblegum pink with little white bows on the hips. When the other girls called to Hayley, though, her tendrils thrashed in excitement, distracting from the supercute bows. Clearly, the thing inside her wanted her to die of embarrassment. Hayley wrapped a towel around her waist and exited the stall.
The girls descended on her immediately.
“What’re you hiding?”
“Is your swimsuit ugly or something?"
“You can’t wear that in the pool!”
Like vultures upon carrion, they tore Hayley’s towel to shreds. Several gasped as her tendrils unfurled, and one idiot girl even screamed. Maggie—who Hayley once thought had the cutest breathy laugh—brayed like a donkey, the sound raking Hayley’s ears all the way to the drums.
Hayley’s cheeks burned. She didn’t wait for their onslaught of uninspired taunts; she ran.
The slap of her bare feet echoed down the empty halls. Could her day get any worse? Yes, she decided—someone could stumble upon her like this, basically naked with ugly fucking kraken tentacles exploding from her legs. God! She plunged into the courtyard, hoping the overgrown weeds would conceal her while she called her parents to take her home.
“Oh, wow.”
Hayley spun to face a girl leaning against the gasping air conditioner and smoking a cigarette. She wrinkled her nose. Smoking was so gross.
The girl sucked her cigarette while her gaze dragged from Hayley’s legs to her eyes with an intensity that made Hayley blush. What, never seen a girl naked before? seared the tip of Hayley’s tongue.
“Hot,” the girl said as Hayley opened her mouth. “I like the bows, too.”
As the girl spoke, smoky tendrils wriggled from her pierced nose and black lips to caress Hayley’s cheek. Gentle. Soft. Hayley shivered.
Okay, maybe she was wrong about smoking. And tendrils. The thing living inside her purred or growled, like her stomach after smelling something really, really appetizing.
“You think so?”
Hayley held the girl’s hooded gaze as her own tendrils coiled around the girl’s wrist and guided the cigarette to her lips. Strawberry lip gloss moistened the outside. Yum.
The girl licked her own lips, watching. “Yeah.”
As the girls passed the cigarette between them, their tendrils tangled, drawing them closer and closer together, until their mouths touched, and their teeth clacked, and they couldn’t tell where each other and their tendrils and the things living inside them began.