Hell Is Other People

by Danielle Bellwood

  BOOKS BY DANIELLE BELLWOOD

  Hell Is Other People

  The Candomble Guard Series

  Book 1: Daring

  Book 2: Rising

  Book 3: Beginning

  SHORT STORIES

  Trapped in Paradise

  Cake Decorating for Beginners

  COMING SOON

  Life in Paradise

  Hell Is Other People

  By

  Danielle Bellwood

  Hell Is Other People Copyright © 2020 by Danielle Bellwood. All Rights Reserved.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in a review.

  Cover designed by Anna Volkin

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  First Edition April 9, 2021

  eBook ISBN: 9781735773759

  Paperback ISBN: 9781735773742

  This book is dedicated to all the introverts who fell in love with an extrovert in spite of ourselves.

  CONTENTS

  PART I: Gillian

  The First Chapter

  The Second Chapter

  The Third Chapter

  The Fourth Chapter

  PART II: Arlo

  One Mississippi

  Remember

  Try Anything

  Now What?

  Part III: Roger Goodspeed

  Act III, Scene 1

  Waking Up Is Hard to Do

  Form 37B

  The First Step

  Part IV: Worse

  Twilight Zone

  The Ultimate Experience

  The Handbook

  Epiphany

  Part V: The Accountant

  The Man Behind the Curtain

  The Bean Counters

  Let’s Make A Deal

  Exit Strategy

  PART VI

  PART I: Gillian

  The First Chapter

  Every day of Gillian’s life felt exactly the same as the one before. At 6:00 AM, she woke up, got dressed, and walked to work at Forever Pharmaceuticals. For the next nine hours, she would enter coded data and generate medical billing statements before walking back home to her apartment. She would then eat her dinner alone at the small table in her dining room/kitchen, take a shower, and go to sleep. Or try to sleep. It was always so painfully cold inside her bedroom. The building superintendent was notoriously bad at fixing things, the HVAC being top of the list. Most nights, she shivered herself to sleep curled up in a tight ball beneath the blankets before finally drifting off into an uneasy slumber. The next morning would start this uninspiring cycle all over again. The only real highlight of her day was the few minutes she spent at the coffee shop on her way to work every morning.

  As Gillian exited her apartment, she dropped a color-coded key ring into her purse and squared her shoulders for the eight-minute walk to her caffeinated waypoint.

  Dark hair pulled back in a severe bun, work dress suit carefully pressed, makeup meticulously applied, Gillian was the poster girl for professionalism. And OCD. And probably anti-social personality disorder, but that one hadn’t been officially diagnosed yet. Clutching the burgundy shoulder bag tightly with one clenched hand, she took extra care to avoid any and all human contact on the sidewalk.

  Java Joe’s Coffee Haus didn’t have good coffee, or even okay coffee, really. It was usually burnt from sitting on the warming pad too long, and consequently hot as a river of lava, but it was the only coffee shop on the way to work. That made it the best. And the worst, but that was beside the point.

  The proprietor, Java Joe, liked to post inspirational messages on the white bulletin board affixed to the shop’s front door. However, he must have an odd sense of humor because the messages were usually something along the lines of ‘Things can always be worse’ or ‘Always look on the bright side of death.’ Today, the two-inch red letters glaring at Gillian from the white board read ‘Today is the first day of the rest of your existence.’ Some funny guy customer took it one step further and crossed out the first two letters of first and changed it to worst.

  ‘Today is the worst day of the rest of your existence.’ Well, that’s a little unnerving, Gillian thought.

  The smoked black glass of the swinging door gave under her confident push as she entered the shop, and the scents and sounds of Java Joe’s saturated her senses.

  The pimply kid behind the counter took her order and Gillian sat at one of the tiny tables, trying unsuccessfully to connect to the free WIFI.

  A minute later, the teen barista plopped her order on the counter and Gillian grabbed the paper cup with its little plastic lid. She twisted the cup in her hand to look at the name printed on the side in black sharpie.

  ‘Jelly Bean’

  Seriously? Well, it could’ve been worse. Last week, he wrote ‘Gilligan.’ Although, to be fair, he was a bit of a professor with that ancient espresso machine that looked like it was hand-assembled from the corpses of a hundred dead espresso machines, AND a drunk guy in a bar once told her that she looked like Mary Ann, so she’d been willing to let that one slide.

  Gillian took a sip of the hot drink and almost burned her lips off. Sputtering, she grabbed a scratchy recycled paper napkin to dab the volcanic liquid dripping down her chin… and onto her white work blouse. Of course.

  Sighing dramatically, she rolled her eyes up to heaven and mumbled a gruff, “Thanks a lot.”

  Coffee clutched in one hand, and a wad of napkins in the other, she lifted her shoulder to slide her purse strap back up as she bumped the door with her hip. The glass door was tinted just enough that she didn’t see the man walking in right as she was walking out. The swinging door thumped back against her hard enough that she wobbled on her high heels and gripped the coffee cup a little too tight. A little too tight translated to: squeezed the hell out of a cup of hot liquid hell fire so hard that the cup basically exploded, lid flying and coffee splashing down in a brown rain all over her, her purse, and her woefully pathetic bundle of napkins that were never going to be able to dab this up.

  Gillian did not cry out in pain. Instead she let out a bellow of garbled obscenities that sounded like the blathering of tongues. The basic translation could be summed up as, “people suck.”

  Choice colorful metaphors aside, she was past the point of eloquent communication as coffee dripped from the tips of her toes, having travelled a circuitous route down her cleavage, along her torso, down both legs, and following gravity’s path to the earth.

  She hadn’t moved. Frozen in place. Ironic, since the coffee must’ve been about 2,000 degrees. Surprising that it didn’t burn a hole through the floor straight down to the earth’s core.

  The door jammer, a mid-thirties man of average height, average looks, and average intelligence took a few seconds to stare before letting out a small, awkward laugh. Not because the scene was especially funny, but because that’s what he did when he was nervous.

  “Oops! My bad,” the man blurted.

  The goofy smile on his face, the I just rolled out of bed hairdo, and the artfully distressed $300 jeans practically yodeled HIPSTER.

  “Let me get that for you,” he said as he grabbed a handful of paper napkins and started blotting hopelessly at her sopping wet jacket.

  Socially awkward AND overly helpful. What a combination.

  Gillian brushed his hands away, the garbled cry dying out as
the coffee cooled to room temperature, leaving her wet and burnt and altogether uncomfortable.

  “Leave it,” she blurted, dropping her now empty coffee cup to the floor where it rolled to a stop at the man’s feet.

  The black sharpied horrifyingly misspelled name pointed up at the ceiling mockingly.

  “Woah, you shouldn’t litter like that,” the hipster said. “It’s not cool…” He glanced at the name written on the white paper cup. “Jelly Bean.”

  Gillian stared at him. Was this dude for real?

  He stuck out the hand not holding a wad of wet napkins and said, “I’m Arlo.”

  Gillian looked from the extended hand to his stupid grin. “Good for you,” she said, shoving past him and out the door.

  Gillian navigated the broken sidewalks and crowds of commuters as the hot, smoky air of Downtown dried out her clothes, fluid logged heels squishing disgustingly with every step she took. She didn’t have time to go home and change. There was an extra skirt and blouse in her locker at work. That’d have to do.

  By the time she arrived at the blocky concrete cube almost completely devoid of windows that could only existentially be considered an office building, she had exactly fifteen minutes to spare. Good thing she always got to work early. She’d need those spare minutes today.

  She squelched into the employee bathroom. Removing her shoes, she wadded up paper towels and stuffed them inside to soak up as much coffee as possible while she stripped out of her blazer and the now dry but crunchy and aromatic coffee tinted work blouse. That all-over stain was never coming out. With a sigh, she dropped the blouse into the trash can. Shimmying out of the dark pencil skirt, she folded it on the edge of the sink with her jacket and dug through her locker in her underwear.

  The door opened and Gillian turned to see the hipster, Arlo, walk in. She stared at him in disbelief as he froze just inside the door to the unisex employee restroom.

  “What…?” she asked, glancing around in confusion at the bizarre coincidence. “What are you doing here?” Her eyes widened in shock as she demanded, “Did you follow me?!”

  “No!” He waved his hands in protest. “I work here! Well, I will work here, I mean,” he said. “Today is my first day.” He couldn’t help the awkward laugh from bubbling out.

  Gillian narrowed her eyes and glared at him until the uncomfortable chuckle died out to a light cough.

  “Excuse me, I just need to…” He pointed at the door to the stall behind her.

  She raised her eyebrows in disbelief. “Really?”

  “Well…”

  “Hold it,” she said.

  Arlo backed slowly out of the room. As the door closed, Gillian took a deep breath and grabbed her purse from the counter. Reaching inside for her lipliner, she cringed at the cold, wet lining that enfolded her hand. Oh god. The patent leather did a fine job of holding in coffee. Quite a selling point. They should have put that in the online description: Patent leather purse. $99.99. Doubles as a goldfish tank.

  Gillian walked briskly into her cubicle, shoes only slightly coffee-logged at this point. Dropping her purse on the floor beside her office chair, she ignored the faint squishing sound as a tiny wave lapped up and over the maroon leather and onto the taupe high traffic carpet.

  “Janet,” her boss’s monotonous voice droned from the doorway to her cubicle.

  She’d worked in the same division for… she didn’t actually remember how many years… a while now, but Roger had never bothered to learn her name.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “You have a trainee.”

  Gillian closed her eyes, squeezing the lids shut, silently praying that it would be some art school student with a nose ring and blue hair or a lumbering ox with slow but careful typing skills. Anything but-

  “Oh, hello again!”

  Arlo.

  Today is the worst day of the rest of your existence.

  The Second Chapter

  Gillian woke up. Got out of bed. Dragged a comb across her head. Made her way outside to have a smoke, and then somebody spoke.

  “Watch it!”

  She jumped out of the way of the infernal bicycle messenger. Goddamnit. That one almost got her! Being mowed down by a twenty-nothing year old on a Schwinn was about the least dignified thing that Gillian could think of, short of dying on the can. Interestingly enough, a lot of famous people throughout history have died in that most unholy of places. The toilet. Elvis Presley being arguably the most notable. The King of Rock and Roll had a heart attack in the impressive salle de bain of his palatial Tennessee mansion. Even the king must bow to the porcelain goddess.

  Gillian flicked her lit cigarette into the gutter. Maybe it was time to quit.

  Every day of Gillian’s life felt exactly the same as the one before. The angry buzz of the alarm on her nightstand would go off at 6:00 AM. At precisely 6:01, she’d slap the off button and force herself to get up even though she felt like she had gotten zero rest. She’d step outside for a quick smoke and try not to get murdered. And then she’d get ready for work. She worked a just above minimum wage entry level job for a medical billing firm that she hated.

  Her boss, Roger Goodspeed, gave a whole new meaning to the word boring. The man was nondescript, monotonous, and clueless. Not the best combination for a team leader but someone higher up had determined that he was the man for the job.

  It took Gillian precisely forty-two minutes to get dressed, apply her makeup, pull her hair up into a tight bun, and march purposefully through the front door of her apartment. Eight minutes later, she grasped the handle of the darkly tinted glass door to Java Joe’s Coffee Haus. The sign on the white board before her read ‘Every day is another opportunity to ruin your life all over again.’

  She blinked at it for a moment before passing through the door to the coffee shop. Joe Jr, the pimply teen son apparently of Java Joe, asked her for her order although it was always the same. A medium latte with a single shot of espresso. Skim milk. Iced. The barista carefully noted the order.

  “Name?”

  “Gillian. G.I.L.L.I.A.N. Gillian.”

  He nodded. “Got it. Just be a sec.”

  She sat on the edge of one of the bar stools jammed around the tiny tables that filled the room. Swinging her foot lightly back and forth in her high heels, she tried to connect to the WIFI. Yeah, that was wishful thinking. Oh, well. No news was good news, she supposed.

  She was watching the counter like a hawk when she saw Jr slip the white paper cup onto the pick-up counter and nod in her direction. Hurrying to grab the cup, she could feel the heat baking the skin of her palm through the paper. Definitely not iced. Twisting her hand at the wrist, she read the name printed on the side in black sharpie.

  ‘Kill him’

  Gillian couldn’t help but laugh at that one. It was almost as if he read her mind.

  She lifted the cup to sip the coffee and almost burned her lips off. The coffee was so hot that it felt like her insides were melting. A thin dribble of hot coffee dripped from her chin to land on her white work blouse.

  She grabbed a wad of recycled brown paper napkins and dabbed hopelessly at the faint brown spot. Well, she could blot it better when she got to work. Lifting her shoulder slightly to hitch her purse strap back onto her shoulder, she bumped the glass door with her hip.

  Just as the door began to swing out, someone shoved it back against her from the outside. Gillian gripped her coffee cup to keep from dropping it and must have gripped a little too firmly, because the little plastic top popped off so hard it flew toward the ceiling. Flaming hot coffee shot up like a brown lava fountain, raining back down on her, sizzling where it struck flesh.

  Gillian didn’t cry out in pain. She was in too much shock for that. Frozen in place like an ice cube as the boiling hot coffee flowed down her chest to her underpants, dripping down both legs to puddle in her heels. Suddenly cooled coffee dripped from her toes to the scratched linoleum planks.

  Gillian was making a sound
like a wounded animal or a horde of angry bees buzzing, if bees knew how to curse in a dozen different languages.

  “Whoops! What a bummer! Sorry about that!” said Arlo.

  He let out an awkward chuckle even more distressing to Gillian than the coffee squishing between her toes. He was laughing?

  “Let me just…” He grabbed a handful of napkins and reached toward her like he intended to blot the Lake Eerie sized coffee stain on the front of her… well the front of her everything.

  “Leave it!” she snapped.

  A wave of something rolled over Gillian at this point. Not a physical, tangible wave. It wasn’t something you could see or touch. But it felt heavy somehow. Oppressive. To Gillian, it felt like when you suddenly remember that you forgot something of vital importance but have no idea what that was. The soggy hairs on her arms stood on end and she shivered slightly even though it was so hot that the cacti were wilting outside.

  The feeling vanished as quickly as it appeared, and Gillian stared angrily at the overly helpful, awkward guy with the messy bedhead and high tops peeking from the cuffs of jeans way too tight.

  She sighed and dropped the now empty coffee cup to the floor where it rolled through the brown puddle to bump against the hipster’s Chucks.

  “Hey, litter bug. You shouldn’t just drop your trash like that…” He glanced at the name printed on the side of the cup. “Kill him… Ummm. What kind of name is that?”

  Her eyebrows rose.

  “I’m Arlo.” He stuck out a hand in her general direction, a wide, innocent smile on his face.

  Gillian shoved past him out the door. She now had ten less minutes to get to work and she still needed to change her clothes. Luckily, she kept a spare skirt and a clean blouse in her locker. She did not, however, keep a spare pair of pumps.