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
