Gallows, Melissa Brown [read novels website .TXT] 📗

"You're my number one broken record."

The Pilot is sipping something lime green like the blood of an extraterrestrial out of a plastic cup with his goggles nearly slipping down his forehead to cover his eyes. His gut hangs below his belt and his hands are covered in the scars of worlds before him. He claims to have seen Rome and Paris before the word fell to hell and so on and so forth and shit I swear is all a lie. I can see the earth on his back, oceans of sweat slipping down his fat cheeks.

"No, no, no. It's all you ever say. You can't trade the truth no matter how hard you try, Riley."

My spine feels like jelly, forehead pressed against the doorway. I want to leave. I always want to leave. Through the looking glass, down the rabbit hole with me, because any alternative fantasy can't be any more fucked up than my reality.

The Pilot's eyes are nasty slits, laughter coating his throat. He can read my thoughts. He always can. Nothing is safe except for the ones I tell Judith. The Pilot is psychic, he is gross, he is perverted and smelly and so intrusive in the way he sits on my bookcase, refusing to leave. Refusing to let his feet touch the ground, he makes my room into mountains, possibly some kind of Grecian hierarchy because evil is always atop a pedestal in his mind. He is also imaginary.

The Nurse is in my closet, her tattered dress increasingly tighter around her breasts, the curves of her hips. I think she hides from The Pilot and his disgusting catcalling, but unlike him, she'll actually come out and talk to me, let me rest my head against her. She'll give me a comforting hug and tell me that all the bad I'm seeing is nothing more than a smoke screen. I'm watching a movie, she says, and I'm safely in the audience while the mistakes I'm seeing are safely phantom.

I don't believe her.

But God, do I try.

Judith travels with me wherever I go. She rides my back, a mutual parasite. Her grey dress is falling apart and her Mary Janes no longer shine but her eyes are still bright and her blonde hair still glistens.
The Pilot came to me when I was 16 and told me that God didn't exist. It's nothing more than teenage schizophrenia, he tells me. I can't contain all my thoughts so he's doing it for me. Everyone, he tells me, manifests their angst and their philosophical traumas into outside sources. My mind is just too big for this world.

###

Overhead lights are the ultimate form of suffocation. I can see the nooses around the necks of the students in my classes growing tighter as their eyes bug out over bad grades and they text message their fake high school sweethearts. My teacher's noose is so tight I don't understand how she can possibly be talking, but she is. All I hear is static and I want to throw up but all I put in my body these days is lemonade.

She puts my test in front of me. It makes me sick. In my neat, perfect handwriting, 'Riley Wilson', my least favorite two words in the entire world. I hate my name. It's a permanent label that can't be changed. I suppose I could give myself a nickname, like Scooter or Mayhem or Starr, but that would just be another label. A big, red 97 with a sticker next to it.

Vile.

I didn't mean to study, but I did so for six disgusting hours anyway. It's like my bones are made of metal and I'm programmed by a battery meant to turn the pages and put this shit in my head. The Nurse assured me it was all for the best, this all meant something. Geometry will help me advance in life, even though all I want to do is make clothes. College is crucial. Love exists. But none of it means anything because it's all just promises.

The Pilot looked so disappointed. I can still feel his hot stare in my spine. When he's not speaking, all he does is stare.

Embarrassed, I turn the paper over, but not before Nicole can sneak up behind me and catch a glimpse of my grade. Her curly red hair tickles my chin and she bends over so far I can see down her shirt. It's too small for her.

"God, I hate you. I got a D," she moans.

"You'll do better next time," I lie. I want to tell her I know what she told Candace and Ethan about me, that she makes up lies about what a slut I am because she feels inferior. I want to grab the noose around her neck and pull it so tight she'll shit her size 22 pants, breaking my bony wrist with her meaty hands so I'll let her breathe. Some best friends we are to each other.

"I wish I could sit behind you so I could cheat off you."

Does she have a single goddamn original thought? She can't even do her own math. But it's always been like this since we were both five years old. She chased me around at recess and pushed me in the dirt so I'd dirty my dresses. Then she'd buy me ice cream as an apology. Faults and apologies are the foundation of our friendship. 15 years later, few things have changed.

"Maybe you should study."

"I don't have time for that!" Nicole gasps, evidently mortified. She likes to pretend she's demanded everywhere at all times but she can't get a date and her 'friends' never invite her anywhere. She punches me in the ribcage and I can feel my blood cells dying. "We should go to the mall this weekend, don't you think?"

"I have a date with Andy." To the mall, most likely, but even so.

"You whore," she snipes, grinning. I can feel the hostility, the jealousy. Not because I'm spending time with Andy, but because I have an Andy.

"Yeah, whatever." I smile up at her. She really could be pretty if she'd lose a hundred pounds or so. I didn't start to hate her until the Pilot came into my life. He's made me hate pretty much everyone I know.

"We're gonna start class soon. You should sit down."

"Love ya," she smiles. Suddenly I am sad.

###

"You're a fast learner."

I am braced against my bookcase, arms folded, staring up at the Pilot.

"You can see the nooses already. Do you know what they mean?"

"Morality." I am like a robot. "Broken individuality. Society strangles us all." I pull my own shirt down, almost exposing my flat chest entirely. I'm afraid to let anything touch my neck these days out of fear I'll suddenly stop breathing.

"God, the government." The Pilot adopts my tone. "Life, love, commitment. Grades and work. All these things we're supposed to have keep us from our real selves."

He holds up a towel.

"Blankets. The more blankets, the tighter the noose."

"Right."

"The rebels like you, like me? We're the Aliens. People don't believe in us. They're afraid of us, afraid of what we know." He grins. "The demons of society. Complete social anarchy."

I tuck my hair behind my ears.

"The people who blindly follow? Those are the junkies. They're hooked on the instant gratification obedience can get them. Soccer moms and teachers. They have no control."

I take a sip of my lemonade.

"The politicians and the religious, the ones who actively follow the rules of something else, the ones who know what they're doing… those are the toy soldiers."

It makes sense. The Aliens, the Junkies, the Toy
Soldiers. Anything related to humanity can be cut into thirds.

The nurse sneaks up behind me. I can feel her breath on my neck. "Stop spreading your hypocritical nonsense." But she's not looking at the pilot.
She's looking at me. "Everyone's unique. You can't label people like that."

"Right."

But the labels that really work, I've found, are the ones that aren't self imposed.

###

I'm increasingly sure that my boyfriend is gay. He likes shopping for clothes more than I do and I am nothing if not a fashion fiend, obsessed with my appearance as much as I am with trying to figure out which way the world turns. Andy in his girl pants with his bleached fringe and his gauges. I think I love him but at the same time I feel so distant from him.

Everyone's convinced we're having sex but a lot of the time I can barely bring myself to kiss him. It's not fair and I know it. It's all in my head- at least, I think it is. I magnify his faults like I do with Nicole's. The noose around his neck is the same color as his ego.

"Do you like this?" He holds up a tasteless hoodie against his skinny frame.

"I have to go to the bathroom."

I am quick on my feet, practically running to the family restroom before I dry heave into the sink. This always happens, every time I come here with him. Every time I see the haze in his eyes over a faint light of the dying hope that someday he'll be able to grab a hold of me.

I swallow water from the faucet, being sure to keep my hair out. When I am down I look in the mirror to fix it, rubbing my lips and swallowing repeatedly. I can still feel sickness in the back of my throat but I have to keep it away.

Mirrors are like alternate worlds. I always figured I'd find my sign within them. I called for Bloody Mary, the Candyman, and no one ever came to show me that there was something different than this. To my great distress, Judith is absent from my shoulders at the moment. All I see is myself. Shiny, neat, dark brown hair straightened to a point, doll bangs that nearly cover my eyes. I am thin, so thin my veins practically stick out. I am skeletal. The Incredible Shrinking Girl.

I don't have anorexia or anything. It's just that solid objects feel like bombs and razors, arsenic cannonballs, so violent and nauseating against my throat. Soda makes my stomach hurt so I drink lemonade. I shake all the time, feel my skin shrinking and my ribs against the fabric of my dresses but at the same time I feel light like a bird with hollow bones, hollow organs.

Regardless, Andy is texting me, telling me to meet him at the food court. He's starved. So am I, but everything here will just put me into a coma. Even so, the Junkie in me grabs me by the noose and drags me to the food court.

"Are you okay?" He doesn't wait for me answer. "What do you want to eat? I want Chinese."

"Just some lemonade."

His brow furrows. "You gotta eat something one day, Riley. You look like those girls on that program we watched about eating disorders." He swallows. "Not that you're not still pretty."

"I'm really not hungry. I just want some lemonade," I insist quietly.

He opens his mouth, an expression