Chapter 8
Chapter
Eight
HALLOW
Two hundred and fourteen days.
I think. Time doesn’t really have a pulse in the Soft Room; it’s just a long, grey smear of vinyl and silence.
Aris thinks he’s finally done it. He thinks he’s reached into the clockwork of my brain and snapped the mainspring.
I don’t scream anymore. I don’t speak. I don’t even beg for the light.
I just lie here in the dark and let the madness crawl over my skin like a thousand busy spiders.
He thinks he broke me. Maybe he did. But that’s the thing about being broken, isn’t it? You end up with so many more sharp edges.
I wasn’t born a monster. That’s the lie they tell themselves so they can sleep at night after they’ve spent the day unmaking us.
No little girl wakes up and prays for the cage.
We dream of the white dress, the soft hands, the “forever” that you see in the movies.
We dream of being seen. Truly seen. I just wanted to be loved.
Is that pathetic? To admit that even now, with the smell of my own burnt scalp in my nostrils, there’s a part of me that still aches for a hand that doesn’t want to squeeze the life out of my throat?
But men… men take that want and they turn it into a hook.
I remember my father’s hands first. They weren’t surgical, but they were just as cold.
He’d come home smelling of cheap beer and disappointment, and I’d hide behind the velvet curtains in the living room, trying to be a shadow.
I’d watch the way he looked at my mother—like she was a debt he could never finish paying off.
He didn’t use a scalpel; he used silence.
He used the way he’d walk past her like she was a piece of furniture until he wanted something.
Then, he’d use his weight. I remember the sound of the bedroom door locking and the way my mother’s face looked the next morning—grey, like ash, her eyes looking at a world that wasn’t there.
She taught me how to be a ghost before Aris ever touched me.
Then came the boy with the blue eyes and the varsity jacket.
My first “love.” He told me I was his “everything” while his hands were under my skirt in the back of a rusted-out Chevy.
He didn’t care that I was crying. He didn’t care that it felt like I was being torn in half.
He just kept saying shhh, it’s because I love you.
He used sex like a flag he was planting in a conquered territory.
When he was done, he didn’t hold me. He lit a cigarette and told me not to be a “drama queen.”
That’s when I learned that “love” is just the word men use when they want to keep you still while they take what they want.
And now? Now there’s Aris. The pinnacle.
The master. He’s the one who realised that if you break the body enough, the soul just spills out like wine from a cracked glass.
He uses his “therapy” to strip me down to the nerves, and then he looks at me with those beautiful, obsidian eyes and tells me I’m magnificent.
He’s the worst of them all because he actually believes his own bullshit.
He thinks he’s worshipping me while he’s strapping me down.
He thinks the way he gets off on my seizures is a form of intimacy.
He’s turned my pain into a sacrament, and he wants me to thank him for the privilege of being his sacrifice.
It’s a funny thing, isn’t it? To be so thoroughly used that you start to wonder if there was ever anything there to begin with. Was I ever a person, or was I just a collection of holes for men to fill with their rage and their loneliness?
I lie here in the dark and I can feel the memory of Miller’s boot in my ribs.
I can feel the phantom heat of that first boy’s breath.
I can feel Aris’s silk thread pulling through my lip.
It’s all one long, continuous thread of violence.
They take the girl who wanted to dance and they turn her into a thing that flinches at the light.
They take the girl who wanted to be loved and they teach her that the only thing she’s good for is being a mirror for their own sick desires.
I’m so tired of being a mirror.
I want to be the glass when it shatters. I want to be the jagged shard that finds the soft part of their jugular.
Deep down, under the madness, under the static, there’s a little girl in a tutu who’s still crying.
She’s screaming for someone to just hold her without hurting her.
She’s screaming for a version of the world that doesn’t exist. And I have to be the one to tell her to shut the fuck up.
I have to be the one to tell her that no one is coming.
Because in this world, Hallow, you don’t get a hero. You just get a longer leash.
The madness is warm now. It feels like a blanket.
It whispers to me that it’s okay to be a monster.
It tells me that if I can’t be loved, I can at least be feared.
It tells me that when the walls finally come down—and they will come down—I’m going to show them exactly what happens when you spend two hundred days trying to break a heart that was already made of glass.
I’m not crying anymore. I’m just waiting.
I’m waiting for the moment the “ghost” decides to stop haunting and starts hunting.
I look at the dark and I see them all. A long, ugly line of men standing in the shadows of my mind, waiting for their turn to take a piece.
It’s the greatest trick the world ever played on us—telling us we’re made of sugar and spice and everything nice, just to make us easier to swallow.
They groom us for it. They give us dolls so we can practice being mothers to their mistakes.
They give us stories about princes so we’ll keep our windows open for the wolves.
I remember the first time I realised I wasn’t a person to them.
I was sixteen, standing at a bus stop in the rain, and a man in a car old enough to be my grandfather slowed down.
He didn’t look at my face. He looked at my chest, at my wet shirt, with a hunger so casual it made me want to peel my own skin off.
He offered me a ride, and for a split second, I thought he was being kind. Then I saw his hand on his lap.
That’s the “humanity” Aris talks about. That’s the “connection.”
It’s always a transaction. They give you a compliment, you owe them a smile. They give you a drink, you owe them your body. They give you a “treatment,” and you owe them your fucking soul.
I think about the girl I was before the stitches.
She used to look in the mirror and see a future.
Now I look in the mirror—if they ever let me see one again—and I’ll just see a map of everywhere a man has left his mark.
I’m a ledger of their insecurities. I’m the place where they bury the things they hate about themselves.
Aris thinks he’s special because he uses a vocabulary I have to strain to understand.
But he’s just like the guy at the bus stop.
He’s just like my father. He just has better lighting and a cleaner set of tools.
He doesn’t love me. He loves the way I break.
He loves the way he can look at my shivering, splayed-out body and feel like he’s the centre of the universe.
He’s a vampire in a lab coat, and he’s been drinking me dry for two hundred days.
I wonder what it feels like—to be the person who does the breaking. Does it feel powerful? Does it make the voices in their heads go quiet? Or are they just as scared as we are, so they build these high-walled hellholes and strap us down just to prove they exist?
I used to pray. Can you believe that? I used to lay in my bed as a kid and talk to a God I thought was listening. I asked Him to make me pretty. I asked Him to make me talented. I asked Him to send someone who would see me—the real me—and hold me like I was something fragile and precious.
God must have a sick sense of humour. He sent me Aris. He sent me a man who sees every nerve, every bone, every drop of blood, and decided that “fragile and precious” was just another way of saying “easy to ruin.”
My heart is beating against the leather straps, a dull, rhythmic thud that feels like a shovel hitting dirt. Thump. Thump. Thump. I’m being buried alive in my own skin.
If I ever get out of this room, I don’t want to be pretty. I don’t want to be talented. I don’t want to be loved. Love is the cage. Love is the electrode. Love is the lie that keeps you from biting the throat out of the man who’s holding the leash.
I want to be the thing that keeps them awake at night. I want to be the cold wind that makes them check the locks on their doors. I want to be the realisation, right before the lights go out, that the girl they broke didn’t disappear. She just turned into the shadow they can’t run from.
I’m not a dancer anymore. I’m the floorboards that groan under your feet. I’m the silence that’s too loud. I’m the ghost that doesn’t just haunt—I’m the ghost that remembers exactly where you keep the knives.
I’m crying again. It’s pathetic. It’s the last bit of the “little girl” leaking out of my eyes. But it’s okay. Let her go. She doesn’t belong here. She was never going to survive this world anyway.
The room is cold, but I’m burning. I’m a house fire in a padded cell.
“I just wanted to be loved,” I whisper into the blackness. My voice is a ghost of a ghost, a jagged sliver of sound that cuts my own throat on the way out. “But I guess I’ll settle for being the end of you.”