The Broken Hearts' Society of Suite 17C Read online

  Copyright © 2015 by Leigh Ann Kopans

  All Rights Reserved.

  This book is a work of fiction. References to real people, events, establishments, organizations, or locations are intended only to provide a sense of authenticity, and are used fictitiously. All other characters, and all incidents and dialogue, are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real.

  “The world will break your heart ten ways to Sunday, that’s guaranteed. And I can’t begin to explain that, or the craziness inside myself and everybody else. But guess what? Sunday is my favorite day again.”

  ~ The Silver Linings Playbook

  For Jamie and Trisha – my very own Writers’ Broken Hearts’ Society. I can’t imagine making it through one day, let alone all these years, without you.

  And for Lisa, Real Life Arielle’s mom, and all the parents out there just like her, who will never break their children’s hearts because of who their children love. You are making the world a better place, one soul at a time.

  Rion

  Rion Burke’s ex-boyfriend Tate Sullivan was an asshole. A totally gorgeous asshole who could charm the pants off the most raging of lesbians, and who was the best fuck she’d ever had. Rion added “no more hot guys” to her mental notes-to-self list. Apparently, they clouded her judgment way too much.

  It wasn’t the fact that he smoked pot, or even that he sold the stinky shit out of the back of his car, that bothered her. It was the time he’d left five fucking pounds of it in the trunk and then told her the car was okay for her to drive to the store to pick up munchies. On top of that, he’d been too fucking stoned to remember—or care—that there was a police checkpoint on the back road they almost always took on their quest for munchies.

  Rion had only smoked one joint in her life, about five minutes before the stink of it made her want to vomit and she swore her lips would never touch that shit again. Not that this fact mattered when the police officer pulled the Wal-Mart bag full of zippered sandwich bags full of the greenish-brownish curling dried leaves, took in her tattoos, nose piercing, and bleached hair with a sweeping gaze, and decided Rion needed to be in handcuffs, right then and there. Most likely, her trademark glare and the low growly voice that only came out in moments of extreme stress didn’t help her argument that she was a totally sober kid just heading out to pick up Cool Ranch Doritos and microwave pizzas for her friends.

  It wasn’t the look that Mom gave her from across the Indiana minimum security women’s correctional facility metal table that bothered her. Mom’s third DUI in as many months had erased any room she might have had to criticize Rion.

  No, what bothered her was the judge telling her that she was lucky she was only getting a ten thousand dollar fine and losing her federal college funding, plus spending hundreds of hours in community service. That killed her. Hearing the bullshit from her court-appointed lawyer about how lucky she was for an eighteen-year-old offender with such a sizeable stash found on her person didn’t help a bit.

  Ten thousand dollars and a lingering promise that she’d graduate college was all that was left between her and Dad after he died in that wreck two years ago, and Tate Sullivan had ripped that away from her before she even saw it coming.

  Rion should have known shit would just go downhill from there, especially with Mom’s history of alcohol issues. With one parent dead and the other in the slammer, Rion’s last year and a half of high school were pretty well fucked over before they even started.

  Luckily, the staff of the group home where she’d been living turned out to be good for something. At the last minute, Rion’s exit counselor had dug up an unclaimed private scholarship for foster kids going to college to major in fine arts. So Rion had made it to Indiana Northern University, where she hoped to make her love of music into a career and ride out the State’s support for foster kids just a little bit longer.

  She stood outside Harrison, Suite 17C, after a long and snarling battle with the admissions office to convince them that, even though her name sounded like “Ryan,” she was not, in fact, a guy, and did not have to sign up for the selective service to complete her admission. Though the prospect of Army service was fearsome, it had nothing on the group home she’d just escaped from. She’d seen enough of how disgusting guys’ personal hygiene could be after living there for the last six months.

  A used duffle bag and a cheap backpack held all the important stuff she had to her name. Every item in her parents’ house, which Rion was seriously considering selling off, held too many painful memories for her to lug to the dorm room. The one and only upside to having just a suitcase, a purse, and a laptop bag to unpack was that she could skip move-in day and all the dumbass roommate introduction bullshit. Just as she’d hoped, Rion arrived to an empty three-person suite. Evidently her roommates were out participating in what looked like a combo meet-market and extracurriculars clusterfuck on the quad.

  Rion wasn’t afraid to snoop around a little to figure out what kind of roommates she’d be dealing with. She crossed over to the space between the doors to the other two bedrooms and nudged each open with a toe and peered inside. One of the rooms was already unpacked with the same methodical, obsessive order as Rion’s social worker’s desk. According to the embroidered name on the fluffy white bathrobe draped across the bed, it belonged to someone annoyingly named Amy. The other room was also taken. It looked like a damn hurricane had blown through it. The only visible signs of humanity were a cork board with endless pictures of the same girl tacked to it, and a brand-new planner splayed open with a color-coded class schedule filled in on the first page.

  So many other things had been chosen for her lately. Why should her bedroom at college be any different?

  A dozen t-shirts, three pairs of jeans, a pair of shower shoes, and a secondhand laptop all sat in their new places within minutes. It didn’t matter that Rion didn’t have a lot of stuff, because she really only needed one thing. This laptop, and her headphones.

  These babies shut out the world Rion hated and took her to her favorite place at the same time. A world where she could shuffle together, speed up, and remix half a dozen digital sound files, each of them pretty good on their own, into something truly transcendent.

  If there was one beautiful thing left in Rion Burke’s fucked up world, it was mixing, combining, twisting, and making new music out of songs that already existed, ones people thought were finished. And she’d be damned if she didn’t make it into a career, one that would take her out of White Trash Woods, Indiana, and give her back a normal, peaceful, trouble-free life.

  Rion settled into the hard plastic desk chair, leaned back, plugged in the headphones, and got so lost in the sounds that she almost didn’t notice her phone ringing three feet away. The thin, bright white letters announcing the caller caught her attention at the last minute, and she lunged for the phone. She’d ignored two of Mom’s last three calls, and missed the other. Between brooding over her lost scholarship and getting her shit together, Rion had given herself a pass. Still, she knew damn well Mom only got one call a week. The guilt had been eating at her, and even though she hated to admit it, it would be pretty bitchy to ignore another one of Mom’s calls.

  “An inmate from the Indiana Department of Correction is trying to reach you, do you accept this call?” The bored recording of a woman’s voice was the one familiar thing in this strange, empty dorm room, and Rion’s heart jumped. “Yes, I accept.” The familiar click and then emptiness of dead air set her on edge for the three seconds it took for the approval to go through.

  “Rion?” Mom’s voice came clear enough over the staticky line.

  “Mom,�
�� she sighed, trying to hide the sense of relief that washed over her at the sound of something, anything, familiar in this stuffy, empty dorm room.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hey. Sorry I missed your last few calls. I was …” Rion’s voice trailed off.

  “Pissed off?”

  Mom’s language had gotten progressively rougher with each month of prison. Even minimum security was a pretty tough place to live, apparently. “Um…for a while, yeah.” Rion had needed her, and she hadn’t been there. She didn’t have to say it.

  Just like everyone else, Mom thought Rion was a tough, hardened bitch who didn’t give a shit about anything, who lacked so much care for her own future that she would do some dumbass thing like sell pot out of the back of her boyfriend’s car. Yeah, Rion had been a pain in the ass for a couple years—since that night the police came to the door with news of his accident. There were only two ways to deal with that much pain—inflict it on others to make yours hurt less, or make yourself tough enough to hold it all in. Rion had tried both. Neither had worked too well.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t change the sentence, or the fact that Mom clearly believed she’d committed the crime. It was only when Rion had screamed her ear off about how she’d never been high, let alone sold pot—which was only a little bit of a lie—that she’d felt the slightest bit bad about it.

  “I know. I expected you to be. I…I’m sorry, Ri. I don’t know what else to say.” Mom’s voice broke the slightest bit before she recovered. Then she cleared her throat, and said softly, “It’s no excuse. But I’m still learning how to be a mom in prison.”

  Too bad she couldn’t be a mom in fucking prison. Rion had lost her mother two months after she’d lost her father. For that, Rion could never really forgive her.

  She was on her own now. Time to fucking put on her big girl panties and deal with it.

  Rion sighed. “What’s up, Mom?” Always better to ignore her pathetic fishing for compliments. Rion knew Mom wanted her to say, “You’ll always be my mom.” She also knew Rion well enough to know that it was never going to happen.

  “Uh…well, I’m calling because I managed to get a hold of Olivia. Wrote her snail mail, I actually didn’t think she’d get it.”

  “Who?”

  “Oh, you remember Olivia. She used to visit all the time, back when …”

  “When, Mom? When I was a baby?” She’d always been bad about this—letting her love of nostalgia interrupt her goddamn common sense. She knew how easy it was to want to rewind to a time when Rion was a little kid, dad was alive, and she was sober, but Mom was the one who’d fucked things up. Not her. She wasn’t going to pull this passive aggressive Indiana guilt bullshit. Not on her first day at school.

  “Well, uh…maybe. Maybe it was. Now that I think about it, I remember her bouncing you on her knee. Doesn’t seem that long ago to me.”

  “So?”

  “So.” Mom cleared her throat again. “She owns a place near campus. ‘The Studio on High?’ And since we’re old friends, and I told her about our, uh…situation, and that you could use a job that’s kinda flexible around your classes …”

  “Wait, wait.” Rion’s stomach flipped. “You got me a job?” This was a part of the whole mess she’d been avoiding just because she didn’t have any idea in hell how she was going to resolve it—how to pay for college now that her federal funding was gone. Her scholarship covered her classes, and an allotment from a state fund from former foster children paid for her board. But there was still the cost of the dorm, books, and everything else she might need. No sane person would hire her with her record. Not with a campus fucking overrun with upperclassmen and upright citizens shoving their applications at every retail manager in a ten mile radius.

  Mom chuckled, and a smile spread across Rion’s face. It had been so long since she’d smiled that it actually felt unnatural. “I suppose I did. Livi has always been an entrepreneur, and I haven’t seen her in ten years, or more maybe. But I knew she had been buying up some businesses near campus, so I thought I’d check in with her. When she mentioned she ran a studio, I jumped on it. She says she’s got a lower level receptionist position for you but she’ll up your pay grade to what she pays her second level artists.”

  Rion’s head spun as she glanced at her headphones and shitty, slow computer. Could it be possible that Mom had done something right for once—gotten her a job in the field she hoped to work in, for life? “An artist at a Studio.” An uncharacteristic gushiness fought to get out of her, but she tamped it down. She couldn’t turn soft with Mom now, not yet.

  “Well, um. Thanks, Mom.”

  “Do you want her number?”

  “Oh. Um. Yeah.” Embarrassment flared in Rion’s cheeks. Sixteen months in a group home should have taught her to fucking focus and keep her head on straight.

  Thank God, the prison’s one minute warning message came on a second later, not leaving too long for Mom to go through her list of awkward goodbyes. The kicker was the way she ended. “I’ll call you next week, okay honey?” Her voice shook.

  Rion sighed. Mom wanted to hear that Rion would pick up when she did. But with all the shit that had gone down in the last month, Rion was having a hard time promising anything to anyone anymore.

  “Take care, Mom,” she mumbled before she hung up.

  Rion called Olivia right away, but hadn’t expected her to tell her to come in for an interview “any time.” Rion was used to having her life run for her at the group home, with specific times for waking up, going to work, and lights out. The freedom stretching in front of her felt huge, and she hadn’t yet decided whether that was in a good or terrifying way. Someone trusted her to manage her own life. Rion wasn’t even sure if she trusted herself.

  She glanced at the clock. Already 4:00 PM. Too early for dinner, and nobody was here. The floor had just been buffed and the cheap area rugs still had vacuum lines in them. The suite had slightly more charm and less of a moldy smell than the waiting room outside juvenile court, but the emptiness of it made something deep inside Rion twist. She hadn’t been really, truly alone for a very long time. She thought that was all she wanted, but now that she was, the emptiness of her surroundings made her feel restless.

  She sighed. Now was as good a time as any to wander around looking for a random music studio somewhere along campus’s main drag.

  New students filled the sidewalks on either side of Francis Street, a meandering road that curved down over a hill and was lined with shop after shop hawking college spirit wear, antiques and knick-knacks, cheap beers, and everything in between. All these kids were new here—had to be. At least one thing about each of them was more than necessary—more polished, more flirty, more desperate, more excited. She’d gritted her teeth and determined to avoid being a stupid freshman, or at least looking like one.

  She rolled her eyes as she watched a girl far too dressed up and painted for textbook shopping giggle at a guy like she’d literally never heard anything funnier. A cluster of three assholes in khaki shorts and boat shoes pushed past her, leaving a noxious cloud of cologne in their wake.

  Finally, near the bottom of the hill, she found it, on the corner of a small street full of older, less flashy shops, and a bar or two. The Studio on High, 420 Francis.

  A black plastic sign, with chunky neon lettering, creaked gently on two hooks above the door. Obviously a nod to the famous Doors album. She nodded appreciatively. Maybe this wouldn’t be so bad after all. A long, red desk with a cutout Pinpoint records logo greeted her, and she breathed out as she stood at the desk. “I’m here to see Olivia?”

  Some guy in a white t-shirt with a mess of dark hair sat behind the desk, sketching with a thin Sharpie on plain white paper. He didn’t look up, but kept sketching manically, the tendons on the back of his hand dancing in time with the flick of his wrist. Rion rolled her eyes, fighting the urge to bark, ‘Hey, are you deaf?’ She cleared her throat and leaned over the desk, casting her shadow over his p
aper.

  Only then did he stop drawing, look up, and show her the most gorgeous fucking ice-blue eyes she’d ever seen.

  “Oh, Jesus fucking Christ,” he stammered, standing up and toppling his chair to the floor at the same time. “I’m so sorry. How long have you been standing there?” At his full height, he stood easily two heads taller than she was. His plain, dark sleeveless shirt and tattoos and stretched earring holes made him look like a rocker, but he didn’t have the skinny-guy body of a typical front man. No. He filled that shirt and, despite her better judgment as far as thinking about any guy’s body, Rion guessed that his ass probably filled the back of his jeans equally well.

  Do. Not. Drool. You desperate horny bitch. She’d become used to berating herself for her stupidity, but now there were new stakes. This job might be her last chance to stay at Indiana Northern. She couldn’t fuck it up.

  “I’m here to see Olivia,” she repeated, tearing her eyes away from his biceps. “There’s a job opening?”

  Something clicked in the guy’s head, and his face relaxed into a friendly smile, showing off a shining lip ring. If Rion believed in God, she would have cursed him for sending a guy that embodied literally everything she found attractive, but who she couldn’t have because he worked in a fucking head shop.

  “Holy shit,” he said. “Please tell me you’re going to be our new receptionist. Me and the rest of the artists are beyond sick of this answering-phones shit.”

  Rion’s eyes flattened into a confused glare.

  “Not that it’s a shitty job or anything. It’s not. It’s a good job for a freshman. Totally.”

  “What makes you think I’m a freshman?”

  “Christ,” he said, jerking his hand back through his hair. “Just that…I mean…I’ve never seen you here and…Christ,” he said again. “You look young, okay? You caught me.”

  Rion grunted a short laugh. “Well, you look old.” He did, but not in a bad way.