The Broken Hearts' Society of Suite 17C Page 3

  Arielle laughed. “I have no clue either.”

  Amy nodded and smiled to herself as she left the Suite first, holding the door for Arielle. Yes. Everything was going to be just fine, after all.

  When Amy had envisioned life at Indiana Northern, she saw a large-scale version of high school. But this was different in so many ways. For one, crosses were everywhere.

  Amy had gone looking for the “religious life” section of the Activities Fair, sure. Dad would definitely be wondering whether she’d settled on a church for weekly services, and sending a flier with a worship schedule home should be enough to appease Mom and Dad, as well as Adam’s parents.

  But she hadn’t expected there to be this many Christian groups. She scanned the crowd. Adam had told her he’d meet her outside Admissions, which was straight ahead, but he was nowhere in sight. Arielle had already run off toward some girl she knew from home, and it made Amy nervous to be alone.

  She craned her neck over the crowd. The quad was an interconnected web of paths, all meeting in the middle where the information booth had been. Arielle had been looking for the section with the sororities, and the guide had sweetly explained the color-coded system. Amy had heard “religious life” and zoned out after that, only half-noticing which direction Arielle had gone. She’d thought for a second about asking for Arielle’s number, so they could meet up later, but once she touched base with Adam she probably wouldn’t be back at her own room for awhile, anyway.

  She pulled out her phone and texted Adam: Where are you?

  She stood, jittery, until the little dots indicating he was typing popped up on her screen, then furrowed her brow when they disappeared. A minute later, nothing.

  Apprehension twisted in her gut, but she quashed it down. Everything was going to be fine. Perfectly fine.

  If he wasn’t standing in front of admissions yet, Adam had to be in the religious life section. He was a pastor’s kid—the pastor’s kid. He went to church every Sunday and Wednesday, not to mention every youth group and outreach event. She walked tentatively down the sidewalk lined with cheap, six-foot folding tables, trying not to be too obvious about looking for him. One girl handed her a glossy handbill promising a “Coffee and Christ” Bible study, a man in a short-sleeved shirt and priest’s collar handed her a small potted plant and a schedule of masses on campus. When she smiled politely at the table for Hillel, which she assumed was Jewish because of the stars, the kid working that table handed her a pen. She grasped for the right words to tell them she was a Christian, but didn’t want to offend anyone, so she wrote her name on the signup sheet the kid pointed out to her and kept walking.

  She scanned the crowd again. Where in the world could he be? She’d made it to the end of the walk with an armful of fliers, the plant, and a few candies and pens, but no boyfriend.

  Finally, a reply came through on her phone. At the activities fair. I’ll find you.

  She blew out a breath. Maybe he’d been recruited to help the football players with their table, or maybe he’d gone to grab some fast food for lunch.

  Way to be a crazy psycho girlfriend, Amy. You know he loves you. What are you worried about?

  She slung her backpack to the ground to drop her armful of stuff in, wondering how much longer she was going to be out here. There were so many people, and she suddenly felt she was making an impression on all of them at once. She should have worn one of the cute new outfits Mom had taken her shopping for—skinny jeans, flats, and a little cardigan. She’d never forget how Mom had held her out at arm’s length, brushed a copper wave back over Amy’s shoulder, and pronounced her ‘perfect.’ She’d needed to hear that this summer, since everything that had happened since prom suggested otherwise.

  Amy sighed again and shook her head. She was in a different world now, and she was determined to put all that nonsense behind her. Except for Adam.

  Then it occurred to her—maybe he’d gone to the cheerleading table looking for her. Of course. She really should get to him.

  Amy pushed from squatting over her bag to standing so quickly that she rammed her head into some poor guy’s crotch.

  “Holy crud!” he grunted, doubling over and backing up at the same time. Amy blushed in mortification, rushing to pick up all his dropped papers.

  “Oh my gosh, I’m so sorry. Here, let me …”

  The guy puffed as he stood up to full height—just one or two inches taller than she was, his head topped with hair almost as orange as hers was. His mouth twisted into a grimace as he adjusted his dark-framed glasses, and he moved toward Amy with a slight, but obvious, hobble.

  Amy’s heartbeat slowed. Thank goodness, he seemed like he’d recover.

  When he finally spoke, it was with the beginnings of a smile. “They told me this year’s Activities Fair would be challenging, but man. They didn’t tell me it’d be a gauntlet. A surprise one, at that.”

  “I’m so, so sorry. I didn’t…I mean, do you think you’ll be okay?”

  He laughed again. “I can’t say for sure. I’ve never taken a direct hit to that…uh…area, but I know a lot of guys who play sports have, and they end up just fine.”

  Of course he would be. Adam had been knocked between the legs more times than she could count, and he was certainly no worse for wear. She almost reassured the poor guy she’d just headed in the crotch by saying just that, but something held her back. Maybe because something else entirely occurred to her.

  “You didn’t swear,” she blurted.

  “Huh?” the guy asked, finally looking sort of normal instead of wincing in pain.

  “When I…you know. Ran into you. You didn’t curse, even though it obviously, um…hurt.”

  “Oh, right. Weird, right? I’ve always been weird. But, you know …” he gestured around to all the crosses and shirts mentioning Jesus in some capacity or another. “I was raised in a super Christian house. My parents would have killed me if they’d heard I’d cursed, and our neighborhood was pretty small. So I kind of trained myself not to.” He chuckled. His eyes were rich brown with flecks of moss-green, like if she could go inside them she’d be standing in a lush forest. A feeling of inexplicable, complete safety bled through her. “I think I adequately expressed my pain regardless, though.”

  “Are you sure you’re okay?” she asked again, her voice helpless and small.

  He opened his mouth to respond, but at that moment, a girl approached and thrust a flier at them. There, in glossy magazine-print glory, was a picture of an eight-week-old fetus with the words “It’s not a choice, it’s a child” in bold black lettering beneath it. “Come to our meeting for support of pre-born rights?” the girl asked in a voice too high and cheerful for the picture she held hundreds of copies of in her hands.

  Amy’s mouth dropped open and she stammered. She tried to make words come out—simple words like “no thanks” or “I’m busy that night”—but came up empty. The brown-eyed guy’s eyes swept over her face and saw something that made him step forward and take the paper, then examine it.

  “Are you a Christian group, or a political group?” His eyes narrowed at the girl.

  “Our table is in the political activism section, but …”

  “You shouldn’t be here. This is for churches, prayer groups, and Bible study groups. Not gross shock and awe campaigns.”

  “Listen, pre-born rights are …”

  “Not for this section,” the guy repeated. “If I see you here again, I’ll report you.”

  The girl snatched back her paper, glared at him, turned on her heel and marched away.

  “You okay?” the guy asked softly.

  She wasn’t okay. “Yeah. Yeah. I’m just …” What was she? Suffering from PTSD? Was she pro-choice now, after everything that had happened to her?

  ”Pro Choice” was among the dirtiest of phrases back home. But she wasn’t home anymore. “Those pictures just gross me out,” she said quietly, trying to maintain eye contact with him but staring at his ear instead.


  “Yeah. I had a class last year about the psychology of political campaigns. We spent a while on those. There are more gross things about that than just the picture.”

  She nodded gratefully. “You know, it’s my first day here. And I was only here looking for—”

  Then the sound of an anguished sob ripped through the air. Nobody else seemed to notice, but her head turned in a flash. Mom had always said that Amy felt everyone else’s suffering ten times more than her own—it was what made her the star of every mission trip her church sent them on. Sure enough, there on the stone steps of one of the old buildings sat a girl with her head bowed and bobbing as she cried. Amy’s heart twisted when she realized she recognized that head, covered in dark brown curls highlighted with streaks of burgundy. Arielle, her new roommate.

  The guy with brown eyes stood closer to her now than he had a few seconds ago, watching her. “That’s my roommate,” she explained, hitching her bag over her shoulder. “I should…Maybe I’ll see you later?” How did you end a conversation with a random, ridiculously nice, non-swearing guy you just head-butted in the private parts?

  “Definitely,” he said. “You’d better go,” he said when Arielle lifted her head to reveal tears running down her cheeks in rivers.

  Amy plowed through the crowd toward her.

  She only looked back once, and when she did, the guy was still watching her with those patient, calm brown eyes.

  Amy didn’t have to ask what was going on. She knew from the second she saw Arielle sitting on those stone steps, lonely and despairing in the middle of the busiest day on campus, that the surprise she’d been so excited about less than an hour ago hadn’t gone as well as she’d hoped.

  Had gone disastrously, by the looks of it.

  Amy fumbled in her purse for the little packet of tissues her mother had taught her to carry everywhere—she wouldn’t want to be seen with smudged makeup or a runny nose. She found three wrinkled ones left in the packet, and handed one to Arielle, who noisily blew her nose, then sat there, no longer crying, but taking deep, shuddering breaths as her red eyes stared blankly out onto the quad.

  She said it almost without hesitation, like it was totally natural. “Let’s get you home.” Something deep and satisfying warmed in her when Arielle nodded and grabbed onto her for support when she stood. “There’s a path behind this building that’ll let us go around the quad instead of through the crowd. Okay?”

  Arielle just nodded and took another shuddering breath.

  The girls walked quickly together, Arielle looking at her feet and Amy sneaking a glance at her every now and then. Arielle moved purposefully in the direction of their dorm, but Amy doubted she would have ever moved if she hadn’t told her to. The look on her face expressed nothing but emptiness.

  Up the elevator and inside their common room, Amy dropped her bag of fliers to the floor, and coaxed Arielle’s messenger bag down from her shoulder. When it was gone, Arielle crossed the room like the weight of it had been the only thing keeping her from moving. She collapsed on the couch and resumed the same pose she’d had on the quad—staring into nothing.

  Her tears had stopped. Amy couldn’t decide whether that meant she was better or worse. Back in June, when Amy had lain on her bed weeping for days, the tears stopping meant that she was so exhausted with grief and confusion that she felt nothing anymore, and had nothing left to put forth, not even her pathetic, snotty tears.

  When Amy was in that situation, the one thing she’d needed was for someone to sit beside her, keeping her company and understanding that she was in the midst of a horrible, endless expanse of sorrow. So that’s what she did.

  Cautiously, she raised her hand and put it on Arielle’s back, moving it back and forth just a bit. With that, Arielle’s whole body convulsed, and the tears started again.

  “Shhhh. Shhhh. It’s okay. I mean, maybe it’s not, but I’m sure it will be. Eventually.”

  “It was the whole reason I came,” Arielle sniffled in a voice just above a whisper, which was somehow even sadder than the twisted sound Amy expected. “So we could be together.”

  “Oh, honey,” Amy crooned, surprised at her own easy affection for this girl she had only just met two hours ago and knew next to nothing about. “It can’t have been that bad. Maybe he was just so surprised that he…didn’t know what to say? What were his exact words?”

  Arielle raised her eyes to Amy’s, and stared at her while she took another shuddering breath. “Yeah. She was surprised. And it really is that bad. She said we can’t be together—that nobody can know.”

  Amy’s stomach sank. After all those sermons Adam’s dad had given about the homosexual agenda, how it was going to destroy families, the very fabric of the country, she had a lesbian roommate.

  Suddenly, when that agenda was sitting beside her and heartbroken, it seemed a whole lot less scary. A whole lot less other and a whole lot more human.

  Amy gave Arielle a pitying look, and reached further around her back to hug her at the shoulder. Arielle’s head fell onto her shoulder, and she sniffled. After a few seconds, the sniffles got wetter, and Arielle asked timidly, “Do you think you could get me another Kleenex?”

  “Yeah. Of course.” Gingerly, she stood up, and Arielle slumped back onto the couch, drawing her knees up to her chest and staring at the front door.

  Mom had packed 20 tiny packets of tissues in with her stuff, of course. The instant she emerged from her room with one in each hand, their common room door swung open, revealing a girl in a leather jacket, despite the heat, short shorts, and combat boots, with the most rage-filled scowl on her face that Amy could imagine. The girl looked from Amy, standing stunned in the doorway, and Arielle, still looking at nothing on the couch, dropped her bag on top of the pile Amy had started, and sighed heavily. Her eyes burned into Amy’s. “What the fuck is wrong with her?”

  Amy flinched, seeing a flash of Mom’s judgmental brow-wrinkling in her memory.

  “Um. It’s just…she saw someone from back home, and it wasn’t …”

  “Breakup. A breakup happened,” Arielle’s voice ground out, low and hopeless.

  “Fuck.” The girl actually looked sorry now. “Um. Whoa. Okay. Well, I’m Rion, and I’m in the other room. So.”

  Amy put on a smile that was hopefully friendly while being respectful of her new destroyed friend on the couch. “Amy,” she introduced herself.

  Rion’s eyes swept over her body, then over to Arielle, then across the room. Amy was being evaluated, and Rion’s cold stare didn’t give a single hint of what her verdict was.

  “Okay. Well I’m gonna…I mean, I should…my stuff is still everywhere …” Rion jerked her head toward the only room with a closed door, and quickly disappeared into it.

  Just then, Amy’s phone buzzed. She flipped it over.

  Adam: Waiting in the lobby of your dorm.

  Butterflies filled Amy’s stomach. It was amazing how Adam could still do that to her. Maybe they’d be one of those couples who still felt their hearts skipping a beat when they looked at each other, even after 50 years of marriage. Everyone deserved to love someone like that.

  “Arielle?” she asked softly, trying to meet the girl’s gaze. “I promised someone I’d meet them for dinner,” she said softly, leaving her words purposely vague. No need to rub it in Arielle’s face that she was in a happy relationship, not now or ever. “Can I bring something back for you? Or…do you want to come with us?”

  “I’m good,” Arielle said in that same strangled whisper of a voice.

  She was definitely not good, but Amy didn’t think she was going to slit her wrists either. Not right now, anyway.

  “Okay. I’ll come back soon, okay? Make sure you’re alright?” And she wasn’t lying. Amy knew the kind of pain that made you stare into nothing, and at the very least, it deserved to be checked up on. Arielle’s nod was barely perceptible. “Alright,” Amy said on her behalf. She quietly picked up her purple backpack embroidered with he
r initials and slunk out the door.

  Amy slumped against the elevator wall, watching the glowing red numbers slowly tick down from 17. She flipped her key card over and over in her hand, letting the plastic rasping against her skin bring her back to the moment at hand. She was about to see Adam again, and she really couldn’t wait.

  She had understood when Adam hadn’t been able to hang out during move-in day. Saturday had been a whirlwind of hauling things in from cars, unpacking, decorating, orientation tours and hall meetings. She thought she’d seen him once in the crowd at one orientation event—he was so big and bulky, it was hard to miss him—but he’d been talking to someone else and she’d only glimpsed his profile before he’d turned and walked the other way. She’d texted him, but sometimes he’d been so busy he hadn’t even been able to reply for hours.

  The elevator dipped down, then stopped, and Amy held her breath as the doors slid open. There he was, waiting at the desk for her. As an offensive lineman, Adam was of course a big guy—six foot four and two hundred ten pounds—but he was a gorgeous, muscled kind of big. Huge in the best way, that made her five-seven frame feel petite and feminine. There was nothing like being engulfed in his hug, as though she could completely disappear in it—be completely hidden from the world. And in just four years, it could be just the two of them. That future began now.

  Adam turned at the ding of the elevator door closing, and Amy practically skipped toward him, beaming. “Hey, you!” Her voice lilted, automatically becoming higher pitched in his presence. She waited for the big grin to spread across his face, like the one she was used to seeing. Those beautiful straight teeth, the dimple that only showed on one side. He was perfect.

  But that smile never came. Instead, it was one with lips pressed together, like the one he gave to the guys on the losing team when they lined up to shake hands, murmuring “good game.” It was the smile that meant, “Sorry you lost. I’m being a good sport by shaking your hand.”

  Amy tried to ignore the sinking feeling in her stomach and turn it into concern for whatever was upsetting him. “What’s wrong, babe?”