Plastic Hearts & Satellite Stars by N. C. Stephens (romance book recommendations .txt) 📖

CHAPTER ONE

I’m going to be truthful about this, honest for once in my life, I’m not perfect. Real shocker, I know. My life isn’t perfect. I don’t live in a perfect house, or dwell in a perfect neighborhood. I haven’t been raised by perfect parents (well they think they are anyways). I don’t always do the right things. I make mistakes, don’t we all though?

Though I have something that everyone has but don’t know they have; a story. I’m going to tell this story how it actually happened. There aren’t any extravagant words and smooth flowing sentences, that’s not how it happened. There were bumps, there were troubled times, there were fights and heartbreaks, but kisses and laughs. Everything happened for a reason, and I’m thankful everyday that they did. So in every story, there must be a beginning, and this story begins in a therapist waiting room.

Doctor Melvin’s white walled waiting room was particularly cold in morning, as it was every Tuesday morning I was drugged in against my will. I should have been used to it by now, to the cold I mean; I’ve been seeing Doctor Melvin for over a year now and not one day did it ever get above sixty-four degrees in the waiting room at least. Mom always said it was the medicine that made me irritable to the cold. He gave me the medicine anyways; wouldn’t he have the decency to turn up the heat once in a while?

Then I would yell, telling Mom that I didn’t need medicine and how everything was just fine. Quickly things would escalate, Dad would get involved, and that’s when the fighting would start. Medicine or not, his office still had to be colder than the farthest northern tip of Alaska.
I started seeing Doctor Melvin around last year, the day after Labor Day to be precise. My parents decided I needed a psychologist to deal with my “internal feelings” and inner rage towards most of the human race. Since my Dad’s was the Robins in Black & Robin’s Attorneys At Law, my parents were able to find Seattle’s top rating psychiatrists.
After a week, Doctor Melvin categorized me as a severe patient and that I needed to see him every week for the first year of therapy. It’s almost been a year and today, I was told, today I supposed to be my last day since I’ve been improving at an astounding rate, or so they say. Though, I’ve never been able to believe anything anyone says anymore to me nowadays.
So I didn’t like people, was that really a horrible thing? Mom says having absolutely no contact with anyone my age would damage my psyche. What was the big deal? So I don’t like having close friends, or any friends at that matter. I’ve tried the whole “friends” thing in the past and all they’ll do is just disappoint and hurt you. I like to be alone. Alone is where I can be me, and when I’m me, I’m happy, fully and truly happy. Though recently I’ve had to endure the awful truth of life, happiness is intangible.

I sighed as I picked up an outdated edition of Cosmo off of a nearby chair. In the center fold, was a picture of a strikingly beautiful woman, anonymous to me, posing in front of a beach house with a smile stretched across her face. I’ve always wondered if models were as beautiful as they looked in magazines and on billboards, and if they were; were they actual people with real lives outside of being pretty, or just media drones forced to a life of gossip and despair. I don’t know why, I’ve just always been curious to know.

When I was really little, I wanted to be a model and be featured on the cover of all the fashionable magazines (isn’t that every little girls dream?). Or maybe it was a Disney princess, I not entirely sure which would have suited me at the time. I dreamed of being swept off my feet and flown away to a secret place no one knew about. It would be all mine, and mine alone. Inevitably puberty set in and all my hopes and dreams where crushed by immortal pimples, pale white skin, and a tangled thatch of black hair which covered my head like a frizzy mop.

Isn’t life just a wonderful thing?

Slouching in my chair, I stared to flip through the pages of the magazine, briefly skimming over articles and pictures. Most of the topics, vain and vile, included: How to be pretty, why you’re not pretty, ten tips sexy tips for getting dirty, is your boyfriend gay, are you gay, and so on. Is this truly what people my age actually cared about, if whether or not a magazine thinks I’m pretty or not? No wonder girls are so insecure and scared all the time, they have things like this telling them who and what they are. Though could I really judge, look where I was now, in a psychologist’s waiting room.

I tossed the magazine onto the chair next to me and looked at my mom sitting in the chair besides me. She sat perfectly erect in her chair, engrossed in one of her romance novels. I just stared at her smooth crème colored hands as they softly turned the pages of the book with a graceful ease. After a moment of staring, she made eye contact with me and put her hand on my hand which was flopped out onto the arm of the chair.

“It shouldn’t be much longer sweetie,” encouraged my mom with a warm smile. She knew how much a loathed this place and Doctor Melvin, but she says it’s for my own psychological good.

“Can we just go home?” I begged slouching even more in my chair. She took a deep breath and ran her hand through my mess of hair.

“Come on Suzanne, is Doctor Melvin really that bad?” asked Mom with a hint of encouragement in her voice. My first case in point that my parents never listen to a word I say. I, from day one, have complained nonstop about my complete and utter loathe of Doctor Melvin. From his too-old-for-wearing-young-cloths look, his always happy appearance, to the way he looks at me through his wide rimmed glasses and says ‘How does that make you feel?’ It was like he was trying to dig his way into my inner thoughts and uncover some deep secret.

“He’s just okay,” I sighed trying to be nice and control the internal rage that is boiling up inside of me.

I scanned my eyes around the waiting room. The room was a perfect four by four square of white walls and smooth edges. Only a handful of people where still waiting. Two seats down sat an Asian woman reading a magazine, two identical sisters sat across from us typing rapidly on their phones, and a woman with what looked to be her pre-teen step son because of their differing ethnicities in the very corner of the room.

“You still need a ride to the Rec. Center afterwards?” asked Mom, trying to change the conversation on me. Even though I was sixteen, going on seventeen in a few months. I still didn’t have my driver’s license. It could have been for a number of reasons why I’m still the only person in my class who still didn’t have her license. Doctor Melvin said I wasn’t emotionally ready to get behind the wheel of a vehicle just yet. My Dad just bluntly says I’m too immature, and my Mom always sided with my Dad. I would be fifty five years old and still being driven around by my parents.

“Yeah, I need to practice,” I said with a cold smile as a song began to dance around in my head.

“Practice for what?” said Mom with a sarcastic yet serious tone in her voice.

“Seattle Beat Mom” I said leaning over on my side in the chair. She knew exactly what I needed to practice for. Seattle Beat; anyone who was anyone in the performing world around the west coast knew of the legendary vocal contest. The three day long festival would bring together singers from hundreds of miles around to compete. From newbie’s and dreamers, to old pros and wishers, anyone with a good voice and a dream could and would compete. Best of all, the grand prize would be a demo record with Jonathon Records, Seattle’s top recording studio. To be frank, my entire life, my over all existence as a person lived on the singe dream of winning Seattle Beat. A stretch? Maybe, but what’s the point of living if you can never have dreams?

“Should I pick you up at seven o’clock?” asked Mom turning the page of her book.

“No, I think I’ll just walk home,” I said in a quiet tone sinking slowly down into my chair.

Mom quickly closed her book shut, her eyes locked on me, “You’re most defiantly not walking home alone.”

“Why not? I’m sixteen, practically seventeen, and it’s a five minute walk,” I exclaimed raising up in my chair.

Her eyes closed in on me. “Its twenty minutes at least and I don’t want to argue about this, Suzanne. I’m picking you up, end of conversation,” said Mom sternly reopening her book to page number eighty-five, exactly where she left off.

“What are you so scared about? Think I’ll jump off of a bridge or something?” I said bitterly, crossing my arms and turning away from my Mom.

It was like as if everything went silent in the waiting room (even quieter than it already was in the waiting room). It was as if all eyes in the room were plastered right on me and my Mom.

“Suzanne, enough,” said my Mom sternly slamming her book shut against once more, “I refuse to argue about this. I’ll be picking you up at seven o’clock at the Rec. Center and that’s final.”

“I’m not a child anymore, when will you finally realize that?!” I exclaimed, trying not to raise my voice even though I was. I was getting angrier by the second. I wasn’t the innocent little girl my Mom once knew and loved, why couldn’t she understand that?

Before she was able to say anything in return, a voice rang out over the waiting room intercom that was mounted just above the window that looks out towards a serenity garden.

“Suzanne Robins, Doctor Melvin will see you know,” the female secretary said behind her desk over the intercom.

I sprang, grabbing my punk rock style backpack, and quickly walked towards the doors which lead to Doctor Melvin’s office, not giving my Mom a second glance.

***


“Good morning Ms. Robins,” said Doctor Melvin in his happy, up-to-beat tone of voice as I entered into his office. Doctor Melvin had to be about five times my age, but he dressed like he was twenty still. He wore a tie-died polo that read ‘PEACE’ on the front. He had a ghetto and a receding hairline and pale white skin that matched the walls of his office. The office was almost as bare and symmetrical as his waiting room, except he had one painting