Page 18 of The Perfect Poise

When she eventually confessed her dark desires to both Jessie and Dr. Lemmon, they’d convinced her to admit herself to a facility where she could work on curbing those yearnings. They officially admitted her to deal with “anger management issues,” but the three of them knew why she was really there.

It had worked, at least in one major way. Hannah learned that to keep her demons at bay, she had to do what Jessie did, find a productive outlet for her need to punish the guilty.

She’d found it in some measure by continuing to do for others what she’d done for Lizzie. Word had spread among students that if someone needed help with a problem that they didn’t want to take to the school administration or the campus police, Hannah Dorsey might be able to help.

That was why she was hurrying to the Student Center’s Starbucks right now. She had agreed to meet with Clayton Callum, a sophomore from her Exploratory Data Analysis class. He’d mentioned that he’d heard about what she’d done for Lizzie, and for another student and basketball player named Reggie Calderone who was wrongfully accused of cheating. He was hoping she could help him out too but said he was embarrassed to explain his issue. Intrigued, she agreed to meet him for coffee and see if she could help.

When she walked into the Student Center, it was 10:12. She was three minutes early, but Clayton was already there, sitting at a table in the corner. Hannah caught his eye, waved, then ordered a drink. Once it was in hand, she joined him.

He stood up to greet her and she took him in more closely than she’d done before. Clayton had longish black hair that hung down in his blue eyes. He wore gray cargo pants and a striped rugby shirt that hung off his wiry frame. Hannah, at five foot nine, was about an inch taller than him.

Even though she felt no need to impress the guy, she gave herself a half-glance in the glass window of the place to make sure she was presentable. She was wearing blue jeans and a thick navy sweater to fight off the mid-morning cold. It hid her once-painfully-skinny-but-lately-proudly-athletic build. Her blonde hair was tied back in a loose ponytail and her green eyes, the same shade as her sister’s, were well-rested, something she didn’t expect to last long now that school was back in full swing.

Satisfied that she looked like a credible amateur campus sleuth, she walked over to him and took the open chair.

“Thanks for meeting me,” Clayton said, leaning in as if they were spies rather than students.

“Sure,” she replied. “I’m happy to hear what’s going on, but you should know my workload this quarter is pretty heavy, so I’m not sure I’ll be able to help you out.”

“I understand,” Clayton said. “I appreciate you taking the time.”

“So what’s going on?”

“Okay,” he said, his voice dropping to an unnecessary whisper in the crowded coffeehouse where no one was paying any attention to them, “there’s this girl in two of my classes. We’re both business administration majors. Her name is Dana Douglas. Do you know her?”

“I don’t think so,” Hannah said.

“Okay, anyway, she was in one of my classes last fall too,” he said. “She seemed nice enough, although we didn’t really talk that much. But because of our last names—Callum and Douglas—we were seated next to each other in Principles of Accounting this quarter. She’s been especially chatty since then. It was a little annoying because sometimes I couldn’t hear the professor, but I didn’t think much of it until last Friday.”

“What happened then?”

“A series of things all in a row that I didn’t even notice at first. One thing was that there’s this group project in Intro to Marketing. We were put into groups of three. Dana wasn’t in mine at first. This other girl named Bridget was in it, but she got sick, like so sick with food poisoning that she had to go to the hospital, so Dana took her place in our group. No big deal, right?”

Hannah shrugged. He didn’t seem to be really asking for her opinion. Sure enough, he continued without waiting for a response.

“But then I was returning to my apartment that same day—I live in an on-campus one with three other guys—and I saw her darting down the stairs just as the elevator door opened to my floor. When I got to my door, I found this had been slid under it.”

He handed over an open envelope. Inside was a black and white photo printed out on computer paper. It was of him sitting in a study nook in what looked like the main library on campus, Langson, hunched over his laptop. Typed below the photo in all caps was one word: HOT!!!

“So you think this girl has a crush on you?” Hannah asked, handing back the envelope.

“If I thought it was only that, it wouldn’t be a big deal,” Clayton said. “I’d just politely tell her I’m not interested and move on. But I’m a little worried.”

“Why?” Hannah asked.

"Well, for one thing, I heard from a guy I know that she got fixated on someone else last year. Supposedly, it got so bad that he ended up transferring at the end of the year."

“Hold on,” Hannah said. “This person didn’t go to the administration to complain. He just up and left school?”

“The guy I know said that this other dude decided it wasn’t worth it to go through the hassle. He just wanted to get clear of her.”

“What was this dude’s name?” Hannah asked, realizing that her disbelief was starting to bleed into her tone. She had to rein that in.

“I don’t know,” Clayton said. “It didn’t occur to me to ask, but I can go back to the guy I know and try to find out.”

“That would be great,” Hannah said, more supportively. “Is there anything else that has you concerned?”

“Well, there’s what happened to Bridget. What if that food poisoning thing wasn’t an accident? What if Dana did something to her so that she could be in our group?”

---