Page 6 of The Perfect Illusion

“If you say so,” Lizzie replied with a knowing smile.

Even though she was being teased, Hannah was happy to see her roommate so playful. Last fall, Eliza “Lizzie” Dempsey was in a bad way and would never have joked around like this. She was being anonymously harassed by someone on the campus of UC Irvine, the school where they were both in their freshman year.

Hannah had eventually determined that Lizzie’s own roommate was responsible for the harassment. The girl left school and, since Hannah wasn’t clicking with her own roommates, she moved in with Lizzie.

In the months since then, Hannah had seen Lizzie slowly lower her defenses and actually begin to participate in campus life. Dark-haired and pale, with a quiet demeanor and a sweet smile, Lizzie was understandably slow to warm up to folks. But this felt like one of the final steps to embracing college life: tweaking Hannah over her get-together later today with fellow psychology major Dallas Henry.

“We’re in the same class,” she insisted, pushing her blonde hair out of her eyes, “and the midterm is next week. Studying over coffee is a time-honored tradition in these circumstances.”

“That’s true,” Eliza agreed. “However not everyone does their studying with muscular dudes with wavy black hair, blue doe eyes, and charm to spare.”

“That’s immaterial,” Hannah maintained, though she noticed as she glanced in her mirror that her own flashing green eyes and flushed cheeks betrayed her claim. “When I told him I might be open to a coffee date, he said I should wait until I was really ready for that.”

“Sounds like he was playing hard to get,” Lizzie noted.

“We’ve agreed that, at least until after midterms, this is a strictly collegial relationship.”

“So you’ve discussed the nature of the relationship changing after midterms,” Lizzie pointed out, acting like some kind of co-ed prosecutor.

“Are you enjoying yourself?” Hannah asked, leaning back on her bed.

“Very much so,” Lizzie replied before seeming to re-think her answer. “As long as you’re sure he’s a good guy. We both know you’ve had some bad luck.”

That was an understatement. It felt like more than bad luck to have a fellow student pretend to need help with what he claimed was a stalker, then try to assault her in a library study room. That had turned out badly for her attacker, but it still wasn’t much fun.

And then there was frat boy Finn Anderton. Initially a suspect when Hannah was searching for Lizzie’s harasser, Finn had turned out to be uninvolved and cute. The two of them hit it off and developed something beyond a flirtation.

But when they worked together to locate a missing pledge in his fraternity, Finn had shown a troubling willingness to put the frat's good name ahead of the well-being of the pledge. He'd apologized profusely in the weeks since, but it still left a bad taste in her mouth.

Since then, he’d exhibited some mildly disturbing behavior. Hannah was pretty sure he was following her around campus. She’d noticed him on more than one occasion when she entered or left a class. Considering that he was a business major and none of his classes were near hers, she found that beyond odd.

There was also his vehement hostility to Dallas. Hannah understood part of it. She’d shut down any romantic potential and he’d likely just gotten jealous when he saw her talking to another guy. But in their recent conversations, he’d actively tried to sabotage Dallas, calling him a sketchy guy but offering no evidence to back it up.

And she was in a position to know. Almost immediately after Dallas had first asked her for help with a class assignment, she’d done some research on him. Since she’d spent an entire summer working at the detective agency of Kat Gentry, her sister’s best friend, Hannah, was well-versed in how to conduct comprehensive background checks.

Considering her recent string of bad luck, she’d done an especially deep dive on Dallas, combing through his social media history, family background, and even accessing his medical records through a backdoor trick that Kat had taught her. The guy had a brief stretch acting out early on in high school, coinciding with the time just after his father died in a car accident where he appeared to have been drunk. The acting out included a few disciplinary issues, specifically a couple of fights with other students and an allegation of once being high on campus, although that was never proven.

But he’d eventually pulled himself together and turned things around. He stuck to the straight and narrow for the back half of high school, and after spending a year at a community college, he’d transferred to UC Irvine for his sophomore year. There were no other red flags.

Of course, that didn’t give someone a clean bill of interpersonal health. Hannah had come across multiple truly evil people that presented as “nice” and “normal” on paper and in conversation. But seeming normal also wasn’t automatically a warning sign that someone was a freak. If she walked around with that mindset, she’d go crazy pretty quick.

Besides, she wasn't without her own red flags. She was the illegitimate daughter of a serial killer. She still regularly dealt with the trauma of being kidnapped once and nearly killed on multiple occasions. Until recently, she had no ability to handle the violent urges that led her to kill a man. That act had been ruled self-defense., but she knew better. If anything, Dallas should be the one running in the other direction.

Part of Hannah wondered if Finn had it in for Dallas because he was "an older man" or a transfer student and he was embarrassed to admit that prejudice out loud. Whatever was going on, it wasn't her concern as long as it didn't escalate. She still believed that Finn was just going through a rough time rather than being some kind of imminent threat. But that wouldn't stop her from keeping her guard up around him.

And she’d do the same thing with Dallas when they met later. Cute, polite, and deferential were appreciated qualities in a guy, but far more crucial was lack of violent intent. So far, Dallas had passed the test on that basic character threshold. But the key element there was “so far.”

She rested her head back on her pillow and shook her head slightly.

“What is it?” Lizzie asked.

Hannah wanted to tell her. She wanted to say “I’m a nineteen year old college student. I shouldn’t have to game out whether every guy I meet is a potential rapist, stalker, kidnapper, or serial killer.”

She’d encountered all of those in the last three years and she was pretty sick of it. But she said nothing about any of that. After what Lizzie had been through, she was still healing and didn’t need to be consoling Hannah. So she smiled as sincerely as she could and offered a sigh.

“I guess I’m just not in the mood for drama these days,” she said, which was true, if incomplete.

“I hate to break it to you, girlfriend,” Lizzie said with a naughty smile, “but you attract drama like a flame attracts moths.”

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