Page 24 of Make Me Lie (Rich Demons of Darkwood 1)

No, it carried the tang of wet paint. Someone had doused everything so thoroughly, the carpet was wet with paint, too.

A gasp startled me. I turned to find Jenna, wide-eyed. “What happened?”

“Apparently someone dumped paint all over my stuff,” I said, staring at the damage, too stunned to say anything comforting.

“But everything was fine when I went to sleep.” She shivered and wrapped her arms around her chest, her shoulders sloping. The look on her face was lost and horrified. “Someone came into our room while I was sleeping.”

“Well, it's a good thing you were in your bed.” I gestured at her untouched side. “That was how they knew not to mess with any of your stuff. Otherwise, they would’ve had to use twice the paint.”

She stared back at me. “This isn't funny. Someone snuck into our room. What if they'd hurt me?”

“I'm sorry. I didn't mean to suggest it was funny. It's not funny to me at all. It's just that your stuff is all fine. And you're not hurt.”

“But I could have been,” she said. “Do you know how much it creeps me out to think that someone got into our room?”

She stared at me for a second then blew out a long, slow breath.

“I'm sorry,” I said again, because she was obviously mad at me. Even though I was the one that felt like I'd just been hurt. I mean, I was the one who had red paint covering every single possession I owned.

“Don't worry about it.” Her voice was flat, and it made my stomach curdle. I’d just ruined my one-and-only friendship, with a little help from my new stalker. “I'll go get our RA.”

A few minutes later, she was back with our RA, a peppy 22-year-old grad student with Kramer style hair and a perpetual professional smile, although that smile distinctly froze as he took in what had happened to my room.

“This is very upsetting for you girls,” he said. “I don't know who would pull a prank like this. This is so wrong.”

“I don't feel safe here anymore,” Jenna said. “Do you think someone has a key to our room?”

“Maybe you left the door unlocked,” he suggested, although he didn’t sound very confident.

She shook her head, her arms pressing harder and harder into her breasts, as if she was going to shrink herself until she could disappear. “I can't stand it.”

“It's all right,” he said. “We'll figure it out.”

I began to gather some of my things into a laundry basket. Even my dirty clothes had gotten the red paint treatment.

Letters in the general red chaos caught my eye. Someone had paintedkillerin red paint above my bed. I stared at it for a few long seconds.

I turned and realized Jenna was staring at it too. For a moment, our eyes met and her lips parted, as if she had no idea what to say or what to ask me.

Then she fled the room.

“I'll go see if she's okay,” the RA said.

“All right. Great,” I muttered. “Yes. Take care of her.”

There was no way I wanted anyone to take care of me. I couldn't imagine what comfort anyone would give me in this situation anyway. But the whole thing still left me feeling rattled. So much for my second chance here. I needed to make a new plan for the rest of my life. I couldn’t go through a fresh round of plastic surgery when my face was still swollen from the last one. I didn’t want to go full Michael Jackson.

In what seemed like an uncharacteristic fit of optimism, I dragged my laundry basket downstairs and piled everything into a washing machine with an unreasonable amount of Tide. It didn't seem likely, but maybe a miracle would happen. Did girls like me get miracles?

It was only when I had finished feeding quarters into the machine and started to head back through the fluorescent-bright hallways that I noticed the first of the signs.

There were posters hung up everywhere, but at first they just blended in with the decor. There were, after all, tons of signs everywhere. Signs about intramural soccer and outdoors club and study groups and Greek life recruitment. They all just kind of blended together for me because I wasn't much of a joiner.

But the sight of my own face stopped me. My arms were splattered in red paint from my laundry as I reached out and ripped the poster off the wall.

On one side was my old face, Delilah’s face. And so was the text from one of the tabloids that had caught me and photographed me that day. But on the right side of the picture was my student ID photo, all shiny blonde hair and bright smiles.

It was quite the contrast to my other photo where I had my hand up, telling the photographer not to take a picture of me, but my hand was still rising, and he’d gotten a good shot of my whole face. I was scowling at the camera. I looked like I might just kill the cameraman. If I could go back in time, I might undo that moment.

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