Hey, they can’t all go to college.

She walked into the room like she owned it, and did, at least me anyway. Red hair, a mice smile, and curves like the Blue Ridge Highway. It seems so long ago, not just six months.

It was the freshman college mixer. I don’t know why I was there. I wasn’t a freshman, and I sure as hell wasn’t looking. I had a girlfriend. But Dale had bugged me until I came along. It was one of the things I hated about rooming with Dale. The guy couldn’t go anywhere alone. So It had been a evening of awful music, watery beer, and brain dead conversations. I’d had better conversations with porn bots online. I was trying to think of a way to extract myself when she walked in.

Sherry Dubois had transferred in from New Orleans, Why someone would leave that place for a small liberal arts college in northern Wisconsin was beyond me. I know now, sadly. But I didn’t care. Love had hit me like Ali hit Foreman.

I could lie and say it was instantaneous on her end, but it wasn’t. Not even close. She strung me along until I just about gave up, then surprised me by spending the weekend in my dorm room,doing things I ‘d only seen on the net.

We were inseparable, it seemed. Love that hard and fast can sometimes burn for ages. But that’s only in fairy tales. And I wasn’t a prince, and she wasn’t a princess.

What she was came as a shock when the cops showed up at my door. Sherry wasn’t her real name, and her real name I can’t reveal because of the grand jury. But her daddy ran most of Baton Rouge, and Sherry had decided one day to empty daddy’s safe, and flee fast and hard. She was going to run to Canada or Mexico, but that was thinking like a criminal. Nope, Sherry wanted some fun, and a college would be the last place anyone would look for a Dixie mafia princess.

For a guy from a small town in Minnesota, it was a lot to take in. The cops had found her because they, unlike her dad, had never lost her. At least two of the guys at the freshman mixer had been U.S. Marshall’s. Great things are done with our taxes, I tell you.

The reason they’d revealed themselves was that daddy had put a hit on her. A million for her corpse, two million if you got his money back. The police gave Sherry two hours to pack. She’s gone to do just that, then coming back here. I told her we could start our new lives together.

What Sherry don’t know is that I’m not who I say I am,either. My mom runs half the identity theft rings in the world from a house outside Budapest. She’d sent me here to get an education. Something that’s hard to believe in when your mother sits around all day on furniture literally made of the money she’s robbed off thousands.

I need a nut to start this squirrel on the road to fortune. Maybe she’s figured out I’m a fake. But if she hasn’t, I’ve got the safety off, and this will be the last room she ever enters.