Oliver Trask knows Marissa's type. She's the type of girl who doesn't want to admit that she has a problem. He's sure that her boyfriend – he's guessing she has one, and he's usually right about these things – has tried to get her to stop, as well as her friends and family. That is, unless her family is as messed up as many families from Newport Beach are.
But he knows that Marissa's life has been more strenuous than many of theirs. Alcoholism, ODing, divorce of her parents, anorexia, shoplifting… those are just the things he can get from her appearance, things that she's done before and does now. He's sure there's more that she's got so far hidden within her that even he can't speculate what it is.
She's one of those preppy, "innocent" girls who won't admit the reality of things she's done, but when she took painkillers and overdosed, Oliver suspects that Marissa was trying to kill herself. She'll tell anyone that she just wanted to get away, or she just wanted all the pain to go away. That adds into it, but there was that glimmer of hope in Marissa that she wouldn't wake up.
Oliver doesn't know, however, why Marissa took the pills. Family issues, friend issues, relationship issues. It doesn't really matter. The fact is, she did it. And Oliver can relate. He'd attempted suicide a few times.
Pills, sure. Simple. More painless than other forms of suicide.
So when Marissa walks into the waiting room at the office, he smiles. She'll be here more than once. Good. It'll give them some time to get to know each other. He knows how to get to her. Show how much he knows and how intelligent he is, but nothing more. Make her curious. She'll want to know how he knows these things and where his intuition comes from.
She'll become interested. He's the mysterious, handsome stranger. He's not narcissistic, but Oliver knows that he's got boyishly good looks with a certain charm that seems to enthrall girls to the extent of them being completely captivated with him. His boy-next-door looks with the sense of his iconoclastic past had come to Oliver's favor more than a few times in the past.
Although he can sense things about her, Oliver knows how to keep Marissa in the dark enough to where she'll become one of those girls.
And when she goes into the right office through the antechamber's doorway, Oliver doesn't give it too much more thought. As he flips through the random magazine he'd picked up, he knows that he'll get to her.
end