Hmmn... Interesting games the author is playing with my perception of events... intentionally or not, I'm not sure?
One gets the feeling that everything could be exactly as it seems, but it seems several characters aren't being totally honest. (Starting with the suspiciously cheap nice house from the slightly skanky upperclassman—is that just an excuse for allowing this sort of cohabitation? It seems like a bigger Chekhov's gun than that), or more pertinently, the prospective love interest constantly showing brief flashes of emotion (or having reactions) that don't seem to match the facts as we know them.
OR I could just be overthinking it and those are just slightly forced developments leading up to pure romantic fluff! We shall see. It doesn't feel like something likely to have an unhappy ending, at any rate.