And I was right. She announced the dissolution of their romance to one of the New York Post’s Page Six editors three days after the “Corey Caught Cheating” issue of Celeb Weekly hit the newsstands.
Then she moved to London, a place where they didn’t care about American football, for about three months until the firestorm died down. From what I gleaned during the fallout, James also severed all ties with his old friend.
It was funny I had been terrified that James would recognize Chloe the few times that she was on shift while he was at the club. There had been an especially bone-chilling time when she served him. But he never figured it out. He had let the affair end his friendship with Corey, but he couldn’t even pick the woman that Corey had slept with out in a crowd.
. . .
I don’t know when my unhealthy love for James turned into an equally unhealthy hate, but the switch is common in stalkers. And relationship sabotage is a classic psycho’s move. I learned that in one of my psych classes my sophomore year of college. Unfortunately, I decided to sabotage James’s relationship with Erica London in April 2003 during my freshman year of college, so that information came a little late for me.
Breaking James’s heart required a lot more effort on my part than my other two triumphs. The humiliation of Tammy and Veronica had been as much luck as anything. But James’s heart didn’t break quite so easy.
For one thing, it took James a while to fall in love. He went from one carefree relationship to the next. The women were always outrageously attractive and usually possessed big, gorgeous smiles and an overabundance of long glossy hair. They seemed perfectly happy to be dating James. And when he ended these relationships—it was always he who ended them—there was never any scandal attached. Just a good-natured “time to move on” effect. In fact, I had seen many pictures of him kissing girls he had dumped on the cheek at later events.
Somehow he always managed to leave the women he dated sad—not mad.
But Erica London changed all of that. She was an up-and-coming actress who had arrived in Los Angeles with a degree from NYU, a flawless, caramel complexion, and a knack for landing cute-girlfriend roles in commercials.
She actually made her living rolling her eyes at the antics of her boyfriend in a Ford commercial or walking hand-in-hand down an urban street with her boyfriend in a “Come to New Orleans” commercial or getting a salad while her boyfriend got a big, juicy burger in a McDonald’s commercial, and so on.
Then she met James Farrell while he was in town for the Farrell Cosmetics launch. His inheritance had been sold to Gusteau, and for once his life wasn’t going exactly as had been planned. Maybe he was feeling vulnerable, but after six months of dating, he decided that he was ready to spend his life with someone, and that someone was Erica. Then two months before their June wedding she landed a role as the cute girlfriend of the school’s star jock in a hot high school drama.
Basically, her future was so bright she had to wear Dolce and Gabbana shades.
I wouldn’t say I was jealous of Erica. At that point, James was more like a distant concept than a person I could ever fathom meeting, let alone having an actual relationship with.
In fact, I tutted at the news because the only piece of dating advice that Nicky had ever given me before he and I hooked up was this: “Don’t date no actor. Don’t EVER date no actor. If there’s a nuclear war and everybody in America is destroyed except for you and one actor, figure out how to get your ass to Canada. Because even then, you don’t want to be dating no actor.”
It didn’t feel like jealousy to me as I plotted how to destroy James’s relationship with Erica. It was more like I was doing him a favor.
. . .
“Erica who?” Russell said when I called him about her. I could hear the click-clack of his keyboard on the other side of the line. Russell was busier than ever now that he had moved up from reporter to a staff writer position at Celeb Weekly. And if you weren’t A-list, he always continued typing when he was on the phone with you.