I backed into the elevator, unable to stay, but equally unable to take my eyes off him. He was walking toward me with a look of concern on his face, but then the elevator doors closed. And he was gone.
I slumped against the elevator’s back wall and covered my poor, abused heart with my hand. It felt like a bomb had gone off inside my chest.
“What the fuck?” I asked the empty elevator. “What the fuck?”
. . .
I have no idea how I got back to the club. I don’t remember driving. I don’t remember rehearsing with the band. It was all pretty much a daze, until Nicky came up to me and said we needed to switch Friday morning’s rehearsal to Saturday morning.
A film was coming to shoot in the club, which Nicky encouraged over all else because not only did he get the rental fee from the production company for using the place, but free publicity, too. Over the years more than one tourist had wandered in, asking, “Is this the place from . . .”
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me get my planner.”
I walked over to my satchel, still thinking about James. What had he been doing there? Did he live in Los Angeles now? It had taken only a few psychology classes in college to gather that I was mentally unstable when it came to James and his sisters. After that I had forced myself to stop scouring magazines and the Internet for mentions of him.
The last I had read, he was living in New York, and he, Veronica, and Tammy Farrell had been relegated to acting as “the faces” of Farrell Hair. It was just Farrell Hair now. Gusteau had kept their family name for brand recognition, but had dropped the “Fine,” which in my opinion was a good call, since it had seemed old-timey even back in the nineties.
So the Farrells no longer owned the company, but they did represent for it. Tall Tammy Farrell, with her girl-next-door looks, was the Farrell Hair spokesperson and the main model for the spin-off makeup line Farrell Cosmetics. I wasn’t quite sure what James and Veronica did, but it seemed to consist of going to a bunch of red carpet events and society parties in order to promote the revitalized brand. James always had a game smile in all the pictures, though I never was sure if he had truly accepted his new position or if he was just acting like he did for the cameras.
I had also never been able to figure out if the Farrell family had been blindsided by Gusteau’s offer, or if Mr. Farrell had seen the writing on the wall as black-owned companies sold out all around him and prepared himself, but not his family, for the sale by seeking out a career in politics.
I had a feeling it was the latter, and that made me feel bad for James, but not so bad that I could feel any less embarrassed about running him down in a bunny suit, of all things.
During the years before college, when I had occasionally allowed myself to dream about running into him again, that is so not how I saw things going down. My face burned hot all over, and I started to get all worked up again just thinking about him standing over me with pity on his face.
Then I realized that I had been rifling through my satchel for a while now, but still hadn’t found my planner. So I focused and searched again. But it wasn’t in my satchel. For the second time that day, my heart dropped into my stomach.
“Is Saturday cool or what?” Nicky asked from across the club.
“Hold on,” I said. This could not be happening. I wrote every appointment down, and was religious about not agreeing to anything before I checked to see what I already had on the books. Taking a cue from Nicky, I scheduled everything, and I mean everything. I even wrote down when I would be washing and deep conditioning my huge Afro every week. I kept my entire life organized in neat handwriting in that appointment book. And because I prided myself on being responsible, I had never misplaced it. Not once. Until now.