The Siren by KATHERINE JOHN (general ebook reader .txt) 📕

including three in California. One of the California profiles showed a picture of a smiling Black woman in her thirties, one a plump white woman in her fifties, and the last was a blank icon. Could that be our Felicity? But the page had no friends and didn’t seem to have been used. Thwarted, I checked Instagram, finding again a long list of Felicity Foxes that were not my Felicity Fox. The only possibility was a locked California profile that showed a palm tree, but it had only fifty-three followers. Did anyone her age have only fifty-three followers?

I searched fruitlessly on LinkedIn, Twitter, and Snapchat. I wasn’t a member of anything else, so my social media search stopped there. Google wasn’t helpful either, turning up only advertisements for a Felicity Fox who was apparently a successful hair stylist in Bethesda, Maryland. I even went as far as to pull up the picture of her ID, which Francisco had sent me (issued two months ago, showing an address in Echo Park that turned out to be a charming blue fourplex), to search her driver’s license number. Nothing.

The absence of her presence online was almost more alarming than if I’d found evidence she was…What? What did I think I was going to find, and why was I fixating on this? Sure, I was jarred by the fact that she’d slipped under the radar (after the business with Rory, I was a fiend for a tight budget), but the girl hadn’t done anyone any harm.

I sighed, and feeling like a teenager, turned my attention to Rick. He wasn’t hard to find. The website of the resort told me his last name was Hamilton and led me to all of its social media pages, on which he was featured heavily. He didn’t seem to be on Twitter, and his Facebook page was locked, but his Instagram was open. The first picture was from a few hours before, of the conch he’d just given me resting on a white sand beach. Next were pictures of the fishing trip he’d taken the crew on, followed by him flying a small plane (God, he looked hot flying a plane), a group of guys in a bar, a girl he referred to as his niece graduating from elementary school, more fishing trips, dolphins at sunset…all totally kosher, confirming he was exactly who he said he was. My finger hovered over the “follow” button, but I held back. I didn’t want him to think me too eager. Instead, I clicked on the page of tagged photos.

The top few were from fishing trips, but the next row down was a picture of him with his arm around a pretty light-skinned Black girl with long magenta-tinted hair, her head resting on his shoulder. I clicked on it. The caption was only a red heart, and it was dated six days ago. Shit. I stared at the picture, willing it to disappear, then clicked on her profile. @JeanieBabie24, tagline “keepin’ it hot in the sun” had 1,476 followers, and her feed featured multiple pictures of her flaunting her figure in various skimpy outfits, interspersed with pictures of Rick. One of him shirtless on a dock with a fishing rod (“love that pole”), another a selfie of her kissing his cheek at what appeared to be a party, a third of the two of them smiling with a group of people at the beach (“beach daze r the best daze”), the same picture he had on his page of him flying a plane.

Two and two added up to he obviously had a girlfriend he’d failed to mention. My brain balked; he’d seemed so nice, so not an asshole. Had I misinterpreted his gaze? Had he only wanted to be my friend? But then why not mention the girlfriend? I thought back over our conversation. I’d run my mouth most of the time. So maybe he hadn’t had a chance to mention her. It was true he’d done little more than ask questions—but that was also a classic player move. And it didn’t bode well that he didn’t have any pictures of the girlfriend in his feed. I could just imagine that conversation: Sorry, honey, he’d say. I need to keep it professional for my job. And having a hunch he might be acting shady with the hordes of horny girls on holiday he was likely to meet, she’d tag pictures of him to show up on his profile in case any girl he hit on happened to check his feed before diving in.

Like me.

I cringed. I felt so incredibly stupid for revealing myself to him, for feeling seen by him. Stupider than if I’d slept with him. I’d been so desperate for real human connection, I’d made myself vulnerable, and he’d played me like a fiddle.

No wonder I’d been attracted to him. He was an asshole.

July 22, 2013Industry Standard:Stella’s River of Wellness Runs Dry

Stella’s River of Wellness has been canceled by WTV. The docu-follow series, which centered around actress-turned-spirituality-advocate Stella Rivers’s attempt to open wellness center WelLife, selling crystals, life coaching, psychic readings, guided meditation, juices, and various dietary supplements, aired only seven episodes of a planned twelve-episode season.

The troubled Rivers found spirituality during her latest stint in rehab, after a string of incidents that included physically attacking a paparazzi, throwing pickle jars at a fan, assaulting the ex-wife of her boyfriend, and driving under the influence. From the beginning, production on Stella’s River of Wellness was plagued by protesters supporting the neighborhood taco joint the spiritual center displaced in the hip Eastside Los Angeles community of Silverlake. But the bigger problem was Rivers’s lack of business acumen and the public’s distrust of her as a guru after her checkered past. One of the terms of Rivers’s contract was that she would fund the spiritual center with her own money, and Rivers has filed a suit claiming the producers of the show intentionally sabotaged WelLife for ratings, causing it to go belly-up