“Well,” says a voice from the waiting area, “isn’t that what we like to hear,” and Ben turns in time to see a tall, sharply dressed, auburn-haired woman walk through the door.
FOUR
“Miranda,” Rick says. He sounds very calm and entirely unsurprised when he adds, “I wasn’t expecting you until ten.”
“Richard,” Miranda says coolly, inclining her head. “My last meeting wrapped early, so I thought I’d pop down and see if you were free to move this up.” She turns to Ben and Pete, and smiles. “Which it would appear that you are; wonderful.”
That’s a lot of teeth you’ve got in your mouth, lady, Ben thinks, which is both entirely unhelpful in this moment and, honestly, not the heart and soul of kindness. She’s a perfectly nice-looking woman, to the extent Ben is qualified to judge such things; a little fox-faced, maybe, but it works for her. It’s not her fault there’s something a bit uncanny about her smile, the faint suggestion that perhaps, somehow, she stole it off a shark.
“Andyoumust Ben,” she says, her tone taking on the slightest whiff of a condescending coo as she passes over her business card. She doesn’t, Ben notes, greet Pete; she just nods to him tightly. “I’m Miranda Culter, Formica’s Executive Director of Creative Strategy. That was quite the video the two of you made—the traffic bump we saw wasenormous. Of course, we won’t have a full picture of the year-over-year data until the end of the month, but—you know the traffic to thatkale salad recipe broke the site for about twenty minutes on Saturday, right? A nightmare for our support staff, of course, and obviously, we hate to see the site have any downtime, but if ithasto go down, you know?”
She pauses here, seeming to expect some sort of response from them, but Ben doesnotknow; he has no idea what to say to this. Should he confirm that he is, in fact, Ben? That’s the only part of her statement that he feels capable of replying to with any level of coherence, understanding, or accuracy. Is he supposed to care about the site going down for twenty minutes? Is he supposed to know what the “year-over-year numbers” are? Surely not; he doesn’t even work here, at least not yet. Ben’s almost positive that the technical videos he usually edits don’t have those, and absolutely certain that, if they do, it’s beyond his remit to know about them.
Luckily, Pete says, “Wow, that’s wild; gotta be a first for kale traffic to break anything. A great day for brassica enthusiasts everywhere.”
Ben bites the inside of his lip to keep from smiling; Rick shoots a quick but unmissable glare at Pete, there and gone again. But Miranda doesn’t seem to notice that Pete’s being sarcastic; she just offers another one of those unsettling, toothy smiles, this one slightly more brittle than before, and says, “I think you mean a great day for Formica Media. Listen—did Rick fill you in on the plan?”
“I’m not entirely sure I’ve been filled in on the plan myself,” Rick says, leaning back in his chair and fixing her with a somewhat unpleasant smile of his own. Ben notices, a little belatedly, that he has not invited her to sit, and that there is no available chair. “So I thought I’d better leave that to you. Wouldn’t want to put the cart before the horse, you know, or step on any toes.”
“Kind of you,” Miranda says, her smile seeming to brighten a watt or two. Not appearing bothered by the lack of chair, she leans over to the laptop on Rick’s desk and says, “May I? I didn’t want to lug my laptop all the way down here for this.”
“I see you already are,” Rick says. Ben notes one of his eyelids is twitching slightly. “So…be my guest.”
“Great,” Miranda says. She types for a moment, and then, much as Rick had, rotates the computer so only Pete and Ben can see the screen. Turning to face the two of them, and with her back to Rick, she stands next to the desk with one long finger resting lightly against the computer’s arrow key, as though she’d never thought of wanting a chair, and says, “All right, gentlemen. This is the presentation I gave to the folks upstairs, but I’ll try to dumb it down a little for you. Let’s go through this point by point.”
The slideshow that follows is…dizzying. So many numbers; so many charts; so much unacceptably hideous graphic design. Miranda flips through it so quickly Ben can hardly take in one slide before she’s moving to the next, babbling in jargon that doesn’t ever seem to relate to anything that’s on the screen. Ben’s absorbing roughly every third word, so his experience isn’t a presentation so much as one of those weird, half-awake dreams he used to have as a teenager when he’d fall asleep with the television on. Miranda might as well be speaking another language, or be, if Ben’s teenage dreams are going to serve as a reference point, a large and vaguely alarming pineapple singing odd snippets of theFresh Prince of Bel-Airtheme song.
But there is, at least, a production calendar; Ben can read one of those. And Miranda, thankfully, is kind enough to leave it on the screen for a whole forty-five seconds, so Ben has time to process…well, most of it, anyway. It looks like, as Rick said, they’ll be doing nine videos, on some sort of staggered schedule that involves a step ominously labeleds&p. Pete appears to havetwo days to shoot most of the videos, and Ben three to edit them; S&P, on the other hand, is slotted to take a wildly vacillating amount of time, sometimes as little as a few days, sometimes as long as a week or two. It’s honestly an incomprehensible timeline, and certainly doesn’t give much insight into what the process is meant to be; Ben is reasonably sure Formica doesn’t intend to salt and pepper the edited file before posting it, which is honestly his best guess.
Whatever it means, it looks like the videos will go live following the mysterious S&P. A handful of the prospective episodes are marked with intended themes—Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas—but others are blocked out with a list of SEO keywords, like “best ravioli sauce” or “fall recipes.” That’s clear enough, and Ben can certainly make three days work, even for Pete’s…less than clean footage. After all, he’d done the last one in a single, unhinged night.
The only other slide he understands in the whole presentation is the last one, labeled,In Summary. This slide contains a single short paragraph, which Miranda recites verbatim without looking at the screen: “This engaging, non-traditional web show, to be shared for free on our website as well as across several widely accessible social channels, has the potential to direct significant traffic to theGastronomebrand, as well as to other Formica Media properties. Additionally, it offers us the ability to bring in supplementary revenue streams, such as episode sponsorships and brand engagement deals.”
Still smiling that unsettling smile, Miranda pushes Rick’s laptop closed with one hand, ignoring his annoyed little huff. “Of course,” she says to Pete and Ben, her voice honey smooth, “we’ll be using those additional revenue streams to offset production costs. This is still very much a pilot run—if it goes well, it has the potential to open up a whole new world of options for this…Well, let’s say we’ve all commented on what anadorablyold-fashioned food brand you are.”
“How flattering,” Rick mutters, through what sounds like gritted teeth.
“But if it goespoorly,” Miranda continues, her back still to Rick, “well. Obviously, we’ll all be very sorry about the missed opportunity, but we’re hardly in the business oflosingmoney, are we? Anyway, we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. Pete, of course, you and I have already touched base on your situation, and I can’t imagine you need a refresher?—”
“Nope,” Pete says dryly. His face is very calm, but Ben notices his fingers flexing and releasing against the black denim of his jeans. “We remain crystal clear.”
“Fantastic,” Miranda says; the way she says it suggests, to Ben, that in fact it isn’t fantastic at all. It certainly isn’t fantastic when she turns to Ben and says, “You’re an interesting case. Usually, we’d be bringing in someone a little more…experienced for something like this.”
“Why didn’t you, then?” Again, Pete sounds cool and calm, but his body language tells a different story—or Ben thinks it does, anyway. It occurs to him that he doesn’t know, that this man is still more or less a stranger to him. Still, in spite of that or maybe because of it, it warms Ben a little when he adds, “I doubttheywould have netted us five million views, or whatever it’s at now.”
“Five point seven-five,” Miranda says crisply, and turns the smile on Ben again. “Perhaps Pete’s right, and no one elsecouldhave done it. Certainly, the argument was put forward that it was your unique voice that led to the video’s success; some found that argument convincing. I suppose we’ll find out, won’t we? For now, we’ve talked to your team on twenty-seven, and they’ve agreed to allow you a semi-remote model. So long as you make all your meetings and turn all your projects in ontime, you’re welcome to work wherever you like, whether that’s out of their offices or theGastronomesuites. The time you bill toGastronomewill be at a slightly higher rate, since the work expected is of a different caliber. It’s all in the contract.” She pulls a thin stack of stapled paper out of her attaché and proffers it. “If you wouldn’t mind taking a quick look and giving it a sign; itisa tight schedule for you, after all. You’ve got deliverables due to Standards and Practices quite soon, and theywillneed the full allotted time to review. Dave’s a real stickler for that sort of thing.”
“Iknewit wasn’t salt and pepper,” Ben mutters, very muchnotintentionally, reaching out and grabbing the contract. Pete makes a sound that seems almost like a laugh for a second but turns out to be a cough; odd. Everyone else, thankfully, ignores it entirely.
It occurs to Ben, as he looks down at the contract in his hand, that it’s quite a bit harder to read than he was expecting. He realizes after a mystified second that it’s because his hand is shaking so badly that the paper is actively vibrating; whoops. Too much coffee and too little sleep, not enough to eat—Benpurchaseda bear claw at his favorite coffee shop on the way into work, yes, but he’d been so nervous that it tasted sickeningly sweet. In the end, he’d put it back in its bag for later and, he realizes only now, left it behind on the subway.
Ben’s alwaysdoingthis in critical moments. Other people learned how, probably, to say rational, reasonable things to themselves, and then follow through with them, somewhere in their orderly, well-managed childhoods. Things like: “Hey, self, you have a big meeting tomorrow, why don’t you make sure your laundry is done, and then go to bed at a reasonable hour, and get some sleep instead of lying awake in a torment of nerves! And then, in the morning, you can have a nice normal breakfast and only one coffee. Certainly, you would never go to a career-altering meeting on no breakfast and a coffee at five a.m., and then another at seven a.m., and then another at eight forty-five a.m.! Only a madman would do something like that.” It must be nice, Ben thinks, to be that sort of person. Calming. Restful.
But Ben is the sort of person who grew up in chaos, always one more thing to do, one more problem to solve, one more crazy thing about to happen just when he thought the restaurant was finally closed for the night. So now, as an adult, he seeks chaos like a homing pigeon, flapping past cleaner and safer roosts to the one his heart knows as his own. If he cannot find chaos—if chaos is not, by fate or fortune, thrust upon him—then by God, Ben will create it for himself.
The paper shakes in his hand, reminding him that he is not, actually, free to sit and consider this any further. Quickly, Ben rests it on his lap, smooths it over, tries to read it. He realizes he has no chance of doing this almost immediately; hecanread, of course, but his eyes are skipping over the words, aware that the other three are looking at him. God, had they noticed the paper shaking? Miranda in particular would probably see it as a sign of weakness, andPete—no, Ben doesn’t have time to think about this right now. He’s not going to be able to focus, not like this; anyway, hadn’t Rick said that Ben should go along, for now? Not push back?
Ben makes a decision. It’s not a great decision, certainly, but it’s the only one available to him in the circumstances, and in a real way, he made it last week, when he realized who Rick was. He said it already: He’s going to sign the contract. So, really, what does it matter what it says?
