Remove all but one living room rug (keep the beige one)
Reduce cushions by half
Remove all stick-on kitchen items (backsplash, worktops, and floors)
Re-dress Cara’s bedroom with forthcoming supplies
Remove all string lights and LED lights from the second bedroom
Repaint front door (same colour, please)
Clear rear courtyard of all weeds and moss
I abstained from emailing her back to ask where I was meant to put all the stuff I had to remove, or to remind her that her daughter had purchased most of it. I also didn’t suggest, as much as I wanted to, that they were responsible for improvements; I wasn’t technically on a lease, and I wasn’t paying market rates, so I knew helping out was sort of assumed. Instead I did what I did best: ignored her message until the latest I could possibly leave it so that I could rely on the pressure of a deadline to motivate me.
I threw myself into my design project; Greg had loved the anvil idea I’d sent him, so I was refining it and trying out some different overlays for the text. I’d had to teach myself so much in order to design a logo – Could I use graphic brushes in the app I used without copyright infringement? What was the difference between a logo and a logotype? Not to mention the fact that I hadn’t worked with text design since uni – but I was loving every second. It was the first time I’d ever reallychallengedmyself with my art, at least since I’d finished my degree. When I was designing, or drawing, or even just watching the YouTube videos I was learning from, I felt like the best version of myself. Like I could do anything.Makeanything. It was a feeling I’d only ever got secondhand when playing D&D or reading a book, except now the sense of achievement was mine. Not some other main character’s, and not Captain Morgana’s. Mine.
Unfortunately, things were decidedly less dreamy at my day job. Aaron was so set on “training me up” that I was basically doing all the work myself, on top of my normal job. There was no way I was going to hit my (newly increased) quota for the quarter, so I had to make sure the gala was as incredible as possible to make up the numbers. But Aaron seemed to be doing his best to make that impossible.
For starters, he’d blown the budget right out of the gate. He’d neglected a whole tab on the spreadsheet, which meant we were left unable to pay the design agency we’d contracted for the invites, the place cards, the name badges, and all the signage at the event itself.
I was escaping the problem over my lunch break by going to play with Pablo. It was tipping it down with rain outside, so we had to content ourselves with playing in his pen, which was fine; he just seemed happy to see me, which melted me and put me back together again all at once. I hung my dripping jacket and tote bag up on a hook, then sat down next to him and started playing. Only he seemed to want nothing to do with that, curling up in my lap instead.
“Oh, how cute!” Lauren said as she walked by. “There was a big group of school-age kids here earlier, so they must have tired him out.”
“That’s great,” I said. “Hey, can you hand me my bag?”
Lauren grabbed the tote bag when I pointed to it and handed it to me over the half wall. “Here you go.”
I thanked her, and then took advantage of the quiet moment to open up my tablet and work on the Game On! logo some more.
But then I noticed that Pablo was doing an adorable snarl as he slept, and after I took a video on my phone and sent it to Chloe, I decided to try to draw him. It was another new effort for me; most of what I’d drawn in the past had been more of a cartoon-style fantasy art. It took me a few minutes to figure out how I wanted to approach it, but once I did, I was actually quite pleased with how the picture was coming out. I was sketching fast, but it was a fairly minimalist illustration style, and it came together quickly once I knew what I wanted to do.
Once I’d finished his face, I decided to try drawing the sausage dogs that had been recently adopted, and then I moved on to the cat I’d had growing up, and then the otters Jack and I had seen when we were kayaking. That one was harder, and I had to look at a reference image, but I was happy with it by the time I was done. And by the end of my lunch break, I had a file full of almost a dozen animal faces, lined up like they were at a party. I’d even added little party hats on their heads to add to the effect.
That’s when the idea came to me.
I got up quickly, displacing Pablo, who gave me a very disgruntled, “how dare you” kind of glare.
“I’m so sorry Pabs,” I said. “But I’ve had an idea, and I need to go back to work. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
I practically sprinted through the rain back to the office, where I didn’t even stop at my desk before barging into Simone’s office, dripping all over her floor. I only realised what I must look like when she glanced up at me with a passable Miranda Priestly impression (read: unimpressed).
“I had an idea,” I said, quickly hiding the layer with the party hats, “but it’s a bit of a departure.”
“What’s that?” she asked, gesturing for me to sit down. I perched as far on the edge of the seat as possible, not wanting to get her chair wet.
“Well, like I told you earlier, we don’t have budget for the design agency,” I said. “And I already checked with the internal team, and their pipeline is packed. They wouldn’t get to us in time.”
Simone gave me an impatient look. “These sound like problems, not solutions.”
I took a deep breath, all the urgency and enthusiasm I’d felt before suddenly evaporating out of me. But I’d come this far, and it would be much more embarrassing to leave now without showing her what I’d done than for her to reject the idea. So I handed the tablet to her and watched as she squinted at it, pinching her fingers together and apart several times to see the drawings better.
“Tell me what I’m looking at here,” she said.
“They’re animals from the rescue,” I said. “Well, some of them. But I drew them. And I think we should use them for the gala. Give everyone a different animal. Use it on their place card, their name badge, their invite, all of it.”
Simone was quiet for a long moment before she spoke, and I had to remind myself to breathe. “It’s not exactly on theme.”
