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It’s so hard to keep from crying at this point. My emotions are a bubble of crazy. The excitement and rush from earlier are gone, replaced by embarrassment and frustration. This was the perfect job, and now I’ve ruined it. Getting an interview with no experience right out of college is hard, but getting an interview with Aspire is unheard of. I didn’t even apply for it.
Somehow, Emery Brooks found me and asked me to interview. Maybe all my good luck was used up in that moment, and I’ll forever be cursed to have broken dryers and lose my skirts in elevators.
“What floor?” the man asks again.
“I was going to the twenty-seventh, but now I think I’m just going home,” I mutter.
The smile on the man’s face gets even wider. “You wouldn’t happen to be Madison, would you?”
My heart sinks all the way to the first floor to lay with my skirt. “Mr. Brooks?”
He nods and doesn’t stop the laughter that escapes those beautiful lips. “Well, you’ve already embarrassed yourself as much as possible, so why don’t you come to your interview, anyway?”
The question hangs in the air as the elevator dings over and over again as we fly upward toward Aspire. I want to throw my hands in the air and scream. This isn’t fair. No one should have such terrible luck.
But maybe I was wrong. Maybe all this bad luck is the balance for incredible luck soon. Like actually landing the job of a lifetime. He’s right that I don’t think I can be any more embarrassed than I already am.
“Okay,” I mutter as I put on the suit coat as if it were mine. Luckily, Mr. Brooks is a giant, and it hangs even lower than the shiny silver granny panties. At least I wore something. Thank everything holy for small favors.
“Great. I’ll show you to my office, where we’ll have a bit more privacy.” The elevator dings a final time, and the gold doors slide open to a reception room with an older woman sitting behind a desk.
Mr. Brooks goes directly to her and says, “Sandy, could you order Miss Carter a black business skirt, and have it sent to my office when it gets here?”
She looks behind Mr. Brooks at me with an upturned eyebrow. She doesn’t comment, instead looking back at him. “I’ll get it done. And thank you for the flowers this morning. They’re beautiful.” She runs her fingers over the bright white lilies sitting in the crystal vase on her desk almost absentmindedly.
He smiles at her. “Every woman deserves flowers occasionally. Especially one who works as hard as you.”
Sandy’s eyes light up at the compliment and we walk through the door into a bull-pen style office space. Individual offices line the walls, many of them empty, but in the center, there’s a mass of people all talking and typing around tables. Some are working on their own things, and other people are sitting on desks and talking with their hands.
“This is the idea room,” Mr. Brooks says as he walks down a pathway between the idea room area and the offices. “Everyone in here is trying to work through their thoughts. Teamwork is how we turn good ideas into great ideas. If you need people to run something by, everyone there is open to listen and give their thoughts. Just remember to return the favor and give your opinion on their ideas.”
He continues talking as he glances back at me. “Aspire isn’t just a business. We’re small enough that everyone is a piece of the family. The only thing that we require is that you give your absolute best from the moment you walk through those doors until you leave.”
I’m still struggling with the fact that I’m not wearing bottoms, but I try to listen and soak it all in. I’m supposed to be trying to get this job. The people in the idea room barely seem to notice us as we walk by, even though Mr. Brooks is one of the owners of the company. In the very back of the room, there’s an office with windows looking out at the idea room, and he leads me to it.
As we walk in the door, he closes the blinds and locks the door before going to sit behind his desk. It’s an odd thing to do for an interview, but it really doesn’t compare to the rest of the oddities today. I straighten the coat as I sit down in the chair as though it were my skirt.
This is not how I imagined this interview going, and Emery Brooks is not the man that I expected. This guy seems like he’s just out of college with all the energy of a twenty-two year old instead of a titan of the advertising industry.
He never stops smiling as he reaches into a desk drawer to pull out a file folder in the otherwise silent room. When he flips it open, it shows my resume first, but there’s a stack of papers underneath it. My degree from NYU is highlighted along with my perfect GPA. It’s not surprising that they cared about that, but the thing that surprises me is that my part-time job in retail is highlighted as well.
I’d worked at an upscale lingerie boutique for the first two years in college to make sure I didn’t have any debts. Once I started making ChitChat videos, things changed. I’ve been a reader my entire life, and Tessa convinced me to become a BookChat reviewer. It was perfect. Tessa came up with ideas, and I filled in the content. Together, we made the perfect duo.
We made enough money to pay for life and college.
“You have an impressive GPA,” Emery says, “but so do hundreds of other people. Aspire doesn’t need an army of drones who know about the past. We need people that can break molds and shift paradigms, and you’ve proven that you can do that with your ChitChat experience. Consumers don’t trust traditional advertising anymore, and the industry is about to make a major shift. You’re here interviewing because I think you can be someone who can help lead us into this brave new world of advertising.”
He moves the resume and slowly flips through the rest of the stack of papers. Each page is a printout with information on one of my ChitChat videos. Views, type of video, date published, total videos at that point. Everything. It’s nearly as thorough as my dashboard.
“We need someone who can take a product and give it this amount of reach,” he says as he points at one of my more popular videos. “I don’t know how to do it, and no one else in this office does. That’s why we didn’t ignore your application like we did for every other recent graduate.”
My application? I didn’t even apply for this job because I was sure I’d never get it. I assumed one of my professors had talked to them about me or something.
And this isn’t what I’d expected at all when I received the email from Mr. Brooks. My degree is in data analysis, not the creative side of advertising. I was supposed to be a data cruncher, someone who figured out why things worked or didn’t. How am I supposed to design ads for things I know nothing about?
“Mr. Brooks,” I begin, but he stops me by raising his hand.
“Emery. If my clients call me Emery, the people that do the work to buy me my next yacht can call me Emery, too.”
