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“Thought I’d find you here,” he said. “You’ve got to pry yourself away from the desk. I know you and I lost a lot of quality time together while you were on vacation, but you can’t try to fit it all back in by just staying there overnight,” he teased.
“Shut up,” I said. “What did you bring?”
“Chicken,” he said.
The lights were still on over the patio out back, and the temperature was warm and comfortable, so we brought the food outside rather than settling into the breakroom. He spread out what looked like enough food for about five people. Which meant it was going to be just enough for the two of us. We dove into the fried chicken, biscuits, mashed potatoes, and corn, and talked about the upcoming race season. This was always an exciting time of the year. A fresh season of races stretched in front of us, and everything was electric with possibility and potential. I pointedly didn’t mention Merry, even when Vince seemed to try to guide the conversation in that direction and looked at me like he was there for gossip. I wasn’t going to take the bait.
6
Merry
Merry’s log. Star date… I didn’t know. What did that really mean, anyway? Despite my grandmother’s deep devotion to Star Trek in all its various iterations, it didn’t rub off on me. I might have inherited more of my features and characteristics from her than any other member of my family, but that particular fandom didn’t come along with my almond eyes or the weird way my thumbs bent backward. Or the pissed-off determination my grandmother would have referred to as grit but everybody else knows was just stubbornness. Whatever it was and for whatever reason I had it, it was what fueled me the morning of my third day of working for Freeman Racing.
My interaction with Quentin was still bothering me. After all, he wasn’t even the one who hired me. He didn’t really have any place preemptively evaluating my quality of work or the value of my contribution to his company. Obviously, other people who worked for him, including his mother and brother, believed he was in need of my professional services. So, he should have just accepted their input, respected my qualifications, and given me the space to do my job without already assigning me failures.
Of course, that was also a fairly ridiculous way to look at it. Regardless of who hired me or who within the company thought my skills were going to be beneficial to the company and its success, Quentin owned the company and was the one who ran it. His opinion was actually the only one that really mattered when it came right down to it. He had the ability to decide I wasn’t doing well enough or that he didn’t need me and just kick me to the curb. I wasn’t going to let that happen. As much because I wanted the job and the security that came along with it, his arrogance and assumptions about me made me angry. I didn’t like the way he’d treated me from the very beginning and especially didn’t like the thought of him just going about his life continuing to think that way. He seemed like one of those people who floated around at the top of every situation he ever encountered. No matter what, if there was a food chain, he was at the head of it and he was comfortable with that.
But I was going to prove him wrong. No matter what I needed to do, I was going to show him his assumptions about me were far off base. Not only was I very good at what I did, but I was going to take that expertise and those skills and use them to whip his company’s image into shape. Once he saw what a difference good social media could make, he wouldn’t make hair-trigger assumptions about anybody else again. At least not about me.
Before heading into the office, I took a few minutes to go back over all the work I’d compiled the day before. After spending my first day at the complex exploring and getting familiar with the buildings and the people who worked in them, I devoted the next day to creating content plans and schedules. Managing the presence of such a large, dynamic company wasn’t as easy as just occasionally throwing a picture up or sharing posts made by fans. It didn’t take much digging through the accounts Minnie gave me access to for me at to realize just how extensive the reach of the company was, and how many angles I would have to use to approach the communities that made up the fans.
Rather than just one type of person or one type of fandom, I needed to familiarize myself with the various different people who enjoyed bike racing. From the people who loved the adrenaline and competition of the races themselves, to those more interested in the machines, to the ones who poised themselves as devotees of the riders, there were different fans to appeal to on each platform. There was also the need to reach out to similar-minded people who might become fans of racing simply by being exposed to it.
