Chapter 4
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.
“And you must 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 was enormous.
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 that kale 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 it has to go down, you know? ”
She pauses here, seeming to expect some sort of response from them, but Ben does not know; 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 the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air theme 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 labeled s S 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 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 doubt they would have netted us five million views, or whatever it’s at now. ”