Chapter 2
Chapter Two
Owen
“Tell me again why this is necessary,” I say to my older brother Jason.
I’m sitting at the coffee shop, on the phone, wishing I had brought bleach wipes to this interview.
I don’t even want to think about the concentration of bacteria per square centimeter on this table.
With this level of public exposure, it’s probably approaching lab-grade culture conditions with all of the bacterial colonies competing for dominance.
“We went over this,” Jason says with a sigh. “We need to increase your public profile. We’re trying to bring in some whale investors for phase three and it helps if they know all three of us.”
“We had an agreement when we started,” I say, starting to feel a fluttering in my stomach. “You and Ryan handle the public. I handle the lab.”
“Is that Owen?” It’s my younger brother Ryan in the background. He must hit the speakerphone button because his voice gets louder. “Hey Owen, are you at the coffee shop?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have a napkin spread out like a tablecloth?”
I look down at the spread-out napkin under my arms. “No.”
“Remove it,” he says. “This is important.”
I reluctantly crumple it up into a ball and stuff it into my pocket. I’ll just sit with my hands in my lap, not touching the table.
“This is a light and easy interview,” Ryan says. “Just be cool.”
Sometimes I wonder if my younger brother knows me at all. Being cool is not something I’m capable of.
“You’re gonna do fine,” Jason says, jumping in. “Just be yourself.”
“Maybe a little bit less like yourself, and more like… me,” Ryan adds.
My nerves start going into hyperdrive, buzzing through me as I look around the room.
I hate the inside of this coffee shop with all of the plants in colorful ceramic pots, funky signs on the walls, chalkboard menus, and mismatched chairs and tables.
I guess it’s supposed to be eclectic, but it’s just… overstimulating.
But Faye does make my coffee exactly how I like it. She’s the only one in Toronto who has the skill and the patience to get it right. It’s too bad she insists on talking every second I stand up there. Someone should tell her that silence is underrated.
“You’ll be fine,” Jason repeats, although now I’m wondering if he keeps saying that for his benefit or mine. “Just talk about your work.”
“Of course I’m going to discuss my work,” I say. “What else would I talk to a chemistry periodical about?”
“Chemistry periodical?” Jason asks in a muffled voice. “What did you tell him?”
“Nothing,” Ryan whispers back. “He just assumed… And I didn’t correct.”
“You must be Owen,” a lady says, walking over with a big smile on her face, her hand outstretched aggressively. “I’m Elizabeth from Madame Gossip.”
I hang up the phone, stand up, and shake her hand. She has a firm grip. I appreciate that. “Hello.”
We sit down and she makes herself at home, placing her leather bag on the empty table beside us and draping her coat across the chair.
I sit with my back straight and my hands in my lap, waiting for this to be over.
“It’s great to finally meet you,” she says with a big smile as she pulls out a pen and notebook. “The mysterious third Lavoie brother. What a scoop.”
I’m feeling a little faint with nerves, so I pull the coffee cup sleeve from my pocket and hold it under the table, rubbing the four-leaf clover that Faye drew on the off chance it will give me some luck.
“I saw the photographs from the shoot,” she says, that lipsticked smile somehow getting even wider. “They turned out great. Very hot.”
I’m glad the photographs turned out satisfactory because the whole thing was a disaster. The photographer kept asking me to give him ‘smoldering sexy bad boy chemist’ whatever that meant. He seemed pretty frustrated when he left.
“Your photographer was quite inappropriate,” I tell her. “He told me to ‘strut like I’m packing a twelve-inch Bunsen burner.’ I believe that was an innuendo, although a wholly inaccurate one at that. Standard laboratory Bunsen burners are made to a maximum height of six inches.”
She nibbles her bottom lip as she watches me closely. She looks like she’s trying to figure me out. Good luck with that, lady, I want to tell her. I’ve been alive for twenty-nine years and my parents still haven’t figured me out.
“So, you and your two brothers own one of the hottest companies in the country right now,” she says, drawing a little heart on her notepad. “You’ve revolutionized an industry. Tell me about Temporary Ink.”
“The details are on the company website.”
She laughs, but that smile dissolves when she realizes I’m not joking.
It’s a long story, and I’m not about to get into all of it with her, especially when the details are well documented on the Temporary Ink’s website About page.
“Let’s back up and start from the beginning,” she says, leaning back with those wolfish blue eyes locked on me. “What was it like growing up with two brothers?”
It was frustrating is what it was. And loud. And chaotic.
I was always the odd one out. Jason and Ryan were extremely popular. They excelled at everything that juvenile adolescent boys would want to excel at—sports, school, girls. My parents fawned over them. They always put smiles on their faces while I just gave Mom and Dad migraines.
My brothers were sports legends growing up, winning everything from basketball hoops, to football touchdowns, to baseball matches. Our father was thrilled.
He never showed one iota of excitement for my accomplishments, even though I graduated college-level chemistry and physics before I had armpit hair.
He wasn’t even impressed when I won the hockey championship game for our school.
I wasn’t playing, of course, but I noticed the temperature of the ice was lower than the required -4.
5°C, which resulted in an immediate disqualification for the home team.
My father didn’t even cheer when the zebra men announced it.
“So, you don’t want to talk about your childhood,” she says when I don’t answer. “I don’t blame you, I wouldn’t either. I had a headgear. Ew.”
I just stare at her.
“You’re quite the inventor,” she says, running the tip of her pen along the heart doodle until the black line thickens. “How many companies have you started?”
“Three.”
“Impressive,” she says. “What was the first one?”
I was thirteen years old and it drove me crazy that my mother never had any windshield wiper fluid in her van.
Either she was too lazy or too poor, and infuriatingly, it didn’t seem to bother her that the tank was always running on empty.
I loathed a dirty windshield, so I created my own recipe in the makeshift lab I set up in my father’s shed between the lawnmower and my brothers’ hockey sticks.
It turned out to be far superior to the drivel they sell at gas stations and big box stores, and I was able to sell the patent to a large manufacturer.
After the success of my windshield wiper fluid, my brothers began to pay attention.
They begged me to create an energy drink recipe, and their persistent nagging annoyed me so much that I capitulated to get them off my back.
Jason and Ryan found a supplier, branded the drink, and began selling them everywhere.
After two years, we sold the recipe to a large food and beverage conglomerate for a big payout and a recurring royalty, which we still earn today.
In one afternoon, we made more money than my parents made in their lifetime and the Lavoie boys became millionaires.
I tell Elizabeth this, in a shortened version of course, and she scribbles it down on the notepad.
“Which brings us to the star of the moment,” she says with a grin. “Temporary Ink.”
She twists around, pulls down the collar of her shirt, and shows me a tattoo of a swallow on her back. “I’m a satisfied customer. How did you come up with this genius idea?”
I was twenty-one years old when Ryan returned from a three-day long music festival with a horrible tattoo of a woman on his arm.
She was supposed to look like one of those old pinup girls from the fifties, but she looked like she got microwaved on the way home.
It was a mess. Some amateur ruffian applied it in the back of a filthy pickup truck.
Ryan said he loved it, but I knew the truth.
Nobody could love that ugly thing. It was reprehensible.
It got me thinking of ink that could break down and disappear after a set length of time. A tattoo, applied in the same way, but with temporary ink. Jason and Ryan were instantly in and we decided that the optimum time for a tattoo to last would be three years.
After that, it was just a chemistry problem, and I excel at chemistry.
I engineered special pigments with a three-year lifespan.
Once introduced into human flesh, the biological timer would start.
The ink remained bright and vibrant until the self-destructing process started, lasting about three weeks in total, and the ink-stained effect would be reversed with one hundred percent effectiveness.
“How long did it take you to develop?” Elizabeth asks.
“Sixteen months,” I tell her. I worked obsessively on it.
I barely slept or ate during that time, becoming hyper-focused on my mission until the point where I was hospitalized twice.
At one point, I had lost twenty pounds. But I cracked it, and it works perfectly.
You can tattoo your entire face and three years and three weeks after the needle touches your skin, your face will return to normal with zero trace of the tattoo.
Jason and Ryan packaged it, branded it, and got to work selling it. Today, Temporary Ink is in over thirty thousand tattoo shops around the world. We manufacture over five hundred gallons of ink per day. Quite a bit more than I can make in a backyard shed.
My brothers are the face of the company and they are everywhere. Celebrity CEOs they’ve been called. Me? I prefer to stay in the lab. I work on R&D and manufacturing. I have no interest in that public life.
I’m happy to keep the operation as is, but Jason and Ryan want to open up our own line of tattoo shops around the world. Our first shop will be in Toronto. It’s under construction right now and will open in a few weeks. Jason says it’s the first of many.
Their plan is to eventually make Temporary Ink exclusive to our shops, so if someone wants a tattoo with our patented technology, they’ll have to come to our branded store to get it. Ryan says that’s how we’re going to become billionaires.
I don’t need billions. All I need is my own lab and unlimited time to work in it, which I already have now.
Which is why I don’t see the need for this interview.
“So, what do you do for fun?” Elizabeth asks as she scribbles on her notepad. I try to read her writing, but she picks it up and hides it from me when she sees me looking.
“I work,” I say. “In the lab.”
“And what about your personal life? Is it as rambunctious as your brothers’?”
I sit up a little straighter. “Do you have any chemistry questions?”
“Sure,” she says with a smirk. “Let’s talk chemistry.”
Finally.
“Your brother Ryan was recently seen canoodling with a reality TV star, and Jason was seen talking to actress Nora Harvey on a yacht. Is there a girl you share chemistry with?”
“That’s not the kind of chemistry I was talking about.”
“You’re single, right?”
I start squirming in my chair. I look at the exit. My heart is pounding so fast I can feel it thundering through my torso.
“Yes.”
“What kind of girl are you attracted to?”
I look around for help. Faye meets my eye as I rub the four-leaf clover under the table. It’s doing nothing for my luck because this intrusive lady is still sitting in front of me.
Faye casually grabs the broom and makes her way over, sweeping the floor, but keeping her eyes on me.
It makes me feel a little better.
“How are you qualified to give this interview?” I ask in a curt tone, turning this interview around on her. “What are your credentials?”
“I worked at BuzzFeed before this.”
“Mmmm,” I grunt. “I don’t know that lab.”
“Everything okay?” Faye asks as she arrives. “Do you guys need anything?”
Yes. An ejection seat to burst me out of here.
“We’re fine, thanks,” Elizabeth says.
I just stare at Faye. She gives me an encouraging smile and stays nearby, sweeping under the booth.
“Where would you take someone on a first date?” she continues.
I swallow hard. “Ummm...”
“Would you bring flowers or chocolates?” she asks, not even waiting for me to answer her first question. “Are you more of a fancy restaurant kind of guy, or concert and drinks?”
My mouth turns dry as I get an overwhelming urge to get up and run out of here.
“Do you call immediately after the first date or make them wait a bit?” she continues.
Faye is watching all of this and hurries to the front.
“And what about weddings?”
“Weddings?”
“Would you prefer a large party with everyone invited, or a small, intimate affair?”
I gulp. Is she asking me to marry her? I don’t understand.
“Owen,” Faye calls from the front. I jerk my head up and look at her. She’s holding up the phone. “You have a phone call. They’re saying it’s an emergency.”
I rush over and take the phone. “Hello?” There’s only a dial tone. “They hung up.”
“There’s no emergency,” Faye whispers. “You just looked so uncomfortable, I couldn’t take it. I thought I’d save you.”
I stare at her in awe. She’s my savior.
“Just go tell her there’s an emergency in the lab and you have to leave.”
“I can do that?”
“Yes,” she says, taking the phone back from me. “She doesn’t work for a chemistry magazine.”
“I knew it,” I whisper. This whole thing has been incredibly fishy. I wouldn’t even be surprised to learn that she doesn’t have a science doctorate.
I thank Faye and head back over. My shoulders are pulled all the way back and my spine is straight as a thermometer. I’ve never been very convincing at lying.
“There’s an emergency,” I say. “In the lab. I have to go.”
“That’s fine,” she says as she shoves her notepad into her leather bag. “I’ll just figure out the rest on my own.”
“Oh, okay,” I say as she gets up.
“The magazine will come out next month,” she says. “I’m pretty sure you’ll have the cover.”
“Uhhh…”
She shoves her hand into mine, giving me another firm handshake, and then she leaves.
“Your cup…” I say, as she walks out the door, but she doesn’t hear me.
I pick up her garbage and bring it to the counter where Faye is waiting.
“How was it?” Faye asks.
I sigh. “It went about as well as I expected.”
“That bad?”
I nod. “Yes. That bad.”