Chapter Two
Two
Of course I knew that Campbell had won the Cannes Lion. It was impossible not to know. And not just because I was there, in France, when it happened.
The Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, inspired by the film festival and nearly as glitzy, lasts five days along the cerulean coast of the French Riviera. It’s the final frontier of advertising awards, and Campbell beat me to the win.
His campaign was for Lachausse, an athletics brand that hadn’t done much worth talking about in years.
They’d been on Slater Faust’s roster for a while—I wrote social media copy for them as an intern.
But that year they decided to pony up for a real campaign.
Billboards, a full-page spread in the Tribune, a big-budget video they cut up into so many digital shorts I couldn’t escape it, no matter what platform I scrolled on.
I didn’t know it was Campbell’s, at first. The line was smart: If Not You.
The visuals, even smarter: bug-eyed little kids in swim goggles, Paralympic champions on the track, a set of parents with tears in their eyes watching their college athlete play soccer.
It was all about opportunity, personal destiny, limitless potential.
It asked: If you don’t achieve this next frontier, push through this boundary to greatness, who’s to say anyone will?
And who’s to say it can’t be you who does it?
It was simple and provocative. It made heroes out of anyone who’d ever laced up a sneaker. Who didn’t want to believe in that?
It wasn’t until Adweek published a case study that I realized it was Campbell’s work, his name there in the credits next to a title that, according to his LinkedIn, he’d just gotten.
Senior copywriter. I’d only been promoted to copywriter the year before, after nearly three years with “junior” in my title.
Truthfully, it was enough to make me want to jump off a building.
Campbell Porter and I didn’t speak, if I could help it, but he was always around.
I ran into him at nearly every networking event I went to in the city; I heard his name from new hires who’d crossed his path at Slater Faust. He’d stopped wearing boat shoes and dressed mostly, now, in expensive-looking, colorful button-downs that did nothing for him.
He’d always looked better in neutrals. Someone needed to tell him, and it wasn’t going to be me.
If Not You became the industry’s golden child, a case study I heard about at nearly every strategy meeting in the months that followed.
Campbell had created a perfect campaign, and I couldn’t escape it.
He was always there, a thorn in my side, this great failure between us—something embarrassing he’d be able to hold over my head forever.
I felt it at industry panels, when my eyes found Campbell’s like traitorous magnets on the other side of the audience. When he smirked at me, always that smirk, a reminder that he’d watched me try harder than I’d ever tried in my life and still come up short next to him.
I felt it when we hired a junior art director out of the Slater Faust intern program and she pulled up the brainstorming matrix Campbell had devised the summer we worked there together. The way she called it magic, and I knew she wasn’t referring to the matrix, but to Campbell.
I felt it when the Cannes Lions short list came out. When I flew to France with Dexter and Iris, my own pride tempered lukewarm by the knowledge that Campbell Porter was on that list, too. That he would beat me again, like he always did. And it would be one more thing between us.
But I felt it most that night in January, seven months ago in the piercing lakefront cold.
I was alone at the Diversey L station. Ava had stayed out—of course she had; she should have, that night.
I was desperate for my bed, for Pancake, for the rattling way she purred on my chest and I felt it through to my ribs.
I was already crying by the time I saw Campbell.
Across the tracks on the northbound platform, his laugh making clouds in the cold.
He was under one of the heat lamps, and it cast him red and glowing.
Campbell was with friends; he always was.
A group of men in pea coats and gloves. Only Campbell had a hat on, a gray knit beanie tugged over his hair.
I wasn’t wearing anything but my coat. No hat, no scarf, no gloves.
It was stupid of me, but I’d left in such a rush.
I could feel my tears turning to ice on my face, stinging.
Campbell looked warm and thrilled. Him, like that, was the only thing that could’ve made me feel hollower than I already did.
He looked up at me on a laugh. He was too far away for me to hear it, but I knew how his laugh sounded.
He went still when he saw me, a freeze-frame version of himself I might’ve found funny under different circumstances.
His smile suspended in place, his mouth half-open.
Only his eyes moved, across the tracks in the frigid dark, scanning me like he was searching for someone he recognized.
I didn’t turn away. I should have; it was unforgivable, Campbell Porter seeing me cry.
But nothing about that moment felt real enough for me to react.
I felt like I was watching from behind glass as Campbell finally stopped smiling.
He was stepping toward me when my train came.
The last thing I saw before moving into the flooded light of the L car was his mouth, moving to my name. Not French. Just Mattie.
It was the first time we’d seen each other since France, and I’ve avoided him in all the months that followed. No panels, no networking events. I’ve told myself it’s because I’m so busy with work and helping Ava plan the wedding—which isn’t untrue, but isn’t the entire truth, either.
I’m dreading seeing Campbell. I never want to explain that night at the Diversey stop. Not to anyone, and especially not to him.
“Greg’s not on this?”
Dexter glances behind him like he expects Greg to join us at any minute. But Iris, our creative director, just uncaps her pen and writes the date at the top of her notepad.
“Greg worked on Wicksteed at OverComm,” she tells him. “He wants fresh thinking, here.”
It’s Monday morning, and we’re kicking off the Wicksteed Resorts pitch in the conference room overlooking Lake Michigan.
“But we’ll run our ideas by him?” I ask. Keiko, the strategist on the pitch, plugs her laptop into the projector.
“Of course,” Iris says. She has marker smeared on her forearm from her three-year-old daughter and box braids tied in a low knot. “But he’s trusting you to run with this.”
I glance at Dexter, who lets out a puff of air. “No pressure,” he mutters. But Dexter will come up with something magic—he always does.
“It’s a big opportunity,” Iris says, lightly.
If we move on to the next round of the pitch, it’ll be her traveling with us to the Wicksteed resorts.
Dexter and I leading design and copy, with Iris there to guide the creative and, ultimately, report back to Greg.
“I didn’t say this to you, but winning would go a long way when it comes to review season. ”
She looks straight at me. I’ve been lobbying for a promotion since last year, right around the time I found out Campbell had already made senior copywriter at Slater Faust. And now, with the looming prospect of Ava moving out, I need it more than ever.
I can’t afford to stay in our place alone—or to move anywhere else a reasonable distance from the Art Room—on the salary I’m making now.
“All right,” Keiko says, just as our account manager slips into the room and closes the door behind him. “Let’s spin through some demographics and key insights to get you set up for next Friday.”
We have less than two weeks to pull this off, which already has Dexter cursing this project, this agency, and everyone involved.
“Wicksteed Resorts is catering to a striving, optimistic audience.” Keiko clicks to her next slide, where Campbell’s If Not You campaign lunges out at me like a jab to the eye socket. “They’re going to want this campaign to be aspirational. Motivating.”
I let her words haze out, twisting my pen between two fingers. I don’t need to hear anyone fawn over If Not You ever again.
I can’t believe Greg’s AWOL on this.
The message pops into the upper right corner of my laptop, and I pull it closer so Iris won’t glance over and read what Dexter’s saying. Next to me, he’s typing furiously.
You’re going to assign something like this with a two-week turnaround and then not even help?
We don’t need his help, I reply. We’ve got this.
Dexter scoffs, soft, under his breath. When Iris glances at him, his ears go pink.
We always do, I send. Plus he probably doesn’t want to travel for a month with his kids just starting school.
Iris has a kid, Dexter counters. And I have Krish. It shouldn’t just be people with kids whose schedules get considered.
I blink at my screen. Kids and partners, apparently. So where does that leave me?
Ava jokes that my work is my boyfriend, which is true in the sense that I spend all my time thinking about it.
I’ve dated, a little, since one semi-serious college relationship that ended a week before graduation.
He was moving to Los Angeles; I had the internship lined up at Slater Faust and wasn’t giving it up for anything.
The men I’ve known in Chicago have been friendly and fleeting. Ava doesn’t get it.
“You don’t give anyone a fair chance,” she told me, when we’d been here a couple years and I broke something off with a nice guy on the Chicago Bears’ marketing team. “Two dates is barely enough to know somebody.”
“I know enough,” I’d said.
Dating has always served different purposes, for Ava and me. She wants all of it: the husband, the children, the house in the suburbs with a fenced-in yard. She always has. When we were in the fourth grade, Ava picked “mom” as her dream career.
I’m medium on marriage. It’s something I’d consider with the right person, but not something I’m seeking—and kids have always felt like a future that’s meant for other people, not me.
My parents were married for nineteen years before they got divorced.
I think they hated each other for at least eighteen of them.
And when you aren’t dating for marriage, when you don’t need a partner to help you reach a goal you’ve always had, it becomes simpler.
I don’t need to give someone more than two dates of a chance.
No one owes anyone chances, really, but I’ve especially never felt obligated to dole out my time to bland men in sticky-floored bars. I’d always rather be writing.
What else are you on right now? Dexter taps out. At the front of the room, Keiko’s still talking about Campbell’s campaign. I don’t think I’ll even have time to brainstorm on this until Thursday.
I’m a little annoyed with him, but one of us needs to put on a brave face for this, and it clearly isn’t going to be Dexter.
That’s fine, I say. I’ll block time on our calendars?
He sends a thumbs-up and then jerks back in his seat, crossing his arms while he watches the rest of Keiko’s presentation.