Page 60 of Breaking All The Rules
Won’t be long before another agency snaps you up?
Bea’s blood pressure spiked into the danger zone, the beat of her heart washing loudly through her ears. Did people not think she was capable of doing something else—anything else—with her time other than genuflecting to corporate America? Just because her father was an ad man, as his father had been before him, didn’t mean she couldn’t do something else. Sure, Kim was only being complimentary, but after almost a month dropping out in Credence, it felt like an affront.
Like even the idea that she might choose a different lifestyle was inconceivable.
Super annoyed at these assumptions—yeah, she was in a real mood now—Bea clicked on the hyperlink in Kim’s signature line, and Greet Cute’s website opened in a new window. She clicked on the About Us tab, and three happy faces grinned back at her. Kim, looking regal and kickass with her full Afro and large hoop earrings. Nozo, sporting a nose ring and wearing dramatic sparkly eye shadow and a pair of funky green-framed glasses. And a dude called Mal with a hipster beard and a man bun.
They were relaxed and smiling, arms around one another, standing outside a funky-looking triple-floor warehouse in what Bea was fairly certain was downtown LA. The next picture was their work space, which was massive—the entire top floor, apparently—with four corner offices and a huge glass-walled boardroom on the street-facing wall.
The creative areas were all centralized in an open floorplan—very Google—with color and light dominating the space. There was a lot of beautifully displayed tech as well as all kinds of funky chairs and beanbags, not to mention the giant potted plants and vibrant wall art.
Reading their story, Bea discovered the trio were old college friends who’d started their own home business after they’d all been let go from their jobs a couple of years back. Eighteen months later, the business had grown exponentially and become so successful, they’d hired another five full-time content creators as well as establishing a small production facility with a staff of fifteen that saw to everything from paper production to printing and distribution. The eco-friendly cards were made from recycled materials, and every part of the final product was biodegradable.
Bea did some more googling to see what the Internet said—not just their own PR machine—and she was impressed. It appeared that with their small start-up mentality, they’d been able to stay smart and nimble in the face of fickle market forces, pivoting quickly from things that hadn’t worked and using social media to their advantage. They had almost 200,000 Instagram followers and more than 300,000 TikTok followers. Obviously all this had helped them find their niche and was starting to attract the attention of some big market players.
Well done, Kim!
Switching back to their site, she checked out their product on their online shop. And that’s where the love affair ended. Greet Cute all right. Bea could feel a toothache coming on just looking at the offerings. There was a large variety of cards, from the more traditional to the sickeningly cutesy, but nothing appealed to Bea.
Each to their own but…no.
She wasn’t really in the corny greeting card demographic—never had been. But right now, today, the sentimental messages of good wishes and cheer and a perfect world where an expensive piece of folded cardboard was some kind of panacea to the world’s ills really grated on her nerves.
Nerves that felt stretched thin and exposed.
Kim thought she’d be into this…this…sappy crap? When, today of all days, she wanted to burn everything down?
To be fair to Kim, she had no idea that Bea would open her email right after the Kevin news, but she would like to think that, even on a day when she wasn’t contemplating lethal world destruction, she’d never have been a good match for schmaltzy, feel-good fakeness.
And she was pissed enough right now to prove it.
She headed to the couch and snatched up the sketch pad, then yanked her suitcase out from under the bed and grabbed the adult coloring book she’d bought at a rest stop on the way to Credence. It had appealed to her in the moment as something she might fill her time with, but then she’d discovered Supernatural. Included in the packaging, however, was a large pack of pencils and a sharpener, and that’s what she was hunting.
Returning to bed next to an exceedingly disinterested Princess, Bea’s fingers flew over the page, anger peaking and falling and peaking again with every line, every curve she drew, not really even registering that she’d tapped into that same place she’d tapped into at the lake. She hadn’t had a clue what she was going to draw when she started, but pictures formed quickly in her brain, and within an hour she’d done three anti-sap sketches that pretty much summed up her not Hallmark mood.
All three of them were done mostly in black pencil with occasional color added for emphasis, and they featured her. The her she’d been out on the street that day meeting Austin for the first time, still pissed at the world and taking it out on pie and ice cream. Wild, mousy hair in a messy, fall-down knot at the back of her head, baggy sweats, no bra, and floppy-eared bunny slippers. Glaring and clearly cranky.
At her feet was Princess in all her face-for-radio grandeur. Huge body, tufty marmalade fur, shriveled eye socket, exaggerated ear hair, exposed fang, staring straight ahead like she was a freaking queen. Bea added the tiara just in case people missed it.
They made a great pair. Ragey, pissed, seen-better-days.
The first one she’d captioned: Oh, I’m sorry, were you after a Disney princess? The second: Look at all the fucks I give. The third: They say crazy cat lady like it’s a bad thing.
She stopped and admired them for a moment, feeling a little out of breath at the mental effort they’d taken but weirdly proud of them. They were the antithesis of what was on offer at Greet Cute, which made them just about perfect in her eyes, and before she could think about it twice, she picked up her phone and called the café downstairs.
“Hi, Jenny, it’s Bea. Was just wondering if you could tell me where I would go in Credence if I needed something scanned?”
“The library has a scanner,” Jenny offered.
Bea smiled. “Excellent! Thank you.”
She hurriedly donned some new sweats and put on a bra—that’s how pissed she was. If Princess minded Bea’s abrupt departure, she didn’t vocalize it or even feign interest in her leaving, and indeed, when Bea returned half an hour later, Princess hadn’t moved from her spot on the bed.
After inserting the USB stick with the scanned images into her laptop, Bea made a few clicks and attached the images to the reply email she was sending. It was polite, thanking Kim for thinking of her but explaining that she was more Cranky Bea than Hallmark Bea these days, as she could probably see from the attached images. Then she wished Kim every success. Because she did. Bea loved that Kim was kicking corporate ass.
The email had just made that nice little whooshing noise signaling it had been sent when she heard footsteps on the stairs outside her door—Austin’s—and Bea realized she’d passed almost an entire day fueled by rage and an all-too-familiar low-level anxiety that had evaporated all her lovely happy feels from last night and her daring little X-rated flash. Not only that, but she was also rethinking everything to do with this new…thing with Austin.
What the hell was she doing? Was this really the way she wanted to start her new life? Getting herself tangled up with a younger man, something that really couldn’t go anywhere.
