He rolls his eyes good-naturedly, and his tongue touches that tooth again with a smirk.
Dangerous.The word flashes in my mind, like a neon sign.
There’s an ease with him I think I’m going to like working with. No bullshit, seems like he can walk the walk, but I’ve interviewed alotof people with promise who turned out to be borderline useless in the areas they were self-professed rock stars in. So I’ll withhold my judgment until I see what he’s working with.
A light rap of knuckles on the open door pulls my attention from my new apprentice, and I’m surprised to see Shelby in the doorway, I didn’t even hear her approach. She smiles broadly, walking farther in and standing to the side of my desk so she can see us both.
“Silly me, I almost forgot to leave you with your new employee orientation checklist,” she says to him with a wink and a pat on his shoulder. “We don’t have one for apprentices, since this is a special situation.” Her voice turns conspiratorial as she leans in a little closer to him. “But something tells me you’ll be a full-blown employee in no time, AJ.”
It’s not malicious, how she says it. Just oblivious. To her son. The fact that he’s a grown ass man. That he has his own hopes and dreams. Whether she is just ignorant of them, or doesn’t believe in them is yet to be determined. But either way, both he and I raise our eyebrows at her words.
In a move I’ve done a thousand times, I glance to the side, a la Jim fromThe Office, like a camera is filming this awkward encounter, and I’m making eye contact with the viewer, breaking the fourth wall.
And in a blow to my originality, I look over to find Asher doing theexactsame thing.
I feel like I’ve been ripped off! Or amIthe con artist here?
Except Shelby just rolls her eyes, like she’s brushing off his usual antics. Like he’s done this tohera thousand times before.
What. The. F—
“I’ll never understand your generation,” she tells the two of us, like it’s something we’re in on together. Like we weren’t raised a decade apart, with an entire (rather massive, entirely significant) generational divide between us.
When I was a kid, we still played outside. I remember life before we had computers, or the Internet. Boy bands were my sexual awakening. TheTwilightfranchise changed my life. This guy was probably raised on a tablet from birth, he probably thinks of the nineties aslast centuryor—shudder—“the late 1900s,” rather than not all that long ago, and I’ll bet he has no idea about all of the pop culture gems he missed out on from the eighties and nineties.
How she can compare us is beyond me. Shelby drops the paper on my desk before turning and heading back out the door, a wave over her shoulder as she goes.
And I’m left stumped. The first time she came in here today, not twenty minutes ago, I thought I knew exactly what I was getting. Some teenage apprentice who didn’t give a fuck about this arrangement, who would be more of a pain than an asset, who would make me feel a hundred in comparison, calling everyone “fam” or “chief” while spouting things like “yeet” much to my annoyed confusion.
Instead, I feel a strange kinship to this guy, who believes in himself, his ability. Who’s been working on bringing his goals to fruition since his early teen years, just like I have. And perhaps strangest of all, we don’t feel so different at all. My work ethic. My logic. My dorky humor. These are the things that have always defined me. And in a weird twist of fate, my instant read on this guy is that I think I might have found the first person who can relate to all three.
FIVE
ELLIE
You know how publishing companies can have imprints? I didn’t either, until I watchedYounger, and saw how Hilary Duff’s character got to run a subdivision of a big publishing house that was geared toward a specific market (millennials), under a different brand name than the main company.
Like, okay, when you read a Tessa Bailey book, she’s published by Avon (who you might not have heard of), which is an imprint specifically for romantic fiction of Harper Collins (who you probablyhaveheard of).
That’s sort of the idea of what we’ve done here at the marketing company I help run. Not for romance, mind you, but for different types of marketing services.
At the end of the day, books are books, and marketing is marketing. But I had this idea that specializing in a particularkindof marketing with a separate offshoot of the company would make us not only better at those specific things, but would also make us more valuable to our clients. We don’t fuck with anything but exactly what we’re great at.
I took that approach to my father, convinced him of it, and ever since I’ve been running Darling Digital.
I hope I don’t bore you to death by sharing this, but it’s kind of my baby. Scratch that—with how much of my life goes into it, it’s definitely my baby at this point. Lord knows if I’ll ever have any kids thataren’tthis company, and I won’t be sorry for putting my everything into it. I will try my best, however, to keep this short for you.
See, we have the long-standing, traditional marketing company that caters to a classic market under a decades-old brand, Mitchell Media, and then we’ve kind of started a subdivision of it, Darling Digital, headed by yours truly, that is a little more modern, a little more cutting edge, and more niche.
We embrace the digital age, catering to brands that want to stay fresh in the age of constant change, and the thing has absolutely taken off. We are on track to outpace the “main” company and outperform it in every key metric within the next five years, which is really saying something considering Mitchell Media is one of the top fifty marketing firms in the entire US and has been around for decades. Darling Digital is now a top ten marketing company in Tampa Bay, and we have a bright, bright future. Hence, the reason my dad is looking at an early retirement and letting me take over the entire company within the next ten years, if all goes according to plan.
I may be younger than a lot of the staff here, I may not have a college education or a formal degree, but I wasraisedto run this company.
Other kids got bedtime stories about princesses and talking animals, I got stories about business acumen and lessons on branding. I started out at the bottom of this company as a teenager (literally, I was thirteen and working in the copy room—back in the age when that needed an employee to run it) and have worked myself up through the ranks over the years. (Actually, in just under two more years I’ll be celebrating my twentieth anniversary here, and at only thirty-one, that’s saying something.)
After I graduated high school, I did about six months studying and specializing in each different service we offer—Google ads, social media ads, web design, email marketing—you name it, I’ve put the elbow grease in to learn it and nail it for our clients.
Then I became an account manager, where I oversaw all the aspects of my clients’ campaigns, and was the point of contact for them, ensuring they knew how well our efforts were performing for them, handling any concerns that arose, and upselling them on additional services that could benefit their campaign goals or increase their returns.
