“The kitchen’s just around the corner. You’ll smell it before you see it. I’ll run you through the basics when you come back.” Her desk phone rings, but she pauses and says, “I’m Katie, by the way.”
“It’s nice to meet you. I’m Maddie,” I whisper as she picks up the phone. She points toward the kitchen and gives me an encouraging grin.
After the third or fourth bank of cubicles, the hall makes a sharp turn, and the fragrance of burnt coffee and copy machine toner reaches my nose. The kitchen is a gray tunnel so narrow that I could touch both walls at once, and I do, just ’cause I can. A basket of fruit and packaged treats sit on a sideboard at the back of the room next to a water cooler.
As the coffee brews, I tap my fingers on the white countertop and consider my options. I need to give William a reason to remember my name. A positive reason.
There’s a forgotten pen on the counter, and I use it to give myself a quick tattoo. In big, block letters, I write WWED on the inside of my left wrist.
In this case, I can guess the answer.
I put William’s coffee in the only cup with a matching saucer, peel open a chocolate-dipped biscotti, and lay it at an angle behind the mug. Nothing too fancy, given the scant selection in the kitchen, but it looks better than a Styrofoam cup with coffee sloshing over the side.
William’s office door is open when I get back, so I set my offering on his desk and smile.
He looks at the cup, then up at me, bushy eyebrows peaked. “Did you need something?”
I think a “thank you” might be in order. “No. I was just … do you need anything else?”
“I’ll let you know when I do. Go see Intern. She has assignments for you First Years.”
There’s no questioning the derision in his tone. Being a “First Year” must not being a good thing.
“Yes. Thank you. Okay. Bye.” I grimace as I walk out of the office, shutting the door after me. Did I thank him and tell him goodbye? Speak sentences, Mads. Or say nothing at all.
Intern—I mean, Katie—is leaning out of her cubicle, chair tilted back as far as it can possibly go without tipping over, and has a giant phone pinched between her shoulder and ear. “Ignore him.” She pushes a couple of buttons on the phone before she hangs up. We play a quick round of get to know you. Katie’s almost eighteen but will be a senior in the fall, too. Her parents held her back before kindergarten because her birthday is late, and she was really small for her age.
I don’t mean to notice, but she’s still pretty teeny.
“Your desk will be between mine and Arman’s. He’s an adorable cupcake of a second-year intern. You’ll love him.” She ushers me into a cubicle that is identical to hers, complete with a rolling chair, an L-shaped desk, and a blank calendar. “We’ll check out a laptop and get you all logged into the system.” She points to the cubicle directly across from mine. “That’s where Mara sits; she’s a third-year, shiny black hair, thinks she’s in charge. Javi is another second-year, worshipper of Mara, spends more time in her cube than in his own. They’re all doing Big Important Things, but I’ll try to introduce you at the end of the day. If you’re lucky, you’ll only have to associate with them in small doses.”
“That bad, huh?”
Katie gives me a dramatic eye roll. “Feel free to make your own judgments.” She tugs a paper box out from under her desk and offers it to me, before pulling out a second box for herself. Both are filled to the brim with tabloids from all over the world.
“We’ll spend half our time combing through gossip magazines and news articles looking for dirt on Velocity’s clients. Sometimes it’s boring stuff—like stories in trade magazines—but other times,” she pauses to point at a shirtless actor on the cover of one magazine, “other times, it’s stuff like this.”
The headline reads, “I’ve Made a Lot of Bad Choices,” but eating carbs must not have been among them. Dude’s got abs for days.
I follow Katie to what she calls the Ugly Conference Room. It’s got a big glass-topped table, some rolling chairs, a whiteboard, and a narrow window overlooking the parking garage.
She places folders labeled Bad, Good, and Neutral at the table’s center with a stack of sticky tabs and a handful of highlighters. “Let me explain what we’re doing, then you can tell me all about you while we work.”
We’ve been tasked with digging for stories on some baseball player from Texas who may or may not have thrown a garbage can lid through a restaurant window after he caught his British actress girlfriend kissing her costar.
He totally did it, by the way.
Any mention of the athlete is sorted into one of the files for an executive to review later.
“Major corporations, professional sports teams, and agents hire Velocity to help keep their ‘assets viable’—those are William’s words, not mine. There’s a lot of brand management and event planning stuff.” She plucks the top off a highlighter, running it over the baseball player’s name. “The image cleanup branch is handled mostly by your aunt. If she can make athletes look like decent humans, or at least not caught up in a scandal, they’re more likely to end up on commercials and billboards and endorsing products.”
“Which means more money for everyone.”
Katie has a giant, sparkly smile with movie-star-white teeth. “Exactly.” She kicks back in her chair, feet on the table, magazine in her lap. “Tell me about you and why you’re stuck here for the summer.”
I give Katie the basic rundown of my life—this is my first time away from home, I actually want to work for Velocity when I graduate from college, I love contemporary dance and cake—and she tells me all about training for a triathlon, growing up in the city, and more of the backstory on the three other interns. Each of them is assigned to report directly to one of the executives. They each have “real” assignments, while we’re stuck with the leftovers.
“If we don’t do anything important, how are we supposed to use this for college applications?” I need to do something impressive so that William can write me a glowing letter of recommendation that will help me get early admission to the University of North Carolina—the starting point for the rest of my life.
She shrugs. “What I gathered from Mara, assignments develop throughout the summer. She says you have to jump on any opportunity that is tossed your way.”
I can do that. I’ll find something to pounce on.
Something about Katie’s tone, and the fact that her feet are on the table, makes me think that this internship might not mean as much to her as it does to me. Which I guess is good. If Katie’s not a pouncer, then I’ll be more likely to score a noteworthy project.
Katie keeps up running commentary as she flips through the magazines, pausing every now and then to show me some dress or gasp at some new celebrity coupling.
“Living your life like this must suck,” she says, as she flashes me an article titled “Cellulite before Twenty-Five!” “Of course, you can also afford to have any fat sucked out. So maybe it’s not so bad.”
I grimace and nod at her, running my highlighter over the phrase “steroid-fueled rage,” then add the magazine to the negative folder. Things are not looking good for pretty-boy baseball player, and I’ve only got three hours of experience.