His Nasty Little Pussy

BRADY

I stood at the head of the boardroom dressed in my finest suit. Half a dozen of the most important people in the marketing business sat in a semicircle across from me, their expressions interested but skeptical. My heart raced as I glanced toward the door. Tess was ten minutes late.

Although I had always planned to be the one to give the speech, I knew that having her here would make this whole thing more relatable. That it would increase our chances of getting full support.

While I had enough money on my own to invest in the product, if there was one thing I’d learned in the marketing business, it was that money wasn’t everything. Connections created success. I could finance a product all on my own, but marketing went way beyond an initial investment.

I needed connections with the department stores that would advertise my client’s product in their malls, slapping posters across every available wall space and stocking it in their stores.

I depended on my relationships with Hollywood agents who knew producers and directors to direct commercials that would fight for the product to be displayed on television during high traffic times.

These same people also incorporated the use of product placement in film and television, slipping the products into the storyline for extra exposure. In the past, they even brokered deals with A-List celebrities to attach their name to the item.

There were also manufacturers who could mass produce the product in short times and high volumes.

And this was just the domestic market. It didn’t even scratch the surface of the foreign market.

Yes, marketing was much more than just about me being rich. With time, I came to realize the constant urgency that plagued every single person who worked in this business. One minute loss equaled thousands of dollars that could have been funneled somewhere else.

It was because of that that I knew that I would have to start without Tess. Fortunately, I had prepared for this. Although she’d insisted that she would make it, I knew the woes of food poisoning. From a personal experience, I knew it could knock a grown adult man on his ass for two to three days or even more.

“My apologies for the delay,” I said. “My business partner fell ill yesterday. I thought she might make it today, but it appears that it might not be the case. Let’s get started, shall we?”

I grabbed a remote and pointed it at a projector screen on the wall behind me. Clearing my throat, I quickly ran over my plan in my mind, prepared to sell this product more than I’d ever sold anything before.

I’d spend the greater part of the night before preparing an emergency scenario, expecting that Tess might not show. And that was where my money had come in handy. In the same way I’d convinced Quincy to skip a day to shoot a commercial, I paid professionals to expedite the process that would enable me to be extra prepared for today.

My prior contacts in Hollywood had linked me up with some exceptional editors who could enhance even the blurriest of photos, transforming them into a spectacle of magic. It was to those editors that I’d sent over two photographs: the one I’d taken of Tess at the Hampton beach house and a photo from her childhood.

Cal was the one who had gotten me that childhood photo. He’d worked overtime the night before to scour the yearbooks to find a handful of photographs of Tess as a kid. Out of the six that he’d found, I chose one from her adolescence, and I picked that particular photo for several reasons.

I turned off the lights, pressed a button on the remote, and the image of Tess appeared on the wall in front of the table.

“I’d like to introduce you all to Tess Perkins.”

In the photograph, Tess was in her high-school chemistry class, wearing an apron and goggles while holding two beakers in one hand.

It not only painted an image of the intelligent scientist she would become, but it showed her in almost the exact position of the photo I’d taken of her in the kitchen, her body twisted at a three-quarter angle to look at the camera behind her. The photo also displayed the severity of her acne, the thick ripple of pustule red bumps clearly evident.

She hadn’t been joking about that. And seeing the severity of the cystic pimples, combined with the exquisite smoothness of her current skin, only made me believe in Perkins Formula much more.

“Everyone can relate to the struggle of adolescence, the mean kids in school who have no shame, who bully others to make themselves feel better without any awareness of the repercussions of their behavior. Perhaps, no one could relate more to this than Tess Perkins.

“You see, there were two things Tess Perkins always yearned to have in life: to find professional success so that she could make her father proud and to just feel pretty enough to fit in. The first was easy. Science was second nature to her…but the second, well, as you can see, Tess wasn’t exactly your stereotypical definition of beauty.

“She wasn’t a cheerleader, she didn’t depend on her looks to get things in life. On the contrary, she used her mind to do that. She kept her head down, she focused on school. Not only did she graduate valedictorian, but she got a full scholarship to NYU, where she graduated with a Ph. D. in Chemistry.

“Now, with the story I’ve told you all, what do you imagine Tess Perkins looks like now in your mind’s eyes? Glasses. Maybe a few extra pounds? Some leftover scars on her face from self-consciously picking at her pimples as a child? Single with six cats?”

The men in the room chuckled, and my shoulders relaxed. I’d been in this business long enough to recognize that this was a good sign. Humor was something I always attempted to use in these meetings, and I often judged how well I was doing based on the reactions of my audience.

If people were looking at their phones, then I was in trouble. But to my delight, everyone in the room was looking directly at me. I had captured their attention.

I smiled, my posture relaxing. “What if I told you that this is Tess Perkins today?”

I pressed the remote again. The first photo of Tess disappeared and was replaced by the photo I’d taken just yesterday.

The editor had done a fantastic job. Fortunately, the original photo hadn’t been blurry at all, but they had sharpened it either way, expanding the pixels so that it could be blown up to fill the wall across from the table.All content © N/.ôvel/Dr/ama.Org.

While I preferred hiring professional photographers to do the work for me, I knew that this wasn’t a photo that could be recreated. The editor had gone pixel by pixel to sharpen it, making every color, every aspect of the kitchen and Tess stand out. It was more expensive than hiring a photographer, but it was worth it to keep and use this shot.

“Now, what if I told you that Tess Perkins invented the product that cleared up her face?”

I pressed the remote again, and two more images appeared on the screen. One of Tess in her lab coat, holding a bottle of Perkins Formula, and a second of her accepting the Fresh Face award from me at the award ceremony.

It was at this point that I turned to the two women in the room. One of them was a middle-aged woman, a producer for mainstream commercials. The other was my sister, Brooke, except that unless you knew her very well, it was impossible to tell it was her. Large sunglasses shielded half her face, and she wore a wide brim hat that was connected to a wig of dirty blonde hair, disguising her normal color.

“You mean to tell me that this girl created that formula?” Brooke asked, adding a crisp and perfect British accent.

“That’s exactly what I’m saying.”

My eyes darted to the producer, a woman named Meredith Plier. She had a reputation for turning down eighty percent of her proposals, and the twenty percent she hired always went to find immense success-mainly because her connections to Hollywood ran deep.

I’d been trying to land her for most of my career but never managed to get even close. When I discovered Meredith had agreed to come to the meeting, I knew I needed another woman to join.

Women were going to be our target audience-they would make up ninety percent of those who would buy this cream. Having another woman present was pivotal to showing interest because I knew how Meredith worked. She wouldn’t accept a product that she didn’t see success in. And in order to see success, she needed to know that the intended target audience would take an interest in the product.

Using Brooke to show interest was one hundred percent cheating… except not in the traditional sense. It was cheating to get to Meredith, not cheating to sell this product. I knew that with a little push, Perkins Formula would sell all on its own.

“How does it work?” Brooke asked.

“Well, you see,” I said. “Ms. Perkins originally aimed to create a cream to help her acne. She used herself as a test subject. As it turned out, that was more simple than it sounded. Her first test cream smoothed out wrinkles. Her second test cream added moisture to the cells. When she combined the two of them to create a third cream, her acne started to clear up. And the previous side effects lasted. This cream is proven to shave years off women’s faces.”

“Hell,” one of the men laughed. “Does it work for guys?”

“In fact, it does,” I said. “That will be one of our first rollout plans, developing a counterpart container that appeals to men instead of women. However, our target market in the first twenty-four months will be women.”

I dared a glance at Meredith. She sighed, tapping the end of her pen on the table, her wrinkles spreading around her eyes. “How long does it take to work?”