Page 17 of All Superheroes Need PR
“Some of the other ideas in your presentation were what I believe Mr. Casteel was referring to. Liaising with the COE, for example, acting as his representative with brands. That kind of thing—though, of course, I am not the expert.” He gives me a smile that should feel reassuring but doesn’t.
I nod and continue reading aloud. “Salary and details to be fixed at a later date?” I say, frowning as I read the words.
“The Pyro’s PR budget is $180 million, Ms. Theriot. That’s salaries and ad spend. Your hardware budget and office space rentals are included under a different line item. I trust that from that pot,you’ll be able to carve out a nice salary for yourself as both head of his PR managementandhis personal representative, no?”
One hundred and what? I think I black out for a moment. That’s ... huge. Huge. The largest ad budget I’ve ever worked on was $2 million. One hundred and eighty ... I shake my head, trying to snap out of it, and when I come to, that icy cold feeling of suspicion licks at my heels even as I take the pen he holds toward me.
I can’t help but look at Mr. Singkham’s signature in the blank space below the crude contract. Harsh scribbles. What surprises me is the signature below that. Large but neat, Mr. Casteel’s signature takes up more than its fair share of space, but it’s beautiful really. Making a decision that would have had my first boss, a wonderful South African woman who taught me everything I know about marketing and running a business today, sobbing into a handkerchief, I sign below Mr. Casteel’s name.Roland Casteel.My mind flashes to last night. He told me to call him Roland—or did I drunkenly hallucinate that?
“He’s, um ... I have some social anxiety, Mr. Singkham.” And PTSD. Mild to moderate PTSD is how past doctors have classified it, but nothing about the way I feel when confronted with violence feels mild or moderate to me. “If Mr. Casteel is serious about this, he’s going to have to learn to work with me too.”
“Mr. Casteel has been made aware that his attitude in our last business meeting won’t be tolerated. I would like to have your team back in the office Wednesday to sign the final papers for the official contract between our two companies. The Pyro will be but a cool ember when you meet with him then, Ms. Theriot. He has assured me.”
I watch him tuck the papers I just signed away in his inside jacket pocket and whisper, “No.”
“No?”
I blink. “Sorry. Wednesday works for our team, Mr. Singkham. I was just already thinking ahead of myself to the name.”
“The name? His name? The Pyro?”
“Yes. Along with his gruff attitude, that’s the first thing my team and I would like to get rid of.”
“What name did you have in mind?” He smiles broadly, looking far too much like the cat who caught the canary, making that tension in my stomach tighten.
As I explain to him some of the ideas my team and I came up with, I can all but feel that paper burning a hole through his pocket, mocking me. I’m missing something.
But I know my proposal, and I read the contract; I negotiate contracts in my sleep. It can’t be anything serious—that really affects me. And that’s what I tell myself, and my parents and my brothers when I go back inside after Mr. Singkham leaves, and they pop a bottle of bubbly to celebrate me—even if Vinny and Charlie and, well, all of them are still holding a deep, deep grudge against the Pyro for the events of the previous evening.
That’s what I repeat to myself as I make my way back to my town house in the city, crawl into my bed, and stare at the ceiling.
But the one question that wakes me up three hours later, shivering with cold sweat? The one that I realize only now I should have demanded Mr. Singkham answer on the spot in my parents’ driveway?
From the first moment he saw me, Mr. Casteel acted like I shat in his soup and ripped the heads off his dolls—like we’d been two members of rival families in a lifetime that came before—and now he wants to work with me closely for a decade?
Nuh-uh. No way. This is a dumb, dumb idea. Because if my team was sure that he was a villain deep in his heart, then I just signed on topersonallydo the bad guy’s PR.
The amount of expletives I shout into my pillow as I try and fail to fall asleep are enough to overflow Elena’s jar.
All I can do now is pray that my stomach settles, that my team was wrong, and that our meeting this week with Mr. Casteel theChampiongoes smoothly.
Chapter FiveVanessa
I’ve never been in a more tense meeting in all my life, and I’m including the last time I was in this exact room. It’s so tense, I’d call it painful. The last meeting had been painful, but this is pain of an entirely new and considerably less pleasant variety.
I shuffle in my seat, wanting to toss the rolling chair back and run. I’d prepared for this, been so prepared. But I couldn’t have prepared forthis.
My team and I strategized every possible scenario as we worked and reworked plan after plan and cobbled together clause after clause to finally complete a contract. We worked through Sunday and late into the night Monday and Tuesday before finally getting something together that we were happy with and that we could present today. I was thrilled with my team’s work and wished I could reward them with a few extra days off, but we would have to hit the ground running; our first press release would be tomorrow, and there we’d announce Mr. Casteel’s new name—the $180 million brand.
“One foot in front of the other.” That’s what Margerie said to me at the end of our first team meeting Sunday morning, in a very different tone than the one she’d arrived with when she’d all but shouted, “Emergency PR overhaul to redirect the narrative?” and stumbled intoour small office, prepared to throw down to help clean up the mess I’d made—literally and figuratively—when I threw up all over our newest client.
Even though it was only April, Margerie showed up on Sunday in a summer dress and heels and sunglasses that made her look like a celebrity trying to remain anonymous. She was the last person to arrive to our small office. The shock on her face seeing my entire twenty-two-person team stuffed into our not-quite-big-enough conference room was priceless.
“Not quite,” I answered with a grimace. “I actually called you all here to let you know that Mr. Casteel changed his mind.”
“Changed his mind?” Margerie looked around, taking a seat on a high stool against the wall next to Melody, one of two legal associates working under Jem. “On what?”
“Everything.” I swallowed hard. I was dressed in an oversize button-up with leggings underneath. Some unfortunate combination of still hungover but trying to be professional. “He wants to join the Champions, and he wants our team on the long-term contract.” The cheers that went up after that only happened after a long moment of utter astonishment as I explained to them what had happened in my driveway yesterday morning.
