Painting Sage

by Rachael K Hannah

  “Personally, I love these smoothies,” Jessa said as she reached into the fridge and pulled out a bottle containing this dense, dark green, putrid-looking liquid. “They’re super-energizing, and def help get me through the day. Want one?”

  “That looks wretched,” I said, wrinkling my nose in obvious disgust.

  “Don’t let your eyes fool you. These go by real quick here,” Jessa said. “A lot of people like to grab one before they hit the gym upstairs, especially on Monday nights when Kenya leads intermediate yoga. She’s an amazing instructor. Super-energizing.”

  This place has a gym? I tried picturing Dad in lotus pose, namaste-ing everyone before demanding nineteen quirky yet trendy ways to declare, Nailed it! For a sponsor’s latest project.

  “I think I’ll pass,” I replied.

  “Oh, well, suit yourself,” Jessa said, slightly snippily. Then, just as abruptly, she continued, “So, not in school today?” I could tell she was revving up for yet another interminable diatribe. “What brings you here? Are you interested in copywriting, too, or are you more of an editorial writer? I know some people around here can get pretty snooty over the difference. Have you seen your dad’s work? Oh, I’m sure you have. Isn’t it amaze? He was recently promoted. They’re opening an office in Chicago, and for like a second, I thought he was going to trans—”

  “I’m not really a fan,” I interrupted with a lie. “I’m here because I was expelled from school last Thursday.” I folded my arms across my chest petulantly and slightly stuck out my right foot, leaning all my weight onto that side.

  “Oh?”

  “Yeah. This girl made fun of me because I spent a month in a mental hospital, so I broke her nose.”

  “Is that right?” Jessa asked, rather uneasily. With a single finger, she pushed up the glasses that had slowly started to slip down her pert nose. I hadn’t noticed before, but her irises were rather large and almost violet in color. As they visibly widened, she appeared even younger than I had initially suspected.

  “It’s all over social media—turns out it was an expensive nose.”

  Crickets.

  “She’s getting a new one, though,” I continued. “And she’s kinda a real big jerk who’s a pro at the whole plastic surgery thing by now anyway, so no worries.” There. That ought to shut Jessa up.

  “Well, would you look at that?” Jessa held up her phone for me to see, as if to validate her overly eager departure. “Maliek just texted. The debrief is starting right now. Why don’t I take you over?”

  Perfect.

  “Sure thing!” I exclaimed rather chirpily while cramming three croissant donuts, two monster-sized energy drinks, and a blueberry muffin into my messenger bag.

  As we headed back through the hall and towards Conference Room North Side, I started having serious second thoughts about that whole promise to behave myself. Before coming, I thought I’d be nervous, but still cool with seeing all this and even learning the ropes a bit. It was a big lie that I wasn’t interested in advertising or online media. Almost everyone I knew had downloaded the FEADURHEDZ app.

  “Here it is.” Jessa politely held the door open, leading me into the conference room. Upon entering, I sucked in my breath sharply, completely floored by what I saw. It was something, to say the least—practically a New York City cliché within itself.

  Aside from being ridiculously spacious with immense, towering ceilings, the room was filled with the most up-to-date, state-of-the-art tech everything you could possibly find—from outrageously enormous flat-screen TVs to interactive whiteboards and gadgets I had never even seen before. Three of the four walls, where someone had hung up various pieces of eclectic and intriguing modern artwork, were seemingly illuminated by countless aluminum ceiling light fixtures. The fourth, a single long wall composed of dark red brick, stood out in absolute stark contrast. In the center of the room sat a massive and bulky hand-carved wooden table, complete with matching armchairs.

  The four of them were already seated. It seemed almost absurdly comical to hold such an intimately sized gathering in this mammoth of a room. Yet there they were: Dad sat at the head with Sheila to his right and Maliek to the left. Another exceptionally attractive young woman, whom I surmised was Tuyen, was fumbling with the chord of her laptop as she tried charging it to an outlet mounted under the table. When she was finally settled and took her seat, she smoothed her blue and black streaked hair over her petite shoulders and flashed me a most stunning smile.

  “OMG, is that her?” Tuyen practically gushed, obviously motioning over toward me.

  “Mike, you never said how adorable she is. She’s like an anime character,” Maliek added.

  They were talking about me?

  “Isn’t she?” agreed Jessa. “Those huge eyes.”

  “That’s enough.” Dad held up his hand. “Yes, this is my lovely and talented daughter, Sage. Sage, this is Maliek, Tuyen,” he paused, his voice noticeably deepening, “and Sheila.”

  “Hi, Sage,” Sheila greeted warmly.

  “Hey,” I responded, followed by a moment of uncomfortable silence.

  “Well, I’ll leave you guys,” Jessa said. “Mike, if you need me, just text.” She waved cheerfully before leaving the room.

  “Come, have a seat.” Dad motioned me toward the table. “Sage is visiting today, like I said earlier. She’s just here to learn a bit about what we do here. Sage, we’re working on a sponsor’s project titled ‘Ten Things I Love About You,’” he winced and then continued. “We completely realize how lame that title sounds.”

  “Which is part of our challenge,” Sheila jumped in. “We need to make something so cliché sound, well, not. We need it to sound inviting to our audience.”

  “Why can’t you just change the title?” I asked, taking the seat next to Tuyen.

  “The client picked it,” Dad explained.

  “But it’s stupid,” I countered. And the room, again, grew unpleasantly quiet.

  Dad cleared his throat and then tried again patiently. “Well, like Sheila said, it’s about working through what the client wants and making it… more accessible and desirable to our audience. As you can guess, we’re a little behind on schedule. So, let’s con—”

  “But I still don’t get it,” I interrupted, refusing to buy into it. “You’re all writers. Why should you compromise your talent for what is clearly a craptastic idea?”

  Dad grinned at me as if about to explain something incredibly complex to an impetuous three-year-old child. “Because we don’t pick the client, Sage. The client picks us.” He turned to his team, “As I was saying—”

  “But why not tell the client it’s a stupid waste of—”

  “Sage.” There was a pause, and then Dad exhaled. “This isn’t editorial. That’s the twenty-third floor.”

  “Sorry.” I stared down at my hands as they flattened against the table. Clearly, I didn’t understand the business world as well as he did.

  As the four of them continued working, I listened wordlessly while they engaged in a game of wordplay, bouncing off ideas left and right. Truthfully, they all sounded incredibly idiotic, and I was terribly disappointed by the entire brainstorming process—if you could even call it that. I had read Dad’s material before. It was always razor-sharp and biting, apologetic to no one. Jessa had mentioned an expansion in Chicago. Was that behind this? Is this what happens when a media outlet gets bigger? Does it lose its voice and edge and trade innovativeness for trite security? They were conferencing over an ad for sneakers, of all things.

  Even worse, throughout their entire conversation, I tried not to look over at Sheila, but it was admittedly hard. Wearing an oversized red and black plaid shirt over matching black leggings, she barely looked older than a wide-eyed Tisch School undergrad as she incessantly flipped her hair over one shoulder. Her face was almost perfectly proportioned, except for a remarkably prominent bump on the bridge of her nose. It would have looked harsh, perhaps even odd, on anyone else’s face. But on
Sheila, it strangely added to her distinct attractiveness. As she leaned in towards Dad, at one point even playfully tapping a finger against his broad shoulders, I felt my blood boil. She was close, too close, lost in his eyes—the same hazel-green as my own—and hanging on his every clichéd word.

  I begrudgingly pulled a croissant donut from my messenger bag and picked it at quietly but messily, my eyes slowly filling with severe indignation.

  “Croissant donut!” Maliek cried suddenly as if experiencing a spectacular eureka moment. “Croissant donuts… ten things I love about you… something involving waiting in line at that place—”

  “That could work!” agreed Tuyen. She looked up excitedly at Dad. “What do you think?”

  Dad scowled. “I don’t know. Is the croissant-donut thing even that much of a thing anymore? Last time I checked, it’s all about muffins now.”

  I looked down at my breakfast, back at them, and then asked incredulously, “What are you even talking about?”

  Sheila shook her head, “I don’t know. Everyone loves them, but there are so many imitations out there now. You’re right, though. Muffins are a thing. Croissant donuts were big, like three years ago. It’s all about cookie dough now.”

  “This,” I pointed to my snack, “is a thing,” I argued for the simple sake of being contrary. I hadn’t a clue as to whether croissant donuts or muffins or even brownies were a thing. I was just determined to say the exact opposite of whatever Sheila was saying.

  “Really?” Dad asked skeptically.

  “Sure. A bunch of kids brought them to school all the time.” It wasn’t a total lie.

  “Well, our audience is a bit older than that,” said Dad.

  “Does that make such a difference?” I asked.

  He nodded affirmatively. “It does. We’re geared more towards the twenty-something crowd… say, Sheila’s generation.”

  I threw down my pastry, hitting the table with a sharp smack.

  “Sheila is like, two years older than me, Dad.”

  He cleared his throat. “Actually, Sheila, Maliek, and Tuyen are all in their mid-twenties. That’s a good decade older than you, Sage.”

  My eyes narrowed as I instantly registered the sarcasm blatantly dripping from his voice. “Really? Because she,” I pointed a finger accusatorily in Sheila’s direction, “barely looks

  old enough—”

  “Sage!” Dad’s voice rose more noticeable.

  “It’s disgusting.” I slammed my hand against the table for melodramatic emphasis.

  “Oh, my,” Maliek murmured underneath his breath.

  “Excuse us.” Dad rose from his chair and then unexpectedly slammed it against the table. “My office, Sage. Now.”

  “No offense.” I turned to Maliek. “You seem like a great guy, but your idea sucks.”

  “MY OFFICE, SAGE!”

  Just as intensely, I leaped up from my armchair and slammed it against the other side of the table. Fuming, I exited Conference Room North Side with Dad close on my tail. As we headed straight for his office, Jessa, obnoxiously cheerful and oblivious, popped up from behind her desk.

  “Mike, is there anything—”

  “Not now, Jessa. You,” he gestured furiously at me, “in there!”

  “Fine!” I yelled, stumbling far more awkwardly than I had wished into his office, feeling my face grow flush with rage.

  “Sit down,” he commanded.

  “No!”

  “Sit down!”

  I threw myself down on his sofa and flung my arms defensively against my chest. It took every ounce of strength I had not to burst into tears.

  “What did I even do?” I demanded.

  “Oh, no. We’re not playing that game where you pretend to have no idea what’s going on. This is my job, Sage. Those are my employees. What you did in there was beyond disrespectful—”

  “And what you did in here was beyond disrespectful to Abby, and Mom!” I shouted, and then slapped my palm against my mouth as soon as the words left my mouth.

  He opened his mouth to say something in defense but quickly closed it. He then began pacing around the room, agitated, for a while, before he finally sat down on the sofa next to me.

  “Where were you around 6 p.m. last night?” Dad asked.

  “At your house.”

  “We were all at my house. Specifically, where in the house were you?”

  Busted.

  Reading my silence, he continued, “I’m going to infer that you overheard the conversation I had with your mother.”

  I lost the battle. The tears freed themselves from my eyes, like tipped buckets.

  “Sage, why didn’t you knock on the door? Why didn’t you just say something to us?”

  “I don’t know,” I muttered.

  “Don’t give me that.”

  “I searched her online,” I exclaimed. “She’s barely older than me, and I don’t understand what’s wrong with Abby. And Miles. And Finn.”

  Dad sighed. “Sage, you only see me once every other weekend. There is a lot wrong with my situation right now… You’re too young to understand this—”

  “I’ll be sixteen in a couple months—”

  “It’s not appropriate for a parent to load this type of information onto a child.”

  “I don’t want to go to Brooklyn. I don’t care if it’s the place to be. If it’s a thing,” I spat.

  Dad leaned back against the sofa, closing his eyes as he sunk into it deeply. “That doesn’t give you a license to throw a temper tantrum at the office.”

  In many ways, I felt it did. Was it immature? Yes. Was it a clear sign that I needed to work a bit more on those coping skills that Dr. Warner had mentioned? Probably. But it just wasn’t fair. Every time I felt remotely close to making sense of anything, someone just came along and ruined it. I felt like a little kid trying to build a tower with blocks only to have the preschool bully come along and knock it down. And this time, Dad was responsible.

  “Well, if Sheila’s going to be in a relationship with you, she needs to learn how to handle me,” I justified. “I’m prone to outbursts, and I’m not going to stop now just to make her feel more comfortable.”

  “Are you even listening to yourself? Prone to outbursts?”

  “Are you even listening to yourself? What kind of nonsense were you even working on in there? You’ve written better things than that trash.”

  “That trash is going to help pay for The Tillman School, which I can also assume you know about.”

  I remained silent.

  “That trash is how we even have an in with that school to begin with. Look, this is how the real world works. In your world, you can punch classmates in the face and insult young professionals at the workplace. Maliek, by the way, has an MFA in creative writing and worked a little too hard in his life for the nonsense you pulled in there. When you’re an adult, sometimes you have to make choices that you’re not too happy about.”

  “Dad, I know.”

  “No, I don’t think you do really know. Everyone in that room works on great material, both here and on their own time. If I just decided to throw caution to the wind and tell my employer to go to hell, Miles and Finn would feel it. You would feel it. God, Sage. When I was your age, your grandma broke the bank just to send me to Catholic school. Grandpa Thomas made the same sacrifice for your mother. So did Uncle Connor’s parents. Do you even realize how lucky you are?”

  Lucky was probably the least colorful adjective I would use to describe me or my current situation. With a loud and heavy sigh, I replied, “Throw caution to the wind? What? Are you quoting Mom now?”

  Ignoring my blatant sarcasm, he continued, “Part of this is my fault because I act more like a friend with you, probably because I didn’t know my own father… so it’s hard to know what to do or know what to say all the time. But, really, what am I supposed to do with you now?”

  I refused to answer.

  “You’re going to apologize to them.”
/>   “Fine,” I muttered under my breath.

  Dad stood up from the couch and crossed over to the door. Lowering his hand onto the doorknob, he began to turn it and then hesitated. It lingered there for an uncomfortable amount of time until he finally looked at me and said, “I’m going back in there now to do some damage control. I want you in that room in five minutes. You owe the three of them an apology, and before you even open your mouth to deliver it, you’re going to count to ten. And, Sage, while you’re counting to ten, you’re going to erase every nonsensical smart-mouth comment that might even have a chance of passing through your head.”

  “Fine,” I repeated.

  But it wasn’t fine.

  And with that, Dad twisted the door handle, exited quietly, and left me alone to think about what I had done. The problem was that the more I thought about it, the more I believed my actions were justified. As I examined his office, my gaze fell upon a photograph on his desk of Miles and Finn. Right next to it sat a portrait taken my freshman year at Dayton, just days after I’d gotten my God-awful braces. I had never really noticed just how much my younger step-brothers looked like me, and now I’d be lucky if I ever saw them again.

  Apologize? No, that wasn’t happening.

  Ever more determined, I stood up, smoothed my hands down the fading fabric of my worn black denim pants, straightened my back, and walked out into the hall. Turning to Jessa, I looked her straight in the eye and said, “I’m going downstairs to the lobby for a bit. Dad will be there soon.”

  Jessa looked up somewhat absentmindedly from her tablet. “Really?”

  “Yup,” I lied. “He knows exactly where I’ll be.”

  As I headed out of the office, down the elevator, and out through the main doors, I didn’t feel the slightest sense of guilt or regret. If I’m so important, and he’s determined to play Father of the Year all of a sudden, he can figure this one out. Stepping out onto the sidewalk, I carefully walked over to the curb, threw up my arms, and attempted something I had seen numerous times but had never actually tried myself.