by Billy Taylor
March 27th
Ted decided to come into work with me today. He thought he would catch up with things at work ahead of Monday, and let Autumn and Zac have some time together. He didn’t have anything to catch up on, but I didn’t say otherwise because it would be nice to have someone to talk to at work.
Thirty minutes after lunch, so about 1:30pm, Ted and I were at our desks, throwing a tennis ball back and forth between us. We had nothing to do. Nothing at all. His catching up was going super well. But in all seriousness every possible website and social media post was updated. All our emails had been replied to. We didn’t have any meetings. So the only productive thing left to do was to throw a tennis ball back and forth between us whilst we brainstormed some future ideas to put onto the website and social media pages.
After we’d been throwing the ball backwards and forwards for fifteen minutes, Autumn appeared at our office door.
“Hey!” Ted said.
“Hello, darling,” Autumn said with a grin, holding the door open. She was looking back along the corridor. “Come on,” she said, almost like she was calling a dog to come in from outside.
And then Zac slowly walked in with her arms crossed and her head down so all I could see was the bobble on the top of her beanie. She looked like a child who’d been brought by her mother to come and apologise to one of the teachers at school.
Autumn shut the door behind them. I leant over my desk and tried to look at Zac.
“Hello,” I said.
She glanced up and said, “Hi.”
I looked back at Autumn. “Why is she being weird?” I whispered.
“She’s feeling shy because she thought you would be mad about her coming into your office uninvited,” she replied.
“Aw,” I said. “I’m not mad. Why would I be mad? I’m happy you’re here.”
“Because this is your work and you’re busy and stuff,” Zac answered.
“The first part is true, but the second part isn’t. We’ve been throwing a tennis ball around for a while now to pass the time.”
Autumn walked over and sat on Ted’s lap and kissed him. Zac and I watched them, and then we looked at each other. I held up my hand for a high five, which she returned.
“How come you decided to visit?” Ted asked.
“We thought we’d be good girlfriends and come and visit our boyfriends at work and see how they were,” Autumn replied.
My face suddenly dropped and I was about to correct Autumn. But Ted beat me to it. “Woah! You can’t say the G word in front of Zac.”
Autumn apologised to Zac. “Zac, I’m so sorry. I forget, please forgive me.”
“It’s ok,” Zac said with a smile.
“So what have you two been doing today?” I asked.
“That’s one of the reasons we came to visit you. Zac made an interesting discovery.” Autumn looked over at Zac, hinting for her to take over.
“I put your smoothie in the freezer this morning for you,” she began to say.
“Oh shit, I’m so sorry, Zac. I completely forgot to have my smoothie this morning. I had my soup for lunch though. I swear I did.”
“He did,” Ted supported.
“That’s ok. It’s my fault. I forgot to tell you that I put it in the freezer for you so it would be nice and cold,” Zac said, now moving over and sitting on the edge of my desk. “When I remembered I had left the smoothie in the fridge, I went to take it out, and it had frozen. And then I had an idea. I grabbed a spoon from the draw and took off the lid and scooped out some of the frozen smoothie. And although it looked kinda weird, it actually tasted kinda nice. I told Autumn to try some and she liked it, too. So we dug around the kitchen to find a takeaway tub because they’re better to contain ice cream in, instead of a bottle. And we created some more smoothie and poured it into the takeaway tub and froze that, too. Once it had frozen we took it out and came here to show you, so you could try some. We thought it might help with a future ice cream idea.” She placed the takeaway tub in front of me and gave me a spoon.
It didn’t look too presentable, but after all it was a frozen smoothie in a plastic takeaway tub. I scooped a small amount up and placed it into my mouth. And surprisingly, it tasted fantastic. “This is great,” I said, scooping up some more. The frozen smoothie wasn’t as easy to scoop as ice cream; it was more like a block of ice. “Try some, Ted,” I said, passing it back to Zac so she could take it over to him.
He took the spoon and tried some. He liked it, too. “It looks horrible, but tastes great,” he said. I sort of faded away when they started chatting about it, because although Zac’s frozen smoothie had just given me an idea, another one was approaching me, too.
I stared at the frame on our office wall. Inside the frame are two photos. The first is of me and Ted when we were kids, and we’re sitting in a sandbox in Ted’s back garden, and we’re playing with our toy dinosaurs. Ted is holding a T-Rex and I am holding a Brachiosaurus (one of the really big ones with the long neck). And the second photo is of Ted and I holding the same dinosaurs two or three years ago on our sofas, trying to replicate the image. I’m sure you’re wondering why this is relevant to Zac and Autumn bringing in some frozen smoothie, but when Zac said, “So we dug around the kitchen,” an idea popped into my head.
“Ted, when is the next meeting to propose the new ice cream ideas?” I asked. I think I interrupted their conversation, but I can’t be sure as I’d just reemerged from my daydream.
He rubbed Autumn’s knee as he stared up at the ceiling, trying to find the answer to my question. “I think my dad is going to New York in the next month or two to meet the recipe creating people, and then once they’ve selected some flavours, we have all the surveys and taste tests with our ice cream fans and then some ordinary people so the results aren’t biased.”
“I know how it works, I just wanted to know when the meeting was.”
“Why?” he asked.
“Because I have two ideas.”
“How long have you had these ideas for? Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I only thought them up thirty seconds ago.”
“Did my ice cream help?” Zac asked, all excited. I rose from my chair and took three or four paces before I was in front of Zac. Her arms were still crossed and she looked up at me, waiting for me to answer her question, but then her eyes started to wander as her shyness increased.
I put my hands on either side of her face and then kissed her. She blushed and hunched her shoulders. She smiled her tight-lipped smile over at Autumn and Ted. “Aw,” Autumn said.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “It was like an eureka moment for me, and you and your frozen smoothie provided me with a lot of inspiration.”
“That’s ok. Glad I could help,” Zac replied.
“I told you he would like it,” Autumn said.
“Can we keep your frozen smoothie, please? And can we have the recipe, too, please?” I asked Zac.
“I want some credit for handing my recipe over to you,” she joked.
I then pointed to Ted and said, “No.”
“What?” he said with his mouth ajar, pretending he wasn’t going to say anything.
“You were going to say something like ‘he’ll make it up to you later.’ I could sense it.”
“I wasn’t!” I raised my eyebrow slightly and tilted my head. “Ok, fine. You win.”
Autumn and I laughed while Zac wrote down her recipe on a pad for us. She ripped off the sheet and handed it to me.
“Thank you,” I said to her. “You know what this means,” I said to Ted.
He changed his view from Autumn to me, and took his hand off her knee, his eyes widening. “What does this mean, Will?”
“It means we’re going to need some big whiteboards and lots of coloured pens so we can draw up these ice cream ideas of mine. We can do some ice cream tub designs, too.”
“I love doing ice cream tub designs,” Ted said with a childish look on his face. He looked back at Autumn. �
�Will and I have work to do, gorgeous, you’re going to need to vacate this area.”
“Of course, my darling. I’m glad Zac and I could help.” She got off his lap and stood, then leant over and kissed him.
As I watched them, Zac wrapped her arms around my waist and rested her head against my chest, the top of her beanie tickling my chin. I put my arms around her and hugged her back. It was a nice hug. This was a big moment for us. This was the first time we had ever hugged outside of our apartment.
“I’ll see you later,” she murmured.
“Ok, Captain,” I replied. She let go of me and then looked up at me and fiddled with her beanie. She smiled her tight-lipped smile and then left our office. Autumn followed behind her.
Ted and I got straight to work. Ted went into his dad’s office and asked him if we could present two ideas of ours to him Monday. Ted didn’t even know what the ideas were yet and he was already asking to present them to his dad. It just shows how much we trust each other really. But also the other thing was if we did spend hours working on them we could take them to his dad and he might say he isn’t interested, so it could be a waste of time. Ted’s dad agreed and said we could have fifteen minutes with him Monday.
Ted and I were suddenly fueled by excitement. We grabbed two big whiteboards, the kind that has tripod legs like what some schoolteachers would use. And then we got some whiteboard pens and some notepads. We moved back our desks a little and brought our chairs out from behind them so we could sit in front of the whiteboards. We’d also written on a piece of paper “Do not enter. Geniuses at work” and taped it onto our office door. We’d also shut the blinds so no one could see Ted and I working on our super-secret project.
I stood in front of the two boards as Ted sat in his chair and waited for me to present my two ice cream ideas to him. I wrote at the top of the first board on my left “Captain Panda’s Paradise” and then I wrote at the top of the second board on my right “Dinosaur Disaster.” Then I drew an outline of a large ice cream tub on each board.
“Ok,” I said with my back to him. “I know you’re excited, but please let me explain my ideas first and then you can add your comments afterwards.”
I turned back to Ted who was nodding. “Ok, man. Let’s hear what you’ve got.”
The first thing I did was write down the list of ingredients from Zac’s list onto the Captain Panda’s Paradise board. And Zac’s piece of paper looked like this:
-Bananas
-Milk
-Yoghurt
-Blueberries
That is the order I put them into the bottle to be blended. You can sometimes add frozen fruits and oats. It just depends if you want to mix it up. Zac x
“This is the list that Zac gave me. So obviously Ron’s Ice Cream wouldn’t make it the same way as she did because although it tasted nice and interesting, it didn’t look very appetising.”
“Of course,” Ted said with a nod, trying to not get over excited.
“I’ll start with Captain Panda’s Paradise. I’m thinking we could have a light banana ice cream, almost like banana and vanilla blended together. If it was too strong I think no one would really like it.” Ted nodded and allowed me to continue. “So we have the banana ice cream base. And then what I thought would be brilliant would be to have a blueberry ripple. You know so like numerous blueberry lines running through the banana ice cream?” Ted nodded again. I drew a dome on top of the lid and then drew some lines through it, not breaching the outline. The dome represented the banana ice cream and then the lines represented the blueberry ripple. I drew a line off each and labelled them as such.
“I’m sure you’re still wondering why I have called it Captain Panda’s Paradise. It is because I thought we could add small white chocolate pandas into the ice cream. I thought about adding milk chocolate pandas, too, to sort of symbolise the black and white of a panda’s fur. But milk chocolate is brown so that wouldn’t really work; that’s why I thought it would be best to only have white chocolate pandas.” I drew a few small squiggly circles inside the dome, but I made sure they didn’t interfere with the ripple lines. I then labelled them as pandas. “As for the design on the tub, obviously we have the Ron’s Ice Cream template. But the design idea I had for this was that we could have a panda as a pirate. He is holding a sword and wearing a pirate hat, and the treasure is blueberries and bananas. He’s a friendly pirate, not an angry, bloodthirsty pirate. I’m not going to draw that because it would look nothing like I just described.”
“I can visualise what you’re saying,” Ted assured.
“Ok, great. I think because Ron’s Ice Cream has started selling very well in China, too, the panda ice cream could be a hit over there because pandas live in China, right?”
“Right,” Ted replied.
I stepped next to the whiteboard with “Dinosaur Disaster” written on it. “The explanation behind this one is a bit simpler. I thought we could blend chocolate and vanilla ice cream together, so when you open the tub it looks like the ice cream is swirling like a vortex. And then I thought we could add milk chocolate T-Rex skulls, and maybe other dinosaur bones. And the idea is you dig through the ice cream to the find the remains of the dinosaurs.”
I could see the excitement in Ted’s eyes. He stood and started clapping. “You thought all that up in thirty seconds?” he asked.
“Pretty much,” I replied. His applause continued. “So what do you think?” I asked.
“I love it,” he answered. “So what is your plan now? Where do you want to start?”
“I think we should start right away on making a visual representation of what the ice cream will look like. That’s the most important part. If we waste all our time on tub designs, it could all be for nothing because they’ll have some proper artists design one if they decide to go with the flavours.”
“Ok. The ice cream visuals will take me an hour, maybe not even that long. I can just generate them from previous ice cream images and then fiddle with the colours and things. The most time-consuming part is going to be making chocolate T-Rex skulls and pandas, but I can make that happen,” Ted said, already dragging his desk out to begin the visuals on his computer. Ted is pretty good at graphic design. He studied it at college. “Why don’t you prepare what we will say to my dad? I know it’s kinda self-explanatory, but it’ll help to have some printouts or details or whatever so he can keep them.”
“Yeah, that’s what I was going to do. I thought we could print it all out later onto the A2 paper-sized boards and take them home with us so we could show them to Zac and Autumn. We could have a practice presentation with them. I’d like Zac to see the flavours before we show your dad, too, since she was the main source of inspiration behind it.”
“That’s a great idea, Will. I’m so pumped up right now! This is going to look fantastic!” Ted said, jumping up and down on his seat.
Meanwhile I typed up some details about each ice cream and what audiences they would appeal to.
“Did you have an idea for the design on the tub of the dinosaur flavour? We got so excited we forgot to mention that,” Ted asked, clicking his mouse and focusing on his computer screen.
“I actually had a funny idea for that one. I thought we could have a paleontologist in a museum display with a chocolate T-Rex skull, and then there’s a human bite mark taken out of it.”
Ted sniggered. “Yeah that does sounds funny.”
“Or we could have an ice cream meteorite heading straight for earth. So it’s implying that the dinosaurs were wiped out by an ice cream meteorite instead of a real one.”
Ted sniggered again. “That’s funny, too. If I have time, I will draw both of them up.”
“You just take your time and make sure the visuals look as realistic as possible.”
“Don’t worry, Will,” Ted said, taking his vision away from his computer screen for a moment to look at me. He squinted at me dramatically and said, “I got this.”
Ted finished the visuals in fo
rty-seven minutes, and they looked fantastic. I thought he would struggle creating the chocolate pandas and T-Rex skulls and bones, but he nailed it. And then two hours later, he’d finished the tub designs, too. I didn’t have anything to do during that time, so I ate the rest of the smoothie ice cream that Zac had left us, and then I sat beside Ted and watched him create the designs. We printed everything onto A2-sized boards. They came out so well. We laid them out in our office and admired them for a couple of minutes, and then Ted placed a hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m proud of us. These look great.”
“I agree,” I replied.
“So, how were things with Zac while we were away?” Ted asked as I drove us home.
“Good. Did you not hear the discussion I had with Autumn when we drove home from the airport?”
“Nope. I was asleep.”
“I said it felt like we were actually in a relationship.”
“That’s good! Did you speak about it to Zac at all or was it just the feeling?”
“No, we didn’t talk. We kissed and cuddled a lot while you were away. And when she first created the rules cuddling wasn’t allowed. And kissing was only allowed in the bedroom.”
“Wow.”
“Joke all you like. But it was nice, you know, to wake up and see her lying on me or be holding her.”
“I know what you mean. I love waking up to see Autumn’s head on my chest.”
“Yeah. I think Zac might be some kind of ninja.”
Ted laughed. “What makes you say that?”
“Because I’ll go to sleep in bed and I wake up and her entire body is lying on me, and I think how on earth did she get there without me noticing? It’s scarier on the sofa. I’ll close my eyes for two seconds and then when I open them she’s lying in front of me. Scared the hell out of me the first time.”
Ted laughed again. “So what do you think is going to happen now?”
“I don’t know what we’re anymore. I feel like we’re slowly merging into something serious if that makes sense.”
