CHAPTER ONE - EMMA

 

 

“Did you ever meet that guy? You know. Like… the one? And suddenly your ordinary life is so much more exciting, sunrises are ten times brighter, random daily sounds become a harmony, and all those revolting smells you hate about the city suddenly turn sweet? Yeah. No. Me either.”

The audience laughs and I pause to let them.

“I’m still waiting for that fucking prince to show up, people!”

They laugh again.

I hold up a finger to tell them I’m not quite done yet and let them settle down. “But listen.” I pause here for dramatic effect. “You don’t need a prince to save you. You just need to find yourself and your people. That is how you find success.”

They don’t believe me. They never do at this point. I mean, I get it. You don’t turn to independent cosmetic sales because you have a ton of options. Most of these ladies—and a few men—are here because something bad happened in their life. Maybe a divorce or a break-up. Maybe someone died. Maybe they have always struggled. Have always taken all the hits and never caught a break before.

Doesn’t matter. They’re here now and the only thing they all have in common is hope.

One last spark of hope that they can turn it around. That this shit life they were born into doesn’t have to be that way. And OK. I’ll admit that independent cosmetic sales isn’t most people’s definition of success, but when you’re in that headspace, when you’re in that downward spiral and your options are so limited you cry yourself to sleep at night praying for some magic opportunity to come along and then we show up?

It’s powerful.

This group right here have already been through all that struggle and strife. They’re already successful. They did it. They made it.

And today it’s my job to inspire them by allowing them to inspire me.

“Let me tell you a little story,” I say. “One day, after a very bad one-night stand gone wrong, I met these…” I turn to look at my three best friends standing on my right. “These brave, smart, beautiful, sexy women. We were all sharing the same walk of shame.” I hold up another hand. “Not together,” I say, letting the audience laugh again. “But with the same man. In the same week.”

Gasps from our astonished audience. Some scowls too. But scowls aren’t for us. They’re not judging us, they’re judging him.

“That’s right. He was dating all four of us at the same time. Granted, it was spring break on Key West and we were young and we all wanted to find our prince. And right before these three left to go home, somehow we all ended up in a bar commiserating about all the bad decisions we made that week. Including the name of this particular—very popular—man. And do you know what happened to us that night?”

I scan the crowd of newbies. Mila, Hannah, Natalie, and I have done this speech hundreds of times now and it never loses its effect on our recruits. Ever.

“We bonded over this,” I say. “We didn’t tear each other down, we built each other up!”

The recruits applaud.

“And two years later we launched our first cosmetics line. And two years after that, we had twenty lines, three hundred and fifty employees, and one of the tallest buildings in the city.”

More applause.

“We stuck together, friends! That’s what we did. We became a team. And thirteen years later we are here, in this auditorium, asking you to join us. To be a member of our team and climb your own private corporate ladder of success!”

Wild cheers. Total enthusiastic commitment.

I go on like that for another thirty seconds, then hand things over to Mila, CEO of our little venture. Mila is all boss, all the time. She excels at things like social media, and newsletters, and webinars. Actually, she does a little of everything and she’s very good at it. Mila is the smallest of us. Just five foot two. Slim, not too shapely, but her cuteness makes up for it. Long dark hair always pulled up in a tight bun, and big, bright eyes. She has two kids—seven and ten—the perfect husband, and scares the shit out of men twice her size when she gets riled up.

She talks about marketing stuff and then hands things over to Hannah, our chemist and chief research officer.

Hannah is almost the exact opposite of Mila. Super tall. Like over six foot. Thin and willowy, Hannah was our face model in the early days. We put her up on billboards and ran infomercials using her as our canvas. But she’s super nerdy. Obviously, since she came to this presentation wearing a white lab coat. She’s in a long-term relationship with a similar nerdy chemist for a pharmaceutical company on floors five through eight.

And when Hannah’s done talking about our proprietary molecular formulas, she hands things off to Natalie.

Natalie is pretty average in every way except for her personality, which is always bubbly and optimistic. Brown-haired, brown-eyed, and about five foot seven, she’s our chief operating officer and networking expert. She’s the one who talked banks into giving us loans and got us the contract for the first building we worked out of. When we bought this building, she negotiated the price down almost ten million dollars. When it comes to making deals you really want Natalie on your side. She’s happily dating four or five men at any one time.

After that Natalie introduces the rest of the sales team bosses and congratulates the room of new recruits for making it to corporate. Every one of them is already a success, but they are here because they are the best of the best. They are in the city because they made a choice to change their lives and leave Kansas, or Idaho, or Alabama or wherever the hell they came from and take a chance on a brand-new future here with us.

We are Bright Berry Beach Cosmetics.

That’s how Mila, Hannah, Natalie and I met that night in the bar. Oh, the asshole dude was real. But he wasn’t really the reason we became friends, he was just our common enemy over drinks.

It was lipstick that brought us together. We were all wearing the same shade of pink. Bright Berry Beach.

I mean, yeah. It’s a lot more complicated than that, but basically… that’s really how it started.

Last week we made Ms. Entrepreneur magazine’s Richest Women in the World list for the seventh year in a row.

We have almost a hundred and twenty cosmetic lines now. We own this whole building and use every single inch of space on the top twenty floors. We employ ten thousand people globally and more than two thousand here at corporate.

We are the definition of success.

And yet… we’re still going through with this plan tonight.

There’s a part of me that’s super-excited about that.

The name of the douchebag man who used us for sex back when we were young and dumb is Jesse Boston.

Oh, yeah. You’ve heard of him. Youngest of the Boston Brothers. Infamous for their money, and their power, and their bad-boy reputations.

Jesse Boston was our inspiration. Just like we inspire this room filled with recruits to be their best and rise to the top, he did that for us.

We vowed one thing that night in the bar during spring break. We made a pact that we would never fall for a handsome face with a big wallet ever again. Instead, we would make our own future. Our own money. We would write the happy end to our own fairytale.

And we did.

So… why are we bothering with Jesse Boston tonight?

Well, we are women, after all. And we were scorned. Quite simply put, we want revenge.

He should not be allowed to treat women like that. He should pay for what he did to us. And he needs to learn his lesson.

We are the perfect women to teach that lesson.

The room erupts into a standing ovation. The accolades are for each other just as much as they are for us and our team. And then they are split up into smaller teams and the process of assimilation into our corporate community proceeds without us.

We leave the stage, Hannah leading the way. “I have to get back to the lab. I’m cooking up a new scent for the Glow line.”

“Go, go, go,” Mila says.

“I have to jump too,” Natalie says. “I have four new department managers who need a lot of handholding.”

“Get them settled,” Mila calls. She turns to me. Even though I’m the CFO—finance is my specialty—Mila is the boss of things. She likes to lead and the rest of us really don’t, so we appreciate her take-charge attitude. “You ready?”

“As I’ll ever be,” I say.

“Good. See you at seven. Don’t be late.”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” I say, just as she rushes though the crowd to head back upstairs.

How to describe me?

Well… I’m basically the girl next door. The nice one. The sweet one. I don’t have Natalie’s firm handshake, or Mila’s venomous tongue, or Hannah’s brilliant mind for molecules.

I’m just the numbers girl.

The single, not-dating one.

The one who never quite got over her night with Jesse Boston when she was eighteen.

The one who relentlessly follows his tabloid exploits.

The one who came up with this plan.