RESEARCH ( barry berkman.. ) ✔

o1. perfect person..

Be the type of person you would enjoy being around.

Adelaide smiled again through yet another board meeting with the editorial which has been with her since her early debut with poetry about the time she was thirteen and hardly as knowledgeable. For a kid with her repertoire, everything seemed to good to be true and that was what made it so easy to fall for greatness. Yet her writing declined and even though her failure stood in a two volume novel series published over the recent five year, her entire career was getting dug up and criticized.

"We cannot go back the poetry route again," Mason Burke, owner of the BrittBurke publishing house, frowned to the two editors which have been representing Adelaide since forever at his table, from the time it was just a thin kitchen desk. Now, it grew into whiteness, into a huge office, with tall glass windows and much more light than a lightbulb could have offered in the past. Adelaide Grayson's success built them up and they were not yet strong enough to let her go without getting a bad publicity.

"Yes," his advisor, the supple and strict Vivian Hull, nodded, as serious as ever. On the very tip of her nose, her tiny glasses gained her attention as she straightened in her seat to watch the screen of her telephone. "Indeed, that vague poetry may have stirred some interest when she was just a child, but right now, it is already seen as quite deplorable and pitiful."

"Unrealistic," Mason remembered the reviews he also read. Those one-star commentaries have left stain they did not appreciate, reason behind the quick assembly of this meeting, to fix Grayson's career before they lose all the so important public.

Adelaide's hair was damp, dripping water on the single dirty towel in her car she'd usually use for wiping her rear windshield ━ her wiper on the back got stolen in the parking lot a few month ago. That smutch filled towel was "warming" her shoulders in a try of hers to avoid leaving water everywhere she went. There was not much she could do though about the fact that underneath her already slightly wet clothes was a one piece swimming suit.

When George and Yahir, her editors and representatives came to get her urgently, she was in the middle of her bi-weekly swimming class. Easily said, they did not care for her to finish another few laps, much less dry her hair before arriving there in record time.

"I think the vagueness of my work is what-"

George spoke over Adelaide's tiny voice, gently placing his hand on the table and facing Mason, "What Adelaide really wants to announce is that there will be no more vagueness in the next novel, for sure."

"How so?" Vivian frowned, unconvinced.

Yahir proudly slid across the table a folder, thin enough to have stopped at the middle of the table, without reaching the other end. Adelaide smiled. Below the table George kicked Yahir in the shin, forcing him to scramble out of his seat, reach for the file and give it another push, this time stopping into Vivian's long red nails.

"An Assassin's Life...?" she read, uncertain.

Adelaide may have sat at the head of the table, but the position was just an allusion of control. Though she kept her smile, she felt the imaginary chains tug her into a place of being there just to be used. Her idea for a book was an introspection into the mind of a paid killer, not exactly so action oriented, however, since that was not what the world seemed to need, who was she to oppose the current? She needed to keep writing and there was no other way to go but forward from the moment she signed her contracts.

"The type of gang action shit?" Mason gasped after Vivian read him the title. Past his overgrown moustache and out of control weight gain, he seemed to have also forgotten how to read. "Like car chases, gun fights, cartel wards...?"