“For sure!” said Nella. “Mal, you know how long I’ve been waiting for this moment! And Hazel seems cool. Probably way too cool for me, actually.”
“Impossible.”
“She’s from Harlem. She’s natural—long locs. Ombré.”
The ombré locs invoked an ooooh, followed by a raising of Malaika’s glass. “Okay, maybe she’s a little bit cooler than you. But now,” she said, pulling away when Nella tried to flick her arm in protest, “a toast: to no longer being the Only One.”
“I’ll drink to that.” Nella clinked her almost empty beer with Malaika’s drink. Then she threw back the second-to-last sip and put her glass down, surveying the other people who had decided to grab a drink on a Wednesday evening. For the most part, pairs of twenty- and thirtysomething-year-old women dotted the high barstools, sipping and laughing and shaking their heads with unabashed delight. She felt a warming touch of solidarity as she took in the dozen or so women in their business casual ensembles, mouths full of gin and juice and post-work exasperations.
Nella thought about the gripes she’d planned to bounce off Malaika, mostly about her anxiety toward having to address the Shartricia thing. It just didn’t seem fair. Only a few months earlier, Colin had finally stopped misspelling her name in his emails; weeks earlier, they’d even had a brief bonding moment over growing up in Connecticut. The two of them weren’t ride-or-dies by any means, but Nella did feel as though they’d made quite a bit of progress in their author-assistant relationship. And now, she had to look him in the eye—Colin Franklin, an award-winning author who was on a first-name basis with Reese Witherspoon—and tell him that she had issues with his book?
She’d been saving this Colin thing for last as she listened attentively to her friend kvetch about Igor Ivanov, the fitness guru she’d personally assisted for the last eight years. Nella didn’t want to hog too much of the conversation, especially given how much time she’d spent complaining to Malaika about Shartricia already. So instead of pivoting to Colin when Malaika finished recounting Igor’s latest tirade about her calves, Nella raised her glass again. “I’d like to propose another cheers: to not being confused with the new Black girl. Thank god she has locs,” Nella joked.
Malaika snorted. “Oh, I can drink to that.” She finished the last of her rum and Coke, plopping it down on the table harder than necessary. She had that real talk look on her face that Nella knew so well, her big brown eyes unblinking and opened wider than usual. “Locs or no locs, though… you know one of your coworkers is gonna mix you and the new Black girl up at least once. I promise you.”
3
August 20, 2018
Nella yawned and wrapped her arms around her shoulders, a feeble attempt to stop herself from grabbing at the coffee before the machine finished spurting. The thing had been dying for about a week or so, which meant Jocelyn—Wagner’s business manager and the only employee who knew how to coax sweet nectar from the snarling kitchen Keurig—was visiting family in Germany.
Nella needed her back. Now. Her head was pounding something awful, thanks to the fact that Owen had ended up joining her and Malaika at 2Big the night before. They’d left the bar at an hour far too late for three people who knew they had to get up early the following morning.
Nella was trying to remember what time she and Owen had finally slipped into bed when a new smell disrupted the scent of her coffee and, subsequently, her thoughts. She sniffed the Keurig curiously, unable to name the sweet culprit until she looked over her shoulder. Hazel had breezed into the kitchen, coffee mug in one hand, Tupperware container in the other. She was wearing a bright yellow scarf heavy enough to hinder the aggressive air-conditioning of the subway, but light enough to stick in her bag while enduring the sweatiness of the platform, and a pair of those big white movie-star sunglasses that looked like the ones Nella had tried on the last time she’d gone shopping. With her own small, round face and lack of ample chin, she’d looked like a Chihuahua playing dress-up in the convention center glow of the Herald Square H&M. But Hazel’s bright red lipstick and oversized silver hoops managed to tip the scales in her favor.
“Morning, Nell! What’s going on?” Hazel set her mug down on the big glass table fixed in the middle of the kitchen. Nella had already learned that this was how Hazel initiated most conversations, no matter how obvious the answer was, and no matter how much it stumped Maisy. Which was, Nella observed, every time.
“Just waiting on my morning fix.” The Keurig eked out another wet sound—louder than it had two days earlier—as though it, too, were desperate to contribute to the conversation. Jocelyn needed to return from her vacation, stat, before everyone at Wagner turned on one another with box cutters and loose staples out of caffeine deprivation.
“I still haven’t figured that thing out. Is it any good?”
“Eh. You’d be better off siphoning water from the Gowanus Canal and pouring it over coffee beans that you’ve stepped on with your dirtiest pair of shoes. But it’s free, so…”
“Shit, ‘free’ is my favorite flavor.” Hazel laughed as she stuffed her lunch in the fridge and closed the door. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a pouch filled with herbs. The flurry of movement sent another wave of sweetness toward Nella’s nose that she had to fight not to recoil from. Although she and Hazel had been cubemates for two weeks, she still hadn’t gotten entirely used to her new neighbor’s hair grease. Or perfume. Whatever it was, Nella was sure it wasn’t Brown Buttah. Brown Buttah didn’t smell that strong.
“My boyfriend works at a tea salon. I get ‘free-flavored’ tea all the time.”
“Nice.” Nella considered asking her about this tea salon, but her coffee had finally finished brewing, and a new author of Vera’s was supposed to call her in fewer than five minutes to talk about the copyediting process. “Gotta run.”
“Okay! See you in, like, three seconds.”
“Yeah! See you.” Nella grabbed her mug from the Keurig. As she turned to leave, Hazel said, more excitedly than Nella had heard her say anything before, “Ohmygod, wait! I love your mug!”
“Thanks! It was a gift from my mom.”
Hazel took a couple of steps toward the table and picked up her own mug. Painted on its side in swirls of purple and blue and orange was an unmistakable drawing of Zora Neale Hurston, tilted hat and all.
Nella wasn’t sure how she hadn’t noticed it before; it was so stunning. “Mug twins! Except your Zora is even prettier. That artwork is beautiful.”
“Thank you! It’s kind of my pride and joy,” Hazel squealed, walking over to the hot water tower.
“Where did you get it?”
“My boyfriend, actually. He painted the art. Then he had a friend of his who works in ceramics do this up for me for our five-year anniversary. He customized the handle just for me, too. Ain’t it dope?”
Nella peered closer at the small, finger-spaced grooves in the handle, unable to not notice that Hazel had mentioned having a boyfriend not once, but twice over the course of a very short interaction. It amused her, this double-mention, because it was the kind of detail that meant nothing—until, of course, it was combined with enough other nothings to turn into a something.
In Nella’s eyes, this “something” was a lack of self-reliance. She felt a little bit of pride at not having mentioned Owen’s name even once to her new cubemate. Hell, she even felt just a tiny bit smug. Her boyfriend didn’t define her.
Then again, Owen had forgotten all three of their anniversaries.
Nella offered up one more laudatory phrase regarding the mug and, as Hazel turned to doctor her tea, a brief goodbye. She needed every second of the remaining three minutes to prepare for her phone call.
She’d started to make a subtle run for it when she heard Hazel say something else.
Nella paused mid-step, considering her options. She was far enough away to pretend that she hadn’t heard Hazel speak. But she had. Two words, in fact: Burning Heart. Black Kryptonite against h
er steeled workaholic heart.
Her parents had gifted her Diana Gordon’s first book for her fourteenth birthday, the summer before she started high school. It had captured her from the epigraph. She loved reading about headstrong Evie, a young, Black teenager who runs away from her conservative parents in a small New England town, and the rough-and-tough Black Panther Party member she falls in love with along the way.
Nella saw bits of herself in Evie. Her own parents had never been the turn-the-other-cheek kind of folks—they’d raised her to speak up when something wasn’t right, and to never let anyone treat her like she was less than. But Nella had never really needed to wield these tools as a teenager. And so, she could relate to Evie’s desperation to really experience life, and her desire to take a bite out of the unknown world that existed just beyond her grasp.
Nella hadn’t been able to put Burning Heart down for the entire month of August, and even though it rounded out at a whopping five hundred pages, she’d read it three times in rapid succession. She wrote about it for a freshman summer reading project in September, and nearly eight years later, it provided the backbone for a senior thesis that she’d never managed to publish. Since Burning Heart had been both written and edited by Black women, she placed its societal impact front and center, along with two other books that were edited and written by individuals of the same race—a rare feat, Nella had come to learn.
This was all, however, too much to explain when she was in a rush, so Nella scurried back into the kitchen, let out a small sigh, and said, “Sorry—did you say something about Burning Heart?”
Hazel looked over her shoulder. “Oh, I was just wondering if you’re into Diana Gordon. I stumbled across an old piece on her by Joan Circatella last night, and it made me want to reread Burning Heart, like, right now.”
“Joan Circatella? That’s amazing! I relied pretty heavily on her work for my thesis in college.” Seeing what seemed to be curiosity unravel across her companion’s face, Nella added, “ ‘For Us, by Us: The Effect of Black Eyes on Black Ideas.’ ”
“Girl.” Hazel’s eyes widened as she put her mug down so she could clap for emphasis. “That. Sounds. So. Dope. Look at you, being all modest. You should own that thesis.”
“Thanks!” Nella smiled. Worried she might be coming off as just a hair pretentious, she added—even though Hazel hadn’t asked—“I’d always been really into the fact that Burning Heart was both written and edited by Black women, and that inspired me to put that element into conversation with its societal impact. And I compared two other books that were also written by Black editor-writer pairs.”
Hazel clapped again. “That’s brilliant! I could see something like that running in Salon or someplace. Please tell me you’ve done something with it, sis. I’m begging you.”
“Well—it’s been kind of hard, you know… with Kendra Rae Phillips, and all…” Nella shrugged.
“What do you mean? Wait, oh my god—does she still work here?!” Hazel’s locs slapped her cheeks as she glanced excitedly around the kitchen.
“No, definitely not,” Nella said, lowering her voice. “That’s the thing. She’s been MIA for years.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, I imagine that leaves an annoying hole in your work.” Hazel picked up her mug once more. “It’s too bad she left. This business needs more Black editors, more Black mentors… more Black everything.”
“I know, and—” Nella shook her head, feeling frazzled. This was a conversation she wanted desperately to have, just not right now. “God, I am so sorry. I’m going to miss this phone call.”
She thought she’d said it softly enough. She’d spent so much time on the so, and had indicated how little control she had of the whole situation. Nevertheless, there was a shift in Hazel’s disposition. Her shoulders were slumping, as though a weight had been tied to each one. Even her hold on her mug was different—rather than letting it sit in the palm of her hand, Hazel was pinching the handle with almost all of her fingers, using the last one to tap the side with her long nail.
“I’m sorry!” Nella said again. “It’s not a personal thing. The call, I mean. It’s an author thing. For work.”
Hazel shrugged, her eyes narrowed. “I get it. I’ll be doing that, too, at some point. I guess.”
“You’ll be doing it a lot. Maisy doesn’t like talking on the phone to anyone but Tony.”
“Her husband?”
“Her therapist.”
That got a smile out of Hazel. “So many things I need to learn!”
Feeling confident she’d smoothed things over well enough, Nella tried once more to leave the kitchen. Hazel followed after her this time, keeping pace.
Nella cast her a quick, awkward smile. “Hey, how about we do lunch sometime this week, now that you’re a little bit settled?” She looked around to see if any of their coworkers were ambling through the halls, even though most upper-level employees didn’t float in until ten or so. “I can fill you in on everything. Off the record, of course.”
“For sure. I would love that.”
“Great. Let’s plan for tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow’s perfect.”
They’d finally reached their desks. Nella moved a stack of papers that had been snowballing over the last couple of weeks in order to make room for her practically untouched coffee and took a look at her desk phone. There were two missed calls: one from Vera, and another from Colin Franklin, presumably confirming his meeting with her and Vera next week.
She groaned.
“What’s up?” Hazel asked. “Shit, did you miss that call you were waiting on? My bad, girl.”
When Nella looked up, Hazel was by her side, her mouth formed in a perfect O.
“Um. No. No, I didn’t miss it. I’m—I just have a lot of things going on right now. Author stuff, you know.”
“Aww, you poor thing. Well, hey, just know this: I’m here. To talk about Diana, Zora, Maya, literally any Literary Black Queen… I can go on and on. But I’m also here for you. To spill the tea, complain, anything.” Hazel dabbed Nella’s shoulder. “I didn’t have any Black coworkers in Boston, and I didn’t think I would have one here. So, this is… pretty awesome.”
A warmth Nella hadn’t felt for any other cube neighbor since Yang flooded her senses. She smiled, her eyes welling up with… were those tears? What the hell? “I feel the same way, Hazel,” she said. “Thank you.”
“Of course!”
Nella turned to reach for her phone, rejuvenated and raring to get to work. But something stopped her.
It was Hazel, whom she could still feel lingering above her.
“So, you’re good, then? Everything’s okay?” Hazel’s voice had dipped a couple of octaves, hovering at a register usually reserved for a mother comforting her child. Her eyes seemed vacant, void of anything other than a needy emptiness.
Nella stared up at Hazel, disconcerted. She was still cradling the phone in the crook of her neck, but the dial tone was doing that beep-beep-beep thing it did when you left it off the hook for too long. “Yes. I’m good. We’ll talk more at lunch,” she whispered, motioning around at their surroundings with her chin. “Wandering ears, you know?”
Hazel nodded and grinned, her vacant expression disappearing with the wink of an eye. “Oh, I know.”
4
August 21, 2018
Lunch with Hazel was at Nico’s, an independent hole-in-the-wall café that served Au Bon Pain–quality food with a side of Pret A Manger ambiance. It wasn’t a particularly nice spot, but Nella often chose it because it was cheap, and the higher-ups who actually did set foot inside always took their food to go. And since higher-ups certainly didn’t take agents or authors to Nico’s—waitstaff was an absolute must while wining and dining clientele—the café afforded Nella what she wanted and needed most: a lunch spot of her own, since her cube at the office was everyone else’s battleground as much it was hers.
Hazel finished paying first and, to Nella’s delight, chose a sunbathe
d table next to a large window that looked out onto busy, bustling Seventh Avenue. Nella joined her, setting down her sandwich and juice as she stuffed her wallet into her worn-out Wagner Books tote.
“I thought it’d be nice to sit in some sunlight. This is cool, right?”
“Definitely. Good to get some vitamin D.”
“So true.” Hazel removed the plastic lid from her salad and poked at a walnut with her finger. “I’m so glad we’re finally doing this. I’ve been meaning to ask if you wanted to get a coffee, but shit, man. This learning curve is hard. I feel like I’ve been drowning the last couple of weeks and I haven’t found any time.”
Nella nodded. “Yeah, I remember how hard the first few months were. But you’ve been doing great! Really, you’d know if you weren’t. I mean it.”
Hazel let the compliment roll off her shoulders and into the small tub of salad dressing that she was having trouble peeling open. She picked up her fork and stabbed at it. “So, Maisy mentioned that Vera has some pretty big books in the works right now,” she said. “You must be really excited about that.”
Nella grimaced as the sound of Colin Franklin’s voice reading with a downtrodden Black woman affect echoed in her ears. “Yeah, you could say that Vera has some pretty big-name authors.”
“Sam Lewis, right? Evelyn Kay. And… Colin Franklin?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“And what’s he like?” asked Hazel, her eyes widening. “He must be interesting.”
“Interesting is… a good way to describe him.”
Hazel grinned, leaning in. “Why do I get the feeling there’s more you’re not saying?”
“Well… he’s not an easy man to work for. Although he has mellowed out some.”
“Yeah, but, like—where did he start off, right?”
“Right. Exactly. But the thing is…” Nella looked around Nico’s to see if she recognized anyone within earshot. “I try not to talk about Vera’s authors with anybody else, really. It’s a good rule of thumb—some editors see it as airing out their dirty laundry.”
The Other Black Girl: A Novel Page 5