But if there was one thing she was starting to comprehend, it was that these traits were of no use to her in the real world.
* * *
Nella kept her movements as catlike as possible once she finally crawled out of bed, found some pants, and threw on the first clean sweater she could find. She marched into the bathroom to finish the rest, the bright light bulbs above the mirror shocking her nerves into full wakefulness.
On any other day, what she saw in the mirror would have alarmed her: Her hair was all over the place, and not in the cute, I’m too busy working on my career to care way. She’d been so desperate to pass out the night before that she hadn’t braided her curls or even put on a sleep scarf. But she wasted no time eyeing her hair’s shrinkage as she pulled it all back into a small scrunchie, then brushed her teeth and washed her face. Nor did she bother brewing a coffee or preparing some grits. She simply put on her shoes, packed her tote bag, and stepped out into the sticky summer morning.
Something was pulling her toward her cubicle at Wagner. What that something was, she didn’t exactly know. She just knew it had caused her to practically run over the small, confused woman who was taking too long to fish her MetroCard out of her wallet. And when the time came for her to walk through Wagner’s lobby around a quarter to seven, far too early of an arrival for even the most diligent editors, it caused her to trip and nearly fall on her face.
Ever graceful, Nella fell on her hands instead. “Shit!” she spat, inhaling a rancid whiff of the ratty welcome rug before pushing her body up. How humiliating. But how lucky she was that no other Wagner employees had seen her fall or heard her swear so loudly.
Unless…
Nella spun around quickly. She checked for any conspicuous strangers, ones with and without white sheets. Not a soul was in sight but India at the reception desk.
She continued on toward the elevators, fumbling breathlessly for her work ID, ready to explain why she was here so early. But as she drew closer, India’s head didn’t tilt up the way it normally did.
“India. Hey. How’s it going? Did you enjoy the rest of your birthday yesterday?”
India’s eyes darted up from her magazine. She appeared startled by the intrusion. Maybe even a little confused by it. “Oh. Hi, Nella,” she said, with a touch of listlessness. “What’d you say?”
“I… I just asked if you had a good birthday.”
“Oh. Yeah, I did. Thanks.”
She looked back down at her magazine.
Nella felt her throat tighten. That’s it? she wondered as she stepped into the elevator and pressed thirteen. The metal doors shut in front of her at an excruciatingly slow pace, granting her one last long look at the woman who had given her such an icy reception.
Floors came and went beneath her as she turned India’s greeting over and over in her mind. Something had changed; the look she’d given Nella had matched the one she gave most of Nella’s white colleagues.
Hazel had spent more time talking to India over the course of three weeks than Nella had in the last two years. Was it possible Hazel’s kindness had caused India to group Nella in with everyone else? Had India and Hazel even concocted this note thing together in order to pull some kind of weird prank? India did have so many connections within the building. She knew where all the hidden entrances were… and probably had access to unlimited envelopes and purple pens.
But why?
Nella breathed out, then in. No. No. She had to be overthinking it. After all, her nerves from that scary note were still warping her perception of the world. India was fine. You came into the office before everybody else, and she just hadn’t expected to have to do her song-and-dance greeting so early. How would you feel if you had to smile at one thousand people a day?
This logic only got Nella through a few floors. She was mulling it all over into a pulp, and by the time the doors opened on thirteen, the words Oh hi, Nella had tacked themselves onto the words Leave Wagner, and it was all playing in one nasty loop in her mind, a warning of she didn’t know what.
Nella scrutinized every empty desk as she passed on the way to her own. She was glad to be free from the confines of the elevator, but she couldn’t say she was happy to be back in the office. This was what she’d thought she wanted—to return to the scene of the crime; to explore the premises undisturbed. But everything about Wagner felt different now. The bright hospital-ward lighting felt more clinical than ever. And the AC didn’t feel like it was on at all.
She dropped her things on her chair and booted up her computer before creeping over to Hazel’s cubicle, startled by what she saw. Nella had never noticed how clear or organized her neighbor’s desk was. Everything had its place: To the left of the keyboard were two piles; one labeled To Do, the other labeled Check with Maisy. Hazel’s office supplies were lined along the back wall, jars of rubber bands and thumbtacks on one side, boxes of staples and paper clips on the other. And in the far corner sat a mason jar filled with highlighters, pencils, and pens.
Black pens. One red. Two blue. And zero purple.
Placated for the time being, Nella returned to her cubicle, sat down, and closed her eyes. Instead of darkness, she saw interactions from the day before. People. Everyone she’d come into contact with had been fine: the production team, the publicists, the other assistants. And Hazel—Hazel had been chummier than ever before with Nella. Sending her GIFs and a link to a cool Black hair mecca in Brooklyn. Trying to distract her from Vera’s nitpicking.
Come to think of it, the only person in the office who’d had any kind of problem with Nella had been Vera. God, how stern she’d been. How unfair. Just because Nella had spoken her truth about Shartricia, and was absurdly late to work that one time… those things didn’t make her a bad assistant. She knew what a bad assistant looked like. Trust. All anyone needed to do was look around the office when the other editors went out to lunch. The other assistants were easily distracted. Dispassionate. Neglectful.
Neglectful.
Nella’s eyes popped wider than they had hours earlier in bed. She’d forgotten something. Not a hint as to where the note might have come from, but a task for Vera: tweak the online copy so that it spoke to a younger audience. Perhaps that was the real reason why she had felt pulled to work so early. It wouldn’t be the first time her subconscious was more on it than she was.
Newly humbled, Nella rapped her fingers impatiently on her desk while she looked for the original Word file on her computer and hit Print. The printer on the other side of the wall spat out the page immediately. Nella glanced over toward the sound of the machine, caught by surprise. Usually, first thing in the morning, the machine took close to ninety seconds to warm up from sleep mode.
She grabbed the page and trudged back to her desk. It was only after she’d gotten to her chair, poised to sit down, that she realized she had two pages in her hand, not one. She placed her page on her chair, then headed back to the printer to leave the other sheet for its rightful owner.
It was common courtesy to do this. Nella preferred this method to trying to figure out whose it was by either reading the page’s contents or by doing what Bridget always did, which was circle the office and wave the page high in the air like a pair of stray panties.
And yet, alone in the empty office, Nella broke etiquette and took an unabashed look at what she’d accidentally grabbed. What she saw made her stop in her tracks, just as she turned the corner.
It was a list. A spreadsheet, really. It looked official, like it had been drawn up using the software Wagner editors used to organize the books they were working on—except the titles in the left column weren’t book titles at all.
Aaliyah H.
Ayanna P.
Camille P.
Ebonee J.
Jada A.
Jazmin S.
Kiara T.
Nia W.
Names. And across from the names, in the middle column, were dates. And across from the middle column, on the far right, was a list of ci
ties. Well, mostly one city: New York, New York, New York, all the way down. Only Camille P. from Missoula dared to break the pattern.
Nella scanned the list once again. Missoula be damned; these names had to belong to Black women.
Bizarre.
And then, suddenly hopeful as she slipped it back onto the printer: Could it be a list of candidates to hire? She stood up on her tiptoes and confirmed that Richard’s light was indeed on in his office.
“What you doin’, Nella?”
Nella started at the sound of her name. She’d expected to have the office to herself for at least another half an hour or so. “Hello? Who’s there?”
The sound of laughter echoed from her desk. “Who you think?” the voice asked. “It’s just me!”
Nella knew this voice. She made her way over to her cubicle to find C. J. standing next to her empty chair, his face stretched by a self-satisfied smirk, his arms crossed over the front of his too-small, navy-blue Wagner Mail short-sleeved button-up. Not long after she had started, maybe during her third or fourth week, he’d told her in his thick, buttery accent how he’d once made the mistake of putting it in a dryer for too long. It had shrunk down to a third of its original size, “just five minutes short of a crop top,” he’d said, laughing. When she’d asked him why he hadn’t just gotten another one, he told her that it would cost him more than fifty bucks to replace.
After that, they were buds.
“You fucking terrified me, Ceej.” Nella punched his shoulder, even though she was so happy to see him that she thought she might cry. If she was sure about anything, it was that C. J. wasn’t the perpetrator. “I’m so glad it’s you.”
C. J. raised his eyebrows. Apparently, he noticed that she was close to tears, too. “I should get surgery more often. It’s been, like, what—six weeks? And you forgot I existed already?” His hearty laugh reverberated through the empty halls and through Nella’s core, too, filling up her insides like a cup of gumbo on a January day.
“I didn’t forget about you,” Nella said. She felt like giving him a hug just to prove her point. Instead, she lowered herself back down at her desk. She didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. Even though he’d apologized for that awkward DM he’d drunkenly sent her on Instagram a few months back, and they seemed to have gotten past it, Nella deemed it better to keep their relationship at a place that hovered somewhere around G-rated but meaningful.
“How’s the knee?” she asked him.
“Oh, you know. Doin’ what it should be. Hurts like hell, but I’m here.”
“You didn’t want to take a bit more time off?”
“Can’t,” C. J. said. “We only get so much time, you feel me?”
Nella nodded, although they both knew that his “we” didn’t involve her, because he and the rest of the mail staff were given less paid time off than everyone else. Their situations outside of the office were vastly different, too. C. J. lived with his sister and his sister’s kid in Ocean Hill and helped support them both, partly with his Wagner paychecks and partly with paychecks from his weekend job. She couldn’t remember specifically which nightclub he was a bouncer at, but she vaguely remembered that it was nowhere near where he lived—in Hell’s Kitchen, or maybe even somewhere up in Columbia territory. And it made sense. On Monday mornings, if she looked long enough, she might see him taking a break in between distributing packages, leaning against his mail crate to catch some rest.
Nella wasn’t sure how he managed all of it at the age of twenty-two: the commute; the two jobs; supporting family that was his family but wasn’t really his responsibility, not according to her own privileged rules, anyway. But somehow, he did. Usually with a smile.
Nella eyed his knee skeptically. “You could have at least come in a bit later, you know,” she said quietly.
“Ha! Sherry texted me and told me the guy who was here in my place was doing a real shit job. I’ve been finding mail postmarked from more than a week ago that ain’t been delivered yet. No good. It’s like, how you gonna screw up this job? You know what I’m saying? It’s so easy, my god.”
Nella thought about the scrawny old mailman who’d come up from the software company below them to take C. J.’s spot. She chuckled as she remembered how he’d accidentally run Maisy over with his cart during the first week of his temporary residency at Wagner, of how Nella—of all of her colleagues—was the one person whose mail never got fudged. “I tried to help him out as best as I could when he first took over, but poor guy… he just couldn’t get it together. I think he was overwhelmed by how many packages we get up here.”
“You know what I think?” C. J. flexed his left bicep and kissed it. “I think he just ain’t me. That’s all it is.”
Nella laughed. “I think you’re probably right.”
“So how have things been around here otherwise? Have you taken over the world yet? Bought the latest bestseller?”
“Hell, no. But… um… something strange happened yesterday. I got this really weird note.”
“A weird note?”
“Yep.”
“Who from?”
“That’s what’s really strange about it. I don’t know. It was anonymous. But it was in this envelope with my name on it, and the note said ‘Leave Wagner. Now.’ ”
“The hell? You’re fucking with me.”
“I wish I was, because I’m pretty freaked out. That’s why I’m here so early.”
“Why? So you can fight whoever left it for you by yourself?” C. J. joked, but the light air of humor he’d been reaching for hadn’t quite reached his eyes. He looked straight-up concerned, reminding her why she had shown up so early: to search for clues that she might have missed the night before. To find a smoking gun—that damn purple pen—on Hazel’s desk.
But while she trusted C. J., she wasn’t ready to tell him that part yet, so she just shrugged. “I don’t know what I thought I’d do, Ceej. I don’t know.”
C. J. nodded. “Have you thought long and hard about whether or not someone here’s trying to mess with you?”
“I have. But why would they start now, after two years? The time to do that would have been when I first started, if we think it’s some white supremacist kind of thing. Or when I was trying to do all that diversity stuff way back when.”
“It’s mostly you guys in the office this time of the summer, though, right? Assistants? So, if it was someone who worked here, that means…”
C. J. trailed off, but he was still giving her that scary, worried look. She was beginning to wish she hadn’t said anything about it—not to him. Not before she’d overcome her hangover; not before she’d drummed up a likely narrative that she felt comfortable with.
“I don’t know why you’re so cool about this,” he said finally. “This isn’t something you can just ignore and then it’ll just… go away. Have you told anyone here about it?”
“Not yet. I got it last night, after almost everyone had left.”
“Almost?”
“Donald was still here, but as far as I know, that’s it.”
“Ah, Walk-Man,” C. J. said. Nella could practically see the gears turning in his eyes as he considered Richard’s assistant exactly the way she had twelve hours earlier. “And this note came through the mail?”
“No,” said Nella, shaking her head. “Someone dropped it on my desk at some point.”
“Anyone could have done that. Damn. Maybe you should talk to Natalie about it. She’s real chill.”
“Eh. If I get another one, I will. But I think I’m just going to ignore it for now. Too much going on.” Nella paused. She thought about mentioning the Colin thing, but C. J.’s furrowed brow told her that probably wasn’t a good idea.
“Just lemme know if you need anything, aight? I haven’t broken up any Midtown office scrimmages yet, but I wouldn’t mind being here when the staplers start flying.”
Nella chuckled as he backed away slowly from her cube, throwing a few punches into the air above his head. �
��Thanks, Ceej.”
“Anytime. Good seeing you, Nella.”
“You, too. Actually, wait! I forgot one more thing.” When C. J. reappeared, Nella pointed at Hazel’s empty chair. “Maybe even bigger news: A Black girl started working here a few weeks ago!”
C. J.’s eyes lit up with recognition. “Oh, yeah! You know, I just met her. She seems pretty cool.”
“You just met her? As in… today?”
“Yeah, she’s floating around here somewhere. I ran into her in the copy room.” He nodded at her cube. “Funny that you two happen to be together, ain’t it? It’s like we always have a way of finding one another. No matter where we are.”
Nella looked over at Hazel’s station again, speechless. She had to bend down to see it, but sure enough, there was Hazel’s tote bag, stowed neatly under her desk like luggage on a plane. It was easy to miss unless you were checking for it. What wasn’t easy to miss, not usually, was that sweet smell Hazel always carried around with her—although now that Nella thought about it, she couldn’t remember the last time she had smelled it. Probably because she’d gotten so used to it. “I didn’t realize she was here already.”
“And they say we don’t work hard. Shoot, look at you and her, both here at the crack of dawn.”
It was a compliment, but Nella was too busy mourning the alone time she’d been hoping to have at her desk to appreciate it. “I wonder why she’s here so early.”
“She said something about wanting to get a jump on a manuscript she has to read? Or edit? I can’t remember which.”
“Hm. I’m not sure what she’d have to get a ‘jump on’ editing. She just started working here, like, a couple weeks ago.” And I’m not even editing yet, she added, just to herself.
The Other Black Girl: A Novel Page 12