The Other Black Girl

by Zakiya Dalila Harris

  “Between us.”

  Richard bowed. “Until next time.”

  Nella was still nodding even after she’d been left alone with her thoughts. She caught herself mid-bob, mildly embarrassed and majorly in pain as she pawed a few times at the cramp that now stretched beyond her neck and down to her right shoulder blade. Then she pulled out her phone to Google “Wagner Books.” Thankfully, no op-eds about her employer came up, only a few social media posts about books that had been published recently.

  Nella exhaled slowly, the wave of relief washing over her like a ray of sunshine. But such light, she knew, could be fleeting—so she set a Google alert for her name right then and there. Just in case.

  14

  October 20, 2018

  “Nala?” The barista stared at her, wide-eyed beneath his bangs, his marker poised tentatively over a white paper cup. “Like The Lion King? Cool!”

  Nella shifted her weight to her other boot. “Not quite. Nella.”

  “Bella? Sorry.” He started to write.

  “No. Sort of like Bella. But with an ‘N.’ ”

  He blinked at her. “Okay. So, Mella,” he said, crossing out the “B.” “That’s a cool name, too. I guess.”

  “Actually…” Nella paused. Hardly anyone could be heard over the sound of Christmas music that—in Nella’s opinion—had no business playing in mid-October. Behind her, a double-decker stroller continued to bump against the back of her legs, pressing her closer to the counter. She wasn’t sure why she was spending so much time putting the poor guy through this name thing when he had already taken her order. His only job was to defend that particular Midtown Starbucks from tourist riffraff and the crazy people who went into work on Saturdays.

  Nella, a member of the latter camp, conceded. “Mella works. Thanks.”

  She scurried out of the way of another potential stroller hit, scouring for a safe place to wait for her latte. Nella couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen the coffee shop so crowded… but then again, it was a particularly chilly day, the holidays were rapidly approaching, and the Herald Square Macy’s was a mere six blocks away. She supposed that this was what she deserved for leaving Brooklyn on a Saturday.

  “Logan! Venti chai tea latte no foam on the bar for Logan!”

  A petite blonde woman in a beige fur coat stepped forward to claim the cup. Her trappings swished vigorously as she stormed out, apparently miffed that she’d had to wait at all for anything in Midtown on a weekend.

  Nella pulled out her tablet and started to read, so that she wouldn’t become one of those people who felt their important time had been wasted. She hadn’t finished a full page when she felt a tap on her shoulder.

  “Excuse me, miss?”

  Nella turned around. A tall, broad-shouldered Black man in a green parka holding an iced coffee was looking down at her. She decided in a matter of seconds that he was probably in his late thirties and, as she took in his kind eyes and his bearded face, fairly attractive. An added plus was that he’d elected to pull his black sock cap all the way down over his ears, rather than let it hang off his head like a careless hipster. She wasn’t sure if she knew him from somewhere, although he did look an awful lot like Marvin Gaye in his What’s Going On phase.

  When it became clear he wasn’t going to say anything, she smiled and asked, tepidly, “Yes?”

  “Sorry,” he said shyly, running a hand along the back of his neck. “You’re just… so beautiful. Wow.”

  A flash of heat flared beneath Nella’s turtleneck. “Oh,” she said, as though people told her this in coffee shops all the time. “Thanks?”

  He cocked his head at her and stopped smiling only long enough to take a sip of his iced coffee. His pearly white teeth resurfaced as soon as the straw left his mouth. “You are very welcome. So, uh. Anyway, I just wanted to say… well, that you’re beautiful. And also—I think you dropped this.”

  She held out her hand. He dropped a Starbucks napkin in it.

  “You have a good day, now,” the man said with a wink. Then he turned and pushed his way toward the door.

  “Thanks?” Nella repeated. She looked down at the paper napkin, prepared to crumble it up and throw it in the trash. But then she noticed nine digits and three dashes.

  Did that guy just ask me out on a Starbucks napkin? She felt both a little bit horrified and a little bit thrilled at the thought of it. She tried to find the tall Black man again. He was now walking to the door, pulling it open, squeezing his way not impolitely through a family of tourists. Malaika would love this story, she knew. She’d tell Owen, too—except maybe she’d downplay his attractiveness. Just a little bit.

  Nella looked at the napkin again, expecting to get one last laugh before she went back to her reading, but what she saw turned her blood cold. Somehow, before, she’d missed the words that had been written above the phone number in all caps:

  WAGNER’S DANGEROUS. YOU’RE RUNNING OUT OF TIME.

  Nella stared at the first three digits of the phone number, prepared to see the number that she’d called up last month. But the area code was different: 617. This was a Massachusetts area code, a fact she’d involuntarily committed to memory after a brief fling with an MIT grad back in her early NYC days.

  So, this wasn’t the same person she’d spilled her soul out to last month. Presumably, anyway.

  Unless whoever had been following her had simply changed phone numbers.

  She craned her neck to see if Marvin Gaye’s doppelganger was still outside, watching her. Was he the person who’d been following her this entire time? But all she could see were streams of bundled-up tourists moving down the sidewalk, holding hands, swinging shopping bags, staring down at cell phone screens. The Black man was nowhere in sight.

  Nella turned back around, awash with relief that almost instantly ebbed into fear. She wanted to see someone watching her. She wanted answers. It had been weeks since she’d received a note, and she’d been naive enough to think that calling that number last time meant the letters would cease. But now that she’d received another one—no, not received, it had practically been thrown in her face—she felt like a stone-cold fool.

  This was getting ridiculous. That guy was no racist stalker. He was the guy you called when you needed protection from a racist stalker. He really seemed to be… warning her.

  Nella pulled out her cell phone and quickly typed out a new text message. She had to outrun her other self—the Nella who had sense; the Nella who would remind her that she’d seen far too many horror films and episodes of Dateline with girl-being-stalked plotlines to let herself walk willingly into a trap.

  Who are you?

  The message turned blue. Three gray dots signaling a response appeared almost immediately beneath it.

  I’ll tell you if you meet me in forty-five. 100th & Broadway.

  You couldn’t just talk to me at Starbucks? Nella wrote back.

  There were too many eyes and ears there. And that was my friend, not me. So, 100th & Broadway. Cool?

  Stupid. It would be stupid to go. Nella couldn’t believe she’d even texted this stranger without trying to figure out how to block her own number first. Whoever was following her now had gone through all this trouble to get her phone number, and now they had it. Whatever upper hand Nella’d had was gone. Going to meet this person wouldn’t just be stupid; it would be idiotic.

  And yet.

  She bit her lip. Typed a few letters, deleted those, then typed some more. Can you at least tell me what this is about?! she finally typed.

  Once more, the gray dots materialized instantly. But then they were gone.

  “Come on,” whispered Nella. She gave her phone one violent shake, as though that might help eke out an answer. But no dots. No luck.

  Nella threw her phone in her bag, ready to step out onto the sidewalk and inhale some necessary breaths of sweet fall air. Her fingers were on the handle when she felt the small pulse of a new message:

  Her name’s not Haz
el.

  Shani

  October 20, 2018

  As I turned onto Broadway, trying to scrape my way through droves of zigzagging tourists, a turbulent succession of thoughts popped to the surface of my brain: I don’t need to be a hero. I don’t need Nella’s side of things, either. I can go home right now, disappear from everybody, and still write an entire fucking exposé.

  I should’ve been grateful. I owed Lynn. The only thing that had made Boston bearable was Cooper’s; without that job, I would have holed myself up in my apartment with a bottle of Jack and a bowl of Reese’s Puffs.

  But I’d had enough. How could I sit back and let Nella make the same mistake so many other Black girls had made, especially now that I’d met Kendra Rae?

  I watched the red hand stop blinking, paused at the edge of the crosswalk, and recalled that pleading look I’d seen on Kendra Rae’s face hours earlier. It had been enough to convince me not to leave New York. Not yet.

  But it was this same look—the look that pushed me to go rogue and text Nella this morning, despite Lynn’s orders—that made me likewise want to hop on the next bus back to Boston: Troubled brown eyes turned down at the edges. Corners of her lips turned down, too. No doubt about it, Kendra Rae still looked good—no, great—for her age. But there’d been a light missing. Something was off inside her, and this something had caused her to spend more than thirty-five years in hiding.

  I could see the headline trending now—something clever about the river of Uncle Toms flowing beneath the shiny, plastic surface of corporate white America. That article could be my gateway to telling Kendra Rae’s story next—a story of betrayal not just by a friend, but by an entire industry.

  The symbol above changed to a white man. I forced myself to keep walking, but my legs felt like lead. Behind me, a young Hispanic woman who thought I’d been moving too slowly muttered something profane under her breath as she passed me by. I’d committed the ultimate New York City sin.

  The thought made me laugh out loud—to myself, to no one. Sins. What did I know about sins? Nothing.

  Now, Kendra Rae—that woman knew about sins. She’d committed one of the real ultimate sins by trying to be herself: Black. Unapologetic. Someone who told it like it was. Someone who rejected what was expected of her as a Black woman in a predominantly white industry.

  The thought of it still got me. What a boss. Who else tells an interviewer that she’ll never work with another white writer, right when her star is starting to rise?

  She was grinning when she’d handed me the article clipping. Like she was proud. I couldn’t help but smile a little, too, as I’d started reading aloud: “ ‘I’m tired of working with white writers. I hate it. We’ve had enough of them. No offense to any of them, but I don’t need a white scholar telling me about the Great Migration. I don’t need a Jewish man telling me why Miles was the greatest jazz musician ever alive, or why Black people eat black-eyed peas and corn bread and collard greens on New Year’s Day. I don’t need any of that.’ ”

  I’d looked up at Kendra Rae once I’d finished reading, the brown, faded piece of newspaper threatening to disintegrate in my hands. While I’d been reading, she’d grabbed a copy of Burning Heart from the shelf and started going through it, turning its pages with one neat, short, unpainted index fingernail. She’d become so engrossed that she hadn’t noticed I was ready to speak again, so I’d taken a breath and said, quietly so as not to startle her, “Was this taken out of context?”

  “Not really.” Kendra Rae hadn’t looked up.

  “Oh. Well… this seems pretty mild by today’s standards… but I’m presuming readers weren’t too crazy about it back then?”

  Lynn had scoffed. “They weren’t. No one at Wagner Books appreciated it, either.” She’d walked over to the couch with two steaming mugs and set them down on the small coffee table. “Tell her about Diana, if you’re feeling up to it?”

  “Wait. Diana Gordon is involved in this, too?” I couldn’t imagine the beautiful, enigmatic author from the billboards advertising her latest bestseller-turned-feature film being involved in such a nefarious operation.

  “We go back. Friends since we were younger than you ladies are. But the night I left, I heard Diana talking on the phone about something Imani said.”

  “Imani’s another childhood friend of theirs,” Lynn had said.

  “So you think she…?”

  Kendra Rae had pursed her lips and shaken her head. “That change you’ve all been seeing happen to our kind? I think someone changed her, too.” She’d taken a quick sip of her coffee. “I think it was Richard—he’s the man Diana was talking to on the phone. That’s the only explanation I can think of for why she would try to do that to me. And why she wouldn’t be seen with me in public after what I said.”

  “Richard Wagner was Kenny’s boss,” Lynn had said, before I could ask. “And he’s Nella’s boss now. I’d been sensing there was something behind the connection between Diana and Richard—he’s always at her functions and shows up in her acknowledgments far too frequently.”

  I’d blinked. Hazel was toxic; that much I’d known. But I hadn’t known Richard Wagner and Diana were, too. What about my bosses? Had Anna had a hand in what happened at Cooper’s? Had everyone been in on it except me? “Why didn’t you tell me about any of this before?”

  “Because I wasn’t one hundred percent sure before Kendra Rae confirmed the connection. Plus, I didn’t want you to go off and tell Nella something only for us to find out Nella is working on the other side. And she still can’t know anything,” Lynn had rushed to say.

  “You didn’t trust me,” I’d said, hurt.

  “Don’t do that, Shani. You knew what this was: a need-to-know-basis. I’m telling you now because you need to know.”

  I’d turned back to Kendra Rae. This wasn’t the time. “And you guys think he’s the one who’s been behind all of this?”

  “It wouldn’t surprise me in the least,” Kendra Rae had said.

  I’d thought of Diana again. I’d only read an earlier novel of hers, since most people agreed her story lines were becoming more contrived with each new book she put out. But the one I’d read—a coming-of-age story about Black friendship that spanned forty years—had been so raw and so moving that it had made me cry on a bus.

  My voice had been hopeful when I’d used it again, more like a child’s than my own. “But why would Diana do that?” I’d asked her. “Didn’t you say she was your best friend?”

  The ultimate sin.

  She hadn’t used those words to describe what Diana had tried to do to her, but I didn’t need to know all that to know what I’d seen in her eyes. That her best friend, bestselling author Diana Gordon, had committed the ultimate sin.

  A truck blared its horn at a Seamless delivery person who’d strayed out of the bike lane. I looked up at the nearest street sign, those three words reverberating in my brain. Somehow, I’d managed to get to 100th Street without noticing. It was too late to turn back now, even if I did feel sick. And afraid. What if, one day, I showed up to Joe’s and Lynn had been turned? Then what would I do? Would I even know right away?

  I couldn’t sit back and watch this happen to another person. I had to tell Nella. Besides, Lynn had already said herself that she didn’t trust me.

  I surveyed the sidewalk, but she was nowhere in sight, so I moved to the side, pushing myself up against the glass window of a store on the corner so I wouldn’t be in the way. Then I unbuttoned my black trench coat, a feeble attempt to cool things down a bit. But it was too late for that. The space between my breasts had grown sweaty to the point of no return. My insides felt as though they were swallowing themselves.

  I’m losing it, I thought, but I realized instantly that that wasn’t true. I’d finally found it. This was the clearest I’d seen in months.

  I was planning out my article pitch to Nella when my phone started to buzz. Thinking it was Nella, I pulled it out immediately, prepared to say I’ll be
there soon. But it wasn’t Nella. It was Lynn. Calling me.

  Her voice sounded far away. “Shani! What the hell are you doing?”

  Fuck.

  “Nothing. I’m just…”

  “You’re trying to meet Nella, after everything we told you? What the hell,” she repeated.

  I whirled around the street, disoriented. “What? How do you know that?” I said, even though I knew immediately Will had talked. Never in a million years would he side with me over Lynn. Lynn was blood. “Do you have someone following me or something?”

  “Yes,” Lynn hissed, “and you’re lucky I do. You need to go black now. I repeat, go black. You’re on your own.”

  Shit. “No!” I said, a sob clawing its way through my throat. “You can’t just leave me out here like this, Lynn. C’mon!”

  “Go black!” Lynn shouted again. “Kenny’s around the corner. Just—”

  Reluctant, but with no other choice, I slipped my cell into a nearby open garbage can, pivoting to run. But at some point during the call, a car had pulled up. I hadn’t noticed the soft click of a car door opening, or the subtle steps of shoes against the pavement. I only felt the firm hand take hold of my arm and yank me hard into the backseat.

  15

  October 20, 2018

  Nella knew she was about ten minutes early when she arrived at the meeting spot, but she checked her phone again anyway. Nervous habit. So, too, was the way she kept pacing on the sidewalk, spending ten seconds over here, then fifteen over there. Facing south, then north as an icy wind whipped pieces of her afro into her eyes.

  Those bored enough to notice Nella from the restaurant window behind her probably assumed she was up to no good, or maybe just a little bit off. And Nella wouldn’t have argued with any of them. She felt like a madwoman. People were bustling by her and she kept looking every single one of them in the eye, desperately. Many of them ignored her. Most gave her dirty looks. One man wearing a seemingly innocuous tie-dyed bandanna spat on the sidewalk in front of her and growled, “Get the fuck out of my face, bitch.”