She’d hit the jackpot. There were more and more pages just like this one, each filled with Black girls. She didn’t recognize any of the faces besides the ones downstairs, but she continued to flip anyway, feeling more and more validated that she’d thrown caution—and the Dumb Fool Playbook—to the wind. Because here she was, sitting on Hazel’s floor, sifting through a folder of documents in the dark, finding answers to questions that seemed insane.
And then, to her horror, she found another answer.
The curtains caught her eye first. Aquamarine—her mother’s. And the bright-eyed, wine-tipsy girl standing in front of these curtains…
It was her.
Nella stared down at herself, transfixed. The photo had been taken on her twenty-fourth birthday, when she’d gone up to Connecticut to celebrate with her family. She looked so happy and anxiety-free that she’d made it her profile picture for all of her social media accounts immediately after leaving her party. She’d never taken a photo quite as good as that one, which was why it was the last photo she’d ever publicly posted of herself.
Nella couldn’t escape the message the woman had texted her days earlier, minutes after she’d implored Nella to keep digging.
She’s coming for you, too.
There was one more photo behind hers. Nella waited about a tenth of a second before finally flipping over the page—she’d come this far; how could she not?—and caught an unmistakable glimpse of Kendra Rae Phillips.
Terror and confusion filled her chest as she quickly snapped a photo of the woman. Then, without thinking, she turned back to the photo of herself and snapped a picture of that, too, the flash of her phone temporarily illuminating her chocolate-lipsticked lips and sprouts of a teeny-weeny fro that was still trying to find its wings. But before she put it back in the folder, she skimmed the rest of the page. Nella swallowed, as desperate to sit on the floor and read every single word as she was to throw it all into the nearest garbage can and set the whole thing ablaze.
She’d been allotted an entire page—not a row, like the other girls had gotten. Stuck beneath her photo was a hot pink sticky note with handwritten words on it: Seems complacent enough; but more efforts won’t hurt—order of 8 jars coming in 10/20.
That was enough. Nella slid the folder back where it belonged and closed the cabinet. Then she tiptoed over to the door. She was prepared to let herself out when she heard a toilet flush, followed by the sound of voices.
“Do you think Nella, like, left or something?”
Nella froze.
“No clue. She’s an Involuntary, right?”
“Mm-hmm.”
“So funny. Why wouldn’t you want it? My mother would have killed for this stuff when she was my age.”
“She’s probably one of those uppity Black girls who thinks she can get by on her charm alone.”
“Ew, those are the worst. Good for Hazel for trying to help her out.”
Help me? Nella bit her lip. These girls weren’t Hazel’s victims. They were her comrades.
Nella waited, listening to the sound of running water. For a moment, she thought they might’ve already gone back downstairs, but then she heard one of the girls—Kiara, she realized—say, “Dang, Juanita hooked you up.”
“It looks good?”
“Yeah, but stop fussing with it, now—let it be.”
“I just—it’s so tight. I told her to make it a little bit loose.”
Nella didn’t have a chance to hear whether or not Kiara told her to stop complaining, because their footsteps were already winding down the stairs. Only when she heard nothing did she count to ten once, then a second time, before slipping out of Hazel’s room as quickly as she’d entered.
* * *
“That was terrible,” Malaika complained. “Even worse than I thought it would be.”
Nella remained silent as she took a seat next to Malaika on the row of cold, dirty benches to wait for the train.
“They don’t care about anything other than getting jobs and working in ‘this’ industry and ‘that’ industry,” Malaika continued. “And hair… like, do they not have any other concerns? I love being natural, too, but you don’t hear me talking about it every two minutes. Do you?”
Nella still didn’t say a word.
“And, speaking of hair—you should have seen homegirl’s face when I leaned forward and tried to touch one of her dreadlocks! She practically—”
“Please, Mal. Stop,” Nella snapped, the sound of her voice startling herself. The entire walk from Hazel’s front door to the subway, she’d been too stunned to speak. She’d even had a hard time walking. She didn’t feel like she could trust her mind or her body.
Nella scanned every face on the train platform. Once she was sure none of Hazel’s girls had followed them, she pulled out her cell phone. “And you’re sure nobody suspected anything?”
“I showed them some dumb hair video on my phone the minute you went upstairs. C’mon, now—tell me what you sleuthed! You were up there for, like, days.”
Nella narrowed her eyes.
“What?”
“I just…” Could she trust Malaika? She studied her best friend, wondering if Hazel had somehow managed to get to her, too. Malaika studied her right back, visibly concerned. “You good, Nell? You looking like you took a trip to the Sunken Place and back.”
Nella nodded once. Malaika, she could still trust. She had to.
“What did you find?” her friend pressed.
“I took as many photos as I could.” Nella pulled up the pictures, then handed her phone to Malaika. “These pieces of paper were in her room.”
“Jeez.” Malaika pinched the screen for a closer look. “Is that Ebonee?”
“It’s Ebonee and Camille and Kiara. It’s all of them. Mal,” Nella said, her voice shaking, “I didn’t have a chance to tell you this before, but those girls—all of those girls at the party—I’d seen their names before.”
“You had? Where?”
Nella told her about finding them on the printer one morning, all the while keeping her eyes trained on passersby.
“And you think—”
“Well, I thought they were candidates in the running to replace me at work. ‘Diversity hires.’ But now—now I don’t know what their deal is. I overheard them call me ‘an Involuntary.’ As though I’m being, like… converted to something.”
Malaika looked at the photos again before answering her own question. “Well, see, that explains a lot. They’re sipping that Crystal Light, too, right? Hold up. What are these words next to their faces? They look like bios.”
She was about to say more when she abruptly cut herself off. Nella looked around to see what had brought on the heavy silence. A brown-skinned girl with locs that had been rubbed with pink hair chalk wheeled a bicycle by them, humming softly to herself.
Nella watched her, too, until she was a good fifteen feet away. Just to be safe. When she was out of earshot, Malaika began to read. “ ‘Kiara is an amazing writer and great at picking up social cues. Pretty shy, though, with a lower-than-usual understanding about the classics.’ ” She scrolled down. “ ‘Ebonee’s blaccent is so thick you can hardly understand every other word that comes out of her mouth.’ ‘Camille brought such great vibes to the workplace. But word got around that she was feeling less than pleased with how we were “treating her.” Good attitude, but overall ungrateful.’
“What the fuck—what is this?”
Nella snatched her phone back, did some scrolling of her own. “This page is dated as having been printed on March 4, 2017—which makes sense, because Ebonee doesn’t have a blaccent at all now. Not to me, at least.”
Malaika shook her head as Nella pulled back from that photo and started swiping to the right, skipping over the other photos she’d taken until she got to the page with her face on it. “Here’s the worst part of it all, though. I’m in here, too. With entries dating back to my first few months at Wagner. Way before Hazel got there.”
Malaika’s eyes widened. “What? Lemme see!”
Nella held up a solitary finger and cleared her throat. “ ‘June 2016. NR seems smart, quirky. Has white boyfriend, Owen, which could be useful. Is from CT and proud of it.’ ”
She flinched, but read on.
9/3/16. NR sent Jesse Watson link to external email. Apparently subscribed to his channel.
1/4/17. Cop shooting. Temporary Diversity Town Halls put in place; NR seems complacent.
“Seriously, what?” Malaika said. “ ‘Complacent’? What kind of bullshit—”
Nella continued on, trying her hardest to separate herself from the person she was reading about.
7/14/18. BookCenter article about black grief in a white space published. NR sent article from SK; according to emails back & forth, this was NR’s first time seeing it (said she agreed w/ article’s content but said she did not write).
8/21/18. NR noticeably happy with Hazel. Seems like perfect match. Estimated time until cycle completion: ~4 months.
“ ‘Completion’? Complete what?!” Malaika spat, causing the lady who was emptying the garbage a few feet away to pause her activities long enough to eye them questioningly.
But Nella lowered her voice and continued on. “ ‘9/26. Accepted grease, no questions.’ And here, in smaller letters, ‘Mystery note seems to have her on edge—is it KP? Consider alt plan.’ ”
Malaika scrunched her eyebrows. “That’s the same night we went to Curl Central, isn’t it? And wait, who’s KP?”
“I’ll show you in a moment,” Nella said, reading faster and faster with each new line.
10/16/18. Still concerned about notes. NR may know more about Hazel than she’s letting on. Working with KP?
10/17/18. Note-sender discovered to be Shani (Cooper’s). Confirmed NR still in the dark—more time bought w/ Jesse book & promotion talk.
“Hazel wrote all of this?”
That was the most unsettling part. She knew this handwriting, and it wasn’t Hazel’s.
Nella closed her eyes, picturing this cursive she’d seen a hundred times—the signature on every contract, every thoughtful holiday card written to Wagner’s authors. “Richard. This is Richard’s handwriting.”
“Richard, as in your boss?! I knew that man had skeletons,” Malaika breathed. “But why does Hazel have this?”
Nella covered her face. “Because she’s clearly helping him do… whatever it is that she’s doing. Maybe that’s why she’s at Wagner—to convince me to be ‘complacent.’ To… hypnotize me? I have no fucking clue. Whatever’s happening here, it’s terrible, and it’s big. Bigger than me, and probably even bigger than Hazel. Whoever she is.”
Nella stared out into the dark abyss of the train tracks to clear her mind. But she saw the bald-headed girl, the Black hand. The black sedan. If she’d spent more time looking through those files, she would have probably learned her name, too.
“Four months,” Malaika repeated. “That was written what—three months ago? What’s supposed to happen to you next month?”
“I don’t know. But if that’s not confusing enough… meet KP.”
Nella scrolled to the very last photo in her camera roll—the one she’d snapped of the Kendra Rae Phillips page. Judging by the quality of her wallet-sized picture, Nella guessed it had been taken around the time Burning Heart was published. It was maybe one of the last public photos the editor had ever taken. Beside it were more notes, also in Richard’s handwriting, with dates that went from the eighties all the way up to present day. Nella read a few of them out loud—Possible sighting upstate, 1/5/86. 1992—moved to Paris???—but the last one captured her attention and kept it there.
10/20/18, confirmed sighting of KP near 100th and Broadway. Took Shani’s phone, then went underground.
Something ice-cold shot through Nella’s veins. Adrenaline. Fear. Awareness. It was Shani who had been put in the black sedan.
So, then, the new nameless texter—the person who’d told Nella someone was coming for her…
You chose to deal with Kenny the way you did.
The words clipped Nella in the jaw, suddenly, as though she’d been socked. She tried desperately to remember where she’d heard them. Outside of Richard’s office, when she’d suspected he was speaking to his Black mistress.
“What does Kendra Rae Phillips have to do with you? Isn’t she basically, like, gone?”
Nella looked over at Malaika, who was sitting thoughtfully beside her, nibbling at her thumbnail. She wanted desperately to tell Malaika everything she was feeling—about how scared she was to go to work; about how she’d been talking to someone who was supposed to have been “dealt with.” And how she might soon be “dealt with” herself.
But she didn’t. She simply kept her eyes trained on the turnstiles through which they’d swiped, mulling it all over. Hazel might have pretended she didn’t suspect a thing, but Nella was fully aware that she’d disappeared for just a minute too long. Hazel was Hazel: If there was anything she was perfectly attuned to, it was timing.
“So, now what? You are going to quit, right? Or blow the whistle on the fact that Richard Wagner has been keeping tabs on you like this? You should write an article about this,” Malaika huffed, growing more and more indignant. “Would serve his guilty ass right. Maybe then he’d have to explain everything else here.”
Nella sat as still as stone. She inhaled slowly, then exhaled even more slowly, trying to think of a way to put what she was feeling into words. Something rotten resided within Wagner’s walls, and she’d been tracking that rotten something around on her shoe since Day Damn One. How many people had known? Everyone—it had to be all of them. Vera, Maisy, Amy… they all had to be in on it. How else would Richard have such copious notes?
Far down the track and into the tunnel, Nella could make out the lights of a slow-approaching train coming to take her away from Clinton Hill. After a few stops, she would transfer to another train and be swept into a different, less attractive part of Brooklyn, where few businesses were Black-owned, and brownstones became boxy, medium-sized apartments. Where there were no fancy vestibules to put her imaginary bike and coat rack in.
“Whoever that phone belongs to has had your back since day one. Presumably,” Malaika finally said. “And you’re gonna send those photos to that person who’s been texting you. Right?”
Nella nodded. She started to stand, the red-and-black scarf Hazel had gifted her suddenly pulling uncomfortably at her eyebrows.
Malaika stood, too. “Good. Because you know that’s the right thing to do. Maybe it seems like the crazy thing to do, but what have you got to lose, right?”
“Right.” Nella’s eyes were still trained on the lights in the tunnel.
“Great! So…” Malaika pointed at Nella’s phone, which Nella was clutching tightly to her torso. “Wanna do that, like… right now?”
“I think I just want to handle this when I get home,” Nella replied. “The train is coming.”
“We have plenty of time,” said Malaika. “Here—you must be really freaked out. I can just do it for you. Pass it.”
She reached for the phone, but got Nella’s arm and a withering glance instead.
“I said I’ll handle it, Mal. I just want to do it when I get home. My head’s spinning right now, I’m tired, and I’d rather talk about something else for the rest of this trip. Let’s drop it for now. Please?”
Malaika looked hurt. “Okay, okay, sorry. I just figured…”
The arriving train rattled so loudly, Nella didn’t hear the rest.
19
October 26, 2018
Wagner Books
Eleven forty-three a.m. Still no new messages, and still no missed calls.
Nella slipped her phone into her pocket and sighed. Had she dreamed the last few months? Maybe. Maybe there was some explanation for all of this—one that was hiding in plain sight, right under her nose.
The morning was as normal as any other
one. Hazel had greeted her with her usual What’s going on? when she’d first entered the office that morning, and Nella somehow managed a lukewarm greeting in return. Vera’d asked her if she could read two new manuscripts by the end of next week. And just a few minutes earlier, she’d received an email from Donald reminding her that the Jesse meeting was at noon, and that it would take place in the small conference room. “The most intimate Wagner room,” everyone always called it.
Nella pushed herself up from her desk, smoothed her Prince-purple blazer, and started the fifteen-second walk over to the conference room. She was going to be fifteen minutes early—more than early enough, since she was sure Jesse would be at least thirty minutes late. Like he’d said in his CP Time segment: I show up when I show up.
Nella was checking her phone a third time, setting her first foot in the conference room, when she was proved wrong.
There was Jesse Watson, sitting at the far end of the table with a blue fortieth-anniversary Wagner mug in his right hand and a ballpoint pen in the other. “Oh!” she exclaimed.
He looked up from his notepad and over at her, his mouth articulating words that sounded even smoother in person than they had in her headphones, and in a flash, he was moving to greet her. “You must be Nella,” he said. “It’s so nice to finally meet you. I’ve heard so much about you.”
“Um… yeah. Yes. Hi!” He hadn’t said he’d read her email and loved it, but he didn’t need to. She was starstruck: Jesse was even cuter in person than he’d been on her computer screen. He smelled good, too, like autumnal potpourri. “It is so, so nice to meet you! Thanks for taking the time to come to Wagner.”
“Oh, it’s no trouble at all. I’m always traveling, and New York is one of my favorite places.”
Nella looked around at the empty seats as Jesse sat back down. Seeing her hesitation, he gestured at the one closest to him. “Have a seat?”
She smiled. “Thanks. I wish I could,” she apologized, picking a seat three chairs down, “but I think my bosses will want those seats.”
The Other Black Girl Page 33