The Other Black Girl(108)
Aided now by nothing but her flashlight and roughly two-thirds of the courage she’d felt when she first crossed this threshold moments earlier, Nella returned to the cabinet and grabbed onto one of its knobs, making sure she left not one fingerprint on the glass. Then, she extracted the manila folder and began to leaf through it, turning over what seemed to be various magazine clippings.
But just as she was about to put the folder back, close the cabinet door, and figure out an exit strategy, her fingers found a non-glossy page. And then another. A little more careful concentration of the beam on the stack of pages revealed that one-quarter of the folder’s contents were regular pieces of paper, eight and a half by elevens.
Nella refrained from letting loose a hysterical cheer, but when she came across the rows of wallet-sized faces—all familiar, all in varying shades of brown—she allowed herself a soft one. There they were: Kiara, Ebonee, and according to the name next to the photo, Camille. Next to each of their faces were a city, a three-digit number—a labeling system?—and countless handwritten notes.
She’d been right.
Nella’s first instinct was to run and tell Malaika. Malaika could distract Hazel, and then Nella could tell all the other girls downstairs…
Tell them what? She didn’t know what to tell them, really—and she knew she didn’t have time to read any of the notes. Not now. So she listened to her second instinct and took a photo to save for later. Then, not nearly satisfied, she continued to leaf through the pages, speeding up when she heard the vague sound of a toilet flushing a few feet away.
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.
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