The Other Black Girl(112)

Vera asked about Hazel. Nella shrugged. “She wasn’t at her desk when I walked over here. Maybe she came down with something?”

Maybe she decided not to come in today. Maybe she’s too busy mixing up new batches of hypnotic hair grease. Maybe she—

“Haze! Girl, how you doing?” Jesse popped up so fast to give Hazel a fierce embrace that he practically knocked over his chair. “It’s been a minute.”

“Been too long. I’m great! Better now that we’ve got you here.”

“Didn’t take too much to do that,” he said, casting an arm toward the chair Nella had turned down. Hazel took it without a second thought as Richard smiled at her from across the table. “Thanks for hooking me up.”

“Yes, and for hooking us up, too!” Vera said forcefully. “What a great meeting of minds this is going to be.”

“Indeed!” Amy said, clapping her hands. “Let’s get started, shall we?”

“Let’s. But first, Jesse, have you met Nella yet?” Richard asked emphatically. “She’s one of our finest assistants here. She has a really sharp eye.”

Nella swallowed and forced a smile. The warning nature of his tone hadn’t been lost on her. “Thanks, Richard. We did meet, briefly.”

“Indeed!” Jesse said, beaming. He was practically vibrating now, he seemed so happy. Much happier than he had been ten minutes earlier, Nella noticed, as though a light had just turned on inside of him.

Nella shook off the thought, trying not to let it faze her from the task at hand: Win Jesse over. Make him want to work with you. Leave Wagner.

“Jesse, we normally start off these kinds of meetings by telling potential authors a bit about what each of us does here at Wagner,” Amy began, folding her hands in front of her, “but Richard and I spoke earlier, and we think that it’s best that you start us off. Would you like to tell us a little bit about why you’re here today?”

Jesse nodded and licked his lips in the way that Nella had seen him do countless times onscreen. “Absolutely. As you all may know, I’ve been avoiding the spotlight for the last year or so—everything became too overwhelming. The news, the politics, the tweets—all of it was just too much. It seemed appropriate for me to take a break.”

“Was there any particular reason you did this?” asked Nella, curious. “Like a breaking point, or anything?”

“Nell—maybe we should let him finish first. No?”

When Nella looked over at her boss, she noticed that Vera was smiling a bit too hard.

“Yes, you’re right,” she said, embarrassed. She averted her eyes to the scribblings on her notepad. “Of course. Sorry.”

“It’s all good. Um, anyway—where was I?”

“You wanting to take a break,” Richard reminded him, quick-firing daggers at Nella out of the corner of his eye.

“Right. So, I thought I’d take a break. And then I was sitting in the park, not really doing anything, and an idea for a book came to me. A graphic novel, actually.”

The thought seemed so out of left field that even Raúl, Amy’s intern, sat up in his seat. “A graphic novel?” he asked quizzically.

Jesse nodded. “A graphic novel.”

Noticing that no one had reprimanded Raúl for speaking out of turn, Nella said, hopefully, “That sounds great! As in, like, a socially conscious Persepolis kind of thing that shows the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement?”

The social media mogul blinked at her a couple of times. “No,” he said finally. “Not that.”

Nella regarded her notepad again, this time reading the terms she’d written down. “Police brutality, maybe. Or bussing, housing projects, healthcare—”

“I wasn’t thinking about writing about any of those things, either. I want to do something more positive. Something with two main characters who come from different worlds. Different backgrounds. One’s super chill; the other’s, like, super uptight. But they’re brought together for a particular reason—maybe they’re cops? And they teach each other things, despite their differences.”

“So, let me get this straight. You want to write something like… a graphic novel adaptation of Lethal Weapon.”

Jesse grinned. “Mel Gibson is kind of my hero.”

“Really?” Nella asked, too baffled to hide her disappointment.

Richard cleared his throat. “Nella…”

“It’s just so strange, that’s all.”

“What’s wrong with Mel Gibson?” Vera asked, at the same time that Hazel said, “Nella, I don’t think we want to push him into something he doesn’t want to do. Right, Jess?”

“Thank you,” Jesse said.

Nella cocked her head. “But, like—are you… are you sure? Is it because you don’t think we have the right tools here at Wagner to help you put into words what you’d really like to write? Because we’re fully equipped to help you write a really hard-hitting, award-winning—”

“I mean, believe me, we can discuss some political stuff today,” Jesse said, holding up his hands. “But I don’t want that to be the focus of my book.”

“Oh. Okay.” Nella squinted down at her notepad, unsure of what to make of this. She’d spent the last few weeks imagining what it would be like to actually meet Jesse Watson. She’d flipped through every possible scenario like a deck of tarot cards: snotty diva; Black hippie; total space cadet. But none of these personalities were visible in the person seated in front of her. Jesse seemed washed out. Different. And not just because of his new pair of clear plastic glasses frames, which Nella had never seen him wear in any other photos or videos. He seemed cleaner; tidier. His beard, which she remembered being less reserved and more Rastafarian, was now closely cropped; the tiny twists he used to wear were no longer. His hair now lay flat across his head, smooth and just a little bit shiny. Greased.