The Other Black Girl(15)
“Morning, Nell! What’s going on?” Hazel set her mug down on the big glass table fixed in the middle of the kitchen. Nella had already learned that this was how Hazel initiated most conversations, no matter how obvious the answer was, and no matter how much it stumped Maisy. Which was, Nella observed, every time.
“Just waiting on my morning fix.” The Keurig eked out another wet sound—louder than it had two days earlier—as though it, too, were desperate to contribute to the conversation. Jocelyn needed to return from her vacation, stat, before everyone at Wagner turned on one another with box cutters and loose staples out of caffeine deprivation.
“I still haven’t figured that thing out. Is it any good?”
“Eh. You’d be better off siphoning water from the Gowanus Canal and pouring it over coffee beans that you’ve stepped on with your dirtiest pair of shoes. But it’s free, so…”
“Shit, ‘free’ is my favorite flavor.” Hazel laughed as she stuffed her lunch in the fridge and closed the door. She reached into her jacket pocket and pulled out a pouch filled with herbs. The flurry of movement sent another wave of sweetness toward Nella’s nose that she had to fight not to recoil from. Although she and Hazel had been cubemates for two weeks, she still hadn’t gotten entirely used to her new neighbor’s hair grease. Or perfume. Whatever it was, Nella was sure it wasn’t Brown Buttah. Brown Buttah didn’t smell that strong.
“My boyfriend works at a tea salon. I get ‘free-flavored’ tea all the time.”
“Nice.” Nella considered asking her about this tea salon, but her coffee had finally finished brewing, and a new author of Vera’s was supposed to call her in fewer than five minutes to talk about the copyediting process. “Gotta run.”
“Okay! See you in, like, three seconds.”
“Yeah! See you.” Nella grabbed her mug from the Keurig. As she turned to leave, Hazel said, more excitedly than Nella had heard her say anything before, “Ohmygod, wait! I love your mug!”
“Thanks! It was a gift from my mom.”
Hazel took a couple of steps toward the table and picked up her own mug. Painted on its side in swirls of purple and blue and orange was an unmistakable drawing of Zora Neale Hurston, tilted hat and all.
Nella wasn’t sure how she hadn’t noticed it before; it was so stunning. “Mug twins! Except your Zora is even prettier. That artwork is beautiful.”
“Thank you! It’s kind of my pride and joy,” Hazel squealed, walking over to the hot water tower.
“Where did you get it?”
“My boyfriend, actually. He painted the art. Then he had a friend of his who works in ceramics do this up for me for our five-year anniversary. He customized the handle just for me, too. Ain’t it dope?”
Nella peered closer at the small, finger-spaced grooves in the handle, unable to not notice that Hazel had mentioned having a boyfriend not once, but twice over the course of a very short interaction. It amused her, this double-mention, because it was the kind of detail that meant nothing—until, of course, it was combined with enough other nothings to turn into a something.
In Nella’s eyes, this “something” was a lack of self-reliance. She felt a little bit of pride at not having mentioned Owen’s name even once to her new cubemate. Hell, she even felt just a tiny bit smug. Her boyfriend didn’t define her.
Then again, Owen had forgotten all three of their anniversaries.
Nella offered up one more laudatory phrase regarding the mug and, as Hazel turned to doctor her tea, a brief goodbye. She needed every second of the remaining three minutes to prepare for her phone call.
She’d started to make a subtle run for it when she heard Hazel say something else.
Nella paused mid-step, considering her options. She was far enough away to pretend that she hadn’t heard Hazel speak. But she had. Two words, in fact: Burning Heart. Black Kryptonite against her steeled workaholic heart.
Her parents had gifted her Diana Gordon’s first book for her fourteenth birthday, the summer before she started high school. It had captured her from the epigraph. She loved reading about headstrong Evie, a young, Black teenager who runs away from her conservative parents in a small New England town, and the rough-and-tough Black Panther Party member she falls in love with along the way.
Nella saw bits of herself in Evie. Her own parents had never been the turn-the-other-cheek kind of folks—they’d raised her to speak up when something wasn’t right, and to never let anyone treat her like she was less than. But Nella had never really needed to wield these tools as a teenager. And so, she could relate to Evie’s desperation to really experience life, and her desire to take a bite out of the unknown world that existed just beyond her grasp.
Nella hadn’t been able to put Burning Heart down for the entire month of August, and even though it rounded out at a whopping five hundred pages, she’d read it three times in rapid succession. She wrote about it for a freshman summer reading project in September, and nearly eight years later, it provided the backbone for a senior thesis that she’d never managed to publish. Since Burning Heart had been both written and edited by Black women, she placed its societal impact front and center, along with two other books that were edited and written by individuals of the same race—a rare feat, Nella had come to learn.
This was all, however, too much to explain when she was in a rush, so Nella scurried back into the kitchen, let out a small sigh, and said, “Sorry—did you say something about Burning Heart?”