The Other Black Girl(2)

“Okay. Actually, hold on—I might have seventy-five…” I reached for my wallet again to unearth a few quarters. Only after he handed me my ticket and my change did he punch the air in front of him and say, eyes flickering, “Right! I’ve got it. I know where I’ve seen you before.”

I swallowed, shook my head once. No, no, no.

“I was just reading about you this morning,” he said, pointing at something in his back pocket. A rolled-up newspaper. The twinkle in his eyes went out, and when he spoke again, his words came slowly, like he was deciding if I was worth wasting them on. “I was a big fan of yours. So I was really surprised to learn how you really feel.”

Look away. That was what I told my eyes to do. But instead of averting my eyes, instead of telling this man, Leave me alone, I don’t know what you’re talking about, I did something that surprised him, and surprised myself even more.

I looked him in the face. And I smiled.

“Oh, heavens—you mean that witchy lady from the news, right?” I crowed. “Why, that happened to me on the way here. My taxi driver made the same mistake. Can you imagine that? Twice in one day! I reckon it’s a good thing I’m leaving the city now, ain’t it?”

When the last of the shrill, inhuman sound escaped my lips—laughter, it was supposed to be—some of that early twinkle returned to the conductor’s eyes.

He moved closer, sizing me up a little too long. But I kept my smile big and bold and harmless, just like Grandma Jo did every morning she traveled across town to clean white folks’ houses.

“Ah. I see it now. The eyes,” the conductor decided, finally. “You look far too young to be her.” He turned to leave. “Well, you have a good day, ma’am. And I’m real sorry about that.”

As he made his way to the next car, I heard him chuckle. “Witch indeed,” he muttered.

I breathed out a tiny poof of air. That was easy—too easy. But I couldn’t sit with it for too long. There was another bell; a moment later, the train doors slid shut.

Relieved, I cast one more glance toward the door, the sudden movement causing me to shrink from the pain. The itchiness hadn’t just returned; it was all-consuming. Unyielding. I reached up again to scratch—stop it, stop it—but the itch simply moved to a new site, and I had to bite my lip to keep from screaming. One scratch would always lead to another, then another. I’d be scratching until the end of the line. And once I got to the end of the line, that wouldn’t be it. I’d still be scratching. And I’d probably still be running, too.

I groaned and slid over in my seat to rest my head against the window. It was as warm and sweaty as the skin beneath my collar, but as the train sped up, each swath of tunnel passing seamlessly into the next, I closed my eyes anyway. I could pretend, at least for this train ride, that everything was okay. That it wasn’t too late.





Part I


1


July 23, 2018

Wagner Books

Midtown, Manhattan

The first sign was the smell of cocoa butter.

When it initially crept around the wall of her cubicle, Nella was too busy filing a stack of pages at her desk, aligning each and every one so that the manuscript was perfectly flush. She was so intent on completing this task—Vera Parini needed everything to be flush, always—that she had the nerve to ignore the smell. Only when it inched up her nostrils and latched onto a deep part of her brain did she stop what she was doing and lift her head with sudden interest.

It wasn’t the scent alone that gave her pause. Nella Rogers was used to all kinds of uninvited smells creeping into her cubicle—usually terrible ones. Since she was merely an editorial assistant at Wagner Books, she had no private office, and therefore no walls or windows. She and the other open-space assistants were at the mercy of a hard-boiled egg or the passing of gas; they were often left to suffer the consequences for what felt like an hour afterward.

Adjusting to such close proximity had been so difficult for Nella during her first few weeks at Wagner that she’d practiced breathing through her mouth even when it wasn’t called for, like when she was deciding between granolas at the grocery store, or when she was having sex with her boyfriend, Owen. After about three months of failed self-training, she had broken down and purchased a lavender reed diffuser that had the words JUST BREATHE scrawled across its front in gold cursive letters. Its home was the far corner of her desk, where it sat just beneath the first edition of Kindred that Owen had given her shortly after they started dating.

Nella eyed the gold foil letters and frowned. Could it have been the lavender diffuser she smelled? She inhaled again, craning her neck upward so that all she could see were the gray and white tiles that lined the ceiling. No. She’d been correct—that was cocoa butter, alright. And it wasn’t just any cocoa butter. It was Brown Buttah, her favorite brand of hair grease.

Nella looked around. Once she was sure the coast was clear, she stuck her hand into her thick black hair and pulled a piece of it as close to her nose as she could. She’d been proudly growing an afro over the last three years, but the strand still landed unsatisfyingly between her nose and her cheek. Nonetheless, it fell close enough to tell her that the Brown Buttah smell wasn’t coming from her own hair. What she was smelling was fresh, a coat applied within the last hour or so, she guessed.