The Other Black Girl(31)
Before Nella could bask in these words a moment too long, Vera’s door swung open again. “Nella, are you logged on?”
“I—”
“I sent you something that needed to be addressed immediately half an hour ago, and resent it again just now. Could you please take care of that? Now? Thanks.”
Nella wheeled back over to her own desk as quickly as she could, but her shoelace betrayed her at exactly the same moment, inserting itself into one of the wheels and causing it to stick. The chair was moving at a painful crawl, and Vera was watching, one eyebrow arched. But she didn’t say anything. She simply exhaled and sauntered back into her office, slamming her door louder than she did before.
* * *
The rest of the day passed exactly this way: excruciatingly, soaked with subtext that neither editor nor assistant had the resolve to acknowledge. The “urgent matter” Vera had asked Nella to handle was asking the managing editor if there was still time to include an author’s middle initial in the jacket’s flap copy before the book went to print. The managing editor’s office was a mere ten-second walk away from Vera’s desk.
This, Nella could handle. But for whatever reason, despite her best efforts, every other small thing she did went horribly wrong in some fashion: She forgot to cc the agent on an email to an author; she’d accidentally cut off the important part of a scanned document for Vera.
Nothing she did was right. Or, at least, it didn’t feel right. Was it all in her head—Vera’s frustrations, these tensions, these Colin Franklin demons? Occasionally, she paused her apologizing to wonder if she was simply projecting her own shame. But then Vera would conclude an exchange with all good, her eyes even frostier than her tone, and Nella thought to herself that yes, something had definitely shifted between them.
Meanwhile, inversely, Nella’s relationship with Hazel was beginning to flourish, as though they were two soldiers in the trenches. Hazel worked to keep Nella afloat by distracting her with non-Wagner related things. When Nella responded to one of Vera’s complaints with “Did I do that?! I’m sorry,” Hazel swiftly emailed Nella a Steve Urkel GIF. After lunch, she brought Nella a triple-fudge walnut cookie from the bakery across the street, which happened to be Nella’s favorite. And a few hours later, around three p.m., she sent Nella a link to Curl Central, the “dope hair café” she’d told her about in the elevator.
Curl Central’s home page claimed the store doubled as “an exhaustive mecca for all Black hair matters”—and it wasn’t lying. Curl Central really did cover it all. Not only could you buy scarves there, you could take workshops that taught you how to wrap them in the most intricate of styles. There was even a hair therapist—“Miss Iesha B.”—who, if you went between the hours of five and seven on Thursday evenings, would sit down with you for half an hour and discuss what was ailing your locs. For those who weren’t fortunate enough to live in New York City, or preferred a more solitary hairapy experience, Miss Iesha B. had written a short book that was available online for $9.99.
Whoever owned this store had taken great care to provide smell and texture descriptions of all their hair products, and had found Black models with every kind of curl pattern to showcase the effectiveness of each. It all fascinated Nella, how much time and effort had clearly been put into this website, so she navigated to Curl Central’s About Us page, curious. The café had been founded and owned by Juanita Morejón, an attractive, curvy woman who possessed 3C curls, a clear fondness for crop tops, and an abundance of love for the time she spent growing up in the Dominican Republic with her baby brother, Manny.
Nella paused. Manny? As in… Hazel’s boyfriend?
She read Juanita’s bio through to the end, then read it again. She felt uncertain, but she couldn’t put her finger on why. It wasn’t because Hazel hadn’t told her Curl Central was her boyfriend’s sister’s shop, although for someone who seemed so open to sharing everything about her personal life, it was strange that Hazel had chosen to keep that part to herself.
Only after she’d clicked away from Curl Central’s website could she identify the source of the feeling: It was the new knowledge that Hazel’s boyfriend wasn’t white. He was Dominican. Dominican Dominican. As in, he’d been born in the DR and had lived there for ten years before immigrating to New York.
Nella pondered this new piece of information about her new coworker. Even though Hazel dripped Harlem like Spike dripped Brooklyn, something about her had led Nella to presume she’d ended up with a white guy like Owen, too. Perhaps it was the mere fact that Hazel had lived and worked in Boston for a lengthy amount of time, which to Nella meant that she’d attended white-bright parties similar to ones she herself had attended back in high school and college. And now, here Hazel was at Wagner, surrounded by white people once again.
Then again… just because Hazel was capable of navigating white social spheres all the time didn’t mean she wanted to. Nella could appreciate that.
“I’m leaving, Nella.”
When she looked up, Vera was standing above her cubicle, all dressed up and ready to go home. The pinched expression she’d been wearing earlier had relaxed a bit, thankfully, but she still didn’t look altogether forgiving. It was late, after seven p.m., and Nella’s will to work had walked out the door with Hazel about an hour earlier; now, she was elbow-deep in a listicle titled “Ten Celebs You Didn’t Know Were Afro-Dominican.”