The Other Black Girl(32)
Nella clicked out of it with one hand, using the other to wave at her boss. “Is it time to go already? Wow! Have a great night!”
Vera called out a half-hearted you, too, and strode toward the elevators without another word.
Nella sighed for perhaps the thirtieth time that day—except this time, it was a sigh of real relief. Finally, she could leave and go meet Malaika for a drink. Finally, she could vent about the Shartricia explosion with her, and finally, she could relieve the tension she’d been swimming in for almost nine hours. She stood up and started to collect her things, tossing pages she didn’t need the following day and stacking the ones she would.
That was when she saw the small, white envelope sitting in the far corner of her desk. Her name was written neatly across its front, glaring up at her in all caps.
Nella didn’t move at first. She just stared down at it, confused, as something funny tugged at her earlobes. How long had it been sitting there? An hour? The entire day?
Was it a letter from Vera apologizing for today?
She brought the envelope up to her face to assess it more closely. Yes, that was Nella’s name, alright—written in purple pen.
She rolled her shoulders twice, a nervous tic she didn’t know she had. Her bag slithered off her arm onto the floor, but she didn’t move to pick it up. Instead, she squinted at the mysterious thing in her hands once more. She wasn’t sure she could face what was on the inside of the envelope. She felt even less sure she could go on not knowing.
To hell with it.
Nella ran her pinky under the seal, angling her finger to avoid any paper cuts. Inside was an index card no bigger than two-by-three inches, with three damning words typed up in, confusingly, Comic Sans font.
She counted to three, the numbers hard to hear beneath the sound of her heartbeat. Then she inhaled and cast a glance over the tops of the cubicles to see who hadn’t gone home yet. She wasn’t sure what she expected to see—someone running away in a pointy white hood, or a sadistic trespassing tween who actually thought Comic Sans was cool?—but she did see Donald, Richard’s assistant. Donald, who was too shy to say hello unless he needed something; Donald, who was bobbing his head to music only he could hear, a pair of oversized Bose headphones connecting his round, close-shaven head to a Discman that rested by his left elbow. Donald, who still used a Discman.
There was no way Donald, whose emails were always in eight-point Times New Roman, would ever fuck with Comic Sans—not to intimidate, not even ironically. No one at Wagner would. It didn’t add up.
Nella sank back down into her chair, a sudden chill threading itself down her throat and into her stomach, like she’d swallowed an unhealthy amount of helium. Again, she examined the piece of paper that was in her left hand; then the envelope in her right. She was so lost in thought as to how she could have missed its delivery that she didn’t notice it was now almost eight p.m., and that the rushing air had shifted down from its usual loud hum to the gentle, power-saving whir of the afterhours.
Leave Wagner. Now.
She turned the notecard over, just in case she’d missed something. But that was all it said, so she read the words a second time.
And then, a third.
The fourth time she read them, a short, deep guffaw let loose from her belly. She couldn’t help it. It wasn’t one of those confident Olivia Pope laughs. By no means was she thinking, Ha, I’m better than you, you small-minded anonymous racist stranger, you—because this isn’t going to get to me; I’m going to rise from the ashes and write a think piece about this moment and you will rue the day you ever tried to fuck with me.
No. The laugh was more of a simple, resigned chortle. A Ha! Finally. I’ve always known this moment would come. She thought of Colin Franklin with his crumpled cap; of the elderly Black man shot in North Carolina for reaching for his hearing aid. Of Jesse Watson’s words about being seen as an equal to white colleagues: “You may think they’re okay with you, and they’ll make you think that they are. But they really aren’t. They never will be. Your presence only makes them fear their own absence.”
They. Yes, there had always been a they since she’d started working at Wagner, hadn’t there?
Nella exhaled as she slid the note back into the envelope, intent on throwing the entire parcel into her recycling bin and forgetting she’d ever read it. But something stopped her—the cathartic desire to share its existence with someone else, and the inherent need to survive. She’d seen all the movies, watched all the videos about bullying and racism in health class. What Nella had in her clammy fingers, she knew, was evidence.
Shani
July 10, 2018
Joe’s Barbershop
Harlem, New York
“Name.”
I coughed into my fist, my throat suddenly dry although the night was humid as ever. “Shani. Shani Edmonds.”
“Shani Edmonds. Okay. Hi, Shani.”
The guy manning the door took a break from his phone so he could look me up and down. I didn’t mind it so much. I’d done the same to him when I’d stumbled up to the entrance of Joe’s Barbershop a few seconds earlier, studying as much of him as the shadows beneath the building’s awning would allow. I got a decent look, and I’ll say this: I’d never been to Harlem, but he looked exactly as I’d always imagined Black guys in Harlem would look: Tall, dark, and cute. The kind of Black guy that reminded me of one of the many debonair, coiffed men who speckled my grandfather’s collection of army photos. Old school, 1940s, with skin the color of wet sand and a kind smile that suggested he’d much sooner call a woman “brown sugah” than “bitch.”