The Other Black Girl(34)
7
August 30, 2018
Nella opened her eyes, glanced over at the alarm clock, and moaned. It was only five a.m.; her eyes had closed around one.
She turned to face Owen, noticed how rapt with sleep he was, and promptly returned to her other side, envious. But the flip just made her stomach feel worse. So did remembering how many drinks she’d had the night before… and the reason she’d drunk so much in the first place.
The words “Leave Wagner” worked their way up and down Nella’s brain, stretching wider and wider and echoing louder and louder until her subconscious started playing them back to her in different genres: country, rap, polka, and then—perhaps the cruelest of all—big band. It got so bad that at about three minutes after five, she got out of bed so she could get herself as “together” as she possibly could.
She’d been hearing this tortuous song ever since she’d left Wagner fewer than twelve hours earlier. Throughout her entire train ride between Wagner and McKinley’s, she’d been convinced everyone was looking at her. Was she being watched? Followed? Was that man who was standing by the doors looking at her because he wanted to knock her down and take her wallet, or because he didn’t like the idea of Black people working at Wagner? Had his own son been denied internships at Wagner year after year, and he’d decided to take it out on the one person he thought nobody would miss?
Each new stranger made the note weigh heavier upon her shoulder, to the point that by the time she’d been carded by the McKinley’s bouncer, waved hello to a familiar regular, and headed straight toward the bar, she had already unearthed the envelope from her bag. And as soon as she reached Malaika, she dropped it onto the table like a stick of dynamite she could hold no longer.
“What’s this?” Malaika asked, picking up the envelope and holding it up to the dim bar lighting, as though that would make a difference.
Nella signaled for Rafael to make her the usual. “Didn’t you read any of my texts? Jesus Christ.”
“What? Oh, I’m sorry. I thought you understood that my hand is generally too far up Igor’s ass for me to concern myself with the worries of my own people,” Malaika said, eyebrows raised in mock amusement. “What is this? A wedding invitation or something?” She gasped suddenly, clutching her heart. “Is this your wedding invitation?”
Nella knitted her own eyebrows as she peered over at the bourbon cocktail Malaika was on the edge of finishing. “Mal, how many of those have you had?”
“This may or may not be my third. Igor let me go kind of early today because he wanted me to swing by the dry cleaners before they closed. So I figured, why the hell not?”
“Ohkay.” For a moment, Nella wondered—and not for the first time, either—if perhaps she and Malaika should consider hanging out at an ice cream shop instead of a bar every once in a while. The moment passed fairly quickly, as it always did. “Just open it. Please.”
Malaika picked up her drink and threw the last of it back long and slow, like a woman about to do something extremely dangerous. She set it down, swiped at the moisture above her lip that her previous act had left, and got to work on the envelope.
And strangely, it was work. The top flap had managed to re-glue itself shut, and to Nella’s exasperation, it took Malaika much longer to open than it should have. But Malaika’s reaction to what was inside was satisfying enough to make up for the delay: She threw the envelope on the ground as quickly as she would have thrown a used tampon.
“What the hell,” she said once, and then again, as she retrieved the notecard from the floor. “Where did this come from?”
“I have no fucking clue.” Nella thanked an apprehensive-looking Rafael for her Aperol spritz. It was clear that he wanted to stick around and hear what had garnered such a visceral reaction from Malaika, but another couple had just started to place their jackets on the barstools a few seats down. He gave Nella a modest bow, his sandy hair falling in his face, and ran over to greet them sunnily.
“It just… it just showed up on my desk today. At the very, very end of the day.”
“And you have no clue who could have left it?”
“Nope.”
“And no clue when someone could have dropped it off?”
“My desk is always covered with papers, so… no. It could have been any time of the day.” Nella took a good, long sip of her drink, the shock of bitterness sobering her thoughts a bit.
“Hmmm.” Malaika bit her lip. “Could it be a disgruntled author?”
The thought had flashed through her mind on her way over, but it had dissipated almost as quickly as it had come. There was no way that Colin’s disdain for her feedback on his Black character had outweighed his desire to receive his next scheduled payment for Needles and Pins. The man might have been fragile, with a delicate sense of self-worth, but he wasn’t stupid. “Funny you say that. A certain disgruntled author did cross my mind on the way over here… but there’s no way.”
“Who?!”
“Colin. He flipped out on me yesterday,” Nella explained. “I told him my thoughts about Shar. But that’s a story for my next drink.”
Malaika furrowed her brow in concern. “Shit. Really?”
“Yeah. But there’s no way he would even think about doing that to me. He’s too obvious a culprit, especially since he has a history with harassment.”