The Other Black Girl(36)
Nella remained silent. She both loved and hated whenever Malaika got really tipsy and really real with her, which usually happened around nine p.m. and almost always happened after two drinks and no food.
“Oh-ho-ho-ho, but wait,” Malaika squealed, nearly choking on an ice cube. “Fact four: You’re no longer the only one! I forgot about that other Black girl. What’s her name again?”
“Right. Hazel.” Nella herself still sometimes forgot that Wagner wasn’t all white anymore, perhaps because she and Hazel felt like extensions of one another, two sides of the same coin. “I should have checked her desk before I left to see if she got one, too.” She searched for a memory of what her coworker had looked like when she left the office, trying to sift the day’s events from all the others that had come before it, but all she could see were the many shades of agitated Vera: Vera tapping her black sensible shoe; Vera hovering at her desk; Vera frowning—always frowning. Hazel had to have slipped out without Nella noticing.
“Maybe…” Malaika’s eyes widened. She was not so secretly loving this, Nella knew.
“Maybe what?”
“Maybe… it was Hazel who left it.”
“What? That’s crazy. She sent me a Family Matters GIF today. Why would you think that?”
Malaika considered this. “Nah,” she finally said, “you’re right. Homegirl wouldn’t have been that subtle about wanting you to get gone. Plus, you did all the hard work. You broke in all those white people at Wagner. You’ve been preparing them not to say dumb shit in meetings for two whole years. She would never…”
Nella swatted away the thought. “She could never.”
But the notion of Hazel planting the letter dug its claws into Nella’s neck, sinking deeper as she finished her first drink and even deeper as she finished her second. On her third, when Malaika asked Nella if she’d Facebooked her new coworker, she’d practically flung her cell phone out of her purse, ecstatic at the thought of revisiting this topic once more. The fruitful topic they’d switched to previously—whether or not Boyz n the Hood could be turned into a stage musical—had been squeezed dry.
“Her name is Hazel McCall,” Nella said, typing her name into the white search bar.
“I can’t believe we haven’t done this yet. How have we not done this yet?”
“I don’t know. I was looking at her boyfriend’s sister’s hair café website earlier today, but I never got around to her because Vera was working me like a dog.”
“Hair café?”
“I’ll show it to you later, but we should definitely check it out.” Nella pulled the screen down, frustrated. “Whoa, who knew there were so many Hazel McCalls!”
“Really? I find that surprising. Tabling this ‘hair café’ thing for the very near future, by the way.”
“You know what?” Nella sucked down the rest of her drink, then tapped the screen a few times. “Her full name is something hyphenated. Something like Hazel-Anne, or Hazel-Sue… Hazel-May! That’s what it was.” She typed it in as Malaika grumbled something about how country Hazel’s name sounded.
Only one person in the Brooklyn area popped up that time. Nella recognized her colleague immediately, even though her profile photo showed her decked out in an elegant jade-green gown, wearing a face model’s amount of makeup.
“That dress!” Malaika cried. “And, that man! Hello. Who is this fella?”
Nella had hardly glanced at the sexy man in the forest-green tuxedo before the phone was taken away from her, but she knew Malaika was ogling Manny. Nella understood why. Normally, she thought that a tux in any color besides black or navy blue was tacky, but this green one complemented his terra-cotta complexion so strikingly that Nella couldn’t deny how smart of a fashion choice it had been. His long, dark, wavy hair framed his face perfectly, and his smile was even more dazzling than Hazel’s.
How good—no, how bold they both looked together, this young, beautiful couple donning nontraditional hues. Nella wondered what it would take to get Owen into a tux that sharp. Probably a lot. Probably too much.
“That’s Manny. Her boyfriend. He’s Dominican,” Nella added, as though she’d actually met him, as though Malaika had asked. Malaika oohed in reply, like she’d just been granted a secret to the universe.
Nella continued to take a look around Hazel’s Facebook, scanning her latest posts, peeking through photos that she’d recently been tagged in. Posted just three days earlier was a photo of Hazel surrounded by four Black girls. They were all wearing the same purple shirt, with a logo that was just too small for Nella to make out. Each looked to be maybe sixteen or seventeen and had their arms around Hazel, who stood dead center, smiling so hard that her pupils weren’t visible.
Nella ignored the comments—she often got pulled into the most mundane of comment trails—and scrolled down to the next photo. This one was of Hazel staring straight at the camera, holding a large sign in her hands that said RESPECT BLACK WOMEN.
The last one she looked at was of Hazel bathed in soft pink lighting on a stage, a microphone in her hand, her locs piled high on her head. Nella vaguely remembered Hazel telling her she had gone to DC for a Black women’s poetry retreat not long ago.
“Mentors young Black women… goes on poetry retreats… makes signs with all-caps letters… definitely suspicious,” Malaika joked. “Hey, wait a second.” She held up a hand. “You said her boyfriend’s name is Manny?”