The Other Black Girl(39)

Ebonee J.

Jada A.

Jazmin S.

Kiara T.

Nia W.



Names. And across from the names, in the middle column, were dates. And across from the middle column, on the far right, was a list of cities. Well, mostly one city: New York, New York, New York, all the way down. Only Camille P. from Missoula dared to break the pattern.

Nella scanned the list once again. Missoula be damned; these names had to belong to Black women.

Bizarre.

And then, suddenly hopeful as she slipped it back onto the printer: Could it be a list of candidates to hire? She stood up on her tiptoes and confirmed that Richard’s light was indeed on in his office.

“What you doin’, Nella?”

Nella started at the sound of her name. She’d expected to have the office to herself for at least another half an hour or so. “Hello? Who’s there?”

The sound of laughter echoed from her desk. “Who you think?” the voice asked. “It’s just me!”

Nella knew this voice. She made her way over to her cubicle to find C. J. standing next to her empty chair, his face stretched by a self-satisfied smirk, his arms crossed over the front of his too-small, navy-blue Wagner Mail short-sleeved button-up. Not long after she had started, maybe during her third or fourth week, he’d told her in his thick, buttery accent how he’d once made the mistake of putting it in a dryer for too long. It had shrunk down to a third of its original size, “just five minutes short of a crop top,” he’d said, laughing. When she’d asked him why he hadn’t just gotten another one, he told her that it would cost him more than fifty bucks to replace.

After that, they were buds.

“You fucking terrified me, Ceej.” Nella punched his shoulder, even though she was so happy to see him that she thought she might cry. If she was sure about anything, it was that C. J. wasn’t the perpetrator. “I’m so glad it’s you.”

C. J. raised his eyebrows. Apparently, he noticed that she was close to tears, too. “I should get surgery more often. It’s been, like, what—six weeks? And you forgot I existed already?” His hearty laugh reverberated through the empty halls and through Nella’s core, too, filling up her insides like a cup of gumbo on a January day.

“I didn’t forget about you,” Nella said. She felt like giving him a hug just to prove her point. Instead, she lowered herself back down at her desk. She didn’t want him to get the wrong idea. Even though he’d apologized for that awkward DM he’d drunkenly sent her on Instagram a few months back, and they seemed to have gotten past it, Nella deemed it better to keep their relationship at a place that hovered somewhere around G-rated but meaningful.

“How’s the knee?” she asked him.

“Oh, you know. Doin’ what it should be. Hurts like hell, but I’m here.”

“You didn’t want to take a bit more time off?”

“Can’t,” C. J. said. “We only get so much time, you feel me?”

Nella nodded, although they both knew that his “we” didn’t involve her, because he and the rest of the mail staff were given less paid time off than everyone else. Their situations outside of the office were vastly different, too. C. J. lived with his sister and his sister’s kid in Ocean Hill and helped support them both, partly with his Wagner paychecks and partly with paychecks from his weekend job. She couldn’t remember specifically which nightclub he was a bouncer at, but she vaguely remembered that it was nowhere near where he lived—in Hell’s Kitchen, or maybe even somewhere up in Columbia territory. And it made sense. On Monday mornings, if she looked long enough, she might see him taking a break in between distributing packages, leaning against his mail crate to catch some rest.

Nella wasn’t sure how he managed all of it at the age of twenty-two: the commute; the two jobs; supporting family that was his family but wasn’t really his responsibility, not according to her own privileged rules, anyway. But somehow, he did. Usually with a smile.

Nella eyed his knee skeptically. “You could have at least come in a bit later, you know,” she said quietly.

“Ha! Sherry texted me and told me the guy who was here in my place was doing a real shit job. I’ve been finding mail postmarked from more than a week ago that ain’t been delivered yet. No good. It’s like, how you gonna screw up this job? You know what I’m saying? It’s so easy, my god.”

Nella thought about the scrawny old mailman who’d come up from the software company below them to take C. J.’s spot. She chuckled as she remembered how he’d accidentally run Maisy over with his cart during the first week of his temporary residency at Wagner, of how Nella—of all of her colleagues—was the one person whose mail never got fudged. “I tried to help him out as best as I could when he first took over, but poor guy… he just couldn’t get it together. I think he was overwhelmed by how many packages we get up here.”

“You know what I think?” C. J. flexed his left bicep and kissed it. “I think he just ain’t me. That’s all it is.”

Nella laughed. “I think you’re probably right.”

“So how have things been around here otherwise? Have you taken over the world yet? Bought the latest bestseller?”

“Hell, no. But… um… something strange happened yesterday. I got this really weird note.”