The Other Black Girl(58)
Nella was happy she’d been spared from explaining that no assistant had ever sat so close to the stone table. That it just wasn’t done. But that didn’t stop her from wondering, as she took a bite out of her bagel, why it never actually was.
“So.” Hazel took a bite out her cinnamon raisin mini-bagel, moving forward so she could engage Nella, Sophie, and Gina, a know-it-all assistant publicist, at the same time. “Y’all are coming to my Young, Black ’n’ Lit event tonight, right?”
A muscle tightened in Nella’s neck. This question felt like it had been directed at her and her alone. She pretended to be interested in testing the functionality of her ballpoint pen.
It wasn’t that Nella didn’t want to go, because she’d considered it on more than one occasion since receiving the Facebook event invite a couple of days earlier. She’d looked up Young, Black ’n’ Lit, the nonprofit poetry organization that Hazel herself had founded for Black high school students in Harlem, and realized it was exactly the kind of thing that she and Malaika always talked about doing more of—being engaged in the communities in which they lived, partaking in Black extracurriculars.
She discovered that plenty of other people felt the same way, too, once she’d looked around some more. YBL had approximately fifteen thousand Instagram followers and twenty-two thousand Facebook fans. Since 2012, our mission has been to amplify the voices of teens who have the words, but don’t have the microphone, the main home page read. We aim to promote the next generation of Mayas, Lauryns, and Lucilles.
Their net went far beyond New York—it extended to Chicago and LA, too, where educators had started YBL chapters in their own communities. Most impressive of all, though, was YBL’s Twitter page, which had nearly thirty thousand followers and a breadth of tweets, sometimes five in a day—interviews with Black writers from all over the country and from all decades; posts dedicated to the birthdays of Black poets, many of whom Nella had never heard of. It was rife with so much rich Black content that Nella could have cozied up on her full-sized bed and settled into it for an hour. Two hours, even.
But she didn’t have the time these days. Ever since their conversation about The Lie, Vera had been inundating Nella with manuscripts, day after day. She was thinking about which one she should start first when Sophie said, “Wait! Your reading thing’s tonight? I totally forgot. Where is it, again?”
“It’s at Curl Central. In Bed-Stuy.”
Gina frowned. Nella practically heard the corners of her mouth turn down. A “what’s hot and what’s not” crystal ball of sorts, the redhead fell into the small but revered category of hardcore publicity employees who heard the name of a place located in the city, then joyfully told you if she deemed it literary enough to hold an author event—whether you wanted to know or not. It was a gift that Nella did not wish for, but it did impress her.
“Curl Central. Hm.” Gina’s mouth scrunched up into the left side of her face. After too much thought, she concluded, “We’ve never held anything there before.”
Hazel laughed. “I didn’t think you had,” she said good-naturedly, but Nella could sense a glimmer of amusement in her eye—the same one she’d had when Maisy had whitesplained Harlem to her. “It’s at a hair café. My boyfriend’s sister’s. It’s her first time hosting a literary salon. She’s got the space for it, so we figured, why not?”
“?‘Hair café,’?” Gina repeated, taking a sip of her coffee as she computed once more. “That’s different.”
“I’m down, definitely,” said Sophie, practically bubbling over with glee. Sophie had been coming over to Hazel’s desk at least twice a day to chat, and Nella imagined she was psyched at the idea of hanging with Hazel outside of work for a change.
“Great.” Hazel nodded. She shifted her focus; this time, her eyes really were on Nella.
“I’ll come, too, if the other thing I have going on cancels,” Gina said, a bit resignedly. “It’ll be nice to scope it out, see if we’d want to host something there in the future.”
“Sweet! Nella?”
When Nella looked up, Hazel’s eyes were practically pleading with her. Please, girl, don’t leave me with these white chicks at a Black hair salon. “How about you?”
“Um…” Nella ran a hand across the back of her neck. She had plans directly after work that evening, and not just the kind of plans she invented when she preferred to go home and stream reruns of A Different World Real plans. She was supposed to be meeting a young, established agent she’d been chasing for months; after that, she and Owen had plans to split a blunt and go see The Blob, one of their favorite bad-but-good sci-fi movies, downtown. They’d purchased tickets for the movie two months earlier, nearly a year in New York City time, and she was still in the doghouse after missing quality family time with his parents. She owed him.
“C’mon, it’ll be fun! You’ve been meaning to come by Curl Central, right? You should come. You can bring Owen, too.”
Something about that suggestion felt a bit odd to Nella, but she shrugged it off. “I might be able to make it. I have drinks with an agent scheduled for tonight, but that hopefully won’t go for too long.”
“Drinks with an agent?” Sophie practically shrieked. “Awesome!”