The Other Black Girl(77)

Eva.

I’d looked left, then right, searching for her in the sea of faces that had quickly accumulated outside of Anna’s office. I was the zoo animal on display, and people I’d worked with for nearly two years—people I’d publicly called friends but had also privately called ‘self-important vampires’ because in corporate life, these things weren’t mutually exclusive—had their noses pressed against the walls as they merrily watched me eat my own shit.

The only thing worse than that was knowing that dozens, maybe even hundreds, of other young Black women were experiencing this same kind of humiliation, too… and young Black women were the cause of it. Hundreds of young Black women, probably more, were undergoing severe personality changes all over the world. The degree to which they were changing varied from person to person. Some spoke differently, others dressed differently. But the most important thing was that the change wasn’t superficial. It went down to each and every one of their souls.

OBGs. “Other Black Girls,” Lynn had dubbed them, “because they’re not our kind.” They were something else entirely. Something close to alien, although Lynn wasn’t out-there enough to suspect that these OBGs—or whatever it was that was changing them—had landed here from outer space. She just knew there was a deeper explanation for why these young women were suddenly no longer beholden to anyone but themselves and the white people they worked for. Why they were so obsessed with success—and with taking down any Black women who got in their way.

Twice a month, Lynn held early morning meetings at Joe’s so she could tell us what she heard from her people who were keeping tabs on other parts of the country. The verdict was that the OBGs were spreading far, and they were spreading fast. When Lynn first learned about these OBGs five years ago, they’d been contained to just a few northeastern cities: New York, Boston, Philly. But now, they were being sighted as far south as Miami, as far north as Portland, and as far west as Los Angeles.

Joe himself confirmed it at our last meeting, after visiting his daughter out in California. There’d been a wetness in his eyes as he’d stood in Lynn’s usual spot at the front of the room and explained how it was as though a layer of his baby girl had been peeled away and replaced by a fake, transparent sheen that bore no resemblance to the person he’d raised. “And I know it ain’t just that basic Hollywood bullshit that’s gotten her, either,” Joe had promised us vehemently. “Her goddamn agent got her auditioning for three slave parts this month alone. Three.”

Pen poised above her signature orange notebook, Lynn had pressed Joe about the symptoms his daughter was exhibiting. The smile-and-nod? The helpless shrug? The glassy-eyed stare?

“There was some of the glassy-eyed stare. But when I asked her if she knew what she was doing, my daughter actually said that she didn’t like the idea of playing a slave. And she started explaining it all to me… justifying it. Spouted all this crap about ‘playing the game’ until she didn’t need to play no more. Said she letting them think they pulling the strings, when really she is.”

This got to Lynn. To all of us. This meant OBGs were blending in easier with non-OBGs. Blending in meant they were advancing in numbers. They were radically different now than they were twenty years ago, which was when Lynn suspected OBGs—or some form of them—had first come into existence. But at least they were keeping to themselves back then. Heads down, eyes on the top spot. Now, anyone who got in their way to the top got stepped on.

Or worse, if you weren’t careful.

When I’d searched for Eva in that crowd outside Anna’s office, I’d found her toward the back, her arms tight across her body, her eyes two hard spheres of onyx. I’d heard the screeching sound of life as I knew it coming to a halt; the words, narrated softly but certainly, of the woman I’d met on the train hours earlier: You said too much. You’re fucked. Only then did I realize far, far too late, that something was wrong with Eva. No Black woman would ever do that to another Black woman. Not without being deeply, deeply disturbed. Not while seeming so down. So human.

We’d have to come up with more complex ways to separate ourselves from them, said Lynn. And we’d have to be even more vigilant of my least favorite Resistance Rule: Never confront an OBG or potential OBG unless directed.

Such a rule kept me from going in on Eva when I saw her with Nella at Nico’s in August, and then last night, when I listened to her preach about solidarity and diversity to everybody at Curl Central. In fact, I’d had to restrain myself to keep from jumping out of my seat, grabbing her by a loc, and asking her to run that smug shit about solidarity by me one more time.

I was still envisioning how good it would have felt to wield a piece of Eva’s hair above my head like a captured flag when Lynn called over to me from my desk, asking me for an update.

I swallowed my grin and brought my legs up to my chest. It was a rare occasion for me to have the couch all to myself, but I’d gotten so used to scrunching myself up to make room that it came naturally now. “So far, still good. I was sitting in the front row and Ev—sorry, Hazel, barely even looked at me. You know how it is. Paranoid people don’t see what’s standing right there in the light. They only see what’s in the shadows.”

Lynn did know. “And Nella?”

“Nella’s not compromised. I saw them having a pretty intense-looking exchange at the end of the night. But I’m pretty sure she’s fine.”