The Other Black Girl(80)

Nella glanced over at the microwave clock to assess the damage. It was a quarter after ten, which meant she had no time to run downstairs and buy a coffee across the street. Defeated, she filled her mug with hot water and reached for a box of green tea. She would simply have to sit through the ten thirty cover meeting with Vera, Leonard, and Amy undercaffeinated. It would suck, but it would suck less than walking into the room five minutes late.

Nella tried to keep her hands steady as she poured a slow stream of honey into her steaming mug. Cover meetings had been the highlight of her week when she’d first started working at Wagner. She usually arrived a few minutes early so she could snag that one corner seat by the window with the best view of Leonard’s cover mock-ups for Amy, Richard, and the editors. Back then, those meetings had seemed like the most magical part of publishing. She got tipsy comparing the designer’s artistic renderings of a book with the hypotheses she’d come up with during her own read, and high off the anticipation leading up to the big cover reveal.

She would even sit in on discussions of covers of books she wasn’t working on, listening closely to Amy and the designers discuss color and balance and font size and kerning. And she took copious notes—notes she planned to internalize for that day when she was the one sitting in The Editor’s Seat. Sure, there was an author here and there who quashed a tiny bit of the magic, but this never precluded how humbling it was to be just a few feet away from the inception of an image that would adorn thousands of copies of books and be distributed all over the world. Being able to provide her opinion on covers made her feel powerful, even if—at the end of the day—Vera had the final say.

But this cover meeting coming up in nine minutes was different. This meeting was for Needles and Pins.

Nella swiped at the steam on her face with the back of her hand, getting a nostrilful of cocoa butter in the process. She winced, unprepared for it. She hadn’t planned to use the hair grease Hazel had given her until she ran out of all of the other products she had at home, but on the elevator ride up to the office that morning, it had dawned on her that she hadn’t put any kind of moisturizer on her scalp in more than a week. When she happened to reach deep into her bag and find, to her delight, that the small jar of grease was still there, she went ahead and massaged a pea-sized portion through her hair.

It’s so pungent, though, she’d murmured to her reflection in the bathroom mirror, and now again in the kitchen as she took three slow, deep breaths—a habit she’d developed in the weeks that had passed since Hazel had sung Colin’s praises at the marketing meeting. Thanks partially to her, Needles and Pins was swimming in a sea of buzz so deep that the title was now known around the company as a “surefire bestseller” that Oprah might even tweet about “if we get the packaging just right.”

Nella poked at the tea bag with the thin wooden stirrer, her fourth poke so hard that a part of it split open. She watched, annoyed, as tiny flecks of jasmine broke free and swam out into her cup. The Keurig hissed on behind her, a sweet, mocking reminder of how little control she had over anything these days.

Nella had received this message in other ways—for starters, in the absence of invitations to have lunch with Gina and Sophie. They’d stopped asking Nella to eat with them after she declined five lunch offers in the span of two weeks—she simply had too much work to do—and they’d opted to try Hazel instead. Something magical had to have happened during their first lunch together; after that, they started hanging around her cube, gushing about her boyfriend’s latest art project or her favorite thing she was reading that week. Even Gina—dubious, uninterested, “That Don’t Impress Me Much” Gina—had walked away from one of their chat sessions on a particularly cool day saying that she wanted a pair of platform Timberlands like Hazel’s. All the while, Hazel had gobbled up the attention like a pro. Of course.

Nella didn’t know what to make of any of it. The kind of celebrity status that Hazel had achieved in such a short span of time rubbed her in a way that bothered her, and it bothered her that she was bothered at all—especially since she and Hazel were supposed to be on the same team. She hated how disappointed she felt when editors suddenly started asking Hazel for sensitivity reads, but not her. Nella had never been given even just an iota of the attention everyone had paid Hazel. If she were being honest, she would say that she hadn’t thought she’d ever receive it. And if she were lying, she would say that she’d never wanted it in the first place.

But the validation was important to Nella, and watching Hazel move through Wagner like a knife through whipped cream made her begin to question her own presence there. Maybe I should have listened to those anonymous notes I received last month, she sometimes thought, and once, in a bout of desperation, she’d even tried calling that phone number again. But to her relief—and her chagrin—it had been disconnected.

In a way, she felt like she was already gone, anyway. Her coworkers were certainly treating her like she was. They were floating by Hazel’s desk to chat more and more frequently, and Nella was beginning to understand exactly what Hazel had meant when she’d brought up code-switching. She’d known what the phrase meant, obviously; how else was she able to read about the latest incident of police brutality on the news, then clock into work at nine a.m. with a smile on her face?

But, Hazel… something was off with her. A vibe. Nella didn’t completely trust the way she took code-switching to an entirely new level, or the way she constantly asked Vera about the books she was editing and always charming the plaid-patterned slacks off Josh. Once, while Nella was microwaving some leftover dinner in the kitchen, she’d even caught Hazel talking to Amy about her grandparents. “They met at a march? And he died at a march? My, my,” Amy had crooned, taking a rare moment to remove her crimson-tinted glasses and dab at her eyes. “Talk about a character arc.”