The Other Black Girl(81)
Nella, who’d feigned deep involvement with something on her cell phone, had found this pretty distasteful. But to Nella’s surprise, Hazel had agreed. “I’ve actually been thinking of commissioning a writer to take their diaries and their correspondence and write a love story around their lives dedicated to activism.”
Then there was C. J.: so dazzled by Hazel, so consumed. He would hang on to the edge of her cube and flirt with her for five, ten minutes at a time, smiling at her with those big old eyes he’d once used only on Nella, and Hazel—good-natured, affable Hazel—would smile back. Together, they made a beautiful twosome that belonged in a Black nineties rom-com instead of the thirteenth floor of a Midtown office building.
Meanwhile, Nella would sit quietly across the aisle trying to tune out their conversations. But bits of autobiographical information leaked into her cube anyway, juicy bits that C. J. had never told Nella in the two years he’d known her. She couldn’t help but wonder why this was. She’d been far friendlier with him than she’d ever been with India. Had she not asked him the right questions? Or had he simply figured Nella, raised in a middle-class suburb by two parents—parents with a dysfunctional marriage, but two parents nonetheless—would never truly “get it”?
Whatever the reason, it didn’t matter. What had preoccupied her more was the alien sensation she felt overhearing them reminisce about growing up in Black neighborhoods. It brought her back to her high school days, when Black kids would see her holding hands with her white boyfriend in the hallway or eating lunch with her white friends in a café and whisper to one another, not very discreetly, there go the Oreo. It wasn’t her fault that her honors classes had been overwhelmingly filled with white and Asian students—that they were all she’d really known—and so she’d just pretend she hadn’t heard. Pretend she didn’t worry at least once every day that she wasn’t “Black enough.”
Her primary source of comfort had been the belief that this feeling would go away once she went to college. But now it was back to rear its ugly head, spewing all of the insecurities she thought she’d gotten over.
Nella leaned forward so she could scrutinize the specks of jasmine that were floating around her mug. Then she checked the clock again: ten twenty-four. There was still time to fish out a few of the pieces.
She was reaching for a metal spoon from the drying rack when the sizzling of the Keurig was overpowered by the sound of footsteps behind her.
“Hey, Hazel! How’s it going?”
Nella spun around and saw Sophie, red-cheeked and now highly embarrassed.
“Oh, shit,” she said. “Nella. I am so sorry. I thought you were—”
“Yeah,” said Nella, glaring at her. “I think I know exactly what you thought.” She dipped her spoon into her mug, grabbed some jasmine, and tossed it into the sink.
“It’s just that…” Sophie stopped. “Well, did you realize you two are wearing the same color today?”
“Are we?” Nella looked down at the eggplant sweater that she’d pulled over her head a few hours earlier. She hated this particular sweater; it was too small and too itchy and the tag always stood up in the back. But she’d barely had time to pick anything else. Lately, her body had been waking her up at all sorts of irregular times in the middle of the night, and when sleep did come back to her, it was usually half an hour or so before she needed to actually get out of bed.
“Hazel’s sweater is purple, too,” Sophie pointed out, even though Nella’s question had been rhetorical.
“It’s a very different purple.”
“Yeah? I remember them being pretty similar, actually.”
“No,” said Nella, a bit more forcefully. “I’m pretty sure Hazel is wearing lilac.”
She was sure of this because she’d caught herself eyeing the girl’s bell-sleeved sweater enviously earlier in the morning, when Hazel had wheeled her chair over to ask her how to set up a conference call. Nella had helped her, delivering the same spiel she gave new assistants, but it had been hard. Her spiraling sense of self-worth had started to encroach upon her sanity; her sanity, upon her sleep; and her sleep, upon her ability to be a functioning human being at work. A functioning human being who was able to forgive and forget the fact that a colleague had mistaken her for a dreadlocked girl who was four inches taller than her.
There’s this social phenomenon It’s called code-switching…
Weeks had passed since Hazel said those words to her, but a pang of fury dug into Nella’s side nonetheless. Yes, she knew all about code-switching and being flexible and easygoing and not taking anything too personally, but as Sophie continued to tap-dance around her faux pas, waxing poetic about an article she’d read about how the eye saw hues, Nella felt too tired to play along. She didn’t bother to nod or laugh at Sophie’s half jokes. She simply stood there, stone-faced, picking jasmine out of her mug piece by piece, waiting for the girl to stop speaking—or, at least, to finally stop tripping over herself long enough to realize that she wasn’t going to undo what she’d done.
At last, Sophie stopped to take a breath. She looked to her left, appearing to notice that the Keurig had been making strange noises beneath her own strange noises over the last couple of minutes.
“Is the Keurig broken again?” asked Sophie, clearly still uncomfortable. “Damn thing. I have a friend over at J. F. Publishing and she told me their Nespresso machine never craps out, not like this one. Maybe we can petition to get Richard to make the switch.”