The Other Black Girl(89)

This was getting ridiculous. That guy was no racist stalker. He was the guy you called when you needed protection from a racist stalker. He really seemed to be… warning her.

Nella pulled out her cell phone and quickly typed out a new text message. She had to outrun her other self—the Nella who had sense; the Nella who would remind her that she’d seen far too many horror films and episodes of Dateline with girl-being-stalked plotlines to let herself walk willingly into a trap.

Who are you?

The message turned blue. Three gray dots signaling a response appeared almost immediately beneath it.

I’ll tell you if you meet me in forty-five. 100th & Broadway.

You couldn’t just talk to me at Starbucks? Nella wrote back.

There were too many eyes and ears there. And that was my friend, not me. So, 100th & Broadway. Cool?

Stupid. It would be stupid to go. Nella couldn’t believe she’d even texted this stranger without trying to figure out how to block her own number first. Whoever was following her now had gone through all this trouble to get her phone number, and now they had it. Whatever upper hand Nella’d had was gone. Going to meet this person wouldn’t just be stupid; it would be idiotic.

And yet.

She bit her lip. Typed a few letters, deleted those, then typed some more. Can you at least tell me what this is about?! she finally typed.

Once more, the gray dots materialized instantly. But then they were gone.

“Come on,” whispered Nella. She gave her phone one violent shake, as though that might help eke out an answer. But no dots. No luck.

Nella threw her phone in her bag, ready to step out onto the sidewalk and inhale some necessary breaths of sweet fall air. Her fingers were on the handle when she felt the small pulse of a new message:

Her name’s not Hazel.





Shani


October 20, 2018

As I turned onto Broadway, trying to scrape my way through droves of zigzagging tourists, a turbulent succession of thoughts popped to the surface of my brain: I don’t need to be a hero. I don’t need Nella’s side of things, either. I can go home right now, disappear from everybody, and still write an entire fucking exposé.

I should’ve been grateful. I owed Lynn. The only thing that had made Boston bearable was Cooper’s; without that job, I would have holed myself up in my apartment with a bottle of Jack and a bowl of Reese’s Puffs.

But I’d had enough. How could I sit back and let Nella make the same mistake so many other Black girls had made, especially now that I’d met Kendra Rae?

I watched the red hand stop blinking, paused at the edge of the crosswalk, and recalled that pleading look I’d seen on Kendra Rae’s face hours earlier. It had been enough to convince me not to leave New York. Not yet.

But it was this same look—the look that pushed me to go rogue and text Nella this morning, despite Lynn’s orders—that made me likewise want to hop on the next bus back to Boston: Troubled brown eyes turned down at the edges. Corners of her lips turned down, too. No doubt about it, Kendra Rae still looked good—no, great—for her age. But there’d been a light missing. Something was off inside her, and this something had caused her to spend more than thirty-five years in hiding.

I could see the headline trending now—something clever about the river of Uncle Toms flowing beneath the shiny, plastic surface of corporate white America. That article could be my gateway to telling Kendra Rae’s story next—a story of betrayal not just by a friend, but by an entire industry.

The symbol above changed to a white man. I forced myself to keep walking, but my legs felt like lead. Behind me, a young Hispanic woman who thought I’d been moving too slowly muttered something profane under her breath as she passed me by. I’d committed the ultimate New York City sin.

The thought made me laugh out loud—to myself, to no one. Sins. What did I know about sins? Nothing.

Now, Kendra Rae—that woman knew about sins. She’d committed one of the real ultimate sins by trying to be herself: Black. Unapologetic. Someone who told it like it was. Someone who rejected what was expected of her as a Black woman in a predominantly white industry.

The thought of it still got me. What a boss. Who else tells an interviewer that she’ll never work with another white writer, right when her star is starting to rise?

She was grinning when she’d handed me the article clipping. Like she was proud. I couldn’t help but smile a little, too, as I’d started reading aloud: “?‘I’m tired of working with white writers. I hate it. We’ve had enough of them. No offense to any of them, but I don’t need a white scholar telling me about the Great Migration. I don’t need a Jewish man telling me why Miles was the greatest jazz musician ever alive, or why Black people eat black-eyed peas and corn bread and collard greens on New Year’s Day. I don’t need any of that.’?”

I’d looked up at Kendra Rae once I’d finished reading, the brown, faded piece of newspaper threatening to disintegrate in my hands. While I’d been reading, she’d grabbed a copy of Burning Heart from the shelf and started going through it, turning its pages with one neat, short, unpainted index fingernail. She’d become so engrossed that she hadn’t noticed I was ready to speak again, so I’d taken a breath and said, quietly so as not to startle her, “Was this taken out of context?”