The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

“That’s right!” I say, brightly, as though I am a game show host and she is a player who has guessed the answer to a deciding trivia question correctly.

  Lauren folds her arms across her chest, huffily. “Our viewers are so proletarian. This is how people drink in New York. It’s normal. I’m normal.” Her eyes flit to my unfinished glass of Barolo. She wouldn’t dare say it—You’re the one who’s not normal. At this age, in this world, she’s not just deflecting. The fact that I drink in thimble portions makes her far more average than me.

  Lauren sighs, fluffing her hair at the roots in a way she thinks gives her Brigitte Bardot volume when really, it just makes her look like she rubbed a balloon against her head. “Fine. I’ll say I’m not drinking. Say it. I’m still going to, though.”

  “We figured.” Jen shrugs.

  “Fuck you, Greenberg,” Lauren says with a smile. She raises her glass, seeming to come around more positively to the idea. “To not drinking this season.”

  I raise my own, laughing at the intended irony of the toast, relieved that everyone is so wholeheartedly on board. “To not drinking this season.”

  What kind of narcissist signs up for a reality show? is a question lobbed at me on Twitter often. There are not enough characters to capture the magic of Jesse Barnes when she turns it on. And she did turn it on for me in the beginning. Dinners at Le Bernardin where she quoted from my novels. A twenty-five-thousand-dollar donation made in my name to my favorite charity that provides writing mentorship to underprivileged girls. SNL after-parties, box seats at the Yankees game for Vince, front-row tickets to a Madonna concert, and backstage passes where I got to meet Madonna. And all the while, Jesse was in my ear, promising me this was not my mother’s reality TV show. This was a show about women getting along, about women supporting one another, about women succeeding, about women who didn’t need men. I was absolutely fooled.

  Jesse might have meant some of it. I think she believed, on some level, that she would be at the forefront of a new kind of reality TV, living as we were in a time of performed girl power. Beyoncé had recently dropped a golden microphone on stage at the VMAs, backlit by the word Feminist. It was no longer mainstream suicide to care about the equality of the sexes. And then season one aired and the ratings were so dismal that they briefly canceled us.

  Season two felt different from the start. We got a new showrunner, Lisa, who found Machiavellian ways to pit us against one another. We fought. We aligned. We were a massive hit. There have been many times I have wanted to walk away, but I didn’t, and not because I am a narcissist.

  It is because Diggers don’t survive the push off the couch. Jesse sees to it. The invitations to events that claim to support women stop coming, A-listers you were paired with on Jesse’s aftershow stop following you on Twitter, your businesses shutter, and the only magazine that wants to put you on the cover is The Learning Annex. It’s happening to Hayley right now. I made the mistake of texting to ask if I would see her at Jesse’s annual Halloween party, the one everyone who is anyone attends, and instead of saying yes, she hit me with a series of excuses so fraught my ulcers oozed. I’m having a problem receiving messages lately. Mercury is in retrograde. At least my assistant tells me so. I haven’t actually checked my email myself in a while. It’s probably in my inbox. Where is it just in case? When? Want to grab a drink together before? Ugh, I was nauseous for her. I knew that feeling. It’s like heartbreak, but not, the way cramps hurt differently than a stomach bug, though the pain is similarly located. There is no word for it, but there should be. It is the sting, it is the sickness—because it is also contagious—of your fellow woman turning on you.

  I know my storyline must come to an end at some point, that I cannot reserve a prime spot on the reunion couch forever. But I will not—I cannot—allow a parasite like Brett Courtney to edge me out.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  Brett

  My father thinks it’s a phase. My lesbianism.

  He met one of my girlfriends once. Thanksgiving, two years ago, in San Diego, where he moved after Mom died. He’s remarried now, to a vegetarian named Susan. Susan and my father treated my ex like a best gal pal from college who didn’t have anywhere to go for the holiday because her parents were going through an ugly divorce. They stuck all of us—Layla, Kelly, Sarah, and me—in the second bedroom, mother and daughter in the bed, lezzies on the air mattress. There is a third bedroom in the San Diego house, but it’s Dad’s “office” and he had emails to send “very early in the morning.”

  It’s not hard for me to imagine Mom’s reaction. She was dead when I came out of the closet at twenty-two, but had she been alive, I doubt she would have so much as frowned, abiding as she did by the parenting rule that the best way to discipline your children when they “act out” is to ignore them. Between my maroon hair and my green hair and my purple hair, my tattoos and piercings, and a brief Wiccan stint after renting and keeping Blockbuster’s copy of The Craft, I got ignored a lot growing up. But you better believe she would have been marching in the pussy parade as my star started to rise, as she saw that my gayness was intrinsic to my celebrity. And she would have adored Arch. A lawyer for the A-C-L-U? She could have been a purple Communist with a sexual attraction to mangoes, and Mom would have set out the fancy Clinique lotion every time I brought her home.

  Mom didn’t go to college and while she occasionally flitted around in various retail capacities whenever we needed a little extra cash or she needed something to do, she never had a career. She came of age in a time when it was just as socially acceptable for a woman to get married at twenty-one and have her first child by twenty-three as it was to go to college and earn a paycheck. I don’t think she had the confidence to continue her education, the path that was really in her blood. And so she was always a little bit defensive about being a young mother, getting it into her head that if she could raise a Mensa candidate it would somehow elevate her status in the eyes of second-wave feminists.

  She chased accolades for Kelly before she could even walk, submitting her photo to Gerber baby contests and entering her into child beauty pageants. By the time I was born, four years later, she had so much time and money and hope vested in Kelly that it came down to another decision: Split the effort and risk turning out two mildly accomplished daughters, or go full throttle on the one who was already showing so much promise. Kelly was an honorable mention in the 1986 Gerber contest, so go full throttle on her she did.

  My phone trembles in my hand as the R pulls into the Twenty-eighth Street station and catches a few bars of service. I look down. Kelly. Asking me how far away I am. The production meeting started eighteen minutes ago, but our booking system went down twenty minutes into the Rise and Resist class and I was on the phone with tech support for an hour and a half. I didn’t even get a chance to shower and I’m still in my smelly spandex. Ten minutes, I tell her. Is there food there?

  It’s harder for me to imagine how Mom would have reacted to Kelly’s about-face. And Layla. What kind of grandmother would she have been to Layla? My gut tells me not the kind who baked cookies and read bedtime stories, at least during those early years. Now that Layla’s older and has expressed an interest in SPOKE, she would have warmed. But I don’t know if she would ever forgive Kelly for making her feel like she bet on the wrong horse.

  Kelly was a sophomore at Dartmouth, studying abroad in Morocco, when Mom had her second stroke. I was fifteen, downstairs in the finished basement pretending to be researching a class project, actually in a sex chat room. Kelly was the one who turned me on to them. She once forgot to sign out of her account and when I opened up the browser, I discovered her screen name, PrttynPink85, and that her ambitions did not end outside of the classroom! I was floored, mostly because despite the fact that there were never any rules in place in our household, Kelly didn’t date. It was assumed Kelly was more interested in microbial genetics or whatever the fuck they studied in AP chemistry than she was boys. My sister went to pr
om with her best friend, Mags, and came home early with a greasy-assed McDonald’s bag. Looking back, I can see that Kelly was just taking her cues. Our mother made it very clear that high school was for getting into a top college, not for football games and fun. And so my sister went off to her Ivy a sexually frustrated virgin with a banging bod and an encyclopedia of knowledge thanks to her digital dalliances. None of us should have been surprised when she went on a fuck-crawl of Marrakesh two years later.

  My mother’s second stroke was minor, same as the first. She insisted Kelly stay abroad. Two days later she got up to use the bathroom and a pulmonary embolism took her down as she was washing her hands. She would have been relieved that it happened after she had gotten her pants back on—Mom was obediently ashamed of her ass. In a way I’m grateful that she was, because my inclination was always to do and be the opposite of whatever she expected of me. Body confidence is hard. Teenage rebellion comes with reserves.

  My father and I called Kelly with the terrible news, and then we called her again . . . and again . . . and again. She had become increasingly difficult to get ahold of in the weeks leading up to Mom’s death, even though my parents set her up with the priciest international plan AT&T had to offer. We left messages, telling her we needed to speak to her urgently. She must have heard the news in our voices, because she never called back. She never called back.

  We got ahold of her professor, who told us that Kelly hadn’t been to class in two days. For most students, this was unremarkable, but for Kelly—BRING IN THE NATIONAL GUARD. Through her roommate, we were able to track her whereabouts to the flat of the DJ at the American watering hole, who went by the name Fad. Only Fad. My father and I had to put the funeral on hold and fly to Marrakesh to drag my goodie-two-shoes sister out of the arms of a thirty-two-year-old man who wore tiny yellow sunglasses and double puka shell necklaces. Fad wasn’t actually Moroccan, he’d emigrated from Nigeria as a kid, and that’s about as much as Kelly knows about his background. I have determined that in another life, a life where he didn’t dress like an aging MTV veejay on spring break, Fad-no-last-name-Fad must have invented the polio vaccine and maybe also cold-pressed coffee. Because how else do you end up with a Layla?

  I should thank Fad not just for my niece but for dickmatizing my sister the way he did. Because if he hadn’t, I never would have had a reason to travel to Morocco, and the idea for SPOKE never would have been born. And so it seems a bit of a moot point, what my mother would think of our lives now. Because nothing would have turned out this way if she hadn’t died and Kelly hadn’t fallen out of first place.

  The train shudders into the Twenty-third Street station. I check my phone. I’m already late—what’s five more to dash over to Third Ave and grab a bagel? The chance that there is any sort of substantial spread at the prod meeting is low. We’re a month out from filming—those bitches are in conservation mode.

  Only half the seats in the conference room are occupied, and yet the team has made a complete ring around the table by skipping chairs. Kelly has two empties to her right and three to her left. She’s fighting to look like she doesn’t care that no one wants to sit next to the weird new girl, but I can smell how much it actually bothers her. Seriously, when my sister is stressed, she emits the odor of sauerkraut.

  Lisa, our showrunner, is at her rightful place at the head of the table. When she sees me, she drops her phone and cuts off a speaking field producer. They say that in meetings, women are interrupted at five times the rate that men are. I wonder how that number increases with Lisa Griffin in the room. “There’s Miss My Time Is More Important Than Your Time. Twenty million in her bank account and she can’t afford a fucking Rolex.”

  It’s 23.4 million and it’s in an LLC holding, but I don’t correct Lisa. Lisa could eat me for breakfast—that is, if she ate breakfast. Two years ago she started drinking Jen’s protein shakes and dancing with two-pound weights at Tracy Anderson. Now she wears mostly leather jeans and is smaller and meaner than ever. She resents my friendship with Jesse, and I’m sure she feels like I went around her to get Kelly on the show. If she only knew. “I am so, so sorry,” I say, lifting my cross-body bag over my head and crabwalking between the wall and the table to take a seat next to Kelly. “We had a major technical glitch at the studio this morning.”

  “Thanks for being the one to deal with that,” Kelly says, like I’ve done her such a favor, tending to an issue within my own company. Something about her appearance makes me do a double take, and it’s not that she’s trying too hard in strappy ankle heels and an off-the-shoulder top while Lauren and Jen are across from her looking every bit like they woke up like this in weird jeans, drinking matching coconut La Croixs. Monsters. Who likes the coconut? I can’t decide if I’m embarrassed or vindicated by Kelly’s sexy third-date getup. (You’re out of your league. I told you.) If we should talk about hiring a stylist or if I should keep the float all to myself.

  I’ll sort it out later, because more pressing is the realization that Stephanie is running even later than I am. I shouldn’t—I shouldn’t—but I bristle. Stephanie was notorious for holding up filming in the early seasons, whether it was because she didn’t like her hair or that the shoot started at ten and she just didn’t feel like getting there at ten. She shaped up last season, after acquiring the nickname “Sleptanie” from viewers who complained on Twitter and Instagram that she had gotten boring, that she felt too produced. Sleptanie employs a glam squad—hair, makeup, personal stylist—and together they actually generate a lookbook for her each season. It’s all in keeping with Sleptanie’s very manufactured image of a modern woman killing it on all fronts: life, love, and real estate. Meanwhile, Stephanie is contemptuous of the readers who enjoy her fluffy series, her marriage is riddled with infidelity, she’s been on and off antidepressants since she was a teenager, and her mother paid the down payment on the brownstone as a wedding gift. The audience wasn’t connecting with her because there’s not a hair out of place. You need a little bit of imperfection to make people feel like there’s a human being underneath it all, but she could never quite bring herself to expose her real warts. She even had her agent negotiate in her contract that production could not shoot the outside of her house—for “security” purposes. Really, she’s embarrassed she lives next to a dry cleaner’s. But that brownstone would have cost millions more if it wasn’t, millions more on top of that if it was even one more avenue west of First. Like I said, it’s hard to be rich in New York, even for Stephanie Simmons.

  The fact that she’s back to her old ways means she’s feeling pretty confident about her contract. Did she get a two-season renewal? No one gets a two-season renewal, but you don’t show up late unless you can get away with being late, which is why I’m so mortified that I got held up this morning. I never want to look like I’m taking advantage of Jesse’s obvious favoritism. Yes, I know it’s there, but I will cut you if you suggest it’s because we’re both gay. How about Jesse and I are the only ones who can truly call ourselves self-made women? Jen may not come from the piles of money that Lauren and Steph do, but she was raised in Soho and has gotten by fine on her mother’s name.

  Oh, and in case Stephanie sold you the rags-to-riches story about scraping by on minimum wage when she first moved to New York—because she loves that one—here’s the truth that she conveniently omits. Her mom was paying the rent on her one-bedroom on Seventy-sixth and Third and slipping her an allowance of two hundred and fifty a week. Stephanie may have run out of spending money from time to time, she may not have been able to go out to dinner as often as she would have liked or shopped on a whim, but she was far from fucking Fievel.

  I take a seat and set my bag on the table, rummaging around for the everything bagel with vegetable cream cheese and tomato, my long-standing order at Pick A Bagel.

  “Nice Chloé,” Lauren says, slyly. She turns to Jen with a triumphant smirk, as if I have proven something on her behalf.

  Arch had been on me to “invest
” in a “power bag,” and when I wouldn’t do it myself, she took matters into her own hands. What the fuck kind of messed-up financial advice do we instill in women that even my Harvard-educated girlfriend has internalized it? Invest means put your money into something that has a return. Unless the cost of this bag included some kind of pension plan, I’m pretty sure Arch didn’t invest in anything. She just bought something. “Thanks,” I say. “It was a gift from my girlfriend.”

  “Nice girlfriend then.” Lauren gives me a naughty little wink.

  “Sorry I’m late,” I say again, but specifically to Lauren and Jen this time. Clearly, they’re pissed. Though the Green Menace is usually pissed about something. “The entire booking system crashed just as I was heading out the door.”

  “I know how that goes,” Lauren says, wearily, not to be generous but to reinforce the fiction that she is on the ground at SADIE too. Lauren had a great idea—a dating website where the woman is the one to establish contact—but she never would have gotten it off the ground if her father hadn’t provided her with a jumbo nest egg and a well-stocked corporate advisory board. Lauren has never been anything more than the face of SADIE. It’s a great face, but lately, it’s doing more harm than good.

  I tip my head at Jen, who is going after my hairstyle now, I guess. “Liking the long hair, Greenberg.” It’s been three months since I’ve encountered the Green Menace in the wild, which isn’t unusual at all, and not because we “hate” each other. If anything, production prefers we keep our distance during the off-season. They want us fresh when we see each other; they don’t want alliances shifting when the cameras aren’t around to capture it. It helps streamline the narrative if we can pick up right where we left off in the previous season.

  “And moi?” Lauren asks, pumping an upturned palm by her head, which is zipped up prettily with a crown braid. Did you know that every fourteen seconds a woman in New York City succumbs to a crown braid? It’s a braidemic. “I got carded at Gemma last night.”