The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  “B?” Arch calls when she hears the door to the bathroom open.

  “One second!” I call back, hurrying into the bedroom. I open my underwear drawer and rummage around inside.

  Arch says something else, but I can’t make it out.

  “One second!” I repeat. My knuckles bump against the velvet box.

  In the living room, Arch is on her knees on the couch, looking like a meerkat surveying her surroundings for predators, right down to the dark, fearful eyes. My skin is warm from the shower and cold with sweat, thundering with nerves.

  “What are you doing?” Arch asks, nervously, when she notices my arm behind my back.

  I inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth, just like we remind riders to do in class. Let it go. Whatever you’re holding on to that’s holding you back, let it go. I present my hand for Arch. “I thought you would never ask. So I was going to.”

  Arch gasps when she sees the diamond eternity band, purchased last week from 1stdibs after I sent Yvette the link and she wrote back with her approval. It’s lovely. So SO happy for you, darling one.

  Arch jumps off the couch and makes her way over to me. She brushes my wet hair away from my face and lowers her lips to mine. Dread coils around my ribs when I close my eyes and return her kiss, when I think about how thin Stephanie’s smile will be when she hears about this.

  I am trying to focus on what our head engineer is saying, but Kelly has ripped off Lauren’s crown braid from the other day and her single white femaleness is distracting. When we first walked in, Sharon Sonhorn, who Kelly has flown in from Alabama—business class—exclaimed in that accent so honeyed and Southern it sounds completely put on, “How precious are you?!”

  Our advisory board is eight members strong, five men and three women, ranging in age from thirty-five to seventy-two. They live in New York, Texas, Alabama, Boston, Los Angeles, and London. We have one black person, one Asian person, and one gay person. Two have zero experience in the wellness industry and three have none in the B-corp world. Kelly put the whole thing together based on an article she read on Forbes.com that said advisory boards should represent diversity in its truest sense. You don’t want to be paying a bunch of yes men and women for their time. You want people who challenge you, who offer a different perspective, who are constantly asking you to reexamine your vision. This is money well spent, she’s always reminding me, when I see how much it costs to fly someone into New York business class just to hear that my ideas suck.

  “Listen,” Seth, my head engineer, says, flicking a switch on the e-bike. He had the model covered in a beige tarp when the board first walked in, allowing him the opportunity to rip it off as though we were at a magic show. He even said ta-da! Despite how mad I am at Kelly—for meeting up with Jen behind my back, for getting herself invited to Lauren’s party, for that fucking braid—we exchanged a look. Seth is the nicest and most annoying person we know.

  All kidding aside, my new bike does deserve an unveiling, a middle-aged man’s dorky ta-da! Bloody gorgeous, our London guy said. I’d quite like one for myself. And everyone had laughed, because picturing stiff John Tellmun riding around Notting Hill Gate on this glossy red cruiser with the blush leather seat and plump pink handlebars is pure comedy gold.

  “I don’t hear anything,” Layla says, her ear aimed at the ground. Girls as young as nine will be riding these bikes, so Kelly thought it would be a nice touch for the board to see that a twelve-year-old can easily and safely operate the machinery.

  Seth points his finger at Layla, ding-ding-dinging. “The little lady wins a 2016 Toyota Camry!” Layla looks confused, and Seth clears his throat, embarrassed the joke didn’t land. “The electronic models sound like they are off even when they’re on, so always make sure that you check the switch before you get on, okay, Layla?”

  Kelly reaches up to tighten the chinstrap on Layla’s helmet. Layla shot past me this year, which is not anything to write home about, but she’s almost the same height as Kelly, who has a few inches on me. I don’t remember Fad being especially tall, but maybe he had tall parents, tall sisters. We will never know.

  “Mom,” Layla groans, but she lifts her chin and lets Kelly fuss with the strap.

  Sharon makes a sound that expresses how precious she thinks this is: Kelly’s braid, Kelly’s overprotectiveness, Layla’s indulging of Kelly’s overprotectiveness, all of it. Like Kelly, Sharon has a preteen daughter. Unlike Kelly, Sharon is practically fifty.

  Layla swings her leg over the pink seat.

  “Look at those stems,” Sharon says, lowly, to Kelly, and Kelly beams. “And that skin. Like a latte. She could be in Vogue.”

  Kelly’s smile fails like an old engine. “Not too fast!” she warns Layla.

  “It goes, like, forty miles an hour.” Layla directs her eye roll at me, the only other person in the room who could possibly comprehend the extent of Kelly’s lameness.

  “You kill someone if you hit them at forty miles an hour,” Kelly says, matching Layla’s sulky tone to make her point that this is nothing to be flip about.

  We watch Layla pedal the SPOKElectric prototype deeper into the warehouse, the bike emitting a mild hum that’s amplified by the concrete floors. I could crawl faster.

  “Mine would have torn out the door going as fast as she could just to spite me,” Sharon says to Kelly. “Top-notch mothering, honey.” I used to think it was such a throwaway, whenever someone complimented a woman on her mothering skills. I didn’t think it took talent to be a good mother—just don’t beat them and take them to the dentist occasionally, and voilà!, you’re a good mother. Loving them doesn’t even take much work. Even the moms who beat their kids love them. Then Kelly had Layla, and I realized just how mistaken I was. Because Kelly’s mothering skills were shaky at best that first year with Layla, neglectful at worst.

  Do you know my father made two appointments for Kelly to skulk past the four angry men pumping posters of mutilated fetuses into the air at Kelly’s behest? I flexed my biceps and spoke like Tony Soprano on our way out the door, both times, offering my services as bodyguard. I was trying to get her to laugh. Really, I just didn’t know how to appropriately express to Kelly that it wasn’t the end of the world. It wasn’t the end of the world that she went a little nuts out from under Mom’s watchful eye and it wasn’t the end of the world that she hadn’t had responsible sex and it wasn’t the end of the world to undergo a safe, legal medical procedure that has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years in every sort of society imaginable.

  I wanted Kelly to laugh, but I also wanted her to go. Mom had just died, and although our relationship had been complicated, she was still my mom, and I still loved her. Our lives were in turmoil, and on some level, I believed that if Kelly could just go back to school, graduate, and became a radiologist like our mother had always planned, things would go back to normal too. Normalish. Never mind that normalish wasn’t in my best interests, because normalish meant Kelly was the successful one, the pretty one, the star. But it was what was comfortable, and we’re always drawn to what’s comfortable, even when it hurts us deeply.

  Kelly would need to face the angry men and their posters in order for things to go back to normalish, only she couldn’t get herself through the clinic’s door. This is what I want, she declared in the parking lot on two separate occasions, her voice an unconvincing whisper. Then Layla came along, and it was like she broke Kelly’s legs instead of her vaginal canal. Layla would be wailing for her 2:00 A.M. feeding, sounding like she was being waterboarded, and Kelly would just lie in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep through it. My father and I didn’t have much of a choice but to take on those shifts, and so we did, trading off for the first few months. Kelly needs her rest, my father said to me. She needs to recover. I was never quite sure what he thought she needed to recover from, but it was clear to me that it was the shock of her new life. At first, I was resentful of having to wake up in the middle of my REM cycle
every other night. But after a few weeks, I actually started to look forward to having Layla all to myself, our time together unrushed and uninterrupted. Those tiny little fists, flying up over her ears in outrage as I eased the nipple of the bottle into her mouth—this is what I need?! Her fingers unfurling, her eyelids drooping, lifting, drooping, lifting to check that I was still there, drooping again as she realized this, this is what I need.

  They say that first year is critical to the bonding process, and I think it’s why Layla and I are as close as we are. Kelly missed some special moments, and she can never get them back, all because she was resting, recovering. My sister has always needed someone to hold out her next life for her, like a coat she slips her arms into. Doctor, mother, CEO (in her mind)—these are more titles that have been foisted upon her rather than ones that she has sought out with purpose. My sister’s major malfunction is that she is a doer with no vision. I suppose I have the opposite problem.

  Millennial journalists are always asking me where the idea for SPOKE came from, a sort of attrition in their voices. I get it. It’s hard to care about things that don’t impact us personally, and I think that’s what the Bustle staff really wants to ask but feels they can’t—why do I care so much about a group of women I’ve never met, going through something I have never gone through? How can I be so selfless? Is there something wrong with them that they can’t be that selfless?

  The truth is that the idea for SPOKE didn’t come from a selfless place at all. After my father and I tracked Kelly to Fad’s apartment in the Hivernage district, our next stop was the hospital. She seemed fine, physically that is, but we just wanted to be sure. I was sitting in the waiting room, paging through a French tabloid, when the door swung open and in walked two sisters, one of them not much older than Layla is now. They spoke to the nurse at the front desk in soft French, and were given a series of forms to fill out. They came and sat down one seat to my right, the older one with the papers in her lap. Together, they pointed at words on the page and argued in a language that I know now was not French or Arabic. After a few minutes, the older sister spoke to me.

  “Hello,” she said, with a little circle of her hand. It sounded like Halo.

  I glanced up and found the older sister waving the pencil at me.

  “You can help?” she asked, haltingly.

  My father leaned into me. “I don’t think they can read.”

  I held out my hands, miming writing, my head cocked at a forty-five-degree angle. The older sister nodded, Yes, you write it down. The younger sister stared at her lap, stonily. I moved over one seat.

  The forms were written in Arabic, then French, then English. It took fifteen minutes of stilted translation and signage just to get to the part that asked the reason for the visit that day.

  “My daughter,” the older sister said, and it took me a second to realize they were not, in fact, sisters. “She has go to the well. Three men have hurt her. We have seen doctor so she has not pregnant.”

  My father mumbled, three seats away, “Dear God.”

  I glanced at the daughter, who was still staring at her lap, her jaw clenched furiously.

  “Rape?” I asked in a whisper. “Do you mean she was raped?”

  “We have seen the doctor.”

  “I’m sorry. You have already seen the doctor?”

  The woman nodded, both frantic and frustrated, misunderstanding me the way I misunderstood her. Later, I would learn that the English use of the present perfect tense is confusing for Arabic speakers. Many rely on the present perfect to describe things that have either already happened or have not yet happened. In this case, the girl had already walked to the well for water, had already been raped by three men. Seeing the doctor, preventing pregnancy, that was what needed to happen next.

  Kelly didn’t have to wait to be seen by the doctor, and all that was wrong with her was gross taste in men. I went up with the mother to deliver the forms to the French nurse, explained the situation in English, as though it would be more harrowing in English, more likely to spur urgent action. But the pair was still sitting there when we left an hour later, Kelly with a clean bill of health (it was too early for her pregnancy test to come back positive). I remember thinking in the taxi ride back to the hotel, The world everywhere cares more about girls like Kelly than they do girls like that.

  So really, I’m not selfless at all. I’ve dedicated myself to a cause that feels entirely self-serving: helping girls like me who are not like Kelly. It’s time we come first.

  Layla makes a U-turn at the wire shelving on the far side of the warehouse. Facing us, she’s all helmet and uneasy smile. She twists the handlebars back, speeding up for less than a few yards before Kelly starts squawking.

  Layla parks the bike and climbs off to overblown cheers and applause from the board, like she’s just qualified for the Olympics. She takes a slow bow and immediately turns the color of Jen’s Power juice (beets + carrots + chia) when the applause thickens. “I didn’t even max out, Mom,” she says, unhooking the helmet and pressing it into Kelly’s arms.

  Seth shushes us. “Before we get too excited,” he says, “I need to show you something.”

  He mounts the bike and releases the kickstand with his heel, sets his hands on the handlebars, and squeezes. The bike lurches forward violently. “Whoa!” Seth cries like a goober, bearing down on the handlebars, which only propels him faster. He comes to a dramatic stop just a few feet shy of a delivery van, looking back at us with gasping breaths.

  “Most e-bikes make a rickety sound when they are at speed,” Seth says, making his way back over to us. “But they all have one thing in common. They’re silent when they’re parked, whether they’re on,” Seth flicks the switch, “or off.”

  Kelly glances at me. “Is that a problem?”

  “Most definitely,” Seth says. “And one that Layla demonstrated perfectly.”

  “What did I do?” Layla asks, worriedly, going from feeling good about herself to despondent in a preteen second. She picks at a small pimple on her cheek. On our way out here, I listened to her narrate an Instagram story about the makeup products she used to cover up that very pimple. Instead of posting social media content that makes her peers feel as though their lives don’t measure up, Layla uses her accounts to reassure girls her age that everything they’re going through—the zits, the awkwardness, the malaise—is completely normal. That they are all in this together. She has nearly 30K followers now, and we haven’t even started filming yet.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong,” Seth assures her. “It’s the design that’s the problem. Since the bike sounds like it’s off when it’s been parked, it’s easy for the rider to forget to power it down. The next person who uses it grabs it, intuitively, by the hand grip.” Seth demonstrates the basic way everyone grabs the bike by its handlebars. “But because of the twist grip design, unknowingly, what the rider is doing is accelerating the bike—which is dangerous not only for the rider but for anyone who happens to be passing in front of the bike. A child, for instance. Then, because the rider is startled and off balance, the natural reaction is to do this,” Seth grips the handlebars tighter, “which only accelerates the speed.” Seth widens his stance and folds his arms across his chest. A good glitch makes Seth feel useful.

  “Is there a solution to this?” Kelly asks.

  Seth circles his workstation, pushes a few gadgets around, and holds up a small black lever. “Right here. This, ladies and gents,” he swivels at his waist so that everyone has a fair view, “is called a thumb grip. It attaches to the end of the handlebar, which makes it much harder to accidentally activate.”

  I say, impatiently, “So attach it.”

  Seth levels his chin with Kelly. “I need your sister to loosen the purse strings on the direct materials budget in order to do that.”

  I turn to Kelly, my lips parted in outrage. She’s flown six of the eight board members to New York business class, but we don’t have the budget to outfit our b
ikes safely?

  “Did you calculate the ROI with the thumb grips?” Sharon asks me.

  The warehouse goes very quiet, as though it is the ninth member of the board, also awaiting my answer. It’s a brutal few moments. I feel like I’m having one of those stress dreams, a nightmare really, where you’re back in school, about to take your midterm final, and you realize with hot-cold-hot nausea you haven’t attended a single class all semester. Because I have no fucking idea what the ROI calculation is with the thumb grips.

  “It’s three to one,” Kelly says—bless and fuck her. “That will make costs prohibitive. We’d love to change our promise to riders. But For every seventeenth ride we deliver a bike to an Imazighen family in need doesn’t have the same ring.” Sharon tsks.

  “I know,” Kelly sighs.

  “Where else can we hike?” Sharon wonders. “You know, the boot camp I attend charges for towels.”

  Kelly nods with a vigorous mmm-hmm. “Bike shoes. Water bottles. We can find it somewhere, I’m sure.”

  “Please do,” Sharon says. “I wouldn’t feel right letting a child around this thing in its current iteration.” I notice for the first time that Sharon’s neck is a different color than her jaw. It’s very unattractive.

  “Whatever it costs,” I say, matching my sister’s firm tone, “we’ll make it right.”

  “Well,” Sharon clears her throat, making bemused eye contact with Kelly, “not whatever it costs. That’s the point, right?”

  I can feel my ears getting hot. I know I should make more of an effort to understand the business side of my business. But every time I’ve asked Kelly to walk me through the figures and the projections, the accounting and the payroll, I end up cross-eyed, bored, and flushed with frustration. It’s hard work to understand, and it’s not that I’m afraid of hard work, it’s just that I’ve already done so much hard work, and I don’t think I should have to do this on top of it. I’m the one who came up with the totally original idea for SPOKE; I’m the one who won the entrepreneurial contest. I’m the one who landed a spot on the third most popular reality TV show in the highly prized nineteen- to forty-nine-year-old demographic on Tuesday nights. I’m the one who gets called a wide load but refuses to succumb to Whole30. I’m the one who gives hope to at-risk LGBTQ youth. I have done my part.