The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  Lastly, and I hope not mostly, I want people to believe our story because I was tired of standing in the dark while the spotlight shined on my sister unaccompanied.

  There. I owned it.

  PART II

  * * *

  Filming • June–July 2017

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  Stephanie

  The doorbell rings, and I try not to panic. I’m upstairs in my bedroom, putting on my face for Lauren’s sexy slumber party. I have a strict policy against being filmed waking up or getting ready. I am not comfortable appearing on national television looking anything other than my absolute best. For this, Lisa and Jesse would lock me up and throw away the key. Confident women are cool women and evidently I am neither.

  “Vince?” I call, when the doorbell brays a second time. He doesn’t respond fast enough and so I have to raise my voice. “Vince?”

  I listen to him plod to the front door with heavy footsteps—oh, the inconvenience of having to answer the door in the middle of a Top Gear rerun. There is low murmuring that I strain to make out but cannot. “Who is it?” I shout, batting away my makeup artist’s hand. If it’s anyone with a camera, I’ll lock myself in the bathroom. They’re not allowed to follow you into the bathroom. The bathroom is like the U.N.—generally accepted as off-limits, even in wartime.

  Whoever was at the door is now on the stairs. I spring out of my seat just as Jen appears in the doorway with a pinched look on her small face. “It’s Greenberg!” Vince announces, on a delay. “And she’s wearing a flannel Snuggie!”

  Jen and I are facing each other in a way that feels like we are squaring off. Her enduring scowl morphs into something worse as she takes in my face. It’s the expression of a person who has just walked in on her boss going to the bathroom—mortified, pitying. Jason, my makeup artist, has only just finished “prepping” my face. Which means that my skin is bare, blotchy, and greasy with various serums and primers. I’m without my fake eyelashes, which means I’m without eyelashes entirely. In my twenties, I had my eyelash extensions replaced monthly at a small second-floor salon in Herald Square, until one day, the technician turned me away, declaring: There’s none left. She refused to continue our treatments until I allowed my real eyelashes to grow back, no matter how much I offered to pay her. That was six years ago, and I’m still waiting.

  Jen is not wearing a flannel Snuggie exactly, but rather a deep red and green plaid pajama set in silk. To a guy, it’s a flannel Snuggie. To Jen Greenberg, this is stepping up her game. I suppress a sigh. I have no patience for people who refuse to help themselves. I don’t care how cool the Fug Girls say she looks, she must know that she’s not going to win back that guy—or girl—dressed like a little boy on Christmas Eve.

  “Sorry,” Jen says, twisting her Standing Sisters ring around her index finger. She’s fidgety; nervous for some reason. “Didn’t mean to barge in on you like this, but I need to talk to you before we go and I didn’t want to put this in a text.” We learned from Hayley to keep our digital footprints clean and our face-to-faces dirty.

  “Ohhh.” Vince leans against the doorframe, licking his heart-shaped lips. “Scandal at the sorority house?”

  Jason snorts because my husband is hot.

  “Vince,” I say sweetly, “will you go downstairs and get us something to drink?”

  Vince clasps his hands behind his back. “Red or white, ma chéri?”

  “Water,” I say, at the same time Jen does white. She grins wide, not because it’s funny, but because she doesn’t want to show up to Lauren’s party and film with purple teeth when she prefers to sell herself as a garden-fed teetotaler.

  “I’ve got a trick for that,” Jason says, smearing my face with foundation.

  “Actually,” I change my mind, “I’ll take a . . . white . . . too.” Why not? My ongoing battle with depression (Why do they say “battle” when it’s always a massacre?) has been at a cease-fire long enough that there is no reason to continue slandering an innocent glass of wine in my mind. And not to borrow a problematic line of thinking from Lauren Fun, but tonight is a special occasion. It’s the first group event of the season, a banner evening, and Brett won’t be there. I just received word from my publisher that I am the first female author to hold four consecutive spots on the New York Times bestseller list. In just a few weeks, I’m flying to L.A. to have dinner with the Oscar-Nominated Female Director. I should celebrate when there are things to celebrate.

  Vince turns from a waiter to a soldier with an official salute. At least he’s inconsistent. “Hup-two-three-four,” he chants, as he descends the stairs to complete his assignment.

  “I don’t know how you live with that,” Jen says, in a shocking moment of insubordination. She pushes aside a pile of coffee table books from an ottoman and takes a seat without being asked.

  “I do.” Jason flutters his eyelashes, and I decide it’s time to give Jason a raise.

  “You’d have some competition,” I tell him, trying not to move my mouth as he paints it nude. Smoky eye tonight. Neutral lip. “The gays love Vince.”

  Jen emits a doubting laugh, drawing her knees to her chest. Jen is always rearranging limbs, fixing herself into impossible entanglements, as if to say, Look at me! I’m such an unconventional free spirit that I can’t even sit normally! I dare you to find one photograph of Jen Greenberg on the Internet where she isn’t wound like a five-year-old in need of a bathroom. “Do you want to hear this or not?” she asks. “It’s about Brett.”

  I’m dying to hear it. My rib cage feels like it’s suffocating my stomach, but I don’t want Jen to know that Brett still holds that power over me. “Who?” I quip. Jason snickers.

  “You know she hired my ex to do her hair this season,” Jason says, slipping a folded tissue between my lips. “Blot.”

  “She’s such a scam artist,” I seethe as Jason crumples the stamp of my kiss. Brett took great pride in anointing herself the air-dried one of seasons past.

  “She’s engaged,” Jen blurts out, made impatient by my attempt to prove that whatever news there is about Brett, it can’t be worth begging to hear it.

  Jason speaks with his powder brush, thinking I’m still in the mood to kid around, “That bitch is even thirstier than I thought.”

  Brett is engaged? The last eight months flash before my eyes. Brett and me in the lingerie department at Bloomingdale’s, because she had just moved back in and I couldn’t believe she was still wearing that moth-eaten XL Dartmouth T-shirt to bed. Rihanna had taken a class at her studio. Vogue had profiled her. Time for a grown-up pair of pajamas.

  Brett, accompanying me to a colposcopy at my gynocologist’s office, because my body hadn’t cleared HPV on its own and they needed to make sure I hadn’t contracted a cancerous strain of the STD. I was sick with nerves, and Brett actually managed to sweet-talk the receptionist, and then the nurse, and finally the doctor herself, into allowing her to stay in the room with me while I underwent the excruciatingly uncomfortable procedure. She clutched my sweaty, cold hand while the doctor scraped tissue from my cervix, cracking jokes about how you weren’t cool unless you had HPV. Women who have HPV are the women who have lived.

  Brett and me, rewatching the first season of the show in my bed, hands in the same bowl of Skinny Pop, marveling at what apple-cheeked babies we had been just three years ago, how soft-spoken we all were. We must have just been nervous, Brett theorized, and I had agreed, but now I think differently. I think we were all just softer then.

  The timehop of our friendship has caused the saliva on my tongue to thin and sour. I feel ill. I feel as though I might cry. I am painfully aware that I am sitting here with a greasy face and fewer lashes than a four-month-old fetus, that the person I loved the most in my life turned out to be a stranger, and a cruel one at that, that people are starting to openly question how I live with the annoying man downstairs. I swallow and try, desperately, to sound jaded and impersonal. “So none of us would film with h
er and she knew she needed a storyline.” I nod. “Got it.”

  Jen shrugs, flatly. What a shoddy imitation of a friend—of Brett—she turned out to be. “According to Yvette, it’s not staged. They’re soul mates.” Her voice is a gauzy impression of her mother’s.

  “Right.” My laugh is rough. Brett wants to be married about as much as I want a child: which is a lot if a TV crew is willing to capture it. “I’m surprised I’m hearing it from you and not Page Six.”

  “Yvette says she’s waiting until they tell Arch’s parents before they go public.”

  “And yet,” I say, rottenly, “Yvette knows. And now you. And me.” I give Jen a long look, allowing the facts to speak for themselves. “How long have they even been together?”

  “Long enough,” Jen says, folding her heel into her plaid crotch. I’m suddenly furious with her for what she’s chosen to wear to Lauren’s sleepover-themed party. That is the sexiest you could come up with? I want to jeer. No wonder there are cobwebs growing between your legs.

  “Not really,” I say, lightly. I will not let Jen see that this news has gutted me. “Like three months.”

  “More like six.”

  “Jen,” I say, an edge to my voice I can no longer smooth out, “six months ago I was in Miami, trying to help her get over her breakup with Sarah.”

  “Okay, so, three months. Whatever.” Jen shivers, like the details of Brett’s romantic life are icky. “I don’t care.”

  There is a creak and we both look to the doorway. It’s Vince, ascending the stairs.

  “So how long until she’s pitching a spinoff to the network, Brett Buys the Cow?”

  Jen’s face tightens. “Shouldn’t it be the other way around?”

  It’s shameful, but hearing Jen disparage Brett for something as high school as her weight settles me ever so slightly. She’s still on your side. She still despises the same person who you despise.

  “You two actually hate each other, huh?” Jason says, taking a step away from me and examining his work on my eyes. “I wasn’t sure if it was just for the show.”

  I give him a sharp, stunned look. “You thought we made it up?”

  “Who hates each other?” Vince wants to know, appearing in the doorway balancing three glasses of wine in his hands, mine with a straw because, lipstick. Vince is never more the doting husband than during filming season. Forget crotchless underwear or piping my nipples with whipped cream, filming is the aphrodisiac of our marriage. Somewhere along the way, Vince decided that holding my handbag on the red carpet was still the red carpet, and that was good enough for him.

  “Who else?” I say, as he sets my drink in front of me. I see that he chose the glasses that his friends bought us for our wedding, monogrammed VDS: Vince and Stephanie DeMarco, assuming, naturally, that I couldn’t wait to take my deadbeat husband’s last name.

  “Aw, you guys,” Vince chastises, “give Brett a break.”

  One nice thing I will say about the cad I married is that he stays out of our scraps. We’ve had significant others who try to get involved when Diggers butt heads, evangelizing the more forgiving politics of brotherhood, who are viciously edited into mansplaining donkeys when the time comes. Diggers have lost their places for less, and I’ve made it very clear to Vince, his opinion doesn’t matter but it counts, it could cost us everything.

  “Then you can be the one to congratulate her on her engagement when you see her tonight,” Jen says, and I realize how artfully she’s buried the lede. Because Jen didn’t come here to tell me that Brett is getting married. She came here to tell me that Brett has been invited to Lauren’s event. That the alliance is off.

  Vince fumbles the pass, slopping some of Jen’s wine onto the silk rug. “She’s engaged?” He sets the glass down on my vanity and goes in search of a towel. “No shit,” he says from the bathroom. “To that . . . that same woman? What’s her name?”

  “Arch,” Jen says.

  “Arch?” Vince repeats, rudely, appearing in the bathroom doorway with a roll of toilet paper in his hands.

  “Use a hand towel,” I snap at him, and direct my chin at the glass he’s left on my vanity. “And put a coaster under that!”

  “Welcome to New York, Vince,” Jen cracks, as he disappears into the bathroom again, “we have people from lots of different cultures here. And obviously the white savior of African girls wasn’t going to marry some corn-fed blonde from Ohio.”

  “You should have told me she was coming sooner,” I say to Jen, waving off Jason’s attempt to apply mascara to the falsies he’s glued to my eyelids. “I just wasted a fifty-dollar strip of lashes.”

  “You’re not coming now?” Jen spits, incredulous.

  “Babe,” Vince implores of me, standing in the bathroom doorway with a hurt puppy-dog look on his face. He ordered a satin Hugh Hefner playsuit for this night weeks ago, monogrammed for seventy-five dollars extra.

  “I agreed not to film with her,” I remind Jen, icily. “And unlike some people, my word means something.”

  Jason returns the mascara wand to its bottle in consensus.

  “Fine, Steph.” Jen sets her wine on the vanity—Put down a coaster, you animal! I almost shriek. “She’s going to get the good edit, you know that, right? She’s going to Morocco to help little illiterate rape victims and she’s planning a wedding to Amal lesbian Clooney. Yvette wanted us to know so we have the opportunity to make things right with her before she tells us. Otherwise, you know what it’s going to look like? Like we’re a bunch of calculating mean girls who changed our tune when it became clear Brett was going to be everyone’s favorite this season because she’s getting married, and guess what? Suckers like to see fat chicks get married. It gives their little artery-clogged hearts hope.”

  Vince sucks in a horrified breath. “Jesus, Jen.”

  Jen shoots him an eviscerating look, but her face is a shameful red.

  “She’s always the favorite,” I mutter, sounding so petulant I can’t stand myself.

  “Listen to yourself,” Jen says, and I am shocked when her voice nearly cracks. Is she close to tears? I stare at her in wordless disbelief as she swipes the heel of her hand across her face. What is up with her tonight? “Jesse’s going to be pissed if you don’t go. Do you know what they’ll do to you in the edit room?”

  Jen is not wrong about any of this, unfortunately, as it is a much more reliable characteristic of humanity that we’re happier for people in love than we are for people in the highest tax bracket. Perhaps because we need to see ourselves in our heroines, and the modest accomplishment of finding a spouse and having babies is achievable by most of the general population, Green Menace notwithstanding. Our audience in particular likes nothing more than to see unconventional people getting to partake in conventional traditions. It’s why Vince and I were so popular at first, it’s why Jesse is taking a chance on Kelly and her mixed-race, non-nuclear family, hoping for a Cheerios commercial backlash, promptly followed by a Cheerios commercial defense.

  “Guys, relax,” Vince says, daringly. It takes a set of steel to chance on the r-word around two women with a combined net worth of not in your lifetime, bud, but my husband does not exactly conduct himself in a risk-averse fashion. “You’re getting way too worked up about this. Just go and tell Brett you’re happy for her and get on with it.” Not waiting for my answer, Vince peels off his T-shirt and locates the top of his pajama set. The tier-three trainer at Equinox is doing an abysmal job of taming Vince’s baby potbelly, I see. Jason pretends not to look anyway; those heart-shaped lips and that strong, scruffy jaw make up for that much.

  The first time Vince ever had that effect on me, he was the bartender at a promotional event for a women’s razor blade. My friend from college worked for the PR company that represented Gillette, and she brought me as her plus-one. The event was held at a windowless warehouse in the theater district, and I remember exactly what I wore: a DVF wrap dress and a pair of nude, patent leather Manolo Blahniks. I was twenty-s
ix and he was twenty-four, a two-year infinity. He was an aspiring actor whose biggest break to date was biting into a BLT in a Hellman’s commercial. His dark hair fell into his light eyes each time he looked down to mix up a fresh batch of the event’s signature cocktail (a Hairy Navel—haha), and every woman in the room was imagining what he would look like on top of her, with that hair in those eyes. I still get weak in the knees remembering how, at the end of the night, he beckoned for me to come closer so that he could shout into my ear (the acoustics were poor in the windowless warehouse), “Your boyfriend is an idiot.”

  I made a dubious expression in an effort to play along. “But he graduated from Harvard Law top of his class.” My boyfriend didn’t graduate from Harvard Law top of his class. I didn’t have a boyfriend.

  “There’s no way,” Vince said, buffing a wet wineglass dry with a dish towel. “Because no one that smart would be so dumb to let you out of his sight for even a minute.”

  I rolled my eyes with brute force, but inside, I was jumping up and down, screaming, Don’t stop! Keep trying!

  “Seriously,” Vince said, flinging the dishrag over his shoulder and going very still, so that he could be sure to take in every inch of me. “You are incredibly beautiful.”

  Do you know what I felt like saying in that moment? I felt like saying I know. All my life, people have complimented my looks, but nothing they said ever rang true to me. She has a nice smile, I overheard a friend of my mom’s say when I was eleven. What does it even mean to have a nice smile? Hitler had a nice smile. Sometimes the girls at school would express an appreciation for my skin that they would never actually want to trade me for—about how lucky I was that I didn’t have to worry about my “tan” fading in the winter. Then there were the guys who fetishized me, declaring, You’re hot, with such lascivious fervor that I’d want to go home and take a shower. I’d look at myself in the mirror, perplexed no one else could see it. I don’t just have a nice smile or nice skin. I’m not hot. I’m beautiful. Incredibly beautiful.