The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  Brett folds at the waist, splashing water into her mouth with her hands, getting as much of it down as she can while coughing and sputtering, her nose running, her face a pleasing and unbecoming shade of red. Doubled over as she is, I have full access to my image in the mirror. I lean in, closer, scrutinizing Jason’s work tonight. My skin is a flawless, even canvas, allowing my dark eyes to really pop. But still, I am thirty-four, ache in my heart.

  It is not my age that stings, it is that my age decided to make itself known with very little warning. I have always looked so young. Then somewhere, midway through thirty-three, I looked into the mirror and saw that I was older. Ever since then, I’ve felt apologetic and guilty, exposed as a fraud, like a prominent evangelist pastor busted in a tawdry sex scandal. I deeply regret my last birthday and beg for your forgiveness. I’ve been skulking around the Forbes thirty under thirty crowd, aged out for a while now, but at least looking the part. Then thirty-three-and-a-half kicked in the door, seeming to bring with it the decade’s full wallop overnight.

  Every year, I have looked back on my last birthday and yearned to turn that year again. Twenty-eight was so young, twenty-nine was still so young, thirty was a baby! But thirty-four felt different. There will never be a time when I look back and think I was young at thirty-four. Young was left on the doorstep of thirty-three. I am sure of it.

  Sometimes I think Jesse sniffed out my fear of aging, the way abusive men have a nose for women who grew up feeling undeserving of love. What did I say in my memoir? Feeling less than was wet wood for a termite like A.J. That was a good line. Jesse, like A.J., must have sensed my expiring sense of self-worth and thought to herself, That one That one won’t think more of herself when I subject her to my mind games, that one will just take it. All of the Diggers are damaged in some way. We must be. Why else would anybody sign up to be tossed out? Reality TV is like driving drunk. You know it might kill you, but there is something rakishly sexy about tempting the fates.

  Brett straightens, gasping still, thumping her chest with a fist. “Wow,” she rasps. “Wow. I don’t know where that came from.”

  I know exactly where that came from. It came from Brett’s subconscious, from the latent desire to come clean, to get something off her chest. The ego quashed it in her throat, strangling her, really, but knowing it resides within her—guilt—gives me the conviction I need to move forward with our original plan, hatched eight months ago in my kitchen on my thirty-fourth birthday.

  I turn my back on the mirror, hoisting my butt onto the sink’s ledge. I need to sit down for this. “I never thought of you as a subordinate,” I say. “I thought of you as my friend. And me?” I tent my fingers lightly over my heart. “I go to the ends of the earth to support my friends. I took you in when you had nowhere else to go, and I guess I thought it was a given, that if ever an opportunity presented itself to return the favor, that you would take it. But you didn’t. You had an opportunity to get my book into the hands of a major celebrity, whose support would have been huge, and you flat-out refused to help me. You wanted to keep that relationship all to yourself.”

  Brett’s breathing is still labored, but I manage to detect a sigh of relief in the pattern. So far, I’m on script. I’ve said exactly what we always planned for me to say. “That’s so not fair, Steph,” she says, with a dopey, upward tug at the corners of her mouth. “You didn’t lose anything by allowing me to stay at your house.” She seems to realize that this line, which we practiced months and months ago, no longer applies, because her lips straighten once again. “I don’t know,” she says, eyes downcast. “Maybe I could have found a way to bring it to her attention. I could have at least tried.” She looks up at me, her big eyes bigger. “I’m sorry, Steph. I’m so, so sorry.”

  I raise my eyebrows, and a valve in my heart thinks about opening. Because Brett is the one who is off script now. The plan had always been for me to apologize to her. Brett was to have come out of this scuffle smelling like roses.

  “I miss you,” Brett says, thickly. She might mean it. “It’s killed me not to be able to congratulate you on all your success, which is so so well-deserved. And it’s killed me not to be able to share with you what’s going on with my life. Can we just—I don’t know. Meet for a drink? Coffee? Catch up. I miss you,” she repeats. “Every single day.”

  I am silent. Brett prompts me with a slow roll of her finger. It’s my turn. “I miss you too,” I force myself to say.

  Brett hops up on the counter, so that we are thigh-to-thigh, shoulder-to-shoulder, conjoined twins. She covers my hand in her own, and I feel the cold metal on two fingers, instead of one. “Oh yeah,” she says, holding up her hand with a wry smile. “I got engaged.”

  The band is plain, gold, and a little too thick. The signet I bought for her has so much more style.

  “I’m happy for you, Brett,” I say, with feeling, but everything in my body language is rigid. This does not deter Brett from draping an arm around my shoulders, from the assault of her warm touch. Does she actually believe me? If she does, she is so far down this rabbit hole of our perceived reality I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

  “We can make this right, can’t we?” Brett pleads. “Come on. You know I always support you. Real queens fix each other’s crowns.”

  My disdain takes my breath away. Real queens fix each other’s crowns? This is the equivocating claptrap that passes for feminism these days. An Instagram idiom that places the burdon on the less effective party. Men get to go about their lives, paying women less and black women even less than that, unencumbered by cutesy demands to fix a problem they created. Telling women to help other women in a society that places us in a systemic competition with one another is a fool’s errand. Two percent of the world’s CEOs are women, and yet we are expected to treat each other like sisters and not rabid hyenas thrown a carcass picked to the gristle by lions. Malnourish me, undervalue me, humiliate and harass me when I try to get my money anyway, but don’t you ever tell me to go about it nicely.

  I say none of this because I am not here to be a truthsayer. I am here to capitulate. Brett isn’t the only one acting out of a sense of self-preservation. I lean into this changeling’s embrace, even though the stink of the French perfume I bought her tangled with the body odor in the pajama top I also bought her makes me queasy. “Yeah,” I say. “I think we can make this right.”

  But touch my crown and you will lose a fucking finger. Put that on a coffee mug and hawk it.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  Brett

  It was last year. Steph’s thirty-fourth birthday. I had moved back in with her for the second time, after breaking up with my very needy ex-girlfriend. Sarah and I had lived in a newly constructed high-rise on North End and Murray that cost us forty-five hundred a month. The apartment had one hundred and fifty more square feet than my first place on York and Sixty-seventh, with a dishwasher and a view of a better high-rise across the street and nary a rodent nor a kitchen drawer wide enough to accommodate a utensils divider, and in New York City, that is the height of luxury living. No rats and no room. It was the nicest place I had ever paid to live in, almost nice enough for me to pretend like the relationship was working, but in the end, I couldn’t take one more drunken accusation that I wasn’t all in. The process of breaking a lease on a New York City apartment is more soul crushing than lunch hour at the DMV, so Sarah and I worked out a deal where if I moved out, I only had to pay a quarter of the rent until our lease was up in the fall, just a few months away. Sarah wasn’t totally wrong about me not being all in, and I felt I owed it to her to let her stay in an apartment neither of us could have afforded on our own, at least for a few more months. Meanwhile, like a Pew Research statistic come to life, I was forced for financial reasons to move back in with my surrogate parents at twenty-six years old.

  Steph had declared that for her thirty-fourth birthday, all she wanted was a quiet night in and Vince’s killer coq au vin, which was very unlike Steph
. But later, over dessert, she admitted the truth, which was that she didn’t want proof of a birthday celebration on anyone’s social media or in the press. She was afraid to remind Jesse that she was another year older.

  “You are . . . ridiculous,” I said, catching myself in time. I wanted to call her insane.

  “You’re too young to understand,” Steph said, hysterically, toppling her untouched slice of Milk Bar Birthday Cake onto its side with her fork. She told me once that her medication makes anything sweet taste like cardboard.

  “Try me,” I said, thinking about reaching for her plate, but I didn’t want to look like a pig, having already cleaned my own. Why can’t you just be normal came my mother’s voice. I’m not saying to not eat dessert, I’m saying don’t eat your dessert plus everyone else’s. I’d sneak down here later tonight and eat it straight from the box, I decided. If I polished it off, which was likely, I’d just tell them I noticed roaches in the kitchen and I threw the cake out before it could attract more. The plan had soothed me at the time.

  “So,” Steph said, resting her fork, tongs down, on her plate, “there’s this German word, torschlusspanik. It literally translates to ‘gate-shut-panic.’ Are you familiar with this?”

  I pushed a pair of imaginary Coke bottle glasses farther up the bridge of my nose. “Intimately.”

  On the other side of the table, Vince dropped his head with a soundless laugh.

  “Forget it.” Stephanie’s shoulders tightened, and she clutched her water glass to her chest defensively. There was wine, but only Vince and I were drinking it. Alcoholism runs in my family, she has said to me enough times that I’ve started to suspect there is more to it than that. Like maybe Stephanie is someone who lubricates life’s edges by staying in control at all times.

  “Aw, babe. Come on.” Vince reached for the hand that was pinned beneath his wife’s armpit and settled on holding her wrist when she wouldn’t give it to him. Stephanie never could laugh at herself. People say that I’m quick to make others the butt of my jokes, but I am the first one to recognize when I’m being too Brett-y. Stephanie doesn’t have that ability, and I never realized before I moved in how delicately Vince had to tread around her. He seemed to not mind it, but later I learned he was exhausted.

  “Please,” I begged. “Tell us. I didn’t graduate from college. How else am I supposed to learn about . . . tushy . . . spank?” I glanced from Stephanie to Vince with big bimbo eyes, my palm flipped up by my shoulder—is that right? Vince tried not to laugh again, but even Stephanie couldn’t hold a straight face.

  “I hate you.” She laughed, despite herself.

  “But in direct proportion to how much you love me, right?” I stole one forkful of her dessert and immediately regretted it. It only made me want to pick up the piece of cake in both hands and bite into it like a sandwich.

  Stephanie drummed her fingers on her forearm, taking her time being convinced to share. “Torschlusspanik,” she said finally, resting her water glass on a white marble coaster, “is the sensation—the fear—that time is running out.” She jabbed at her heart with a finger. “I have that. With this birthday. Thirty-three was my last something birthday. The last year your success is special. It’s the last age anyone can call you a wunderkind, if we’re sticking to the German theme.”

  I cleared my throat and chose my words carefully. “Um. Okay. Go on.” I raised my eyebrows at Vince, who sighed wearily.

  “It gets better,” he said, gesturing at his chin, meaning I had frosting on mine. I wiped my face with their lattice-woven linens. Japanese, sixty bucks, Stephanie had told me when I said they were pretty, which is something Stephanie always does, volunteer a brand name or a price when you pay her a compliment, as though you don’t even know the half of how nice her things are.

  Stephanie bowed her head, as if summoning the patience to explain a very advanced concept to very advanced imbeciles. “After the obvious markers—sweet sixteen, you can drive, eighteen, you can vote, twenty-one you can drink, there is a whole chunk of time where you are presumably getting your ducks in order as a young adult. If you’re going to do something exceptional with your life, it takes until twenty-seven to get society to notice. Unless”—she silenced me with a hand before I could object—“you are Brett Courtney, girl wonder of the boutique fitness world.”

  “Damn right,” Vince said, topping off my wine.

  “Damn right,” I agreed, raising my glass in what turned out to be a solitary toast.

  Stephanie waited for me to set my glass on the table before continuing. “So that brings us to the twenty-seven club, of which icons like Kurt Cobain and Janis Joplin and Amy Winehouse are members. The club romanticizes the very idea of the young virtuoso, taken from us too soon. Next we have the thirtieth birthday, your dirty thirty, which is an overtly sexy birthday that doesn’t need much explaining. That’s when all the lists start, the thirty under thirty most powerful, most influential, wealthiest, yada, yada. And everyone gets to say, oh my God, she’s only thirty? You don’t believe me now but you’re such a baby at thirty. You are,” she said off my skeptical look. “And then thirty-one is the year women peak in their beauty and then thirty-three is your Jesus year. Your next special birthday after that is thirty-five, when the medical community categorizes your pregnancy as geriatric.”

  “I’m sorry,” I sputtered, “a Jesus year?”

  Vince tossed his napkin onto his plate. “Talk some sense into her, Brett,” he started, collecting our dirty dishes, “because I’ve tried.”

  “Leave it, Vince,” Steph said.

  “It’s your birthday, babe.” Vince came around to Steph’s side of the table and kissed the top of her head. “Sit with your friend.”

  “I gotta find myself someone who cooks and cleans,” I said, in a blatant attempt to get Stephanie to warm to her own husband, to recognize how much he’d done for her today, to appreciate it. Some days I was Vince’s publicist and some days I was Stephanie’s, depending on who was the one who needed to be pitched to the other more.

  “I’m a man of the millennium, Brett!” Vince said from the kitchen, turning on the faucet and running his fingers under the water, waiting for it to warm. “You should come over to our side. We cook and clean and fold your thongs into adorable triangles.”

  I emptied the bottle of wine into my glass. “Great! I need more rosé, millennium man!” I drew a knee to my chest and addressed Steph. “Okay, so, Jesus year . . .”

  Steph paused long enough for me to stop smiling. “The Jesus year,” Stephanie said, with such reverence I cleared my throat to cover my laugh, “is a year of great historical precedence, given that it’s the age God decided his son had accomplished everything he needed to accomplish on this earth. Your Jesus year is the year you realize it’s now or never. You cash in your 401(k) to open an ice-cream shop in Costa Rica. It’s the last year you’re ever young enough to make a major career change, and it’s the last year anyone can fawn over how young you are if it hits.”

  “Steph,” I said, giving in to the urge to laugh, “you’re a New York Times bestselling author with a major Hollywood studio paying you a lot of money to turn your books into movies. You’re on a TV show with two million viewers. You have stairs in your New York City apartment and three Chanel bags—”

  “And bae is ridiculously good-looking,” Vince said, appearing tableside with a fresh bottle of rosé, so chilled his thumbs left translucent prints on the fogged bottle.

  I made a gesture of support toward Vince. “Who also talks very cool! How much better can you do?”

  “I can’t do any better—that’s the point!” She slid a coaster under the rosé bottle and with her Japanese linens mopped its wet ring from the oiled oak table. Vince responded Sorry, as though a verbal exchange had taken place. “I’ve already peaked. Thirty-four is a nothing year. It’s your done year. I’m not getting asked back for next season. No one has survived the show past thirty-four.”

  Vince and I shared an inc
redulous look across the table. But then I actually thought about it. “That’s not true, is it?”

  Stephanie readied her fingers to be counted. “Let’s examine the evidence, shall we?” Tapping finger number one, “Allison Greene, season one, thirty-two.” Tapping her middle finger she continued, “Carolyn Ebelbaum, seasons two and three, aged thirty-two. Hayley Peterson, seasons one, two, and three, aged thirty-three.” She set all her counted fingers on the table, as if to rest her case.

  I shook my head, refusing to believe any of this was purposeful. “It’s a coincidence. It’s not, like, a height cutoff at an amusement park ride. You don’t have to get off this ride at thirty-four.”

  “Well maybe I don’t want to take that chance,” Steph said, folding her dinner napkin into a prim square. “I need to make sure I’m asked back for season four. The last book came and went with a whimper. I can’t go out like that.”

  Oh, god. The desperation on her face. It will never not break my heart to remember it.

  “Get ready,” Vince said, back in the kitchen now, exfoliating a soaked pan with a Brillo Pad, the sound of steel on iron making my teeth ache.

  Her voice smaller than I’d ever heard it, Steph said to me, “Don’t say no until I’m finished, okay?”

  Across the room, Vince worked his finger around his ear, as though he were spinning cotton candy onto a yarn, mouthing, Crazy. In that moment, I hated him.

  During those weeks I lived with Steph and Vince, my empathy was like a transferable property right, something I leased out, depending on who was shitting harder on whom. I had heard the rumors about Vince before I moved in, of course—everyone had—but I chose to believe Stephanie when she said they were just that, rumors, and that she and Vince were still madly in love. I’ve thought a lot about the difference between believing her and in choosing to believe her, and why I was so gung ho to participate in such an obvious sham, and it must have been because I idolized her. I couldn’t reconcile my fangirl image of her with the clichéd reality that she was just another little wife at home, waiting up for her husband past midnight.