The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  I was fifteen and Stephanie twenty-three when she published the first book in her fiction trilogy. I remember stealing my mother’s copy from her nightstand while she was out of the house, memorizing the page number after each reading because if I folded a corner, Mom would know I had been reading a book with a lot of sex in it and ew, ew, ew. Stephanie’s author picture was a stunningly perfect glamour shot, with lipstick, honking diamond studs in her ears, and a dazzling smile. Her bio was terrifically cosmopolitan: Stephanie Simmons lives on the Upper East Side (Not in New York! Not in Manhattan! On the Upper East Side.) with her dearly beloved collection of Jimmy Choos. The wit of her! The beauty! Stephanie Simmons is when I found my vagina, I once joked to a reporter who asked me how it felt to have her take me under her wing. Stephanie tweeted a link to the interview twice. She loved how much I adored her, and that turned out to be the root of all our problems.

  Living with Steph and Vince, I couldn’t help but notice I played a role for Stephanie not unlike the one Vince had taken on. She had a tendency to gravitate toward people who were below her station in life, to build you up to a certain point but never too high. She did not react well as I started to close the gap between us. She became needy, suffocating, jealous. Why couldn’t she host the fourth hour of the Today show with me? Why couldn’t I bring her as my date to the Glamour Women of the Year Awards? She could keep Vince under her thumb to a certain extent, but she didn’t have the same jurisdiction over me, and she started to resent me for it.

  Steph clings to the fact that Vince chose her before the show was even a twinkle in Jesse’s eye, but she had two books published before she got married, and one movie based on the novel by Stephanie Simmons already made. She may not have been movie-star recognizable when she met Vince, but clearly, he took in her clothes, her jewelry, and her doorman apartment on the Upper East Side and fell in love with her lifestyle. I do believe he fell in love with her next. But marrying someone who falls for what you have first and who you are after does not a healthy marriage make.

  So, yeah, Vince is sort of scummy for that. But Stephanie isn’t off the hook either. She knew what she was getting herself into when she married a guy like Vince, and she still registered for all the crystal stemware from Scully & Scully anyway, because she liked the idea of a trophy husband. And Vince is the quintessential trophy husband—a little skinny-fat—but this is New York, not L.A., and it is nothing those eyes won’t make you forget. Had he been too ripped, a certain grassroots rumor might have picked up more steam, which is that Vince and Stephanie are covering for each other in a Will and Jada Pinkett Smith–esque arrangement, if you know what I mean.

  It’s hard to feel bad for either one of them and it’s hard not to feel bad for both of them. It depends on the day. Throughout that day, leading up to Stephanie’s birthday dinner, I had been firmly in Vince’s camp. He had waited on us hand and foot from the moment we woke up, starting with a heavenly batch of homemade blueberry ricotta pancakes served to us in bed, but nothing could lift Stephanie’s spirits. Stephanie suffers from a sort of dysmorphia when it comes to her success, and good luck to anyone who attempts to convince her that her talent and tenacity have been recognized. Clearly, Vince sensed my exasperation with her, and that’s why he felt emboldened to make that gesture, to break the cardinal rule of Goal Diggers by mouthing Crazy. I crossed party lines again in that moment, over to Stephanie’s side, as I watched Vince wash his white Le Creuset pans that his wife bought him in the beautiful kitchen his wife paid for. I may be engaged to a woman but I know this much to be true about hetero relationships, and that is that men who call women crazy are always the men who have first pushed them to the brink.

  “I’m listening,” I told Steph, and the gratitude in her smile made me look away in secondhand embarrassment. The worst part about getting old has to be asking people younger than you for their help. God, I pray that will never be me.

  “Do you know the highest-rated episode of reality TV of all time?”

  I thought about it for a moment. “Talk shows don’t count, right?”

  “Don’t count.”

  “What about that WWE shit?”

  “This tied WWE Raw.”

  “Holy shit.” I laughed, genuinely intrigued. “What was it?”

  “The Hills. Season three premiere. ‘You Know What You Did.’ ”

  I instantly saw Lauren Conrad in my mind, cast red by West Hollywood lights, berating Heidi Montag, You know why I’m mad at you. You know what you did! “I remember it,” I said.

  “Of course you do. Show me a woman under the age of thirty-five who doesn’t remember the Lauren and Heidi feud. The Lauren and Heidi feud was a thing of beauty. So was the rivalry between Katy Perry and Taylor Swift, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. Female aggression is curtailed, and therefore taboo, and therefore ratings gold. Did you know that toddler girls are just as inclined to roughhouse as boys, but we teach them to blunt those instincts?” She sees the recognition on my face and says, “Yeah.” I was thinking about Kelly and me: biting, scratching, strands of her hair in my hand, from root to split end.

  “We learn to channel our aggression passively from a young age,” she shrugged, as though this were old news, “and that’s why woman-to-woman combat is spectator sport. Women have to get creative when we fight. We’re professionals. No wonder people line up to see us do our thing.”

  “Jen and I fight,” I point out.

  “But you’ve always fought. There’s no room for treachery when you’ve never gotten along. Viewers don’t want a fight, they want a betrayal.”

  “And how do we give them that?”

  “We pull a Lauren and Heidi.” She stole my glass of wine and took a walloping gulp. “I’ll even let you be Lauren Conrad. I’ll be the heel,” she said through that puckering face we all make when we drink something too cold too fast. Stars, they’re just like us.

  The fight, Stephanie said, had to be serious enough that viewers wouldn’t accuse us of being petty, wouldn’t tell us in the comments on our Instagram posts to put our big girl panties on and sort it out. (If birth control doesn’t give her a stroke at thirty-five, it will be a grown woman in Minnesota telling Stephanie how to conduct herself using the language of a kiddie diddler.) The fight also couldn’t be so irreparable that we wouldn’t reconcile in time for the Morocco trip. We would end the season in Morocco, she promised. Nothing we were doing was ever meant to be permanent.

  The heart of this serious-but-not-irreparable fight would be this: that Stephanie had come to me and asked me to push her book on Rihanna, with the thought that she was perfect to play her in the film adaptation should the rights be optioned. She was working on a new book about her childhood, opening up about some things she’d wanted to talk about for a long time. What things? I had asked, intrigued, but also feeling a little queasy. I could tell by the look on her face she was not talking about happy childhood memories.

  “Just some stuff I went through when I was young,” she’d said, glancing at Vince furtively. “But when I ask you to push it on your new star client, you say you aren’t comfortable doing that, and I flip out. I claim you owe me.” Stephanie lowered her eyes sadly. “I’m going to look crazy. But,” she raised her shoulders and thinned her lips, “if Jesse finds out we’re fighting, she’ll have to ask me back next season to see it all play out. And I’d rather be hated for a few months than fast-forwarded.”

  “Fuck that guy,” I said, meaning the writer at New York mag who had taken to calling Stephanie Sleptanie in his recaps of season three. But suddenly, as if her fear were an app with a share feature, I felt it too. There was a very strong likelihood that my closest ally on the show would not be asked back. She had been a bore to film last season. Marc had made that crack about timing his Ritalin dosage to Stephanie scenes, and Lisa was always coming at Stephanie’s face with a Starbucks napkin in hand, calling her Miss New York, not kindly.

  And sometimes, when Stephani
e stops smiling but the lines around her mouth remain, she does look like she’s starting to get old.

  The fight was supposed to have happened off camera, between seasons, and, like method actors, we were to commit. As soon as my lease was up in the fall and I was through paying rent to Sarah, I could afford to move out, and that’s when we would cease all communication. We couldn’t put on a front to the media, to the other castmates, to Jesse, if at home, late at night, we were texting each other goofy emojis. We’d seen what happened to Hayley when she was hacked, and we couldn’t chance anyone figuring us out. It’s why I didn’t reach out to Steph to congratulate her when the book came out and caught fire, even though I was dying to. Even though I was actually hurt. She had been choked out, spit on, and raped, and she never told me? She was supposed to be my best friend.

  It’s also why I was unable to give her a heads-up about the lunch with Jesse and my sister. Maybe I would have found a way to get in touch with her if I thought Kelly was anything more than a Green Party candidate. But I truly saw it as a mercy meeting for my sister, which was completely naive in retrospect. Of course Jesse would see my niece, nine-foot-tall mini mogul, with stars in her eyes. And of course Steph would read the decision to cast two of my family members as me trying to make a grab for the spotlight when we’d manipulated an arc that was meant to split it. I allowed myself to believe that was when the fight became real for her, though deep down I knew that wasn’t it. Deep down, I knew what it was really about.

  It took me until the all-cast prod meeting to realize that the fight was no longer fake. Steph and I are the only castmates who keep in touch off camera. So it was normal that I hadn’t seen Lauren or Jen until the prod meeting. That Stephanie had seen them was not. And when the women simultaneously turned their backs on Morocco, I knew it had nothing to do with me “refusing” to slip the book to my celebrity rider.

  I don’t know what would have happened if Yvette hadn’t taken pity on me and exposed Jen’s back-alley protein habit. Once I obliterated the alliance, I figured I had two choices. I could expose Steph’s scheme, but in doing so, I would have to admit to my role in it, and Jesse, whose nonnegotiables are no fashion bloggers except Leandra Medine and no fake storylines, would have been irate. Or, I could play dumb. Pretend like this was all a part of the plan, that Stephanie wasn’t trying to ice me off the show, that she didn’t sincerely despise me now, and proceed with the reconciliation as we had originally conceived, cumulating in the trip to Morocco. To my great relief, Steph played along when I cornered her in the bathroom at Lauren’s event.

  Only now, it feels like instead of pretending to be in a fight, we’re pretending to be friends. In my wildest dreams I never would have imagined that the fight would become real and the friendship the charade.

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  Stephanie

  My best friend is meeting me at Barneys, to help me pick out shoes for the dinner with the Oscar-Nominated Female Director. I reread Lisa’s reminder text from earlier this morning: REMINDER, this is the first time you’ve seen Brett since you made up in the bathroom at Lauren’s party. This CliffsNote is necessary as she assumes we’ve seen each other since Lauren’s party, three weeks ago. And why shouldn’t she? We “made up.” Things are “back to normal.” I’m going to Morocco. How I wish I could put negating quotation marks around that.

  Lisa sends us these reminder texts before most scenes out of chronological necessity. We are not a scripted series but we are a corralled one. We shoot out of order, sometimes filming a coffee date after a big blowout between two of the cast members to “set up” the confrontation, which will appear to have taken place later in the hour on your television screen. Lisa used to text me before I met Brett, REMINDER, the last thing you talked about was Lauren’s arrest, when we’d spoken about a million different things since then, some on camera and some off. You start to pick out threads as filming progresses, the reminder texts serving as headline beats for all the intersecting storylines. Clearly, the Brett and Steph reconciliation is going to be a big one this season, just like we planned it.

  Ever since Lauren’s event, I’ve waited for . . . something from her. If she texted me, I would have said she should have called. If she called, I would say she should have done it in person. She couldn’t have done it right, no matter what she did, but anything to acknowledge the real thing that happened between us would have been something.

  I have lost friends before but it has never felt like this, like having a stroke and having to relearn how to walk, which hand is left and which hand is right. Brett nuked my instincts, coaxed my most vulnerable secrets out of me by dangling her own, which turned out to be artificial bait. I told her the painful details about things of which I’ve only given Vince the broad strokes, most notably, the extent of my struggle with depression. I hate that word. “Depression.” I hear it and I think of that black lab in the commercials, toy in his mouth, whimpering for a walk, his owner too flatlined to get off the couch. I hate it because it’s true. When my depression is at full strength, it doesn’t roar, it yawns. I have wet my bed, wide-awake and sober, because the effort of getting up and taking ten steps to the toilet has felt like an insurmountable summit. That Brett knows this and more—much more—and that I have now lost her loyalty feels like my secrets have sprouted legs and are out there in the world, wearing short skirts and hooker heels to solicit listeners. The threat of exposure menaces me constantly, but the fear is always secondary to the pain of the breach. I left my heart open around Brett. I turned around for one second and she burgled it.

  Lately, I’ve been thinking that we challenged God by machinating our storyline the way we did, and he did not appreciate it one bit (we all know it’s a man). Like he got wind of our small-potatoes stakes and scoffed down at us, Oh, you’re looking for something to actually fight about? If I’d never proposed it, if I’d never messed with the order of the universe, would it still have happened? Wait a minute, I think-gasp, as I glide above a mannequin outfitted in so much velvet Prince would take offense. Does she think it’s my fault? Has she been waiting for me to say something to her? The softness I was feeling toward her stales as I ride the elevator the rest of the way to the shoe department. That would be typical Brett, who I am convinced does so much good in this world just to absolve herself of any wrongdoing.

  I get to the fifth floor and discover I am the first to arrive. No matter, I think, pacified by the image of Brett showing up sweaty and frazzled, knowing she will find me coiled and rattling. I hate being made to wait. The minutes tick by and I realize, not only is she not early, she is late. Very late. Ten minutes late. Seventeen. Twenty-two.

  “If she’s not here in five minutes I’m leaving,” I say to Rachel, our field producer who could not be bothered to find something other than rubber flip-flops for a morning at Barneys. I know Rachel earns about 38K a year and I’m being an almighty snob, but my mood is decomposing by the second.

  “Let me see where she’s at,” Rachel says, stepping away to call her. But then, as though summoned, Brett rounds the corner, not a stride harried and wearing an expensive-looking T-shirt and weird jeans, a nice watch and those blocky white sneakers that cost more than a laptop. She looks good, I realize, breathlessly, she looks young and rich. But is she pretty? I find myself wondering, pettily. She’s a bigger girl, downgraded from big girl, which was how she identified herself in season one. Oh, the Big Gulp–swilling biddies came for her on Facebook: The average American woman wears a size eighteen. If you’re “big,” what does that make us? (Edited for clarity, spelling, and punctuation. The discourse did occur on Facebook.) I was tempted to fire back on her behalf, What that makes you is enormous, Deb, but Brett can’t stand to be unliked or less than thoroughly understood. She responded to each and every plus-sized crybaby and apologized, explaining that in New York there is a premium placed on thinness, and so she often feels like a big girl compared to her peers. She thanked them for this teachable momen
t, this reminder that she moves in a true bubble of privilege, and vowed to be more thoughtful about the language she used to talk about bodies in the future. What a spectacular waste of everyone’s time.

  I have no idea what size Brett wears, though it’s not a size eighteen and it’s not a four, which is what I am, and I’m a bigger girl than Lauren and Jen combined. I do know that her shape is proportionate and the skin on her thighs and stomach—of which I’ve seen too much, alas—is impressively smooth, unpocked by dimples or cellulite. It is a bigger body but it is not an unconventional one, and I haven’t even gotten to her face, which, with her cartoonish big brown eyes and clear olive skin, is undeniably lovely. It would seem then that the answer is obvious—Is she pretty? Yes, she is. But I can’t quite get there. Perhaps because Brett behaves in a way that suggests she doesn’t even think it is true. She talks a loud game about self-compassion, about how women need to develop the neural pathways to access kind and loving self-talk (self, self, self), then turns around and maims her skin with all those seedy tattoos. And I’ve seen the way she “nourishes” herself. Brett was a violent eater during the time she lived with me, housing boxes of frozen waffles still frozen, spooning strange concoctions of sugar and flour and vanilla flavoring into her mouth like soup in the middle of the night. There was nothing kind or loving about that. It was the secretive, shifty behavior of someone downright ashamed of herself.

  Brett smiles at me, shyly, but not apologetically. I am walled in by a fort of shoeboxes at this point, a pink-bowed Aquazzura sandal on one foot, a suede Isabel Marant bootie on the other. I get up to examine my lower legs in the short fitting mirror, and Brett mistakes it for an invitation to embrace. I cannot reject her, not with the cameras here. And so against my will, I wrap my arms around her and tuck my face into her shoulder. As I inhale the keen powder scent of her Moroccan oil shampoo and compare, breast to breast, her mellow heartbeat to the rabbit’s pace of my own, I wonder, indulgently, Has she gotten fatter?