The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  Lauren translates Steph’s question for Jamilla. Jamilla closes her eyes, thinking about it—is it a him or a her? Lui, she says to Lauren, after an airless moment.

  “Him,” Lauren says to Steph.

  Stephanie pouts. She wanted this to be about me, I realize, feeling dizzy.

  Jamilla continues to speak.

  “You let him hurt you because you believe, in your heart, that he loves you,” Lauren says. “But he has given his heart to someone else.”

  Stephanie sidles up closer to Jamilla, her lips parted in absolute elation. “Is that someone sitting here tonight?” She wiggles her fingers, spookily.

  Jamilla looks to Lauren for assistance.

  “Go on,” Stephanie whispers, at a silly, horror-movie pitch, “ask her.”

  Lauren moves an inch away from Stephanie, but she does ask Jamilla the question.

  “Oui.” Jamilla nods, and Stephanie claps her hands and woot-woots.

  “The person is here?” Stephanie cries. “Oh, goody goody gumdrops! Wait, okay.” She shimmies in her seat, excitedly. “I’m going to point, and I want her to tell me to stop when I’ve pointed to the person my husband has given his heart to.”

  Stephanie raises one arm without waiting for Lauren to communicate her request to Jamilla. For a moment that feels incalculable, she rests an arrow-straight finger on Kelly.

  Kelly starts to say, “This is”—but before she can finish, Steph directs her finger around the circle, stopping for a fraction of a second on Jen, then me, then Lauren. When she’s finished implicating all the Diggers, she raises her arm and points above our hairlines at Lisa, Marc, and the rest of the crew. Stephanie explodes with a hoarse laugh, one that sounds like it’s skinned a layer of tissue off the back of her throat.

  “I have to tell you,” Stephanie says, wiping away tears of joy, “I was skeptical, at first. But this is the most accurate reading ever. She didn’t stop me on anyone—which is the God’s honest truth. Vince is the Goal Diggers’ bicycle. Everyone take a ride! We should have brought him instead of your fancy new electric bikes, B. Kel, would you have let Layla ride him?”

  “Steph!” I say, horrified.

  Kelly hooks her hand under Layla’s armpit, standing, forcing Layla onto her feet with her.

  “Mom!” Layla cries, trying to find her footing.

  “On that note,” Kelly says with a thin, ferocious smile.

  Layla rips her arm away from Kelly.

  “We’re going to bed,” Kelly hisses at her, and Layla skulks ahead, her long legs outpacing my sister’s, clanging open the heavy wooden door without bothering to hold it for Kelly.

  “That was fun.” Stephanie sighs, contentedly, leaning back and resting her hands on her stomach, like she’s just finished a fabulous meal. “Who’s next?” She turns to me. Her makeup is truly insane. She’s extended her dark charcoal eyeshadow far above the arch of her brow. “Roomie?” Her eyes glitter nastily. No, seriously, they glitter. That smoky neutrals eye palette she favors was always too heavy on the shimmer.

  I watch the dark above me, listening to my sister breathe like Darth Vader in the next room. No fucking way was I shacking up with my roomie after that little scene on the roof of the riad. I’d rather not be shanked in my sleep.

  I’m on the short couch in the living room, Jen in the bedroom to my left and Kelly and Layla in the one to my right. I assumed Kelly would sleep in the bed with Jen and I would bunk down with Layla, but apparently my sister and the Green Menace aren’t there yet in their friendship. I flop onto my stomach, sighing, jet-lagged, uncomfortable. My feet are hanging off the arm of the love seat and I’m only five foot three.

  I’m considering moving to the floor when I detect movement behind me—bedsheets thrown off, a soft bump, a softer ow. I figure Jen is just getting up to pee out all that mint tea, but then the door wheezes open, and Jen’s feet are making a sticky sound on the tile floors.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and go very still. Jen pauses next to the couch, watching me. Goose bumps flare across the back of my arms. I’m sure my eyelids are twitching but I’m hoping her eyes haven’t adjusted enough to notice. After a few moments, she continues her tacky trek toward the door. I crack open an eye and in the brief flash of light from the hallway, I see that she’s clutching her phone in her hand. I count to twenty-seven—my age—then I get up and follow her.

  The second floor of the riad is outfitted with a small balcony at the end of the hallway, just past the stairwell. Sheer curtains snap in the cool breeze, providing a sound cover. I stay flat against the wall, sidestepping my way closer to Jen. The breeze stops, and I stop. It turns a sort of quiet that makes Jen’s voice the star, a clear, bitchy three-in-the-morning solo.

  “. . . to hear your voice tell me it’s okay,” Jen is saying, as I hold my breath and starfish the wall. The pious camera tenor is gone, replaced by something I’ve never heard before: something like tenderness. Is she on the phone with Yvette?

  “Yes, she pointed at everyone. But she started with Kelly. And sort of, like, lingered on her.”

  She’s talking about Stephanie.

  “No, no. I believe you. But I thought you should know. They’re trying to set it up as a storyline. So maybe try to stay away from her.”

  There is a long stretch of mmm-hmming while the person on the other line responds. I no longer think she’s speaking to Yvette, but I can’t think of who else it might be until . . .

  “Yeah, I’m rooming with her. I asked Lisa as soon as she told me about it. I’m giving her all kinds of opportunity to deny it. I don’t want you to look like a jackass either.” Her pause is uncertain. “I miss you.” This one too. “Baby.”

  Baby. The word is a peach pit in the back of my throat. Baby. I can’t swallow. Baby. I can’t breathe.

  Jen suddenly makes a shushing sound. I hold everything in my body still, lungs burning, as a trolley trundles in the lobby below. There is an exchange in Arabic, and a shared laugh.

  “Nothing,” Jen says, “just the concierge. I should get back, though. The Big Chill is sleeping on our couch.”

  Pause.

  “Because she doesn’t want to sleep in the same bed as your crazy . . .”

  I slide back along the wall with wide steps, crisscrossing ankles. I slip inside the room, dive onto the couch, and shut my eyes. A minute or so later, the door opens and Jen ducks inside.

  She’s watching me again. I can feel it. My slow, deep breathing is a mismatch for my heart, hauling blood to my organs like it is under a time constraint. Can she hear it? I don’t know how she couldn’t.

  “Brett,” Jen whispers.

  I breathe. I pray.

  Jen tiptoes into the bedroom and shuts the door. I don’t move for a very long time. Not until the sun starts to squint into the room. Then I get up, stuff my feet in Kelly’s sandals, and head downstairs.

  The lobby is illuminated, the fountains whistling dark water. A single attendant sits at the front desk, reading French Harry Potter, Selena Gomez playing softly from the computer. It’s still too early for most of the guests to be awake. I caught Kelly’s eye up in the room when I said I was going downstairs to wait for everyone. I need to talk to you in private is what I hope she took from my expression. I couldn’t very well have this conversation up there, with Jen padding about in her towel and humming happily into her first mint tea of the morning.

  I know Kelly understood me, but as the minutes tick by, I am worried she chose to disregard me. She’s upset about last night, the way Stephanie went after Layla, and I’m sure she’s found a way to illogically blame me for it.

  I’m just about to give up hope and go get breakfast when Kelly and Layla appear at the bottom of the stairwell.

  “Layls,” I say to her with a mischievous wink, “they have a latte machine.”

  Layla murmurs an adolescent, “Cool.” She’s mad. At me for being a racially insensitive dunce. At Kelly for embarrassing her in front of Stephanie.

  “You kno
w I don’t like her having caffeine, Brett,” Kelly says to me.

  “She’s on vacation,” I say.

  Kelly takes her time, deciding. Finally she jerks her thumb in the direction of the dining room: permission to imbibe caffeine, granted.

  Layla perks up, ever so slightly.

  “Will you see if they have to-go cups for us?” I ask her. “I want to talk to your mom for a second alone.”

  Layla nods—Sure, sure, sure—just short of skipping to the dining room.

  “What’s up, Brett?” Kelly folds her arms across her chest. Yup, she’s definitely mad at me for last night.

  “Something happened after we all went to bed. I heard Jen leave the—”

  “They don’t have to-go cups!” Layla shouts from the dining room’s arch.

  “I’m coming, sweetie,” Kelly calls back, and starts to turn away from me.

  “Kel, wait.”

  “No. You know what, Brett? I don’t want to hear it if it’s about Jen. I’m so sick of listening to you bad-mouth her. She’s been the only one here who has been a decent person to me.”

  “She’s using you! She thinks you—”

  “I mean it, Brett,” Kelly says with a murderous edge to her voice. “Shut the fuck up about Jen. And if Stephanie ever treats Layla that way again, I will come at her with what I know. On camera. Make sure your best friend knows that.”

  Kelly turns and walks away without giving me a chance to respond. Without giving me a chance to explain that Vince is the one who broke Jen’s heart, that Jen calls him baby and is probably still in love with him, and that she sidled up to Kelly because she wanted to make sure Vince wasn’t in love with her. Worst of all, she’s walking away without giving me the chance to demand an answer to the question that has been burning a hole in my throat for the last few weeks. Did you sleep with Vince, Kel? Yes. Or no.

  CHAPTER 15

  * * *

  Stephanie

  The tea here is a punch to the heart, a shock from a defibrillator, a towline out of my benzo muck. Who says I’m a penny-a-liner all out of decent metaphors? Oh right, The Smoking Gun.

  “I take one during the day and sometimes two to sleep if I’m traveling,” Lauren had said last night, shaking seven Valium into my palm. The triggerman herself had come to my room with the cameras, glassy-eyed, straight tequila in her cup. What’s wrong? she asked, almost sounding sincere. Is it Vince? I so longed for the days when the only thing I had to worry about hiding from the cameras was my husband’s wandering Willie that I actually said yes Yes, I think he’s cheating on me. Lauren got all excited, thinking she was about to deliver the scoop of the millennium on national TV: Some of us think it might be Kelly, she told me, reaching for my hand to comfort me. You dumb twat, I would have said if I wasn’t busy savoring every last ounce of her sympathy. I’m about to become too repugnant to touch—might as well enjoy these last dregs of human contact.

  Lauren said she takes two at night when she’s traveling, so I took three, figuring it’s like when a new partner swears they’ve only slept with eight other people before you. Multiply by two or three or four (in my case) for a more accurate count. Fifteen minutes later and my brain felt like a tube of toothpaste oozing out of my ear. I’d slumped on the edge of the bathtub while Lauren jammed a wand into a tube of lip gloss and applied what felt like too much. Even to me.

  The van hits another pothole and all of our heads lurch left. I’m sitting in the last row, party of one. My erratic behavior’s gotten me quarantined. I feel like I’m being treated to a private preview of season five with Kelly, Jen, and Lauren seated in the row ahead of me, Brett and Layla in the row ahead of them. Layla has released her braids, reminding me that it’s been twenty years since I’ve seen my natural hair texture. I take another sip of tea.

  I started with the straightening treatments my freshman year of high school, not long after I had the bright idea to dress up as my best friend for Halloween. Ashley had big red hair, freckles under her fingernails, and pale blue eyes. It would be hysterical, we decided, if I came to school as her and she came to school as me. Despite the obvious differences in our coloring, we were roughly the same height and build, and in profile, our long curly hair almost matched. We just had to swap clothes and buy that hair spray paint from Hot Topic. We even went as far as to order non-prescription colored contacts from a dicey-looking “online pharmacy.”

  I showed up to school on October 31 wearing a long-sleeved waffle shirt underneath a short-sleeved piped crew neck—one of Ashley’s signature stylings. I had used my mother’s foundation to lighten my skin—something that did not ring any of my mother’s alarm bells when I told her why I needed it—and my hair was stiff and passably red from the temporary colored spray. It took forever to get the contacts in. I hated touching my eyeball, but in that scene from The Craft, the black girl had used magic to make her eyes light and I thought she looked sooooo pretty.

  I lent Ashley a pair of my loudly printed Lilly Pulitzer cigarette pants and a complementing kelly green cable-knit sweater. My mother barred me from loaning out my real pearl earrings and so we had provisioned a pair of plastic bulbs from a jewelry kiosk at the mall. We had then gone to CVS and purchased “tan” foundation for Ashley, so I was even prepared for that. I was fourteen and knew nothing about the offensive history of blackface—who in that town could have possibly educated me?

  In short, I thought I knew what to expect when I saw Ashley at school. I had helped to appoint every defining detail of her Stephanie Simmons Costume. So when I met her at her locker that morning, I was unprepared for both what I saw and what I felt. Ashley hadn’t just sprayed her hair my color, like I had done that morning in our garage, standing on old newspapers at my mother’s behest. Ashley had used a comb to tease and rough up her texture to within an inch of its life. She looked like a troll. She looked like she had lice. She looked heinous. Pretty good, right? she asked, patting her rat’s nest. And that was the part that hurt the most. She hadn’t done this to hurt me. That was just how she saw me. I wanted to die.

  I pretended to have bad cramps so that I could go home early. I went straight to the shower to rinse off the remnants of the costume, the way women do after they’ve been raped in a Lifetime movie. The slight had been unintentional, but it hurt like a physical assault. Maybe I would have preferred a hit, to have had my underwear torn off. At least then there would have been evidence for forensics to collect, a bad guy to catch, my uncomplicated pain.

  Later that evening, my mother knocked on my bedroom door. I’d told her what happened in the car ride home, and she had fallen silent. When I looked over at her, I saw that her cheeks were streaked with tears, and I had rushed to comfort her, to reassure her that it was just a stupid misunderstanding, that I knew I would be able to laugh about it in the morning. A few hours later, she had arrived at a solution: Would I like to go into the city that weekend to have my hair styled at a salon she read about in Glamour? They offered a service not yet available anywhere else in the United States. Some chemical treatment from Japan. All the girls in New York were crazy for it, she said. It would make me look so polished.

  It feels like the van is tightrope-walking the crag after a few beers. Lauren has her eyes glued shut in terror and Brett is laughing at her, telling her this is nothing, just wait until we get to the apex. I tried to get out of going this morning. I care fuck all about these bikes. Why are we giving them bikes? How much does it cost to make these bikes? Would it not be more economical to send a year’s supply of Poland Spring? I guess a bottled water studio wouldn’t attract twenty-something million from investors. Wouldn’t attract Rihanna. You know what should have happened when I outlined the terms of the fake fight to Brett? Brett should have told me to come up with something else, because of course Brett would never refuse to pass along my book to the perfect person to play me because she does fucking owe me. In fact, Brett should have gotten on the horn that minute and made it happen. Brett didn’t know Van Cleef fr
om Van Halen before she met me, and now look at her, protecting her eyes from the splendid North African sun in the limited edition SPOKE sunglasses designed by Thierry Lasry. Don’t make me feel guilty for flying first-class when the money you’re charging for a pair of plastic sunglasses could feed a family of drumbeaters for a year.

  I’m racist. I’m elitist. I’m a liar. I’m going to hell, but even hell will be better than today. Today, at some point, The Smoking Gun plans to publish a report regarding the “multiple” discrepancies between my life and the account in my memoir. Gwen learned this information ahead of the public after promising The Smoking Gun’s copy editor she’d read her lousy manuscript.

  I told Lisa that I couldn’t leave the hotel today, that I had an important phone call I was waiting to receive and I couldn’t be without service, but Lisa showed me her MiFi and threatened to call Jesse in a voice that could shatter the glass ceiling. So here I am, trapped in this van with a weak signal and five type-A lunatics in caftans, myself included.

  “That’s Mount Toubkal,” Brett says to Layla, pointing out the window. “It’s the tallest mountain in North Africa.”

  Layla takes a video with her phone and thumbs a red caption.

  I lean forward and speak between Lauren and Jen. “Did you just post an Instagram story?”

  Layla doesn’t respond to my question, and I repeat it, crankier.

  “Oh, sorry!” she says, looking over her shoulder skittishly. Apparently, I traumatized the holy babe last night. Something about a Negro Nancy Drew? I’m a hoot when I’m on thirty milligrams of someone else’s prescription! Serves her right for assuming I’d talk to her just because we share the same skin color, which is as presumptious and offensive as assuming all gay men are attracted to one another. “I didn’t know you were talking to me.”