The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  “Did it load?” I ask, impatiently.

  Layla looks down at her phone. “Um. It’s loading.”

  “Lisa,” I grouse, “what the fuck, man?”

  That turns a few more heads in my direction. I don’t normally speak like a twenty-year-old frat boy whose buddy puked on his pillow last night, but here we are.

  “Too many of you are trying to get on the connection for it to work,” Lisa says without looking up from her own inbox.

  “Can we take turns on airplane mode?” I pose the question to the group, but no one bites. “I’ll go first,” I volunteer, holding up my phone and showing everyone as I drag the button right. “Lauren?” I ask. “Please?”

  Lauren groans, but she closes out of Instagram, swipes left, and taps open the Settings icon.

  “Done,” Brett adds. The least you could fucking do, I think. Yesterday’s scrumptious memory returns to me: the optimistic panic on Brett’s face when she showed me the message on her phone: Marc told me Lisa thinks we SLEPT TOGETHER! She was so sure I’d flip out too. What did she think—we’d put our heads together and figure our way out of this, Thelma and Louise style? The truth is, I hope Arch hears about it. I hope Arch leaves her fat ass.

  I stare at Brett’s Pantene commercial hair that she claims is wash and go. When we lived together, her Conair 2000 wasn’t the only discovery I made about her. With a wolfish smile, I say, “I knew I could count on you, Brett.”

  Everyone lapses into silence again, with these phony looks of appreciation for the dusty geological wreckage outside our windows. I make an ooohhhing noise as we pass another patch of burnt-out wasteland. Then I wake my phone and connect to the MiFi when no one is looking.

  From far away, the village looks like it was built out of mountain-colored Legos. We pass an ancient man straddling the neck of a white donkey, two rattan bags attached at the flank. Why don’t they just ride the donkey to the well?

  “It’s a mule, first of all,” Brett says, and I’m startled to discover I voiced the thought out loud. “Only the wealthy families can afford to own them and it’s tradition that the men use them to transport food and supplies.” Brett turns around in her seat and adds, “ ‘Wealthy’ being a relative term.”

  A revulsion bucks me, that I am expected to care about these poor village women denied a mule. I am not heartless. My heart is enlarged with caring thanks to the mess my mother made out of raising me. My mother loved me, and she didn’t mean to ruin me, but she did, by teaching me that I am responsible for how other people feel. Between her and Vince and Brett and the twenty-four-year-old blond viewers who don’t want to be made to feel guilty that their ancestors owned slaves because they don’t even, like, see color, I have performed my job so well I deserve a raise and a corner office.

  We descend slowly to the lowest tier of the village, where the stone-stacked huts are squat and windowless. Brett explains the gites are grouped politically by association, and asks Layla if she notices anything as we pull into what is going to have to pass for the village center.

  “There aren’t any guys,” Layla says, after a minute. Brett reacts to this glaringly obvious observation as though Layla has just defined a parabola.

  “That’s exactly right. Most men between the ages of sixteen and forty temporarily emigrate to North African cities to find jobs, and send the money back home to their families.”

  Then who is raping them?

  We come to a running stop in the hard dirt, attracting a ring of filthy, curious children. A woman approaches the driver’s-side window, wearing a headscarf and sweatshirt, both sound-the-alarm red. The color choice is not a coincidence.

  Brett unbuckles her seat belt and squeezes between the driver and front passenger seat. “Salam!” she calls through the open window, and I think about swallowing my fourth Valium in fourteen hours. There is only so much of Brett’s ham-fisted Arabic I can take. “Salam, Tala!”

  “As-salam alaykam, Brett!” she returns. She rattles off directions in rapid-fire Arabic to the driver, pointing and waving like a crossing guard with tiny balls and a big blowhorn. I thought women here were oppressed little wallflowers who spoke only when spoken to. I thought these bikes were built to save the hymens of preyed-upon preteens.

  We reverse into a narrow sod alleyway, deep enough so that the second van can plug us in. Through the front windshield, I watch Marc push open the back doors and blunder to his feet, rolling his neck and stretching his arms above his head. All warmed up now, he hoists the F55 onto his right shoulder. I take one last sip of tea. Wait for the jump.

  Oh, it’s exhausting. Meeting all these grateful women. Watching happy children be happy with so little, the way they pogo in front of Marc, their scalps momentarily clearing the lens. We visit a hut where women weave rag rugs, where Tala explains the spirit of creative reuse, how when a rug is old or torn, the women cut it and sew it into colorful wool and cotton scraps. They never throw anything away, she says, and I glare hotly at Layla. For a time, these rugs were only considered fit for local homes, a practical solution to chilly mud floors in winter. Today they sell for thousands of dollars in a store on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood. Layla takes hundreds of pictures of toothless smiling women holding up their tatty designs, while Brett explains to Tala in pidgin Arabic that Layla is the curator of Qualb, an online boutique that sells home goods made by Berber women.

  “The heart?” Tala curves her hand around her breast.

  Brett nods. “We have an expression in the States: Home is where the heart is.”

  Tala parts her dry lips with an ah of understanding. “That is very clever.”

  Layla is on her knees, fingering the fringe end of a rag rug in progress. “Thank you,” she says in a courtly voice that sets my teeth on edge. Who does she think she is, repaying a compliment with a thank-you?

  On a sunny stoop we come across an older woman, her face ravaged by the sun, and a young girl with her knees around a pottery wheel. They look like they’ve dunked themselves in a mud bath at an expensive California spa. Layla cries out a name—Kweller?—and the girl glances up, shading her eyes.

  “Layla,” she determines. The girl allows the potter’s wheel to come to a stop and stands, clasping her wet hands at her pelvis, unsmiling. She’s tall and angular, like Layla, and what she’s wearing is the closest I’ve seen to an outfit since we’ve arrived: a long-sleeved navy and white top, bulky bright blue jeans, and a burnt orange headscarf, pushed far enough back from her head that I can see she parts her hair deeply to the side. Nautical top, denim, pop of color, hair flip. I had no idea the basic hos of Starbucks had such far-reaching influence.

  Layla squeals. “Can you believe I’m here?”

  I set my molars to work again. Can you believe I’m here. Starting her young on the make it about me train, which is all reality TV is. Narcissist training.

  Kweller closes her eyes and nods, she can believe it. It’s like watching two people meet off Tinder for the first time when one of them is so clearly out of the other’s pay grade. Kweller has more composure in the tip of her dirty pinkie than the entire hoodwinking Courtney family.

  Layla slides her eyes to the left—I see it! She’s checking to make sure Marc is getting this!—and approaches Kweller, arms flung open like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic. Kweller doesn’t look like she wants a hug, but as a pawn in the shoddy SPOKE empire, she’s getting one.

  “Kweller is one of our top sellers on Qualb,” Layla tells us, her arm around Kweller’s waist. “She makes the most beautiful painted vases.”

  I expect Kweller to blush beneath the dry clay on her cheeks and pass the compliment to the elderly woman who taught her everything she knows. But like Layla, all she says is, “Thank you.” This is the new guard of girls. They take ownership of their accomplishments. They don’t cover their zits in concealer. They like themselves. We hate them because we ain’t them. That’s something they say too, right?

  I cannot take one more second of the La
yla and Kweller show, so I slip back to the van while the rest of the women go on to meet the bread makers and olive oil pressers. The driver is perched on the front bumper, smoking a cigarette. I start to explain to him that I’m looking for the MiFi router because I’m expecting important news from back home, before realizing he doesn’t understand me nor does he give a shit.

  I haul myself into the front passenger seat and turn on the router. I’m sweating so hard my sunglasses keep sliding down my nose, and I set my face with powder, watching and willing the signal light to stop blinking.

  At long last—a connection. I refresh The Smoking Gun report on the screen of my phone, and there it is, top of the page. Digging Deep into Goal Digger Stephanie Simmons’s Bullshit. I actually laugh. That is some New York Post levels of puniness.

  An Oscar-nominated female director has been had.

  A few months ago, she anointed the Goal Digger’s memoir “her next great passion project,” calling it “shocking, heartbreaking, and important.”

  But an investigation into Simmons’s number one bestseller, which has sold close to one million copies in just five months, reveals that the most shocking thing about Simmons’s memoir is that it’s not a memoir at all.

  Hospital records, police reports, and interviews with personnel at the rehab center where Simmons claimed to have checked her mother in after pawning her adoptive mother’s diamonds have called into question many key sections of Simmons’s book. After months of diligent fact-checking, The Smoking Gun can be the first to report that the thirty-four-year-old embellished and, in some cases, wholly fabricated details of her relationship with her birth mother, and the Pennsylvania neighbor she claims she entered into an abusive relationship with while searching for her.

  Simmons appears to have gotten away with sweetening her backstory given the fact that she is an orphan herself. Her adoptive mother passed away in 2011. Earlier this year, Simmons was quoted in the New York Times as saying, “I felt I was finally able to unload my story after I was no longer saddled with protecting the feelings of my adoptive mother. She would have been horrified to know the truth.”

  While Simmons claims that her birth mother passed away in her arms when she was just seventeen years old, hospital records show that Sheila Lott died at the South Ridge Rehab Facility in Newark, New Jersey, in 2003, when Simmons was twenty and enrolled in her sophomore year at Colgate.

  Another whopper of a discrepancy involves “A.J.,” the eighteen-year-old neighbor of Sheila Lott, whom Simmons alleged was her lover and abuser. Simmons claims that on the day she first sought out her biological mother, she met and began a tumultuous eight-month affair with the local high school football star who lived on her mother’s cul-de-sac. Simmons has been widely heralded for her bravery in coming forward as a survivor of domestic abuse when black women are both statistically more likely to suffer at the hands of a romantic partner and less likely to report their abusers. Thus far, The Smoking Gun has been unsuccessful in our efforts to identify “A.J.”

  I reach a scroll of ads and click next. There are six more pages to go, and the screen goes white for too long. I glance at the MiFi. The light is red. The battery is dead.

  “There are your friends,” the driver says, gesturing with his cigarette at our moving spectacle, like one of those Chinese dragon parade floats, Brett the flamboyant head and Lisa the stinger tail. Marc films Kelly and Jen as they start to unload the bikes from the back of the cargo van, Lauren looking on, helpfully. Brett plays bouncer, her hands spread wide to keep jumping children at bay. Be patient. She’s laughing. You’ll get to ride them. Just be patient.

  On a plot of young grass, framed by the old craggy bluffs, I spot two girls in orange headscarves taking a selfie. It’s Layla and Kweller, who must have gifted her pushy American friend a matching wrap. From here, they could be sisters. On any other day, it could be sweet.

  I set to work making a happy place lunch out of a Valium and Lauren’s traveling handle of vodka. I’m too close to caring.

  Slightly north of the village, we come upon a brindled valley, studded sparsely with the sort of Christmas trees that pass as status symbols in New York City. You should see Whole Foods in December, everyone chomping at the bit to get to the front of the line and declare their need for an eight-footer, their ceilings are that high. The Diggers ooh and ah over the mountaintops, which loll before us, flexing an occasional dirt road, not that great. We could be on Mars, everything so brown and dry.

  “Isn’t nature majestic?” Jen marvels at my shoulder. I turn to her with flared nostrils. I decide against informing our sole Jewish castmate that there is a Hitler smudge of dust above her lip. Lane-swerving bitch.

  It was only a ten-minute walk to get here under the mild-mannered sun, but I’m heavy-footed with malaise, greased in a gritty solution of sweat and dust. There is no place to rest but on a bike. I puncture the dirt deeper with the kickstand and swing a leg over the seat. I wish I could say the SPOKE electric bikes look like every other bike I’ve ever seen, nothing special about them, but it wouldn’t be true. The body is a glossy, lacquered red, the seat baby pink leather, with a rear rack designed to transport two jerricans of fresh water. The handlebars look like stitched leather ram horns, like something an old Texan oil baron would hang above his fireplace after a luxury safari. Fuck me, they’re gorgeous.

  “Okay!” Brett claps her hands twice to get everyone’s attention. There is a gaggle of children surrounding her. Periodically one will reach out and wind her fingers in Brett’s long hair, and Brett will gently untangle them without losing a beat. “I thought it would be fun to have a race! Who can make it to the river, fill up her container, and get back here the fastest.”

  Tala translates, and the kids titter excitedly. One girl raises a grubby arm, and another clamps it down with a bucktoothed laugh, waving her arm wide. She wants to go.

  “Grown-ups first,” Brett says, and there is a collective outcry of disappointment when Tala translates.

  “Looks like Steph here is our first competitor!” Brett says, noticing me slumped on a bike.

  I yawn without covering my mouth. “Nah.”

  “But you said you couldn’t wait to ride one last night!”

  I did? I try to remember last night as I dismount the bike, but it’s as though the memory has been placed in a cement-sealed file.

  “Scared you’ll lose to me?” Brett’s smile is playful and infuriating.

  The bolt of competitiveness is absurd, vehemently childish, but it’s in my lungs, sharp as if I had just sprinted to the best, fullest, tallest Christmas tree. I reclaim the pink leather seat with aplomb. “Winner gets her book given to Rihanna,” I say, because I can be funny too.

  Brett plunks a helmet on her head, and in a voice so serious she can only be joking, says, “You’re on, sister.”

  I don’t like things that go fast. I don’t like Jet Skis and I don’t like Vespas. I don’t even like speed intervals at Barry’s Bootcamp, which I took up again joyfully once Brett and I were no longer friends. (SPOKE might make you cool but it will not make you skinny.)

  Lauren starts the race, ripping off her new headscarf and throwing back her chin like she’s Cha Cha in Grease. Brett zips ahead of me, too fast too soon. The Big Chill’s got no strategy. She has to keep slamming on the brakes to avoid crashing into the trees. After a few hundred yards, I catch up with her by maintaining a steady pace. The idea of a race is mostly fallacy, as we don’t have any idea where we’re racing to and we have to follow Tala—at least on the way there.

  It’s a rocky, uphill climb, the elevation subtle then ungracefully steep, and I can’t help but imagine what it would be like to walk this, day after day, year after year of my life. At least it’s downhill with the jugs of water, though I remember the older women I saw as we wandered the village, their backs curved like boomerangs. How bitter they must be, watching these young girls with the bikes, going to school, making their own money. Why wasn’t there a better way in
time for them?

  I have barely moved my legs to get here and yet this film of sweat has turned cold, has drowned gnats in the creases of my elbows. Maybe I’m a little bit sick. Maybe I’m a little bit dying. There is something waiting for me on the other side of these mountains, something happening back in New York that will not leave me unscathed. I should never want to leave, and yet I’m dying to know how bad it is. I’m dying to know what I’m going to do about it. It’s past time to locate my spine.

  “Careful!” Tala calls ahead of us, and then she drops off the horizon.

  The descent is straight out of a stress dream. Something seasoned hikers would consider rappelling. Even Brett idles at the top, removing her feet from the pedals and stemming the earth for a moment.

  “She’s doing it,” I say to Brett, unsure, as we watch Tala bump around boulders and sparse, scraggly bushes.

  “It’s amazing,” Brett says, watching her, and I realize she hasn’t stopped because she’s scared. She’s stopped to take it all in. “You lose touch, back in New York,” she continues. “You know you’re doing something that matters, but it’s never more real than when you come here and see it with your own two eyes.”

  With that, she twists her handlebars and navigates her way downhill fearlessly, her hair flipping sweetly in the wind. I wonder what would happen if I bumped her tire on the way down. If the back would flip over the front, if her top teeth would go through her bottom lip, as easily as a knife parting hot butter.

  It’s greener by the river, obnoxiously, Irishly so. Brett expresses her disappointment that the camera crew was unable to follow us down here. “This is Morocco,” she declares, sucking in a torrent of fresh air, and I want to tell Tala that I won’t say anything if she holds Brett’s face in the shallow river until she stops struggling.