“Oh, come on, I’ll do it,” Brett says, when she notices me daydreaming her death at the river’s seam. Tala has already waded up to her waist and has her jerrican submerged, the water at her side bubbling greedily.
“I’ll do it,” I say, but Brett has already snatched the jug out of my hand and joined Tala. She doesn’t bother to take off her five-hundred-dollar sneakers, which, if you want a tell that someone is newly flush, watch how they treat their expensive things.
I’m about to remove my sandals and join them, prove to Brett that I’m not too much of a priss to get wet, when my pants pocket purrs once, shortly, before going off like a pager at some godforsaken Cheesecake Factory.
My cargo pants are thin silk, adhering to my damp skin like Saran Wrap to Saran Wrap. There is a horrible moment when my phone gets trapped in the lining of my pocket, and my hand writhes like a cat trapped under a bedsheet.
“Oh my God,” Brett judges. “Look where we are! Ignore it!”
“There is a mobile tower over that hill,” Tala says.
“Stop it.” Brett clucks, making apparent her disapproval that underprivileged people should be able to make a call that won’t drop.
“It’s true. There is a well closer to home than this, but everyone comes here because they can find a signal.”
“I left my phone in the car,” Brett boasts as I free my own and open my email. It was as if I’d set a Google alert for “weight loss.” Try it sometime. You’ll see what I mean. My screen is a scroll of vitriol, hit after hit, a greatest collection of pun-y insults. Goal Digger “digs” her own grave? The New York Times removes Stephony Simmons’s “memoir” from bestsellers list, citing fraud. Simmons’s life story is fake news, Fox is the most happy to report.
“Who died, Steph?” Brett laughs, tipping her head back and wetting her hair.
Gwen is coming, Vince has texted me. Call me when you can.
Why is Gwen coming? Where is Gwen going? I open the conversation and thumb back, feeling faint.
At 1:16: A reporter from the Daily News just knocked on the door. I said you weren’t home. Just wanted you to know.
1:47: Okay. A few more have knocked on the door. I didn’t answer. But now there is a small crowd gathered outside the apartment. I’m assuming you are somewhere without service.
I call him immediately, but the connection fails, again and again. I text back, What’s going on? Is Gwen there? I won’t have service much longer. I hit send, but the message doesn’t go anywhere. I growl a curse.
“Can we ride the bikes closer to the tower?” I ask Tala.
Brett wrings out her hair, watching me concernedly. “What’s going—”
We both freeze, terror-eyed, when we hear the ominous rustling in the brush. In an instant, I’ve catalogued every gruesome talking point of Brett’s cause célèbre: the fourteen-year-old girl raped and murdered by four men, the twelve-year-old girl who escaped her rapist only to deliver his baby nine months later, the young mother raped and tortured by a gang, leaving four children behind. At least the Internet will remember me kindly. These days, a woman is forgiven everything when a man kills her.
Tala, shouting a bizarre chant, charges out of the river and joins me on the shore, stomping her feet ferociously.
“Hey-hey. Hoo-hoo!” Tala shouts, and motions frantically for me to mimic her odd dance. But I cannot move a muscle for fear that my brain may stop changing shape, that my synapses may stop spinning this gossamer: A woman is forgiven everything when a man kills her.
“Oh my God.” Brett doubles over with a laugh when a ferret-looking thing sticks his whiskered nose out of the shrubs.
“Jesus,” I say, relieved, and maybe a little bit disappointed. “I was thinking about all those women who have been raped and murdered out here.”
Tala is picking out sharp-edged shells from the soles of her feet. She stops. “What women were raped and murdered here?”
Brett sloshes out of the water, her caftan melded between her thick thighs. “Shouldn’t we go? I thought wherever there are little animals there are bigger animals tracking them.”
I look down at my phone. The text still hasn’t been sent to Vince.
“It’s only a weasel,” Tala says, as Brett plops her big dump on the bike. I’m tempted to go over there and rip her dress from shoulder blades to ankles, check to make sure there’s no butt pad under there. Not a thing about her has turned out to be true.
I smoke Brett on the way to the top, but she gets me on the down, even though we’re both creeping. The other side of the hill is unduly treacherous with a couple gallons of water at our backs, like shooting down a water slide attached to an anchor. A few times I grip the handlebars out of fear, causing a sudden surge forward. How counterintuitive, I think, smug at last knowing Brett has been running game too. Brett upped the stakes of SPOKE’s mission—the bikes will certainly improve the quality of life for the women of this village, but they aren’t the getaway vehicles for fourteen-year-old virgins she made them out to be. But you know what? Of all people, I get it. It’s not tragic enough that boys get to travel to big cities to learn and work and experience life while illiterate women mule tanks of water on their backs in their third trimesters. The truth won’t make people listen unless it is sufficiently awful.
It wasn’t awful enough that I grew up fearing every day would be the day I wouldn’t find my mother’s car in the school pickup line, would be the day she decided it was all simply too complicated. It wasn’t awful enough that I used to change the channel when Family Matters came on after Full House on Friday nights, telling my mother, I don’t really like this one because I was afraid it would hurt her feelings if I showed any interest in the mores of this nice, normal black family with the pretty daughter just a few years older than me. I put that memory and others like it on the page—the constant, small indignities and my constant, asphyxiating silence. It didn’t feel like lying when I said I was choked, though I only said that later, after I handed in those first few honest chapters and my editor’s response was unequivocal: It’s a little slow.
So I self-inflicted some battle wounds, no worse, no better than my best friend.
The valley resolves, revealing the outline of the group, cheering us on, so far and so miniature I could contain them between my thumb and index finger and squish. I roll the handlebars forward another turn, arcing around Tala. Brett appears at my hip, and for a few seconds, we stay parallel but staggered, on a collision path with a clump of wooly evergreens. To be safe, I should lean right and Brett should lean left. To win, I should play chicken and stay the course, force Brett to go wide.
“Steph!” I think I hear Brett call, but the wind has its hands cupped around my ears. I spin the handlebars until they catch, heading rock-ribbed for the trees. Brett swings a wide left, exactly like I hoped she would, leaving a narrow slit between her bike and the trees. I zip through, brakeless, so close a branch cat-claws my arm. I release a wild laugh, glancing over my shoulder, expecting to see Brett in my dust. But she’s not far behind at all. She’s coming up on me, which is impossible, because I’m at max speed. The group is just a few yards before us, forming a chanting, dancing finish line. The cameras track Brett as she crosses half a body before me. She jams a fist into the air; the victor.
We swing around and park our bikes, noses facing the direction from which we came.
“I never took you for such a daredevil,” Brett says, releasing the chinstrap of her helmet and shaking loose her wet, gnarled hair. She round-kicks one leg over the handlebars, walking over to me with her hand outstretched. “You almost had me.”
“I would have if I’d gotten the faster bike,” I say, refusing to shake.
“Steph,” Brett drops her hand with a laugh. “Be serious.”
“You were behind me,” I say. “I was going full speed. How could you pass me if you were behind me?”
“I don’t know what to tell you.” Brett’s fingers get stuck trying to flip the rat’s nest s
he’s made out of her hair. No woman should flip her hair past the age of sixteen. “Then you weren’t at full speed. Full speed is really fast.”
“I was going really fast.”
Brett picks a few of her long hairs out of her engagement ring with a small, discrediting smile. “Well, for you, yeah.”
For you The uptight, rule-abiding, scared-of-her-own-shadow princess. I abandon my bike without staking the kickstand. It topples on its side, clipping the backs of my ankles as Brett yells after me, “These are expensive bikes, Steph.”
You know what else is expensive? The lava stone in my guest bathroom, which Brett—au naturel Brett—stained dark with hair dye. Oh yeah—that glossy brunette mane? Not real, but Brett can’t risk going to the hair salon and being found out so she DIYs it. Also expensive, the antique silk runner in the hallway, which Brett spilled coffee on and attempted to clean using soap and water, which got the coffee out but tie-dyed the pattern. And the candy dish that belonged to my mother’s mother, which Brett shattered, drunk, trying to take off her shoes? That wasn’t expensive. But it was priceless.
I aim my big toe at the kickstand of Brett’s bike, flinging my leg over the saddle, determined to prove she gave me the lemon. I assumed the motor was off, and I’m ill prepared when it bolts forward before my feet have even touched the pedals. Instinctively, I tighten my grip on the handlebars, and before I know it I’m careening toward that cluster of trees again, my heart flung between my shoulder blades.
I don’t know why I don’t pull back. I think about it later and it’s not a blur. It doesn’t happen so fast. If anything, time seems to slow down as I speed up, according me an infinity during which to make a different choice. But still I choose to drive straight for the trees on Brett’s winning bike.
At the last moment, I make another choice. I lean right, even though the right path is not the clear one. Layla is standing in my course, witless and unmoving, a jerrican in her hand, no doubt on her way to the river by foot just so she can say on Instagram that she lived like a poor little village girl for two measly hours of her life. She is her aunt’s niece. The force of the impact throws her onto my handlebars so, for a moment, we could be one of those pictures that already comes in a frame on the top floor of Bloomingdale’s Fifty-ninth. A black-and-white stock photo of an adorable mother-daughter outing, the girl riding the handlebars in peals of laughter while her mother pushes the pedals in discomforted joy. Because that’s what it takes to be a good mother, right? Relishing your unhappiness. They thought we were related, when we got to the private hospital in the Gueliz district, because anyone who is not white must be related. The nurses and the doctors, they were all wondering why my daughter was bleeding from her ears and I wasn’t crying.
CHAPTER 16
* * *
Kelly: The Interview Present day
“I’m okay,” I tell Jesse, my heart swelling in my throat.
“I think it might help,” Jesse says, motioning to someone off camera.
“No, really,” I insist, no, I beg. “I don’t need to see it again. I was there. I remember.” The pitch of my voice crests in direct proportion to the position of the AP, who is in front of me now, proffering the travel-sized C300 camera, a freeze-frame of the dramatic cloud formations that hung low in Morocco’s blue skies that day. Jesse has suggested I review the clip of the accident, to refresh my memory before we discuss it. It reminds me of something Brett warned me about before she died—something the producers do to the women during their confessional interviews. Like a confessional, we’re filming this interview last but speaking about the accident in the present, to weave together the narrative the producers have constructed in the editing room. Brett told me that sometimes, production will show you a clip of your “friend” throwing shade at you, to make you angry enough to throw shade at her, even though you promised to have her back. But I’ve never heard of anyone having to review footage of a woman trying to kill herself and changing her mind, going after an innocent child instead. I’m confident this is a first for all involved.
I have come to conclude that the “accident”—as it was reported in the press at the time it occurred and as we are continuing to refer to it now—was Stephanie’s first attempt at suicide that turned, only somewhat successfully, homicidal. My suspicions were raised when we got home and I found out that the collision occurred on the same day The Smoking Gun report was published. Always the diligent student, I spent hours researching suicide by driving and family history suicide. I knew from Stephanie’s memoir—the part that was true—that her biological mother committed suicide, and I turned up a rash of studies that suggest a person is more likely to complete suicide if a family member has taken his or her own life. I then came across a figure that put the percentage of vehicular fatalities that are actually suicides between 1.6 and 5 percent. The number is impossible to calculate because it is impossible to determine intent, which is the reason people choose this method. They would rather their friends and family believe their deaths were accidental.
That suspicion cemented into certainty after Brett died. What Stephanie did in Morocco was merely a test run. Can I really go through with this? she must have asked herself right before she took aim at Kweller, who she mistook for Layla, something I can’t prove but am sure of. The girls are the same age and height and build, were wearing identical orange headscarves, and Stephanie had acted so strangely, so aggressively, toward Layla the night before.
And what the viewers don’t know, will never know, is that on the ride to the hospital, Stephanie had asked repeatedly if Layla was okay. Her clavicle had been slick with sweat, but her face was dry, her immaculate makeup preserved somehow. It was a bright summer day, too sunny for her pupils to be that dilated. God knows what she was on. “You hit Kweller,” we had to keep reminding her. “Layla’s friend. The pottery girl.”
The AP has hit play without my consent, and because Jesse is watching me, and because I am under her thumb until I no longer draw an audience, I pretend to relive the horror of that day. Really, though, my eyes are focused on the black plastic corner of the camera, the same way I pretend to look when the technician sticks a mirror between my legs after a bikini wax—Yup, looks great! I always told her, without looking, before heading out on my bimonthly Tinder date while Brett babysat Layla. I discovered long ago that I have needs, and bad things happen when they are not met. Still, no matter how hard up, I never would have turned to Vince for a reprieve. The suggestion is unbelievably offensive.
“God.” Jesse sucks in a sharp breath next to me, watching, I assume, Stephanie scoop Kweller onto the handlebars. I mutter something indeterminable, but similar in feeling.
“Thanks, Sam.” Jesse smiles at the AP, which is his cue to exit the set.
“Jesse,” I say, “I really want to address one of the interview questions in this segment. About Vince and me.”
Jesse sets her lips together.
“I don’t want to answer any questions about us.”
“But we’re giving you the opportunity to dispel the rumor that something happened between you two.”
“I don’t even want the suggestion out there that something happened, though.”
Jesse doesn’t say anything, pointedly.
“Because it didn’t.”
Jesse half smiles. She might not believe me, I realize.
“We don’t have to use it,” she says. “Let’s just get through this set of questions and we can reassess from there. Okay?”
No. “Okay.”
PART III
* * *
Tequila Shot • August 2017
CHAPTER 17
* * *
Brett
A pink boob sways from a branch of the Japanese maple on Jen and Yvette’s front lawn. Kelly cuts the engine and squints. It’s eight o’clock in Amagansett in August, roads steaming, sky the color of shark skin. “Is that . . . a piñata?” She releases her seat belt and puts on her Dad-joke voice, “Or is it a ti
tñata?”
I groan at the bad joke, but it’s a loving groan, an oh my God you’re so corny but I love you anyway groan. I’m making an effort to be nice to my sister this weekend. Things haven’t been easy for her since we got back from Morocco last month, and they’re about to get so much worse.
We climb out of the car, our feet sliding around our wet sandals as we make our way to the trunk. We both make a stab at chivalry by trying to pass the other her weekend bag. Kelly ordered the same duffel as mine—an army print from Herschel—but at least her outfit doesn’t irritate me to my core. Net-a-Porter, she told me proudly when I asked her where she got her cute white romper, pronouncing it like a person who carries your bags at a hotel.
“Por-tay,” I corrected her, which was me, still being nice! The not-nice thing to do would have been to let her make a fool of herself on camera. Oh shit, she said, covering her eyes, cringing too much. It wasn’t that embarrassing, but I’m not the only one making an effort to be nice. Kelly is scared, and that chinks my resolve a little, but I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that it mostly feels like standing on a mountain of cocaine with a machine gun slung over my shoulder and two hot bitches on either side of me. Being right is a hell of a drug. And it’s for that reason that I’ve held off having the conversation with Kelly that I need to have. Because what if my judgment is clouded by these being right goggles?
My sister and I climb the three steps to the front porch, wobbly with the weight of our weekend bags. Jen has strung a banner across two tall topiaries: “Welcome, BrideS!” It’s curling at the corners and wrinkled by the humidity, making it look weathered and forgotten, like it’s been there for months, like my bachelorette party already happened and this is some sort of weird coma dream in a Sopranos episode. Am I already married? Did I really go through with it?
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