My fury is swift and deafening, makes outrageous demands: break her nose, blacken her eyes, bite off an ear. With a battle cry, I comply. The two of us are a twister of limbs and low base insults, rolling around on the floor between the two middle seats, scratching, biting, wailing at each other to stop even while our fists blur in motion, because stopping feels about as impossible as sneezing with your eyes open. It is the most conventional catfight you’ve ever seen, and it feels like doing heroin for the first time. The pleasure center of my brain must look like a club in Ibiza during spring break. Lit. I cannot control much anymore, but I can control how hard I hit, how much I hurt this unrepentant impostor. The cabdriver swerves to the side of the road, shouting at us to stop or he’ll call the cops. We pull apart, gasping, exhilarated, and when I look down I realize I’m holding a hank of Brett’s hair in my hand. No, wait. Not Brett’s hair. Brett’s extensions. I actually bow down to her. At last, someone to whom I can cede the moral low ground.
“I should sell this on eBay,” I say, dangling the pelt in front of her face.
Brett wipes her lower lip and pulls her thumb away to check—yup, it’s blood. She stymies the cut with her tongue and says with hangsman good cheer, “Might help pay for your divorce. I hear they get expensive.”
That’s funny. For a second, I actually think about sparing her.
Nah.
CHAPTER 19
* * *
Kelly: The Interview Present day
It could be late, time to go to bed, but it could also be time for lunch. The blackout shades are still drawn and Lisa has pocketed my phone. The dark, hourless room has sedated me, lowered my inhibitions like alcohol, weakened my judgment, made me say things I never would have said sober.
“You didn’t hear them come home from Talkhouse?” Jesse asks.
“I slept through it all,” I say, grateful for a question I can answer honestly. After Brett and Stephanie snuck out, Jen had gone into Lauren’s room and returned with a light blue oval the size of a stud earring. What is that? I asked, when she offered it to me. It’s only five milligrams, she said. Enough to take the edge off. I had taken Xanax before in college, but I was already drunk, and I didn’t remember feeling a difference. I got it into my head that pills just didn’t work on me, that I was too Type A to be felled by such a diminutive capsule. Never trust a first impression, came the gooey, giggly thought right before the benzo dropped me into sleep like a stone into a stream. Plunk. Bye.
I wish I could say that I told Jen the truth in a mentally altered state, but it was in the opposite order. The Xanax was administered to calm me down after I told Jen the truth about Brett. I am always so levelheaded, so restrained, until I’m not. It’s the reason Layla exists.
Following the near-violent end of the Mrs. and Mrs. game, I was relieved to hear Jen behind me on the stairs. I needed to vent to someone who didn’t see the good in Brett. Sometimes you just have to bitch about someone you love to someone who really hates her, okay? My hands were still clawed in the shape of my sister’s neck and throbbing with the unmet need to strangle her. I opened my mouth to say the things I almost said before Lauren’s hair caught on fire but Jen had raised her finger to her lips, lifting her shirt to display a rib cage that looked like a ladder of sharp elbows. She pointed at her mic, reminding me that it was strapped beneath my bra band too. She picked up my duffel (I ordered the same one as Brett because I’m unoriginal. Is that what she wanted to hear me say?) and gestured for me to follow her, down the hall, to her bedroom. There, we took turns unwiring the other, and then Jen stuffed the mics under a European sham and sat on top, to be sure.
“I could destroy her if I wanted to,” I said to Jen, finally free to speak. “With just a few words on camera, I could destroy her. But I haven’t. I have been loyal, thinking I would be rewarded for it.” I laughed bitterly at my own naiveté.
“What was that about?” Jen asked. “Did I miss something? I don’t get what happened down there.”
I told her about the text message I read on Brett’s phone.
“She wouldn’t actually fire you, would she?”
She saw my expression and said, “Right.” She rubbed the thin skin on her forehead, thinking. I was about to tell her to stop, she’d give herself wrinkles, when her eyes suddenly flared. “Oh my God!” She slapped the upturned sides of her thighs with both hands, as though she had it. “You can come and work for me! Think about that storyline. I poach you from my number one frenemy.”
“I don’t give a fuck about a storyline!” I thundered. “I care about what’s right and what’s fair. SPOKE wouldn’t exist without me! It’s so arrogant of her to think that she could get rid of me and that I wouldn’t even put up a fight! With what I have on her.” I wanted to go on, but I bit my tongue, like I always do.
Jen crossed her ankles in her lap, perched lightly on the pillow as though she were about to levitate. “Does what you have on her have something to do with her and Steph? Because everyone thinks they had an affair.”
I shook my head, more to myself than to her. No. You’ve kept it this long. Don’t tell it now.
Jen had shrugged. Not a whatever shrug. There was understanding in her narrow brown eyes. Brett never missed a chance to describe them as beady, but to me Jen always looked focused, like she was listening to what you had to say. “I get it,” she said. “She’s your sister. You love her and your loyalty is to her. I just want you to know, Kel.” She had stopped, blushing a little. “Look. I’m a pretty solitary person. You know, you run a holistic-minded company and people expect you to be this sort of soft, nurturing earth-mother type, but it is serious business what I do. Do you know that at the first advisory meeting for Green Theory, eight out of my ten shareholders passed me the résumés of qualified men who could take over as CEO? One told me I had developed a great product but I had taken it as far as I could take it. I learned early on to say I didn’t need help. It felt like a sign of weakness if I admitted that. And it’s made me lonelier than I’d like. I was really excited when I was asked to be a part of the show. I really thought I had found my tribe.” She rolled her eyes and made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “I couldn’t wait to meet everyone and swap war stories. But Steph, she’s a writer and she didn’t really get it. And Lauren, I mean, she’s fun to hang out with, but we all know her rich dad put up capital and she’s not doing any of the heavy lifting. Honestly, I was most excited to get to know Brett. But it quickly became apparent to me that Brett was a very good self-promoter but she had no idea what she was doing. I tried to have a conversation with her once about the new state tax law and she was clueless. I always thought she was hiding something, and now I realize it was you.”
I felt as though I had just been proposed to by the man of my dreams. It was the validation I had been waiting for since the inception of SPOKE. Finally, someone saw me. Not only that, but someone had been looking for me all along. The only way I could think to repay this kindness was with the truth.
It starts, as it always does, with what seems like a harmless white lie, only it became the foundation on which to lay larger beams of deceit. When NYU pays my sister’s 50K lecturing fee, Brett tells the Stern students that she read about the entrepreneurial contest that ultimately funded the first phase of SPOKE in a doctor’s waiting room. She tore out the page from the magazine and brought it home to show me, and I laughed at her. The truth is, Brett didn’t vandalize a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room—she vandalized a magazine at the nail salon, where she was getting a pedicure on a Tuesday morning, because she wasn’t in school and she didn’t have a job, but she did have her cut of our mother’s life insurance policy to blow through and endless time to while away.
Something she didn’t lie about? My reaction. I did laugh at her, but not because I didn’t believe in Brett or her vision, which is how she likes to spin it now (Look at all the people who doubted me along the way, kids!). I laughed because my sister had no business applying for a grant reserv
ed for aspiring LGBTQ business owners given the fact that she is not lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning. My sister very much likes the D. No questions about that.
I told her not to do it. I begged her not to do it. And so of course Brett went ahead and entered the contest anyway, penning a heartbreaking application essay about what happened when she came out to our mother her freshman year of high school. She woke up the next morning to find her hair had been sheared off in her sleep. If you want to be a dyke, then you can look like a dyke, our mother told her when she stumbled downstairs, clutching her hair in both hands and crying.
It was fiction. Bad fiction that the judges devoured.
The grant covenant stipulated that twice a year for the next three years, Brett had to host aspiring LGBTQ business owners at the studio. She would listen to their stories, help them shape their ideas, and dispel her wizened advice. I always found reasons to stay away from SPOKE on those days. I couldn’t bear to face these struggling, hopeful hard workers, knowing that my sister had robbed them of an opportunity designed to increase their parity. I thought we just had to get through those three years, ride out the contract, and then Brett’s counterfeit sexuality would cease to be one of her defining qualities. But then the show came calling.
A magazine editor at Cosmo had taken a class at SPOKE, and she invited Brett to be a part of a package she had pitched: “Twenty-Five Boss Women Under the Age of Twenty-Five.” The article caught the attention of a casting director for Saluté, on the hunt for a gay woman to round out the diversified cast of Goal Diggers. The show had so much to offer our nascent business—exposure, connections, growth—that it almost justified Brett borrowing an identity from a historically oppressed group of people.
I was complicit. I lied to the cast and to Jesse, which is why Jesse hates me and also why she needs me. I participated in a pyramid scheme that recruited her affections and played her like a gullible desperado, and she would die of embarrassment if anyone ever found out. I know by the way she looks at me—a little bit ashamed—that she imagines Brett and I laughed at her behind her back, called her a dirty old man for slavering over my sister the way she did. Brett tried to once but I shut her down quickly. There is nothing funny about what we did. The deception made me sick, especially when Imazighen girls would whisper to Brett that they thought they might be like her and they were scared that their families would no longer love them if they were, and Brett would comfort them with the made-up hardships she had endured when she was their age. But the sword in my heart was always Arch, who deserved so much better than someone who may have loved her, but wasn’t in love with her. She’s thirty-six, I pleaded with Brett after they got engaged. She wants kids. Don’t waste her time. Don’t plan a wedding only to call it off or divorce her in a year for the storyline.
I don’t think Brett would have proposed, or accepted Arch’s proposal (however you want to slice it), if she hadn’t done what she did in the break between seasons three and four. My sister is not cruel by nature, but she made a bad decision, and she needed to make a grand gesture to cover her tracks. Proposing to Arch was a form of lifestyle insurance.
I could have told Arch the truth. Scratch that. I should have told Arch the truth. But if the viewers found out that Brett was lying about her sexuality, commodifying the gay community’s plight, they would have turned on her (and rightfully so). SPOKE would be done. Her role on the show would be eliminated. My role on the show would be eliminated. Brett told a lie from which we both profited, and I let it live. I own it. But I also worked so hard to make SPOKE what it is today. The thought of walking away from everything I’ve built fills me with despair.
“It must be so painful to know the truth,” Jesse says cruelly. “To know that your sister died while you were sleeping just above her. We know now that after Stephanie and Brett came home from Talkhouse, Vince arrived at the house, and he attacked Brett in the kitchen.”
“That’s the timeline the police are working with,” I say, carefully. That is the timeline the police are working with—but it’s not the correct one, and Jesse and I both know that.
“Do you also believe their theory that Vince killed Brett in a jealous rage after finding out about her affair with Stephanie?”
“It makes sense,” I say, again, carefully. I flinch when I see the blip of anger in Jesse’s eyes. I’m not here to play word hockey. I’m here to conclusively push a narrative that serves the show better than the truth. “It wasn’t just an affair—Stephanie and Brett were in love,” I say, and Jesse’s face softens with forgiveness. “The humiliation of that was clearly too much for Vince to take.”
There was a humiliation, too much for one person to take, but that person wasn’t Vince, it was Stephanie. Jesse and I both know that Stephanie killed my sister, and we both know that it has nothing to do with Brett and Stephanie “being in love.” But the tape shows otherwise. We’ve made sure of it.
CHAPTER 20
* * *
Stephanie
I thought I would lie awake all night, charged with loathing and second-guessing, but my sleep was straight out of a fairy tale, replete with a wake-up call from chirping birds and soft sunlight on my inarguably lovely face. Perhaps I slept so well thanks to the memory foam mattress in the downstairs guest bedroom—Brett’s room, which I claimed from her like a birthright when we got home. I punch my fists into the air with a gratifying yawn, the kind that distorts your face with pleasure, like sex. Good sex. Not Vince sex. Vince. Why am I thinking about Vince on this morning of all mornings? I swing upright and then go very still, listening. It’s after eight and the house is already smug with doing things, and that is Vince I hear in the living room.
I get up and follow his voice without washing my face or brushing my teeth, which is not how the day was supposed to start. The day was supposed to start with Jason and my team here at the crack of dawn (where are they?), my Starbucks order hot and my hair in rollers. I wasn’t to leave my bedroom until I was spit and polished, my wits properly caffeinated. Leave it to a man to fuck up this day, the day I plan to cement my legacy.
In the living room, Kelly and Lauren are sitting on the couch, drinking coffee across from Vince, who sits in one of the hairy white chairs, a plastic Duane Reade bag at his feet. Outside, Jen is holding a warrior pose in the shade. The puddles on the porch are evaporating and the sky is a tragic, September 11 blue. What a beautiful day to ruin these bitches.
Lauren raises her mug in greeting. Her hair (what’s left) is stiff and her face is red and shiny, like she just had surgery. I’m not even hungover, I realize. It’s like a clear seventy-degree day—the temperature so optimal for the human condition that you don’t even notice the air around you. I feel alive and fresh and happy, but not so alive and fresh and happy that I’m thinking about taking up yoga and cutting out caffeine and spending less time on social media or whatever it is people do when they decide to self-improve.
“How was Talk house?” Kelly says the name of the bar as if it were two distinct words. Like Burger King. Or Nordstrom Rack, which is probably where she got that dreadful cold-shoulder maxi dress she is wearing at the moment. God, she is embarrassing.
I ignore her and address Vince. “Why are you here?”
“I mean, Steph. Everyone is calling me. My mom is a mess.”
“A mess about what?”
“You seriously don’t know?” Lauren asks, her voice froggy and hungover. She must have knocked herself out last night through some combination of booze and pills, because she did not stir when Brett and I got home. No one did. God bless all these highly functioning addicts.
“Someone tell me what the fuck is going on before I lose it.” I hear myself and smile, demurely, softening my tone. “I mean—please?”
Kelly reaches for her phone. She calls up something and tosses it my way. I have to wait a second for the screen to right itself, but when it does, I realize I’m looking at a video post from TMZ: Drunken Stephanie Simmons does not
hold back on her soon to be ex-husband. I hit play. In case it isn’t clear what I’m saying, they’ve taken the helpful liberty of adding subtitles: They’re going to try to make it look like Vince fucks Brett’s sister this season. But that’s not who he—boom. Brett plows into me, her huge hips eclipsing the frame. The video cuts off right before I jump offstage. Thank God. I already had monsoon hair. I didn’t need everyone to see me land like an American gymnast with weak ankles.
I face my firing squad. “That’s all?”
Vince folds his hands behind his head and tilts his face to the ceiling. “Great.” He laughs, sarcastically. “There was more?”
“I’m keeping your name alive in the press, babe,” I say to him, sweet as candy. Vince turns away from me, his jaw clenched. Across from him, Kelly is gripping her mug of coffee so hard I’m waiting for it to shatter. She knew. She had to have known from the beginning. That’s why Vince found any opportunity he could to corner her. He wasn’t trying to fuck her; he was trying to get information out of her.
“What are you all so upset about?” I say. “I said Vince didn’t fuck you, Kelly. I did you a favor for when they try to make it look like he did. Which they will do.”
“Steph,” Vince says evenly. He clears his throat, glancing at Lauren and Kelly for their little nods of confidence—You can do this, Vince! “I think we should head back to the city together. I called Jason and the whole glam team and told them not to come.”
I feel like a troubled teen who has come downstairs to find two former Navy SEALs in her living room, about to be shipped off to one of those Wilderness Therapy Camps where they sodomize you with a flashlight for cursing. I cannot go with Vince.
The Favorite Sister Page 33
