The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  I know, on paper, that this looks like a bribe, and that bribes are measures only dishonest and despicable people resort to, but it isn’t like that. (I also know It isn’t like that is something only dishonest and despicable people say.) But it’s really not like that! My investors are expecting a three-episode arc in Morocco with gratuitous placement of the e-bikes. I have gladly participated in all the other group trips for all the other women, who are older, more accomplished, and more established than I am. I arrived at the airport on time for Greenberg’s trip, with a smile on my fucking face, the morning after she told me Willpower is a muscle that can be strengthened when I asked for more bread at dinner. I have shown up for these women. I have ohh’d and ahh’d over their expensive, rat-free apartments. I have read their four-hundred-page books and drank their chunky juices and downloaded their dating apps when I am in a relationship to help boost membership. I have supported them getting richer, more famous, and more important. Now, I get a little taste of that kind of success myself and they can’t stand it. They have banded together to keep the little guy in her place.

  So this bribe, which wasn’t even my idea, really really isn’t like that. If anything, it’s a course correction. It’s what is right. Still, I offer to toss the bag of spoiled food in the Dumpster at the end of Jen’s street on my way out. A small act of penance. Because if I’m being really really honest with myself, it might be a little bit like that. I might be a little bit despicable. But I’m not ready to be that honest yet.

  CHAPTER 8

  * * *

  Kelly: The Interview Present day

  “Jen and Brett reconciled because of you,” Jesse says to me in a complimentary way that induces me to reply, almost involuntarily, Thank you. The gas fire is pistoling hotly behind us and the lights are searing my corneas. The effect is similar to that of the hot yoga classes that have recently become a part of SPOKE’s new suite of services, how the heat allows you to sink more deeply into the poses. Jesse and I are warm now. We are plunged into our story.

  “I don’t know about you,” Jesse goes on, “but I find some comfort in knowing that Brett left this world at peace with all of the women. When we first met Brett and Jen, they were friends, and one of the great joys I found in this season—and there were many, despite how it ended—was watching these two strong women overcome their differences and recommit to supporting each other. It seemed it was important to you to see your sister call a truce with Jen—why was that?”

  A truce. Is that what it was? We’ve been at this for an hour or two now, and my mind feels melted and gooey. I wish someone would open a window, but they’ve been sealed with the crew’s portable blackout curtains. I take a sip of the warm water on the end table between my chair and Jesse’s, and I concentrate on the word “truce.” No. It hadn’t been a truce. It had been a deal. When Brett told me what happened, she had been very careful to phrase it as such—a deal—though Jen convincing the others to film with Brett in exchange for Brett keeping Jen’s secret sounded like a bribe to me.

  I did not facilitate the reconciliation, but I guess that’s the spin production put on it. I can see how my actions would provide them with the raw materials. I did make a play for Jen’s friendship, after all. And not just because I admired the way she scaled her product (and I did!), but because it was glaringly obvious that Brett didn’t want me on the show—her show, is how she thought of it—and I had to do something that made me integral to the drama. Befriending my sister’s sworn enemy was the sort of biblical betrayal that secured you a sophomore season.

  “I’ve always admired Jen,” I say, which is true. I admired all of them. Brett treated her castmates like old Barbie dolls she was tired of playing with. I was the less fortunate kid jumping up and down to receive her gently used toys for Christmas.

  “I wanted to get to know the women on my own merit,” I continue. “I went into this experience with an open mind. I didn’t want to be influenced by Brett’s relationships with the other Diggers.” This is true too. I did want to stand on my own, separate from my sister, because I didn’t feel like I could count on her. That is the hurtful but totally unsurprising truth about my sister. She did not have my back. Slowly, over the years, Brett had co-opted the concept of SPOKE as her own. Even though we were fifty-fifty partners, she used possessive vocabulary around the business—SPOKE was hers, the idea was hers, the seed money was hers.

  Brett never let go of the fact that I only invested 2K of my own money into SPOKE when we were first starting out. The suggestion was that I was cheap, or that I didn’t believe in the brand. But that’s about what to expect from friends and family in the early stages of a startup. You don’t go for broke with a new business. It’s an inadvisable and rash strategy for anyone, let alone a single mother. Brett would have known that if she had bothered to do any research into what it took to incorporate SPOKE. And hey, at least I could write a check—Brett had squandered her portion of the money our mother left us in her will at a breakneck pace.

  In the end, it worked to my advantage that Brett was too focused on the message of SPOKE than the nuts and bolts of building SPOKE. Before I put in my measly 2K, I spent half that on a lawyer to help me draw up a partner agreement that delineated me as her cofounder. I suggested Brett hire her own counsel to read the dense print over before she signed and accepted my check, but she didn’t have the resources to do so and moreover, she couldn’t be bothered.

  My sister is very good at the ideas and selling stage, but there are so many uncreative, unsociable aspects to starting your own company. You have to write a business plan, come up with a mission statement (which I did and which Brett ridiculed mercilessly), secure funding, register your business name, file your papers of incorporation, set up account and tax records. All the unfun stuff. Brett gave me the brush-off whenever I broached anything vaguely resembling an accounting decision with her. She didn’t want to hear it when I told her we had to diversify our revenue stream if we wanted to provide Imazighen women with e-bikes, which cost nearly double to manufacture than the first-generation bikes. I wrote out a break-even analysis, with charts and graphs and visuals that my sister’s unique but easily distracted mind could compute, trying to get her to understand that if operating costs increased, then our profits needed to as well. Yoga studios have low operating margins and a successful history of throughput in New York City, meaning, they attract enough customers to cover the fixed and variable expenses of rent and personnel.

  Sure, fine, yoga, she said in response to my painstakingly researched and thoughtful presentation on the matter. Sure, fine, no thumb grips then, she said, when I told her that if we wanted to upgrade the beta bikes with thumb grips they wouldn’t be ready in time for the Morocco trip. I wasn’t asking Brett to make a decision between giving the women bikes with twist grips or no bikes at all, I was suggesting we push off the Morocco trip entirely until we could provide these women and children with a safe and rigorously vetted product. But when I spelled it out for her, she pushed her jaw forward so that her bottom teeth protruded over her top, the same expression Mom used to make when you told her something she didn’t want to hear (I’d rather take Spanish than Latin, I’m thinking about switching my major to art history, I was invited to the prom). Just put a rush order on it. Brett had sighed, irritably, as though this obvious solution hadn’t been the first thing to occur to me. When I tried to explain how I had asked, but the factory we paid to meet our small-batch manufacturing needs simply didn’t have the manpower, she had flung her hand across her forehead and performed her tired old line. I can’t deal with this right now. I’m the talent!

  It was funny when she said it in the beginning, until our roles became defined: I was to be stuck with all the slog work and none of the talent perks, like the show and the book deal and the 30K speaking fees. I was over it, and I was broke—something Brett continued to pretend she was long after she wasn’t, because she hadn’t figured out how to manage this new dimension of her imag
e. She was not rich, not like the other women, not yet, but she could afford to gift Layla with a Mansur Gavriel bucket bag. To be clear, I wasn’t angry at Brett for buying Layla that bag, I was angry at her timing. Layla had gone behind my back and disabled the app I use to limit her screen time just a few weeks prior, and the bag seemed a missed opportunity to encourage good behavior. Why couldn’t it have been a carrot we dangled to motivate her to get her grades up? Or better yet, why couldn’t she have set aside that five hundred dollars for the trip to Nigeria I’ve been saving for since Layla turned eight? Layla’s hostility toward me for not knowing her father is natural and justified. Since I can’t give her him, the least I can do is help her forge a connection to her country of origin.

  Brett is always describing Layla as so perfect, an angel, a gift from above we don’t deserve. Not only is that not true, I would worry if it was true. I’m proud that it’s not. I’m proud that my daughter sneered I hate you when I took away her phone for a week. I’m proud that she fought me tooth and nail when I told her Mr. Gavriel would stay in his Barneys box until she pulled up her grades (being sure to remind me, once again, how embarrassing I am). These are things I never did as a kid because I lived in mortal fear of displeasing my mother. Truly, when I look back on my childhood, one emotion beats brightly and loudly above the rest: dread. I was shown love when I followed the rules, and I was deprived of love when I did not, and how I dreaded those times when I did not. Kids should be disciplined, but they should never be unloved.

  Kids should also tell their parents they hate them, they should groan at their bad mom jokes. They should bang doors and push your limits and break your rules. Healthy adolescents use their parents to sharpen their arguing skills, to learn how to assert themselves, to advocate for freedom and autonomy. Healthy adolescents who know they are loved no matter what aren’t afraid to use their voices. The ones to worry about are the quiet good girls who do everything mommy asks without complaint or question. I should know. I was one of those quiet good girls. I was the unquestioning, obedient daughter, in awe of Brett’s complete and utter disregard of the rules. I know now it was because she already felt unloved, that she didn’t feel she had anything left to lose by disappointing our mother—might as well have a little fun while she’s at it. It crushes me to know Brett grew up feeling so neglected, but in a way I’m envious of her, because she developed a kind of resilience that was not in place for me when our mother died. Without her rules, without her militant disapproval acting as my North Star, I lost the road. And so, as Brett likes to say, I went off the rails just a little bit.

  When I found out I was pregnant, I experienced the strangest sense of déjà vu. I’ve been here before, I thought, I’ve done this before. But when? It took me years of therapy to make the connection, to find words to adequately explain the curious combination of comfort and fatigue I felt holding that First Response stick in my hand five weeks after I returned from Morocco. Eventually, I stumbled on to it. When it came to becoming a mother, I felt the same sort of imposed purpose as I did when it came to being a radiologist. Neither were things I saw for myself, but there they were, provisioned for me like the perfect-sized shell in which to slip my naked hermit crab body. It felt like I only had two options: be a radiologist or be a mother, and I wanted to be a radiologist only slightly less than I wanted to be a mother. I could do it, and I would do it exceedingly well, though I had to warm up to the idea first. There was a rocky but brief adjustment period when I couldn’t believe what I had done. I couldn’t bear to face Layla in the quiet of the night, no one else around, to be confronted with the full weight of the titanic decision I had made. I was terrified to be that alone with her. Terrified too, of vocalizing such a thought to my father or Brett, because that is a horrible and unnatural thought to have about your newborn baby. And so I lay in bed, eyes closed, ears perked, while Brett got my daughter to stop crying, telling myself that I was protecting her by neglecting her.

  I don’t regret my decision to have Layla. Even when she’s behaving like a hormonally ravaged monster, my primal love for her functions as a net. It catches the heinous thoughts that fall from my brain—I could slap her! What would life look like if I had made it through the clinic doors? I could fucking slap her.—shielding my heart from impact. Layla is my greatest accomplishment, which is something women used to be able to say without having to enter the witness-protection program. Because Layla isn’t just a happy accident, or karmic compensation for a past life well served, Layla is a product of grueling and expensive work on my behalf. She is the direct result of my determination not to become my mother. It’s the overachiever in me; it’s my mother in me; it’s exactly who I did not want Layla to become.

  I took the money our mother left for us in her will and I invested it wisely—in the right asset classes, in Layla’s education, and in self-care for myself. I found a good therapist, who referred me to a better therapist who specialized in intercultural parenting, who taught me that being a single mother to a biracial child is not the same as being a single mother. I learned to untangle love from hubris. I learned that I am wired to make my daughter feel less loved if she goes to a state school instead of Dartmouth, and while I can’t change that instinct, I can learn to recognize it, and choose not to respond to it. I took notes on how to discipline with compassion. I signed Layla up for dance class, music class, horseback riding lessons, swim team, and Little League, and when she didn’t take to any of these extracurriculars I didn’t panic (outwardly) and I didn’t force her to continue. I told her that she was allowed to quit anything, as long as she gave it a fair shot and had taken the time to think about what sport or skill she wanted to try her hand at next. When an Imazighen woman sent us woven welcome mats as a thank-you for her bike, Layla was the one who came up with the idea of starting an online store for Berber goods, and she executed the concept, soup to nuts. She has thrived in her position as “online shop coordinator,” and above all, she is happy (for the most part) and healthy (which accounts for the times she is not). She is not beholden to anybody’s expectations for her life but her own.

  I am immensely proud of myself for raising a moody teenager with a passion, though that’s not something I would ever say out loud to Brett. It’s too dear a triumph for me to risk hearing her pooh-pooh it, or insist that she had it worse than me growing up, being the fat one, the dumb one, the lemon. Brett looks at most things through a binary lens—if she had it bad, I must have had it good.

  I am always the first to say that my sister did not have it easy growing up. Our mother failed her, time and time again. But it was a pain that built Brett’s character. She was forced to create a vision for her life and how she wanted it to turn out, because no one else was going to do it for her. It’s why she’s the talent, and I’m stuck being the Chantal Kreviazuk of the B-corp world. Do you know who Chantal Kreviazuk is? It’s okay. I don’t expect you to, and it’s sort of the point. Chantal Kreviazuk is a classically trained pianist and singer-songwriter who has written hits for behemoths like Kelly Clarkson, Avril Lavigne, Christina Aguilera, and Drake. She’s released a few albums along the way, trying to make it on her own name. One had moderate success in Canada.

  I’ve been writing the hits, and I deserve credit, and not just in Canada. I am SPOKE’s bookkeeper, ambassador, hiring manager, human resources department, janitor, publicist, and receptionist. I’m the duck’s feet, treading furiously beneath the surface of the water, so that the Big Chill can appear to glide across the lake with no effort at all. It was true that Brett made a better face for the company. I have to give my sister credit—she forecasted the trend of authenticity and she engineered a way to monetize it. No one wants to hear the pretty, skinny girl’s story anymore. They want the story from the slightly overweight, tatted-up though still camera-friendly girl who was tortured and made to feel like a freak because she liked girls. The girl who had no choice but to develop grit and spunk, to look out for herself. These are the stories we like to
hear nowadays, so Brett enhanced hers, ever so slightly.

  “Do you want to know what I think?” Jesse asks, and I nod before I even realize I’m nodding, feeling like a ventriloquist’s dummy.

  “The patriarchy survives so long as women are pitted against one another. It is a threat to a man’s way of life when women gather, when they question the status quo, and when they inevitably start to resist it. That’s what this season was about. Strong women apart, who were becoming stronger together. And it scared the shit out of him.”

  What is it to be a strong woman? I’ve been thinking about it a lot, recently, and I’ve decided it has to do with taking responsibility for your actions, even when it feels like you didn’t have a choice in the matter, because you always have a choice. At the reunions, the women are always carrying on about owning it. You did this. You did that. Just own it! they harp, over and over, until they’ve beaten the catchphrase out of you. Fine. Fine! I did delete your app to free up some storage. I own it!

  Owning it is better than an apology, better than retribution, better than an empty promise to change your ways. Because being forced to own it shows that you recognize how far you’ve orbited from a common and decent sense of self-awareness. And the longer you spend on a reality show, the more elusive the trait of self-awareness becomes, thereby increasing its intrinsic value. But a little-known fact about declaring ownership is that it’s not just a victory for the person who has harassed you into submission. Those three words—I own it—also act as an astronaut’s braided steel tether, preventing you from floating away into oblivion.

  No one but Jesse knows that I have anything to own right now, but I do. How we’re saying it happened is not how it happened. Everyone thinks Vince killed my sister, but he didn’t. This is a fiction Jesse asked me to go along with, yes, but I fully acknowledge my part in it too. I want people to believe our story. Partially because I know Brett would have wanted it this way. Partially because if anyone ever finds out what really happened, I’d go away for eleven years. I looked up others who have obstructed a murder investigation in New York State and averaged the sentences they served.