The Favorite Sister

by Jessica Knoll

  “That’s really not necessary,” I tell her.

  “Please let me do this, Brett.”

  “Really, it wasn’t even that—” I turn my head at the sound of footsteps, padding down the hall.

  “Kelly,” Jen says, “look who’s here.”

  Kelly stops when she sees Stephanie sitting next to me. She’s wearing a long chunky cardigan over her romper. “Wow. Hi.”

  “Hey,” Stephanie says, shyly. “I was just telling Brett that I want to cover the cost of Kweller’s hospital stay.”

  “We don’t need you to do that,” Kelly says, in a clipped tone. She starts toward the far couch. Before she takes a seat, she chucks my phone into my lap, a little harder than she meant to, I’m sure. “All charged up.”

  “You were in my room?”

  “I accidentally grabbed your weekend bag and you grabbed mine.” She slaps the arm of the couch and says, without laughing, “Isn’t that funny?”

  I press the home button of my phone with my thumb. The screen comes to life, Arch’s response to my last message beneath an alert from Huffington Post that Houston is bracing itself for new rain-bands from Hurricane Harvey.

  What is Kelly supposed to do if you fire her? Arch had texted me after my phone died. The only job she’s ever had has been working with SPOKE. She’s your partner!

  I look up at Kelly, who is smiling at me, foully. My blood runs cold. She’s read Arch’s text.

  “Let’s start the game!” Kelly cries, spiritedly. She leans forward and collects the printed-out quiz from the coffee table. She raises her eyebrows as she reads the questions to herself. “Oh, this is going to be fun.”

  “First question,” Kelly starts. She demanded to be the one to cross-examine me. She’s pissed and she’s going to make me squirm, so I just have to suffer through ten minutes of this juvenile game and her tortuous innuendo. That’s it. She’s not going to blurt out the real reason she doesn’t think I should be marrying Arch, which has nothing to do with us “moving too fast” and everything to do with the woman sitting uncomfortably close to me on the couch. She wouldn’t do that to me.

  Would she?

  “What’s the one thing—apart from you, dear precious sister—Arch would save in a fire?” Kelly looks at me, expectantly.

  “The one thing . . .” I do my best to picture our apartment, but the question—would she do that to me?—is flying around the projected image of the room like a trapped bird, banging beak-first into windows, wings knocking over lamps. “Her French press,” I manage to pull out. “She packs that thing on business trips and vacations.”

  Lauren hits play. Arch is pensive for a moment. “Hmmm.” She ponders. “I guess I would say the oil portrait of my grandmother from when she was my age.”

  Lauren pauses the video. “Arch has a fucking soul, Brett. You thought she’d save a coffee maker?” Her laugh carries her tangy breath my way. The butcher with a blowout has something on me, and she’s four glasses of “water” deep already. Oh God, Oh God, this is going to end in disaster.

  “Now you go,” Kelly bosses me. “You say what you would save.”

  There is a skylight above us, the rain pounding so hard it’s revving my anxiety. I have the irrational urge to scream at it—Shut up! I can’t hear myself think! “Other than Arch?” I struggle to come up with something. I will say anything to bring this game to a close. “My cell phone.”

  Lauren hits play. On screen, Arch rolls her eyes. “Her cell phone. She’d probably save that before she saved me.”

  “Ha!” Lauren cries, pointing a black fingernail at me.

  “She knows you pretty well,” Stephanie remarks. I turn to her, but there is no trace of snark in her expression. If anything, I only recognize sadness. “It’s special,” she says when she finds me looking at her, askance. “You should hold on to that.”

  “Next question!” Kelly barks. “What is your betrothed’s favorite sex position?”

  Jen snuffs her disapproval of the question.

  “Now we’re talking,” Lauren says, rubbing her palms together lustily. “I bet you’re a sixty-niner, you little equal opportunist, you.”

  Next to me, Stephanie shifts, like she’s uncomfortable for me. I start to sweat in this freezing-cold room.

  “Let’s consult the tape,” Lauren says.

  “Favorite sex position?” Arch makes a face like she’s absolutely stumped, then answers, cuttingly, “Asleep.”

  “Brett!” Lauren scolds. “No bueno, girlfriend. You’ve got to keep a woman like that, you know . . . satisfied.”

  “She gets home after midnight and she’s up at five!”

  “So do it and go back to bed!” Lauren says, unmoved.

  I practically beg Kelly, “Next question, please.”

  Kelly scans the question first, to herself. A slow, depraved smile spreads across her face. “What were the exact words she—she being you, Brett—used when she proposed?”

  “Oh, come on,” Steph says, surprising me by coming to my defense. “That’s private. Don’t make her share that.”

  “I thought you said nothing was private,” Kelly says, tossing my own arrogant words back in my face. “I thought you prided yourself on being open and transparent.”

  “You must have said something amazing to get her to say yes to you.” Lauren sticks her tongue out at me.

  “I don’t remember,” I say, quietly.

  “Yes you do!” Lauren laughs.

  I chew the inside of my mouth for a few moments. I have to say something to get them off my back. “I guess, I love you and I want to spend the rest of my life with you. Something to that effect.”

  Lauren hits play. Arch furrows her lovely brows. “She told me that I was the only woman who had ever made her consider marriage, and that together she thought we could run the world.”

  Lauren whistles. “I am woman hear me roar. Why wouldn’t you want us to know that? It’s good. Assertive.” She shivers. “Assertive is sexy. Damn. I’d marry you, Brett.”

  “I wouldn’t want anyone knowing that,” Kelly says, ironing out her posture so that the superiority of her next statement really lands. “A proposal like that sounds more like a business proposition.”

  “I’m attracted to Arch for her ambition,” I say, my heart booming both with indignation and the risk I’m taking in challenging Kelly in her current state. “And vice versa. It’s not something I’d expect someone like you to understand.”

  Kelly tenses, wild with restraint. “Because I have no ambition, right?”

  Don’t say it. Don’t escalate it. But I can never help myself. “You have regrets.”

  Kelly launches herself off the chair, her hands clawed in the practiced shape of my neck. Lauren gasps and skitters onto the hearth, moving out of her way. But Kelly only stands there, dragon-breathing, the quiz stuck to the lap of her romper. Chocolate or cheese? is the next question. “You are out of line, Brett. Keep pushing me. I fucking dare you. Because I am not going quietly.”

  For a few moments, I am almost resigned. Just say it, Kel. The fallout will be painful, but covering my tracks is exhausting work.

  She might have said it. I’ll never know, because Jen suddenly shrieks Lauren’s name. I smell the very distinct smell first, and I know without having to look at Lauren that she got too close to the fire, and it took a lick at her hair.

  “It’s me? It’s me?!” Lauren leaps to her feet, beating the back of her head, and the unmistakable stench fills the room. We jump up to help, looking and wincing, assuring her it’s not that bad when she demands to know how bad it is. She pushes us away and flees up the stairs to see for herself. Who could blame her? None of us deserve to be believed.

  CHAPTER 18

  * * *

  Stephanie

  Jesse Barnes knocked on my door two days in a row, and on the second try I texted her to come back after six, when the reporters leave their empty Starbucks cups on my front steps in retaliation for my downed blinds. I take sol
ace in the fact that mixed in with the vermin from TMZ, there are journos from the New York Times, Vanity Fair, and New York magazine. My scandal is news fit to print.

  Jesse brought me flowers, like someone I loved had died. I was fleetingly touched—Wow, she gets it—before realizing that was what made her choice so deplorable. She got it, and still she would disavow me.

  Because death was all around me. My love for the page? For those mornings the alarm of creativity woke me early, the way my fingers played the keyboard like a concert pianist sight-reading inspiration? Dead. My romance with my phone? Also dead. No more thunderbolts of excitement every time I open my email or Instagram, no more prestige interview requests, fawning mentions from fans, from celebrities. Who knows what lies in wait for me on that handheld fieldstone now. I know better than to charge it.

  My marriage is dead too, but that was a funeral that should have been held long ago. Vince and I are the two losers from Weekend at Bernie’s, everyone laughing at our bungled attempts to convince them our love is alive.

  Jesse’s flowers were potted in a long, narrow glass box, a series of hot pink orchids. Very modern. Very Jesse. I set it between the two of us on the kitchen counter like a fragrant dividing line and grabbed her a beer from the depths of the meat drawer while she laid out a proposal. She wanted to not pay me and a bunch of black survivors of abuse to go on her aftershow and talk about how deeply my deceit has damaged the community. To talk about the fine example I’ve provided for the men’s rights activists who say women lie about abuse for attention and sympathy and book sales. To acknowledge the Stephanie Simmons effect I’ve created in the publishing industry, which rarely takes chances on black women writers, and when they do, and when their books hit, it’s not like Gone Girl, a sign that the consumer wants a million more domestic thrillers with the word “girl” artlessly thrust into the title. When a black woman’s book blows up it’s an anomaly, and there can only be one of you, and that the one of us it got to be was a dirty, filthy pretender who hurt not just black women with her lies but black men too is the ultimate injustice.

  After I am appropriately dressed down on national television, after we’ve turned this into a teachable moment, I will apologize to the public and make a gracious donation to a local women’s shelter. Then? I take my garden leave. We’ll stage a comeback together, Jesse lied to my face. I’ll write my next book and she’ll document my rise from the ashes, call it Return of the Stephi, proving that not even a faux-hawk can resuscitate your cool once you hit your forties.

  I walked Jesse to the door, where she gave me a long hug. Think about it, she said to me, and also, Orchids need light. So I gave them none. They’re sitting right where I left them, their neon limbs lost to the floor.

  But I did think about it. And I would rather have my ears surgically attached to the insides of Brett’s thighs so that she can ride me like a SPOKE bike than give Jesse the mea culpa ratings boon she’s after, to pardon her of the supporting role she played in all of this. Jesse Barnes is the heroin dealer stationed outside the middle school whose bedtime lullaby is But I didn’t stick the needle in anybody’s arm every time a thirteen-year-old is found purple-lipped beneath the bleachers. Like the seventh-grader, I had a choice: feel like every other normal loser in his class, or feel so extraordinary that you almost believe you are extraordinary.

  For her role in creating such an obvious, fatal option, Jesse must pay. So must Lisa, and Brett, and our whole coterie of Janus-faced feminism. I will not be their straw man. I will not be tarred and feathered in the town square for gaming a game that gave me an unfair start. They want to hold me responsible for an endemic culture of not believing women while at the same time telling me my story is “a little slow” without mention of crushed windpipes and torn arteries. They want a black woman on their “diverse” show, but only if I have been through something sensational, and all those times a white woman has mistaken me for her waitress, her hotel cleaning lady, her salesgirl at Saks? Unfortunate, but not sensational. I don’t know who “they” is—Jesse, Lisa, my publisher, men, women, you.

  So here I am, the second to last weekend of summer, a bounty hunter on behalf of personal responsibility. For the time being, I am how we like our women: contrite, trussed, eyes on the floor. But know I’m doing it through clenched pelvic floor muscles. (Where are you now, Vince? Oh right, the Standard on my dime while we move ahead with the divorce proceedings.) I just have to keep up this yes, ma’am and no, ma’am act through the night so Lisa allows me to attend the brunch at Jesse’s tomorrow. And that’s when I drop the motherfucking nuke.

  You should have seen Brett’s face when I came to her defense during the asinine Mrs. and Mrs. game! She’s actually buying what I’m selling. I’m sure she’s twisted the whole thing in her head, managed, impressively, to fashion herself as the victim in this sordid tale. And now here I am, catering to that delusional fantasy. Brett’s biggest blind spot has always been her willingness to believe her own hype.

  Lauren is locked in the upstairs guest bathroom, crying animatedly about the back of her head, and I can’t say I blame her. Haha. It’s totally charred. Kelly, her rhinestone-studded Victoria’s Secret thong (probably) in a twist, marched up the stairs to Jen’s bedroom, chin held at a righteous angle, Greenberg behind her, repeating her name in consolatory tones. I’ve always wondered how much Kelly knew. Clearly, she knows enough to know that Brett has no business marrying Arch. I’ll make her suffer too.

  I turn to Brett and laugh a wow everyone is crazy but us laugh. “Talkhouse?” I suggest. Because you know, if I’m going to do this, tequila wouldn’t hurt.

  “I can’t believe I said that to Kelly,” Brett says to me in the cab, her long hair hanging in wet panels over her ears. We waited until the crew packed up and left, even going so far as to change into our pajamas to make everyone think we had called it a night, then put on ho clothes that show our ankles and snuck out without telling Kelly, Jen, and Lauren where we were going. The minivan Lindy’s sent over takes a glacial left at the end of Jen’s drive, the rain pummeling the windshield harder than the wipers can keep up. “About having regrets,” Brett says. “What if they use it? Layla will see that.”

  God forbid Layla know she’s not the reason Kelly was put on this earth. “She already knows,” I say, pulling my ponytail out of the collar of my shirt. I tucked it in to protect it from the dash from the front door to the cab but it did no good, which is a shame. My nails are done. My toes are done. I dropped eight hundred bucks on a new pair of Aquazzura wedges and I had a hydrafacial yesterday. I plan on looking absolutely fucking perfect when I do what I am planning on doing tomorrow.

  Brett turns to me. “Knows what?”

  “That Kelly regrets having her so young.” I put my phone back into my Chanel. For the last few seasons, I’ve tried to make those raffia woven clutches from Roberta Roller Rabbit work out here. I’ve tried for the low-maintenance, beachy look, but as I packed for the weekend, I decided I couldn’t spend another night in an ikat print skimming my shins. I packed clean white jeans and sleeveless tops and red lipsticks. I packed things that make me look like a classic beauty.

  Brett is mulling over what I’ve just said, rolling her bottom lip in her top teeth. “You really think she’s picked up on that?”

  I prop an elbow on the back of the seat, shifting so that my knees point in her direction. It’s like the Wonder Woman pose but for empathy—if you put yourself in the position for it, maybe actual empathy will come. “Of course she’s picked up on it. That’s why she’s so lucky to have you in her life. You are the one who makes her feel loved and wanted. You are setting an example of hard work and perseverance.”

  Brett waves me off bashfully—You don’t mean that but yes of course you do because I am the ne plus ultra aunt, businesswoman, lesbian, human being. I swallow repeatedly to force the acidic truth back down: She’s twelve going on twenty-eight for a reason, you halfwit. When I was twelve, I was painting my friend’s
nails and making up dances to Boyz II Men songs, not attending staff meetings with my aunt and running her company’s social media campaign. She feels like she has to contribute or you won’t love her. That she can’t just be a kid because being a kid is a burden on you.

  Brett tips her head back, running her fingers through her wet hair. I can smell her Moroccan oil shampoo again. Mixed in with the Febreze and cigarette smell of the cab, my brain marches in olfactory protest. “Steph,” she says, “are we okay? I mean, real okay. Not TV okay. I know you have a lot going on right now so I can’t tell if it’s that or if it’s something . . . something I did.”

  The almost-admission makes me hold my breath. Keep going, I urge her, exonerate yourself.

  “Because.” She takes a shaky breath. It’s coming! She’s going to do it! “I miss us,” she continues, “but it’s never going to go back to the way it was. I’m not the runt of the group anymore. I’m not going to stop being successful because you’re uncomfortable with my success, Steph.”

  It is all I can do not to laugh in her fat, beautiful face. They should list impaired hearing as a side effect on the bottle of fame. There are so many people clapping for you all the time, for walking, for breathing, for wiping your own ass, that it drowns out what I like to call your not that inner voice, the one that says you’re not that smart, you’re not that talented, you’re not that funny. Some may confuse this gag for progress, as women come out of the womb hearing we are not enough. But having been on both sides of the fence I can tell you this: If you don’t hate yourself just a little bit, you are intolerable.

  In any case, I am back in touch with my not that inner voice as of late. No one is clapping for me anymore. I’m probably a lot more fun to be around for everybody else, but when I lie in bed at night I can’t help but wish that this human suit of mine came with a zipper, that I could hang it in my custom white oak closet with the Chanel spotlights and take a break from myself, even for an hour.