CHAPTER 15
Stephanie
The tea here is a punch to the heart, a shock from a defibrillator, a towline out of my benzo muck. Who says I’m a penny-a-liner all out of decent metaphors? Oh right, The Smoking Gun.
“I take one during the day and sometimes two to sleep if I’m traveling,” Lauren had said last night, shaking seven Valium into my palm. The triggerman herself had come to my room with the cameras, glassy-eyed, straight tequila in her cup. What’s wrong? she asked, almost sounding sincere. Is it Vince? I so longed for the days when the only thing I had to worry about hiding from the cameras was my husband’s wandering Willie that I actually said yes Yes, I think he’s cheating on me. Lauren got all excited, thinking she was about to deliver the scoop of the millennium on national TV: Some of us think it might be Kelly, she told me, reaching for my hand to comfort me. You dumb twat, I would have said if I wasn’t busy savoring every last ounce of her sympathy. I’m about to become too repugnant to touch—might as well enjoy these last dregs of human contact.
Lauren said she takes two at night when she’s traveling, so I took three, figuring it’s like when a new partner swears they’ve only slept with eight other people before you. Multiply by two or three or four (in my case) for a more accurate count. Fifteen minutes later and my brain felt like a tube of toothpaste oozing out of my ear. I’d slumped on the edge of the bathtub while Lauren jammed a wand into a tube of lip gloss and applied what felt like too much. Even to me.
The van hits another pothole and all of our heads lurch left. I’m sitting in the last row, party of one. My erratic behavior’s gotten me quarantined. I feel like I’m being treated to a private preview of season five with Kelly, Jen, and Lauren seated in the row ahead of me, Brett and Layla in the row ahead of them. Layla has released her braids, reminding me that it’s been twenty years since I’ve seen my natural hair texture. I take another sip of tea.
I started with the straightening treatments my freshman year of high school, not long after I had the bright idea to dress up as my best friend for Halloween. Ashley had big red hair, freckles under her fingernails, and pale blue eyes. It would be hysterical, we decided, if I came to school as her and she came to school as me. Despite the obvious differences in our coloring, we were roughly the same height and build, and in profile, our long curly hair almost matched. We just had to swap clothes and buy that hair spray paint from Hot Topic. We even went as far as to order non-prescription colored contacts from a dicey-looking “online pharmacy.”
I showed up to school on October 31 wearing a long-sleeved waffle shirt underneath a short-sleeved piped crew neck—one of Ashley’s signature stylings. I had used my mother’s foundation to lighten my skin—something that did not ring any of my mother’s alarm bells when I told her why I needed it—and my hair was stiff and passably red from the temporary colored spray. It took forever to get the contacts in. I hated touching my eyeball, but in that scene from The Craft, the black girl had used magic to make her eyes light and I thought she looked sooooo pretty.
I lent Ashley a pair of my loudly printed Lilly Pulitzer cigarette pants and a complementing kelly green cable-knit sweater. My mother barred me from loaning out my real pearl earrings and so we had provisioned a pair of plastic bulbs from a jewelry kiosk at the mall. We had then gone to CVS and purchased “tan” foundation for Ashley, so I was even prepared for that. I was fourteen and knew nothing about the offensive history of blackface—who in that town could have possibly educated me?
In short, I thought I knew what to expect when I saw Ashley at school. I had helped to appoint every defining detail of her Stephanie Simmons Costume. So when I met her at her locker that morning, I was unprepared for both what I saw and what I felt. Ashley hadn’t just sprayed her hair my color, like I had done that morning in our garage, standing on old newspapers at my mother’s behest. Ashley had used a comb to tease and rough up her texture to within an inch of its life. She looked like a troll. She looked like she had lice. She looked heinous. Pretty good, right? she asked, patting her rat’s nest. And that was the part that hurt the most. She hadn’t done this to hurt me. That was just how she saw me. I wanted to die.
I pretended to have bad cramps so that I could go home early. I went straight to the shower to rinse off the remnants of the costume, the way women do after they’ve been raped in a Lifetime movie. The slight had been unintentional, but it hurt like a physical assault. Maybe I would have preferred a hit, to have had my underwear torn off. At least then there would have been evidence for forensics to collect, a bad guy to catch, my uncomplicated pain.
Later that evening, my mother knocked on my bedroom door. I’d told her what happened in the car ride home, and she had fallen silent. When I looked over at her, I saw that her cheeks were streaked with tears, and I had rushed to comfort her, to reassure her that it was just a stupid misunderstanding, that I knew I would be able to laugh about it in the morning. A few hours later, she had arrived at a solution: Would I like to go into the city that weekend to have my hair styled at a salon she read about in Glamour? They offered a service not yet available anywhere else in the United States. Some chemical treatment from Japan. All the girls in New York were crazy for it, she said. It would make me look so polished.
It feels like the van is tightrope-walking the crag after a few beers. Lauren has her eyes glued shut in terror and Brett is laughing at her, telling her this is nothing, just wait until we get to the apex. I tried to get out of going this morning. I care fuck all about these bikes. Why are we giving them bikes? How much does it cost to make these bikes? Would it not be more economical to send a year’s supply of Poland Spring? I guess a bottled water studio wouldn’t attract twenty-something million from investors. Wouldn’t attract Rihanna. You know what should have happened when I outlined the terms of the fake fight to Brett? Brett should have told me to come up with something else, because of course Brett would never refuse to pass along my book to the perfect person to play me because she does fucking owe me. In fact, Brett should have gotten on the horn that minute and made it happen. Brett didn’t know Van Cleef from Van Halen before she met me, and now look at her, protecting her eyes from the splendid North African sun in the limited edition SPOKE sunglasses designed by Thierry Lasry. Don’t make me feel guilty for flying first-class when the money you’re charging for a pair of plastic sunglasses could feed a family of drumbeaters for a year.
I’m racist. I’m elitist. I’m a liar. I’m going to hell, but even hell will be better than today. Today, at some point, The Smoking Gun plans to publish a report regarding the “multiple” discrepancies between my life and the account in my memoir. Gwen learned this information ahead of the public after promising The Smoking Gun’s copy editor she’d read her lousy manuscript.
I told Lisa that I couldn’t leave the hotel today, that I had an important phone call I was waiting to receive and I couldn’t be without service, but Lisa showed me her MiFi and threatened to call Jesse in a voice that could shatter the glass ceiling. So here I am, trapped in this van with a weak signal and five type-A lunatics in caftans, myself included.
“That’s Mount Toubkal,” Brett says to Layla, pointing out the window. “It’s the tallest mountain in North Africa.”
Layla takes a video with her phone and thumbs a red caption.
I lean forward and speak between Lauren and Jen. “Did you just post an Instagram story?”
Layla doesn’t respond to my question, and I repeat it, crankier.
“Oh, sorry!” she says, looking over her shoulder skittishly. Apparently, I traumatized the holy babe last night. Something about a Negro Nancy Drew? I’m a hoot when I’m on thirty milligrams of someone else’s prescription! Serves her right for assuming I’d talk to her just because we share the same skin color, which is as presumptious and offensive as assuming all gay men are attracted to one another. “I didn’t know you were talking to me.”
“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 Layla 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.
“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 she’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.