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The Favorite Sister by Jessica Knoll (8)

CHAPTER 7


Brett

How do you feel about your sister taking Jen Greenberg on a girl date?

Lisa’s text stops me bone-cold. I read it again with a flu-like shiver. Taking implies that this girl date with Jen has already occurred. I was with Kelly yesterday, and I’m due to meet her at our warehouse on Long Island for our quarterly advisory board meeting in one hour. Was she planning on telling me?

“Please,” Arch says, disappearing behind the door of the refrigerator, “no phones this morning. We promised.” She reappears with a container of milk. Real milk. Milk that will grow a third arm out of your forehead, with hormones and fat and BPA leached from the plastic jug Arch got at the corner deli for $2.99, along with a loaf of Pepperidge Farm bread and some precut cantaloupe. Cantaloupe! She might as well eat jelly beans for breakfast. You don’t understand; women like Arch are an endangered species in a city where a packet of powder and nut milk passes as a big breakfast on a Grub Street food diary. It’s one reason I keep holding on.

My phone buzzes with another text from Lisa. Jen invited her to Lauren’s sexy slumber party party

Then another. See if Kelly can swing an invite for you lollololol

I’m actually being serious BRETT

Need to get you in the same room with the others

No one wants to watch you peddling a stationary bike by yourself all fucking season long. BORING.

NOT EVEN JESSE

I raise a thumb to respond, but Arch plucks my phone out of my hand.

“Plates,” she orders lovingly, when I start to protest, “to the left of the stove.”

It’s been nine days since Kelly and Layla moved into my old apartment downtown and I moved into Arch’s one-bedroom on the Upper West Side, and, as Arch reminded me last night, nine days since we’ve had sex. The place is a mess. My shit is everywhere. I’m stressed about Morocco. (Don’t think I’m giving up that easily.) Every night, we are on StreetEasy, searching for two-bedrooms in an elevator building by Arch’s office on the west side, between $6,500K and $7,500K a month. I’ve raised $23.4 million in capital, and I still can’t afford to buy in this town.

I set the plates on the counter and Arch drops a piece of toast on each, sucking a finger that’s gotten scalded. We look at breakfast and then at each other with wrinkled noses. The toast is the color of Jen Greenberg’s heart. Black, in case that wasn’t clear.

“I have an hour before I have to reunite an incarcerated father with his newborn baby for the first time,” Arch says.

“I have fifty-five minutes before I test-drive an electronic bike that will help twelve-year-old girls outrun rapists.” This is our favorite game. Who will do more for the state of humanity today?

Arch slams a jar of Smucker’s on the countertop with stoic resolve. “Charbroiled carbs it is then. Breakfast of champions.”

We carry our plates over to the couch and settle in. Arch unfolds her disproportionately long legs—her thighs are normal, but her shin bones belong in the Museum of Natural History—and props her feet in my lap. Arch has skinny, knobby toes, like crab legs without any meat, and her nails are the same shade of red as the SPOKE logo. This was done to woo me, but it managed the opposite effect. You’re too much for me, I thought, guiltily, when she came home with the tissue still between her toes.

“Did you know Kelly and Jen Greenberg hung out?” I ask Arch.

Arch flicks a crumb off her top lip with the inside of a knuckle, unaware that she has left dark grit in the corners of her mouth. “Are you asking me or telling me?”

“Asking.” Arch and Kelly are friends, which should make me happy. That the person you love meshes well with your family is all most people hope for in life. Instead, it makes me nervous, paranoid even. What did you talk about? I ask, my tone light, my heart racing, whenever Arch comes home from an outing with Kelly. Maybe I’m afraid of these two pairing off against me, the way Layla and I sometimes do to Kelly. Maybe I’m afraid that if Arch spends enough time with Kelly, she’ll realize how little of an intellectual connection we actually have. Maybe. Maybe.

“I would have told you if I knew that,” Arch says, to my relief. Now I get to just complain.

“How fucked-up is that?” I ask.

Arch mounts her long hair on top of her head, a ponytail holder in her teeth. I notice our age difference when she puts her hair up. Nine years. It’s nothing sometimes, and then it’s everything. “She’s trying to get to know her new colleague at work,” she says, the black elastic in her mouth bobbing. “She knows you don’t like Jen, and she probably felt funny telling you about it.” Arch lifts a shoulder, failing to see the criminal activity. “Give her a break, Brett. She feels like an outlier. She just wants to fit in.”

“Well, she went and got herself invited to Lauren’s party. She’s fitting in fine.” The group events are where it all goes down—the drama, the tears, the reconciliations. You are dead in the water if you don’t attend the group events. Lisa is a monster but Lisa is right. No one wants to watch me pedal a stationary bike by myself all season long. NOT EVEN JESSE. A dizzying premonition suddenly kicks me in the head: My sister is in the opening credits for next season, but not me. I’m raising the next generation of Goal Diggers would probably be her tagline. I set my burned toast on the coffee table after just one bite.

Arch pokes my thigh with her bony toe. “Hey. You’re going out to Yvette’s to make peace with Jen today. Maybe she’ll invite you once you smooth things over.”

After we test-drive the bikes for the advisory board members, I’m headed out to Yvette’s. There, butthole vehemently clenched, I will extend an olive branch to the Green Menace. Olives are vegan, right?

Arch checks the time on the cable display box. “You want to shower first?”

“You can,” I say, removing her feet from my lap and going in search of my phone in the kitchen. It quickly becomes apparent that Arch has hidden it. I drill my fists into my hips and Arch laughs.

“I promise to tell you where it is after you shower.”

In the bathroom, I turn on the water and plunk down on the toilet while it does the slow work of warming, unsure of what to do with my hands without a screen to manhandle. I flush and step under the spray, even though it’s the temperature of forgotten tea. I wouldn’t put it past Arch to try to surprise me in here, and I am so not in the mood.

I lather my hair with conditioner—the secret to my great hair is that I hardly ever wash it—and reach for my razor. Something small and shiny pings the tile floor, and I go very still, feeling each of the showerhead’s individual strikes. With my big toe, I nudge the thing Arch sent me in here to find, as though afraid it may produce fangs and bite. Compared to my Standing Sisters ring, Arch’s choice is thicker, sturdier, something my father would have worn. I realize Arch doesn’t know what I want at all—this dyke would have welcomed a diamond. The sadness feels like a paper cut. Quick, non–life threatening, brutal.

I spin the faucet left without shaving. If I shave Arch will know I found the ring without . . . what? Shrieking? Crying? Instagramming? Maybe she thought she was going to come in here, pull her tank top over her head, and finally get some use out of this spa shower the size of a smart car . . . I shut off the water and practically staple my towel to my body.

“B?” Arch calls when she hears the door to the bathroom open.

“One second!” I call back, hurrying into the bedroom. I open my underwear drawer and rummage around inside.

Arch says something else, but I can’t make it out.

“One second!” I repeat. My knuckles bump against the velvet box.

In the living room, Arch is on her knees on the couch, looking like a meerkat surveying her surroundings for predators, right down to the dark, fearful eyes. My skin is warm from the shower and cold with sweat, thundering with nerves.

“What are you doing?” Arch asks, nervously, when she notices my arm behind my back.

I inhale through my nose and exhale through my mouth, just like we remind riders to do in class. Let it go. Whatever you’re holding on to that’s holding you back, let it go. I present my hand for Arch. “I thought you would never ask. So I was going to.”

Arch gasps when she sees the diamond eternity band, purchased last week from 1stdibs after I sent Yvette the link and she wrote back with her approval. It’s lovely. So SO happy for you, darling one.

Arch jumps off the couch and makes her way over to me. She brushes my wet hair away from my face and lowers her lips to mine. Dread coils around my ribs when I close my eyes and return her kiss, when I think about how thin Stephanie’s smile will be when she hears about this.

I am trying to focus on what our head engineer is saying, but Kelly has ripped off Lauren’s crown braid from the other day and her single white femaleness is distracting. When we first walked in, Sharon Sonhorn, who Kelly has flown in from Alabama—business class—exclaimed in that accent so honeyed and Southern it sounds completely put on, “How precious are you?!”

Our advisory board is eight members strong, five men and three women, ranging in age from thirty-five to seventy-two. They live in New York, Texas, Alabama, Boston, Los Angeles, and London. We have one black person, one Asian person, and one gay person. Two have zero experience in the wellness industry and three have none in the B-corp world. Kelly put the whole thing together based on an article she read on that said advisory boards should represent diversity in its truest sense. You don’t want to be paying a bunch of yes men and women for their time. You want people who challenge you, who offer a different perspective, who are constantly asking you to reexamine your vision. This is money well spent, she’s always reminding me, when I see how much it costs to fly someone into New York business class just to hear that my ideas suck.

“Listen,” Seth, my head engineer, says, flicking a switch on the e-bike. He had the model covered in a beige tarp when the board first walked in, allowing him the opportunity to rip it off as though we were at a magic show. He even said ta-da! Despite how mad I am at Kelly—for meeting up with Jen behind my back, for getting herself invited to Lauren’s party, for that fucking braid—we exchanged a look. Seth is the nicest and most annoying person we know.

All kidding aside, my new bike does deserve an unveiling, a middle-aged man’s dorky ta-da! Bloody gorgeous, our London guy said. I’d quite like one for myself. And everyone had laughed, because picturing stiff John Tellmun riding around Notting Hill Gate on this glossy red cruiser with the blush leather seat and plump pink handlebars is pure comedy gold.

“I don’t hear anything,” Layla says, her ear aimed at the ground. Girls as young as nine will be riding these bikes, so Kelly thought it would be a nice touch for the board to see that a twelve-year-old can easily and safely operate the machinery.

Seth points his finger at Layla, ding-ding-dinging. “The little lady wins a 2016 Toyota Camry!” Layla looks confused, and Seth clears his throat, embarrassed the joke didn’t land. “The electronic models sound like they are off even when they’re on, so always make sure that you check the switch before you get on, okay, Layla?”

Kelly reaches up to tighten the chinstrap on Layla’s helmet. Layla shot past me this year, which is not anything to write home about, but she’s almost the same height as Kelly, who has a few inches on me. I don’t remember Fad being especially tall, but maybe he had tall parents, tall sisters. We will never know.

Mom,” Layla groans, but she lifts her chin and lets Kelly fuss with the strap.

Sharon makes a sound that expresses how precious she thinks this is: Kelly’s braid, Kelly’s overprotectiveness, Layla’s indulging of Kelly’s overprotectiveness, all of it. Like Kelly, Sharon has a preteen daughter. Unlike Kelly, Sharon is practically fifty.

Layla swings her leg over the pink seat.

“Look at those stems,” Sharon says, lowly, to Kelly, and Kelly beams. “And that skin. Like a latte. She could be in Vogue.”

Kelly’s smile fails like an old engine. “Not too fast!” she warns Layla.

“It goes, like, forty miles an hour.” Layla directs her eye roll at me, the only other person in the room who could possibly comprehend the extent of Kelly’s lameness.

“You kill someone if you hit them at forty miles an hour,” Kelly says, matching Layla’s sulky tone to make her point that this is nothing to be flip about.

We watch Layla pedal the SPOKElectric prototype deeper into the warehouse, the bike emitting a mild hum that’s amplified by the concrete floors. I could crawl faster.

“Mine would have torn out the door going as fast as she could just to spite me,” Sharon says to Kelly. “Top-notch mothering, honey.” I used to think it was such a throwaway, whenever someone complimented a woman on her mothering skills. I didn’t think it took talent to be a good mother—just don’t beat them and take them to the dentist occasionally, and voilà!, you’re a good mother. Loving them doesn’t even take much work. Even the moms who beat their kids love them. Then Kelly had Layla, and I realized just how mistaken I was. Because Kelly’s mothering skills were shaky at best that first year with Layla, neglectful at worst.

Do you know my father made two appointments for Kelly to skulk past the four angry men pumping posters of mutilated fetuses into the air at Kelly’s behest? I flexed my biceps and spoke like Tony Soprano on our way out the door, both times, offering my services as bodyguard. I was trying to get her to laugh. Really, I just didn’t know how to appropriately express to Kelly that it wasn’t the end of the world. It wasn’t the end of the world that she went a little nuts out from under Mom’s watchful eye and it wasn’t the end of the world that she hadn’t had responsible sex and it wasn’t the end of the world to undergo a safe, legal medical procedure that has been a part of the human experience for thousands of years in every sort of society imaginable.

I wanted Kelly to laugh, but I also wanted her to go. Mom had just died, and although our relationship had been complicated, she was still my mom, and I still loved her. Our lives were in turmoil, and on some level, I believed that if Kelly could just go back to school, graduate, and became a radiologist like our mother had always planned, things would go back to normal too. Normalish. Never mind that normalish wasn’t in my best interests, because normalish meant Kelly was the successful one, the pretty one, the star. But it was what was comfortable, and we’re always drawn to what’s comfortable, even when it hurts us deeply.

Kelly would need to face the angry men and their posters in order for things to go back to normalish, only she couldn’t get herself through the clinic’s door. This is what I want, she declared in the parking lot on two separate occasions, her voice an unconvincing whisper. Then Layla came along, and it was like she broke Kelly’s legs instead of her vaginal canal. Layla would be wailing for her 2:00 A.M. feeding, sounding like she was being waterboarded, and Kelly would just lie in bed with her eyes closed, pretending to sleep through it. My father and I didn’t have much of a choice but to take on those shifts, and so we did, trading off for the first few months. Kelly needs her rest, my father said to me. She needs to recover. I was never quite sure what he thought she needed to recover from, but it was clear to me that it was the shock of her new life. At first, I was resentful of having to wake up in the middle of my REM cycle every other night. But after a few weeks, I actually started to look forward to having Layla all to myself, our time together unrushed and uninterrupted. Those tiny little fists, flying up over her ears in outrage as I eased the nipple of the bottle into her mouth—this is what I need?! Her fingers unfurling, her eyelids drooping, lifting, drooping, lifting to check that I was still there, drooping again as she realized this, this is what I need.

They say that first year is critical to the bonding process, and I think it’s why Layla and I are as close as we are. Kelly missed some special moments, and she can never get them back, all because she was resting, recovering. My sister has always needed someone to hold out her next life for her, like a coat she slips her arms into. Doctor, mother, CEO (in her mind)—these are more titles that have been foisted upon her rather than ones that she has sought out with purpose. My sister’s major malfunction is that she is a doer with no vision. I suppose I have the opposite problem.

Millennial journalists are always asking me where the idea for SPOKE came from, a sort of attrition in their voices. I get it. It’s hard to care about things that don’t impact us personally, and I think that’s what the Bustle staff really wants to ask but feels they can’t—why do I care so much about a group of women I’ve never met, going through something I have never gone through? How can I be so selfless? Is there something wrong with them that they can’t be that selfless?

The truth is that the idea for SPOKE didn’t come from a selfless place at all. After my father and I tracked Kelly to Fad’s apartment in the Hivernage district, our next stop was the hospital. She seemed fine, physically that is, but we just wanted to be sure. I was sitting in the waiting room, paging through a French tabloid, when the door swung open and in walked two sisters, one of them not much older than Layla is now. They spoke to the nurse at the front desk in soft French, and were given a series of forms to fill out. They came and sat down one seat to my right, the older one with the papers in her lap. Together, they pointed at words on the page and argued in a language that I know now was not French or Arabic. After a few minutes, the older sister spoke to me.

“Hello,” she said, with a little circle of her hand. It sounded like Halo.

I glanced up and found the older sister waving the pencil at me.

“You can help?” she asked, haltingly.

My father leaned into me. “I don’t think they can read.”

I held out my hands, miming writing, my head cocked at a forty-five-degree angle. The older sister nodded, Yes, you write it down. The younger sister stared at her lap, stonily. I moved over one seat.

The forms were written in Arabic, then French, then English. It took fifteen minutes of stilted translation and signage just to get to the part that asked the reason for the visit that day.

“My daughter,” the older sister said, and it took me a second to realize they were not, in fact, sisters. “She has go to the well. Three men have hurt her. We have seen doctor so she has not pregnant.”

My father mumbled, three seats away, “Dear God.”

I glanced at the daughter, who was still staring at her lap, her jaw clenched furiously.

“Rape?” I asked in a whisper. “Do you mean she was raped?”

“We have seen the doctor.”

“I’m sorry. You have already seen the doctor?”

The woman nodded, both frantic and frustrated, misunderstanding me the way I misunderstood her. Later, I would learn that the English use of the present perfect tense is confusing for Arabic speakers. Many rely on the present perfect to describe things that have either already happened or have not yet happened. In this case, the girl had already walked to the well for water, had already been raped by three men. Seeing the doctor, preventing pregnancy, that was what needed to happen next.

Kelly didn’t have to wait to be seen by the doctor, and all that was wrong with her was gross taste in men. I went up with the mother to deliver the forms to the French nurse, explained the situation in English, as though it would be more harrowing in English, more likely to spur urgent action. But the pair was still sitting there when we left an hour later, Kelly with a clean bill of health (it was too early for her pregnancy test to come back positive). I remember thinking in the taxi ride back to the hotel, The world everywhere cares more about girls like Kelly than they do girls like that.

So really, I’m not selfless at all. I’ve dedicated myself to a cause that feels entirely self-serving: helping girls like me who are not like Kelly. It’s time we come first.

Layla makes a U-turn at the wire shelving on the far side of the warehouse. Facing us, she’s all helmet and uneasy smile. She twists the handlebars back, speeding up for less than a few yards before Kelly starts squawking.

Layla parks the bike and climbs off to overblown cheers and applause from the board, like she’s just qualified for the Olympics. She takes a slow bow and immediately turns the color of Jen’s Power juice (beets + carrots + chia) when the applause thickens. “I didn’t even max out, Mom,” she says, unhooking the helmet and pressing it into Kelly’s arms.

Seth shushes us. “Before we get too excited,” he says, “I need to show you something.”

He mounts the bike and releases the kickstand with his heel, sets his hands on the handlebars, and squeezes. The bike lurches forward violently. “Whoa!” Seth cries like a goober, bearing down on the handlebars, which only propels him faster. He comes to a dramatic stop just a few feet shy of a delivery van, looking back at us with gasping breaths.

“Most e-bikes make a rickety sound when they are at speed,” Seth says, making his way back over to us. “But they all have one thing in common. They’re silent when they’re parked, whether they’re on,” Seth flicks the switch, “or off.”

Kelly glances at me. “Is that a problem?”

“Most definitely,” Seth says. “And one that Layla demonstrated perfectly.”

“What did I do?” Layla asks, worriedly, going from feeling good about herself to despondent in a preteen second. She picks at a small pimple on her cheek. On our way out here, I listened to her narrate an Instagram story about the makeup products she used to cover up that very pimple. Instead of posting social media content that makes her peers feel as though their lives don’t measure up, Layla uses her accounts to reassure girls her age that everything they’re going through—the zits, the awkwardness, the malaise—is completely normal. That they are all in this together. She has nearly 30K followers now, and we haven’t even started filming yet.

“You didn’t do anything wrong,” Seth assures her. “It’s the design that’s the problem. Since the bike sounds like it’s off when it’s been parked, it’s easy for the rider to forget to power it down. The next person who uses it grabs it, intuitively, by the hand grip.” Seth demonstrates the basic way everyone grabs the bike by its handlebars. “But because of the twist grip design, unknowingly, what the rider is doing is accelerating the bike—which is dangerous not only for the rider but for anyone who happens to be passing in front of the bike. A child, for instance. Then, because the rider is startled and off balance, the natural reaction is to do this,” Seth grips the handlebars tighter, “which only accelerates the speed.” Seth widens his stance and folds his arms across his chest. A good glitch makes Seth feel useful.

“Is there a solution to this?” Kelly asks.

Seth circles his workstation, pushes a few gadgets around, and holds up a small black lever. “Right here. This, ladies and gents,” he swivels at his waist so that everyone has a fair view, “is called a thumb grip. It attaches to the end of the handlebar, which makes it much harder to accidentally activate.”

I say, impatiently, “So attach it.”

Seth levels his chin with Kelly. “I need your sister to loosen the purse strings on the direct materials budget in order to do that.”

I turn to Kelly, my lips parted in outrage. She’s flown six of the eight board members to New York business class, but we don’t have the budget to outfit our bikes safely?

“Did you calculate the ROI with the thumb grips?” Sharon asks me.

The warehouse goes very quiet, as though it is the ninth member of the board, also awaiting my answer. It’s a brutal few moments. I feel like I’m having one of those stress dreams, a nightmare really, where you’re back in school, about to take your midterm final, and you realize with hot-cold-hot nausea you haven’t attended a single class all semester. Because I have no fucking idea what the ROI calculation is with the thumb grips.

“It’s three to one,” Kelly says—bless and fuck her. “That will make costs prohibitive. We’d love to change our promise to riders. But For every seventeenth ride we deliver a bike to an Imazighen family in need doesn’t have the same ring.” Sharon tsks.

“I know,” Kelly sighs.

“Where else can we hike?” Sharon wonders. “You know, the boot camp I attend charges for towels.”

Kelly nods with a vigorous mmm-hmm. “Bike shoes. Water bottles. We can find it somewhere, I’m sure.”

“Please do,” Sharon says. “I wouldn’t feel right letting a child around this thing in its current iteration.” I notice for the first time that Sharon’s neck is a different color than her jaw. It’s very unattractive.

“Whatever it costs,” I say, matching my sister’s firm tone, “we’ll make it right.”

“Well,” Sharon clears her throat, making bemused eye contact with Kelly, “not whatever it costs. That’s the point, right?”

I can feel my ears getting hot. I know I should make more of an effort to understand the business side of my business. But every time I’ve asked Kelly to walk me through the figures and the projections, the accounting and the payroll, I end up cross-eyed, bored, and flushed with frustration. It’s hard work to understand, and it’s not that I’m afraid of hard work, it’s just that I’ve already done so much hard work, and I don’t think I should have to do this on top of it. I’m the one who came up with the totally original idea for SPOKE; I’m the one who won the entrepreneurial contest. I’m the one who landed a spot on the third most popular reality TV show in the highly prized nineteen- to forty-nine-year-old demographic on Tuesday nights. I’m the one who gets called a wide load but refuses to succumb to Whole30. I’m the one who gives hope to at-risk LGBTQ youth. I have done my part.

Sometimes, jokingly, when I can’t understand something on the books that Kelly needs me to understand, I will flop onto the nearest couch and bring the back of my hand to my forehead like a Victorian lady with low blood pressure, gasping, I’m the talent. But there is a kernel of truth in the performance. I am the talent! Not everyone can be the talent, just like not everyone can balance the books. Except, here is Kelly, her hair in a trendy blogger-girl braid, signed on for the fourth season of my show, able to do what I do and also what I can’t. She’s the talent too. So where and what does that leave me?

Outside smells like melted dog urine and gasoline. It’s the middle of May, but July hot. Kelly asks if we can talk before we get on the road. I’m dropping her and Layla off at the train station to head back into the city and taking Kelly’s car to Yvette’s house out east.

Now is when she’s going to tell me about meeting up with Jen and explain, I think, and ready my anger and resentment and yes, paranoia that I’m about to be eclipsed by Kelly once again.

Instead, Kelly stares at me for a long time, like I have something to say to her. “What?” I ask, finally.

“You seriously aren’t going to tell me?” Kelly shakes her head, her tongue pressed to the top of her lip in a mix of disgust and disappointment.

It can’t be the engagement. I asked Arch if she minded if I didn’t wear my ring for now. I wanted to break the news to Kelly in my own time, in my own way. I knew she would have a tough time with it. She thought shacking up with Arch after three months was moving too fast.

Besides. Whatever it is she thinks I’m not telling her, what she isn’t telling me is worse. She watched Jen express concern for my organs in her talking head last year, the patronizing worry in her brow layered over a shot of me taking a SPOKE class in a crop top. Waist circumference is directly tied to heart disease, she’d added, her Popsicle stick neck somehow able to balance a head swollen with that much prejudice and misinformation. You know what is directly tied to longevity? The number of friends you have, but you don’t see me going around insinuating that Jen will die early because she’s an insufferable twat no one wants to be around. Jen has found so many ways to call me fat without actually calling me fat she should win an award. To be clear, it doesn’t hurt me to be called fat; fat is not an insult to me. Fat is not who I am, who anybody is. But in Jen’s world, fat is an abomination of womanhood, and it hurts to know that someone is trying to hurt me by aligning me with the worst thing she thinks a woman can be in our culture, which is anything over a few pounds shy of nonexistence.

“You seriously aren’t going to tell me about meeting up with Jen?” I say to Kelly. “And you seriously did that? Behind my back? After everything she’s said about me?”

Kelly’s bitchy look falters. “How did you know about that?”

“Who knows you did that? Other than Jen, obviously?”

“Rachel,” she replies, naming one of the field producers.

My laugh is full of genuine pleasure. After the ROI debacle, it feels so good to be the one who knows what she is talking about again. “Let me give you a little piece of advice, Kel,” I say, lowering my voice as I glance into the back seat of the car, where Layla sits with the door open to get some air. I can hear snippets of the Instagram stories that aren’t interesting enough for her to watch to completion: half a word, a streak of a song, a few dog barks. “The field producers are like high-end strippers. They’re really good at getting you to spill your guts, and they’re really good at making you believe they give a shit. But it’s Rachel’s job to run to Lisa with anything you tell her, and then it’s Lisa’s job to get everyone else all riled up about it.”

Kelly nods, slowly, flippantly. When Kelly goes pious on me I am never more sure that I am capable of third-degree murder. I don’t want to just wipe that smug look off her face; I want to annihilate it. “See, I figured that’s how it works after Lisa texted me to ask how I felt about your engagement.”

Layla’s head pops out of the back seat. “You’re getting married?” she exclaims. Then she squeals, drumming her feet on the ground excitedly. “Can I be a bridesmaid? Please, please, please?”

So she does know. I guess I could have crafted a more strategic response to Lisa’s machine-gun spray of texts from earlier. But after Arch and I were done proposing to each other, I couldn’t help myself. How do you feel about your sister taking Jen Greenberg on a girl date? she had written, and so I had responded: It feels like not giving an F because I’m engaged!!!! But the truth is, that’s not what it felt like at all. It felt like someone had reached inside my body and turned my stomach upside down, shook all my organs onto the floor, and stomped on my spleen. By the expression on Kelly’s face, I know she knows it too.

Like most houses out east, the three—no, four now!—bedroom modern saltbox looks like a place of worship for a cult. It’s where Jen Greenberg was raised, so it would be the kind that spikes the no-artificial-sugars-added punch with arsenic. There is something about the Green Menace that is natural-born scary.

Last winter, Jen’s architectural overhaul included knocking down walls, adding a fourth bedroom and a saltwater infinity pool, and outfitting the kitchen in gray-veined Carrara marble, which should have been the second warning shot for Yvette, after Jen’s on-air claim that the reno was meant to make the house more comfortable for her mom. The thing about gray-veined Carrara marble is that it may look sexy, it may be all the rage on the home décor porn sites, but it’s not recommended for people who actually cook in their kitchens because it stains, scratches, and chips like a wet manicure. (Source: Stephanie Simmons. I heard the word “Carrara” and had a craving for ice cream.) You would think Jen Greenberg, kale smoothie millionairess, would opt for quartz countertops—not as dazzling, but much more durable. Only Jen Greenberg never intended to use that kitchen to make her not food into food. Instead, her intention was to fix it up, jack up the market value, and sell it to some HGTV hornball for a cool 3.1 mil.

Jen has the legal right to do with the house as she pleases. Ethically, she should be fined for all she’s fucking worth. She’s given Yvette no say in the decision to sell even though, for the last twenty-some years, Yvette has paid the property taxes and utilities, taken care of the landscaping and the leaks and the clogs. She’s replaced the roof, the kitchen appliances, and the crap furniture with gorgeous gray linen sofas and chairs. She taught Jen to swim in the ocean down the road, she’s brined fourteen tofurkeys in the Tic Tac–sized oven, and she’s shared gin and tonics on the back porch with Sir Paul McCartney. The house may be Jen’s, but the home was always Yvette’s. She’s absolutely heartsick to lose it.

I park Kelly’s car in front of the cheery red “For Sale” sign, by the flowering Japanese maple Yvette planted in honor of her late mother. The driveway is empty. The Greenbergs share an old blue Volvo station wagon, though Jen is “considering” the Tesla.

The sky is more white than gray, the sun illuminating the clouds from behind. It’s been raining on and off all morning, and I had to keep the windows up on the drive out here. Kelly’s car hasn’t had working AC since Obama was elected for his second term and the back of my T-shirt is color-blocked with sweat. My feet slide around in my sneakers as I approach the front door and knock. I wait. Nothing.

I check my phone. 12:47. Yvette said to arrive at 12:30 on the nose, which was anal and unlike her, but I figured it was because she wanted me to get there before Jen. She’s been out here two days already, trying to enjoy the peace and quiet before the weekend’s open house. I wait until my phone says 12:48 to knock again. Still nothing.

I cup my hands around my eyes and press my nose to the panel of windows shouldering the front door. Jesus. The house is now a Tibetan fur fever dream: shag white carpet, shag white side chairs, shag white throw pillows on the blessedly un-shaggy white linen couch. All this distinctively fuzzy décor paired with cold white stone floors. Limestone is what Jen went with, I recall Yvette telling me. It’s slippery when wet—which makes perfect sense for a beach house with a pool. I’m afraid someone’s going to crack their head open, Yvette confided in me.

My sigh fogs the window, and I wipe it clean with my shoulder, searching in my bag for my phone.

“Hello,” Yvette says, on the third ring. Her hello is always the same, a velvety hell-low-ah, managing to be both unrecognizing and deeply intimate at the same time.

“Hiya,” I say. “It’s Brett.”

There is a pause. “Honey,” she says, “everything okay?”

Ah, yeah.” I laugh. “Where are you?”

There is another pause. “What do you mean?”

“I mean.” I slap away a mosquito on my thigh. I wonder if Stephanie will be avoiding the Hamptons this summer on account of Zika. Seems unlikely. “You told me to come at twelve-thirty.” I wait for her to remember but she doesn’t. “So . . . I’m here.”

“Where?”

“Yvette!” I cry, exasperated. “The house in Amagansett!”

Yvette mumbles something to herself I can’t make out. “I thought we said Sunday,” she says. I can picture her squinting at the Imagined Desks of Historical Women calendar I gave her last Christmas, Mary Shelley with a glass of white wine next to her pen. “Is it Sunday?”

I suffer a spike of fear as I realize this isn’t Yvette being flaky, this is Yvette being in her late sixties and having trouble with her memory. “No, it’s Friday,” I say, gently. “We said Friday.”

“Honey, I am getting so old!” Yvette chuckles. “I come out tomorrow. Jen was coming this afternoon to show the house to a listing agent. I must have gotten my days screwed up.”

I squeeze my eyes shut and exhale hard. I’m stranded in the Hamptons with only the Green Menace to take me in.

“I feel horrible,” Yvette says, though she doesn’t sound horrible. She sounds like she’s in the middle of plucking her eyebrows or some other banal but satisfying activity, like I’ve interrupted her pleasantly productive afternoon. “Jen should be there soon. Why don’t you just wait for her?”

A smattering of raindrops cool my scalp. “It’s about to pour.”

“I don’t mean outside. The key is under the rock in the second planter around back. Let yourself in. Make some lunch. Jen had scheduled a FreshDirect delivery for twelve-thirty.” In an offhand manner that seems anything but offhand, she asks, “Is it there?”

FreshDirect. I wouldn’t take Jen to be so provincial. I scan the front patio, spotting faster with raindrops by the second, but I don’t see a delivery. “Nothing. No. It’s really starting to come down again.”

“Hmmm.” Yvette sounds concerned. “They might have dropped it off by the back door. Would you check?”

“Yvette, I’m sorry, but I’m not staying. I don’t feel comfortable being here without you.”

“Would you at least bring the food inside so it doesn’t spoil?”

I drop my arm by my side, shutting my eyes and taking a deep, calming breath. I return the phone to my ear and force a smile so that it sounds in my voice. “Sure.”

I unlatch the gate and walk parallel to the house. I can see the new pool, its tarp littered with leaves and dead bugs and one lone Solo cup.

“The delivery’s back here,” I tell her, as I round the corner and spot the cardboard FreshDirect boxes, soggy from the rain, piled two deep next to the double patio doors that have replaced the sliding door with the screen that used to always jump the track. The rain has almost washed away the ink on the note taped to the top box: two attempts to contact, left unattended per directions.

“Oh, good!” Yvette says. “Well, help yourself to anything you want—”

“I’ll just grab something at Mary’s Marvelous on my way out—”

“It’s fifteen dollars for a salad there!”

“Good thing I don’t eat salad then.” I locate the key and fit it into the lock. “I’m going now. I need both hands for this.”

“You are a lifesaver!” Yvette says. “Thank you. I am so sorry about today. But you won’t regret this.”

“Thanks, Yvette,” I say, hanging up and puzzling briefly over her last statement. What won’t I regret, exactly?

I hear a car chewing up the pebbled drive and I brace myself, thinking it’s Jen, but it continues down the road. Every crevice of my body is wet with sweat and the rest of me is catching up in the rain. I decide that’s the only scare I need—I cannot be here when Jen arrives. We might both die of discomfort.

I squat and hoist a box into the crooks of my elbows. I’ve not taken one step when the waterlogged bottom gives out, like one of those commercials showing what happens to bargain paper towels when tested with too much blue detergent. Jen’s groceries spray everywhere: on my shoes and bare legs and the fresh whitewashed oak porch. Mother. Fucker.

I step onto the lawn, wiping my feet on the wet grass like a dog, leaving behind what looks like yellow spittle. Egg, I realize, gross. It takes me a moment to connect the dots, because unlike Jen, I am not a masochist in a voluntary state of sustained primal hunger to meet the patriarchal-mandated beauty ideal. I eat eggs for breakfast and put cream in my coffee and cheese on my sandwiches and oh my God, bacon. That is a package of uncured bacon, seeping its pink bacony juice onto the new porch. It’s like a puzzle overturned on the table: Only when everything is laid out in front of you can you really start putting all the pieces together. Jen’s healthy, long hair. Her four-pound weight gain.

I hear another car approach, and I wait, unmoving, as its old engine fusses nearer. There is one short burst of hard rain, like someone has taken a cloud and wrung it out over my head, but I do not seek cover. The car door slams shut and Jen calls out, nervously, hopelessly, “Yvette?” My heart is banging like a gavel; hers must be too. She knows that’s my car in the driveway.

I listen to the gate open, to Jen’s careful footsteps on the slippery deck. I have to look away when she sees me. I can’t bear to see her so vulnerable and exposed. I have earned each and every unkind feeling I have toward Jen after the way she’s spoken about me to America. I get to feel vindicated by the discovery that the nation’s most sanctimonious vegan has been skulking around ordering bacon off the Internet like contraband. It’s turkey bacon. But still. She has no right to make that tragic face and make me feel bad, nearly empathetic, for her.

I make an intense project out of cleaning my shoes in the grass and speak casually. “I think it was from the rain. The boxes just fell apart when I picked them up.” I’m quick to add, “Yvette told me to bring them inside.”

I only look up when I hear Jen fit her key into the lock. She disappears inside, the door latching shut slowly but firmly behind her. For a moment, I think that’s it. Jen is just going to stay inside until I leave, maybe even for the rest of her life, so that she never has to deal with the fallout from this. It’s not the worst strategy.

But after a few moments, Jen reappears with a beach towel slung over her shoulder and some green plastic trash bags. She offers me the beach towel and shakes open a garbage bag. She picks up each grocery item and examines it for damage, setting it aside or throwing it out, depending. I don’t know what else to do other than help.

“It doesn’t look it but I think it’s still good,” I say, holding up a jacked-up wheel of Brie.

Jen holds out her hand, regally, as though I am a huntsman who has brought home the heart of a warring queen. I place the lump of cheese in her palm with a deep curtsy, playing along. I’m uncomfortable, and trying to act like none of this is that big of a deal, which I realize is very much in keeping with my nickname. Jen chucks the ball of Brie into the trash bag, hard, without bothering to examine it. Okay then.

“I had amenorrhea,” she says, tightly.

“I don’t know what—”

“I hadn’t had my period in four years.” Jen speaks over me without raising her voice. “My hormones were all out of whack. You can’t have your hormones out of whack when you’re trying to freeze your eggs, so that you can have a baby, which I would like to do, someday. My doctor suggested I try to go pescatarian to see if it would help. It’s just temporary, while everything stabilizes.”

I scan the groceries left on the deck. Not a piece of salmon in sight, but dairy and fatty cuts of animal hind legs for days. I can’t help but feel a teeny bit vindicated—See? Your way is not the healthy way. “Good for you, Jen,” I say. “You aren’t a strong woman for denying your hunger. You are a strong woman for standing up to society’s expectations of how we are supposed to—”

“Yvette sent you out here?” Jen demands, before I can say look.

I lift one shoulder in a vague non-answer, not wanting to betray Yvette, who clearly wanted me to discover Jen’s illicit affair with breakfast meats and put her on blast. Jen tightens the strings of the trash bag with a scowl. “She’s angrier than I thought that I’m selling. Or maybe she just actually hates me.” She hurls a carton of hazelnut coffee creamer into a trash bag and it splatters back at her in retaliation.

“Your mom doesn’t hate you, Jen. She hates that you are suffering and depriving yourself for an unjust cause. She hates that you see yourself as a body first and a person second. She just wants you to be—”

“I’ll get Lauren to invite you to her party. That won’t be hard. Getting Steph to film with you will be the real bitch.” Jen’s eyes are bright, unblinking. She looks away with a difficult swallow. “I’ll do my best.” She’s going to cry, I realize. In fact, I think I mumble Thanks so that she doesn’t cry. I can’t think of anything I’d rather do less than wrap my arms around an emotional Jen Greenberg. I’d come away with thorns, I’m sure.

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.