Page 12 of The Favorite Sister

I nod.

“But...” Lauren brings her fingers to her temples with a soft moan, as though processing this new information is a painful endeavor. “How old is the niece?”

“Twelve,” Jen says, stonily.

Lauren looks like she’s about to cry. She sits there, her face growing hot, her breathing short and frantic, waiting desperately for oneof us to say something that’s going to make her feel better. “I don’t understand,” she says, finally. “She’s going to be a cast member?”

“She’s like a friend of the cast. It’s the sister who is the cast member.”

“And she has a twelve-year-old?” Lauren crows. “Howoldis she?”

“Our age,” I say.

“Thirty-one,” Jen clarifies, ruthlessly. I haven’t been thirty-one for a few years now.

“Is she married?” Lauren asks, eyes shut, like she can’t bear to look until she knows it’s safe.

“No,” I say. “Not married.” Lauren opens her eyes with a sad, resigned sigh. The news is not great, but it is tolerable. Lauren would probably like to be married with a baby and two ugly nannies, but our master and commander doesn’t want kids; henceforth, none of us are allowed to want them either. A few years ago I started to notice that mothers and not-mothers are equally fixated on childless women in their thirties, and in particular childless,marriedwomen in their thirties. How fun for me. It is a little like living in a swing state and being registered as an Independent. Both parties campaign fastidiously to get me on their side. The mothers make me promises like,I’m not that maternal either, but you love them when they are your own. The not-mothers rage against therapists and doctors who try to pathologize your reluctance for children. Neither party thinks they have anything in common with the other, which makes it all the more hilarious how much they do. It’s human nature to want your decisions validated. You feel better about yourself and your life when others make the same choices as you do. Luckily for me, I have no problem validating this particular decision of Jesse’s. Pathologize my contempt for kids all you want, I’ll never have them.

“But she doesn’t even live in the city,” I continue. “I heard they’re setting her up in Brett’s apartment and Brett’s going to move in with the new girlfriend.”

“Like it’s a storyline?”

“No, like... they’re going to make it look like the sister hasalways lived here. No one’s seen the apartment Brett is in right now so there won’t be any confusion.”

“Whoisshe?” Lauren demands. “Do you know her?”

“I’ve only met her here and there. But she basically handles all the day-to-day at SPOKE so that Brett can do the hard work of cohosting the fourth hour of theTodayshow when Hoda goes on vacation.”

There is a moment of bitter silence. None of us are over the fact that we weren’t asked to do it.

“Fine,” Lauren concedes. “I get the sister. I guess. But why are they making the niece a part of the show?”

“Well, now you’re asking the right question,” I tell her. A bread basket is delivered to the table and out of habit, everyone reaches for a piece. Rule number three ofGoal Diggers, we eat carbs. We are emancipated from diets, and we exercise for health, not weight loss. Even if you starve yourself between takes like Lauren or suffer from orthorexia like Jen, you play your gourmandism for the cameras (or always, if you’re Brett and you found a way to commoditize your thunder thighs). Jesse thinks we have seen too many white, straight women hawking flat tummy tea on Instagram. Women who refuse to eat processed food are passé.

“The niece is black,” I say.

Lauren’s jaw goes slack. “Is the sister black?”

My mouth full, I shake my headno.

“Then what? The niece is adopted?”

I shake my head again, unable to elucidate while chewing. I’m the only one who actually took a piece of bread in the end. Jen and Lauren remembered the cameras weren’t around and returned their empty hands to their laps to be sniffed later.

“Stop making me dig, for Chrissakes!”

I swallow my food and tell her what I know. The data I’ve gathered from the field producer whose Net-a-Porter habit I shamelessly indulge every Christmas: that come season four, I will no longer be the onliest POC on the show. I felt both completely helpless and likeI had to do something after I found out. Something that would make me better, stronger, irreplaceable. But beyond the plans I’d already put into place, there was nothing I could think to do, and so I called Sally Hershberger and arranged a last-minute blowout, even though my hair is always perfect and I didn’t have anywhere to go. Some of us eat our feelings; others turn a hot air stream and a round brush on them. I sat in the leather swivel chair with the junior stylist, the only one available at the last minute, and searched Layla Courtney on Instagram.

I have, of course, met Layla Courtney on a few occasions. A quiet, tall girl with wet hair in a high bun who unimpressed me greatly. What did Lisa see in her? What didJesse? There were no Layla Courtneys on Instagram, and so I tried the mother. I turned up a scroll of Kelly Courtney variations, but only one with SPOKE in the handle and a light-skinned black girl in the profile picture. I felt like I was breathing fire ants as I thumbed her feed. Kelly and Layla at the Jersey Shore, Kelly and Layla at sixth-grade graduation last year, Kelly’s big “announcement” with all of ninety-six likes that you should follow Layla over @souk_SPOKE, where she would be hawking the gimcrack rugs and pottery and clothing handcrafted by Imazighen women, who now have the opportunity to learn a skill and earn a living thanks to SPOKE. A quick Google of the word “souk” told me that it is Berber for market. A terrible name for an Instagram handle, nothing catchy about it, but still I felt light-headed when I clicked on Kelly’s tag and saw that Layla’s account already had 11K followers, and that nearly every picture of Layla, modeling the goods with her baby afro, was riddled with comments likegorgeous girl,natural beauty,@ICManagement she on your radar???I glanced at myself in the mirror, never one more honest than a hairdresser’s. My hair was smooth and straight, a little bit of movement at the ends, the way I’ve worn it for twenty years. Even with the straightening treatments, no one ever called me gorgeous when I was the same age as this mouseburger, and I was.

So why am I up in arms? How could I possibly feel threatened by a twelve-year-old black girl with natural curls? Diversity is one of the pillars of our show. But Jesse, the empress regnant of reality television,never would have opened that door if there wasn’t any green behind it. Advertisers desperately want to capture young viewers, and diversity (Or are we calling it inclusivity now? Better question: Which expression is more lucrative?) is of paramount importance to millennials. To us, I guess I could say. I did make the millennial cutoff by the skin of my teeth, and that was also part of the reason I didn’t think I was coming back after the last reunion. No one survives the show past thirty-four.

I’ve managed to delay the inevitable for another year, and now I can’t help but feel my replacement is being groomed. Because Jesse didn’t open the door for underrepresented women in the media as much as she did crack it. Just enough to allow Brett and me through for a short window of time. On a show with four to five players, any more than one gay woman and it becomes a lesbian show, any more than onewoman of colorand it becomes an ethnic show, and then advertisers start to worry about alienating the audience. That’s not diversity; it’s token-ism, and that’s why it felt like a kick in the stomach when I found out that not only was my choice out of the running for Hayley’s spot (we all hustle hard to replace outgoingDiggerswith our friends), but that the newDiggersatisfied a requirement that up until now only I could fulfill. Think of each of us as a pendant on a charm bracelet. I am the lock and Brett is the heart and Jen is the ballet slipper and Lauren is the ladybug. What we needed was a transgendered woman, not another lock.

“Aren’t you pissed?” Lauren hisses, reaching for her wine and realizing it’s empty. She pretends like she was really going for the bread, tearing off a small piece and docking it on her plate. “I would be so pissed if I were you.”

I experience a flicker of appreciation for the woman I’d written off as a boy-crazy boozehound. I’ve never spoken to any of theDiggersabout feeling like a box Jesse had to check to escape an evisceration fromJezebel, because Brett, the one whoshouldget it, is utterly beguiled by Jesse, and Lauren and Jen could never even begin to empathize. Jen came to the attention of the producers by way of her mother and Lauren shouldn’t be on the show at all. She’s one of those Hitchcock blondes, from a family with its own crest. But she has mastered hi-lostyle and drinks too much and talks about sex too loudly and you’d be hard pressed to find a single woman in the city who doesn’t have her dating app hanging in the gallery of her mobile screen. Her name is Lauren Bunn and viewers call her Lauren Fun, and that has kept her safe, as has her willingness to go in for the kill when Lisa blows the whistle. She’s the show’s lovable hatchet man; indispensable, really.