Page 38 of The Favorite Sister

“I asked her to come,” Lauren pipes up with glee. How thrilled she is to be the wounded bird at the center of this drama. “It’s my event. I’m allowed to ask anyone I’d like to come. I don’t need your permission,Steph.”

Jen reaches for Lauren’s hand and clutches it close to her heart. “Laur,” she says, her voice deep and husky. “Remember what we talked about. Speak from a place of vulnerability, not vengeance.”

“Christ on a gluten-free vegan cracker,” Brett says, making eyes at the camera. When we were filming the first season, we were told to ignore the cameras. It wasdrilledinto us. Then season one aired and we discovered that not only had Brett completely disregarded that rule, but that the viewers loved it, ordaining her the Jim Halpert of the show. Brett is incapable of seeing that private communication for what it is, which is a betrayal of her cast. Staring into the camera at moments like this is analogous to a laugh track. It’s saying to the audience—yeah, I’m laughingatthemwithyou.

“Do you want me to mediate or not?” Jen says to Brett, dropping the Dalai Lama inflection. Something passes between them, indiscernible to anyone who is not us.They’ve seen each other since I was at Jen’s apartment, I realize.They’ve agreed on something. I am the one on the ropes tonight.I take a moment to gather my bearings—do they have something on me? Have they agreed to their own alliance? I decide, whip fast, that my best course of action is to show remorse.

“Lauren,” I say, turning to her with my hands steepled in prayer. “I genuinely thought Brett was behind the Page Six article. That wasn’t a lie. If Brett says it wasn’t her, then it wasn’t her, and I’m sorry to have created such confusion. Now, can we just go back in there and celebrate this important and necessary new chapter of SADIE?” Important. Necessary. These are the things everyDiggerwould like to believe about herself.

Lauren runs a hand through her sunny hair, pluming herself.She’s going to work this conflict to the bone, I realize with a slump. How couldthe tide have turned against me so quickly? How am I the one on the outs here? “I don’t believe you thought that,” Lauren persists. “I think you told me that to get me on your side and fight your battles for you.”

I attempt to disarm her with a smile. “Laur, come on, you know me. I can fight my own battles.”

“Or maybe you did it to try to distract everyone from yourmarriageissues.” She cocks an eyebrow, lazily, but the trick does very little to assuage the regret on her face. She knows she’s taken it too far by bringing up Vince.

“Laur,” Brett gasps, disapprovingly, and the eyebrow falls completely. It’s official. Brett is our new puppet master.

Thank you, Lisa, I think, as I remember what she told me earlier. “You’re not making any sense,” I say to Lauren. “Maybe it was the four glasses of prosecco you’ve smuggled tonight when you’re telling everyone you’re sober?”

Lauren thinks she lunges at me, but in reality, it’s more of a slow, sad lean. She bumps her shin on the bench between the elevators, doubling over and yowling. Jen grabs her by her upper arm, helping to right her, and that’s when I notice it. The bruising. The puncture wounds. Lauren has gotten her vaccinations for Morocco.

“Grow up,” Lauren says, clutching her shin with her hand. “You’re too old to be a mean girl.”

Over Brett’s shoulder, Lisa’s lips form a grotesqueo.

“Steph!” Brett begs after me as I hurry away, crew number two stalking me down the hallway. I’m done. I can’t. I’m done.

Vince has disappeared, and with the camera crew unrelenting at my back, I don’t risk looking for Kelly in case she might lead me to him. The last thing I need is a storyline that my husband is schtupping the newDigger. The second to last thing I need is for my husband to actually schtup the newDigger. I head for the bathroom, where at least I can sit on the edge of the toilet and not worry what my faceis or is not doing in this new reality where I have somehow found myself the villain in the story.

The door to the bathroom is locked. I rattle the knob to let whomever is inside know there is a line, and then again a few seconds later, and then again. I can’t get my face away from this camera fast enough. The door blows open with aJesus, though the woman giggles an apology when she sees the cameras and realizes who I am. I step past her, pulling the door shut behind me, but it catches on something before I can get it to latch. I look down and find the dirty toe of a Golden Goose sneaker.

Brett turns sideways and fits her body inside, closing the door on the long snout of the camera. This has happened before—Marc stuck outside filming a slammed door, while our mics pick up a “private” conversation. Brett seizes me by the shoulders, pulling me toward her with her lips puckered. I can’t tell if she’s going to kiss me or spit on me. “I won’t let you do this, Steph!” She shakes me, with dramatic effect but very little actual force. “You don’t get to walk out like that. You don’t get to decide when we talk and when we don’t. I’m not your fucking subordinate.” She releases me to bring two fists to her mouth, her shoulders quivering with silent church laughter. She jabs a finger at me, mouthing,Go! You go!

I stare at Brett for a few long, hard seconds.Give me something, I plead with her inwardly.Give me anything. Brett blinks back at me, the smile dropping away from her face. It seems like she might say something—something real—but instead she starts to cough, abruptly and violently. She coughs so hard she chokes. She coughs so hard tears stream down her face. “Wrong pipe,” she croaks, clutching her throat with one hand, jabbing at the faucet behind me with the other. She means for me to turn it on so she can get some water. The most I’m willing to do is step aside so that she can see to her survival herself.

Brett folds at the waist, splashing water into her mouth with her hands, getting as much of it down as she can while coughing and sputtering, her nose running, her face a pleasing and unbecomingshade of red. Doubled over as she is, I have full access to my image in the mirror. I lean in, closer, scrutinizing Jason’s work tonight. My skin is a flawless, even canvas, allowing my dark eyes to really pop. But still, I am thirty-four, ache in my heart.

It is not my age that stings, it is that my age decided to make itself known with very little warning. I have always looked so young. Then somewhere, midway through thirty-three, I looked into the mirror andsawthat I was older. Ever since then, I’ve felt apologetic and guilty, exposed as a fraud, like a prominent evangelist pastor busted in a tawdry sex scandal.I deeply regret my last birthday and beg for your forgiveness. I’ve been skulking around theForbesthirty under thirty crowd, aged out for a while now, but at least looking the part. Then thirty-three-and-a-half kicked in the door, seeming to bring with it the decade’s full wallop overnight.

Every year, I have looked back on my last birthday and yearned to turn that year again. Twenty-eight was so young, twenty-nine was still so young, thirty was a baby! But thirty-four felt different. There will never be a time when I look back and think I was young at thirty-four. Young was left on the doorstep of thirty-three. I am sure of it.

Sometimes I think Jesse sniffed out my fear of aging, the way abusive men have a nose for women who grew up feeling undeserving of love. What did I say in my memoir?Feeling less than was wet wood for a termite like A.J.That was a good line. Jesse, like A.J., must have sensed my expiring sense of self-worth and thought to herself,That one That one won’t think more of herself when I subject her to my mind games, that one will just take it. All of theDiggersare damaged in some way. We must be. Why else would anybody sign up to be tossed out? Reality TV is like driving drunk. You know it might kill you, but there is something rakishly sexy about tempting the fates.

Brett straightens, gasping still, thumping her chest with a fist. “Wow,” she rasps. “Wow. I don’t know where that came from.”

I know exactly where that came from. It came from Brett’s subconscious, from the latent desire to come clean, to get something off her chest. The ego quashed it in her throat, strangling her, really,but knowing it resides within her—guilt—gives me the conviction I need to move forward with our original plan, hatched eight months ago in my kitchen on my thirty-fourth birthday.

I turn my back on the mirror, hoisting my butt onto the sink’s ledge. I need to sit down for this. “I never thought of you as a subordinate,” I say. “I thought of you as my friend. And me?” I tent my fingers lightly over my heart. “I go to the ends of the earth to supportmyfriends. I took you in when you had nowhere else to go, and I guess I thought it was a given, that if ever an opportunity presented itself to return the favor, that you would take it. But you didn’t. You had an opportunity to get my book into the hands of a major celebrity, whose support would have been huge, and you flat-out refused to help me. You wanted to keep that relationship all to yourself.”

Brett’s breathing is still labored, but I manage to detect a sigh of relief in the pattern. So far, I’m on script. I’ve said exactly what we always planned for me to say. “That’s so not fair, Steph,” she says, with a dopey, upward tug at the corners of her mouth. “You didn’t lose anything by allowing me to stay at your house.” She seems to realize that this line, which we practiced months and months ago, no longer applies, because her lips straighten once again. “I don’t know,” she says, eyes downcast. “Maybe I could have found a way to bring it to her attention. I could have at least tried.” She looks up at me, her big eyes bigger. “I’m sorry, Steph. I’m so, so sorry.”

I raise my eyebrows, and a valve in my heart thinks about opening. Because Brett is the one who is off script now. The plan had always been for me to apologize to her. Brett was to have come out of this scuffle smelling like roses.

“I miss you,” Brett says, thickly. She might mean it. “It’s killed me not to be able to congratulate you on all your success, which is sosowell-deserved. And it’s killed me not to be able to share with you what’s going on with my life. Can we just—I don’t know. Meet for a drink? Coffee? Catch up. I miss you,” she repeats. “Every single day.”

I am silent. Brett prompts me with a slow roll of her finger. It’s my turn. “I miss you too,” I force myself to say.

Brett hops up on the counter, so that we are thigh-to-thigh, shoulder-to-shoulder, conjoined twins. She covers my hand in her own, and I feel the cold metal on two fingers, instead of one. “Oh yeah,” she says, holding up her hand with a wry smile. “I got engaged.”

The band is plain, gold, and a little too thick. The signet I bought for her has so much more style.

“I’m happy for you, Brett,” I say, with feeling, but everything in my body language is rigid. This does not deter Brett from draping an arm around my shoulders, from the assault of her warm touch. Does she actually believe me? If she does, she is so far down this rabbit hole of our perceived reality I almost feel sorry for her. Almost.

“We can make this right, can’t we?” Brett pleads. “Come on. You know I always support you. Real queens fix each other’s crowns.”

My disdain takes my breath away.Real queens fix each other’s crowns?This is the equivocating claptrap that passes for feminism these days. An Instagram idiom that places the burdon on the less effective party. Men get to go about their lives, paying women less and black women even less than that, unencumbered by cutesy demands to fix a problemtheycreated. Telling women to help other women in a society that places us in a systemic competition with one another is a fool’s errand. Two percent of the world’s CEOs are women, and yet we are expected to treat each other like sisters and not rabid hyenas thrown a carcass picked to the gristle by lions. Malnourish me, undervalue me, humiliate and harass me when I try toget my moneyanyway, but don’t you ever tell me to go about it nicely.

I say none of this because I am not here to be a truthsayer. I am here to capitulate. Brett isn’t the only one acting out of a sense of self-preservation. I lean into this changeling’s embrace, even though the stink of the French perfume I bought her tangled with the body odor in the pajama top I also bought her makes me queasy. “Yeah,” I say. “I think we can make this right.”

But touch my crown and you will lose a fucking finger. Put that on a coffee mug and hawk it.