Page 41 of The Favorite Sister

“But you’ve always fought. There’s no room for treachery when you’ve never gotten along. Viewers don’t want a fight, they want a betrayal.”

“And how do we give them that?”

“We pull a Lauren and Heidi.” She stole my glass of wine and took a walloping gulp. “I’ll even let you be Lauren Conrad. I’ll be the heel,” she said through that puckering face we all make when we drink something too cold too fast. Stars, they’re just like us.

The fight, Stephanie said, had to be serious enough that viewers wouldn’t accuse us of being petty, wouldn’t tell us in the comments on our Instagram posts to put ourbig girlpanties on and sort it out. (If birth control doesn’t give her a stroke at thirty-five, it will be agrown woman in Minnesota telling Stephanie how to conduct herself using the language of a kiddie diddler.) The fight also couldn’t be so irreparable that we wouldn’t reconcile in time for the Morocco trip. We would end the season in Morocco, she promised. Nothing we were doing was ever meant to be permanent.

The heart of this serious-but-not-irreparable fight would be this: that Stephanie had come to me and asked me to push her book on Rihanna, with the thought that she was perfect to play her in the film adaptation should the rights be optioned. She was working on a new book about her childhood, opening up about some things she’d wanted to talk about for a long time.What things?I had asked, intrigued, but also feeling a little queasy. I could tell by the look on her face she was not talking about happy childhood memories.

“Just some stuff I went through when I was young,” she’d said, glancing at Vince furtively. “But when I ask you to push it on your new star client, you say you aren’t comfortable doing that, and I flip out. I claim youowe me.” Stephanie lowered her eyes sadly. “I’m going to look crazy. But,” she raised her shoulders and thinned her lips, “if Jesse finds out we’re fighting, she’ll have to ask me back next season to see it all play out. And I’d rather be hated for a few months than fast-forwarded.”

“Fuck that guy,” I said, meaning the writer atNew Yorkmag who had taken to calling StephanieSleptaniein his recaps of season three. But suddenly, as if her fear were an app with a share feature, I felt it too. There was a very strong likelihood that my closest ally on the show would not be asked back. She had been a bore to film last season. Marc had made that crack about timing his Ritalin dosage to Stephanie scenes, and Lisa was always coming at Stephanie’s face with a Starbucks napkin in hand, calling her Miss New York, not kindly.

And sometimes, when Stephanie stops smiling but the lines around her mouth remain, she does look like she’s starting to get old.

The fight was supposed to have happened off camera, between seasons, and, like method actors, we were to commit. As soon asmy lease was up in the fall and I was through paying rent to Sarah, I could afford to move out, and that’s when we would cease all communication. We couldn’t put on a front to the media, to the other castmates, toJesse, if at home, late at night, we were texting each other goofy emojis. We’d seen what happened to Hayley when she was hacked, and we couldn’t chance anyone figuring us out. It’s why I didn’t reach out to Steph to congratulate her when the book came out and caught fire, even though I was dying to. Even though I was actually hurt. She had been choked out, spit on, and raped, and she never told me? She was supposed to be my best friend.

It’s also why I was unable to give her a heads-up about the lunch with Jesse and my sister. Maybe I would have found a way to get in touch with her if I thought Kelly was anything more than a Green Party candidate. But I truly saw it as a mercy meeting for my sister, which was completely naive in retrospect. Of course Jesse would see my niece, nine-foot-tall mini mogul, with stars in her eyes. And of course Steph would read the decision to cast two of my family members as me trying to make a grab for the spotlight when we’d manipulated an arc that was meant to split it. I allowed myself to believe that was when the fight became real for her, though deep down I knew that wasn’t it. Deep down, I knew what it was really about.

It took me until the all-cast prod meeting to realize that the fight was no longer fake. Steph and I are the only castmates who keep in touch off camera. So it was normal that I hadn’t seen Lauren or Jen until the prod meeting. That Stephanie had seen them was not. And when the women simultaneously turned their backs on Morocco, I knew it had nothing to do with me “refusing” to slip the book to my celebrity rider.

I don’t know what would have happened if Yvette hadn’t taken pity on me and exposed Jen’s back-alley protein habit. Once I obliterated the alliance, I figured I had two choices. I could expose Steph’s scheme, but in doing so, I would have to admit to my role in it, and Jesse, whose nonnegotiables are no fashion bloggers except Leandra Medine and no fake storylines, would have been irate. Or, I couldplay dumb. Pretend like this was all a part of the plan, that Stephanie wasn’t trying to ice me off the show, that she didn’t sincerely despise me now, and proceed with the reconciliation as we had originally conceived, cumulating in the trip to Morocco. To my great relief, Steph played along when I cornered her in the bathroom at Lauren’s event.

Only now, it feels like instead of pretending to be in a fight, we’re pretending to be friends. In my wildest dreams I never would have imagined that the fight would become real and the friendship the charade.