Page 6 of The Favorite Sister

I raise a hand in permission. “No. Tell her.”

Jesse explains how the land has eroded—one hundred and seventy-five feet in the forty-one years since the house was constructed. She’s had to apply for an emergency approval from the East Hampton Planning Department to have the house relocated closer to the road.

“Wouldn’t it be easier to tear it down and build a new one?” Kelly asks, and I squeeze my eyes shut, mortified.

“This house was built on the site of a former World War II bunker and constructed from the structure’s original cement.” Jesse gives Kelly a tolerant smile and starts back toward the picnic table without having to explain further.

Hank has left silk wool and alpaca blankets folded in our seats, blue striped for me, gray for Kelly. We drape them over our shoulders and nod our heads when Hank offers us red wine. Jesse is watching Kelly, and when my sister realizes it, she frames her chin with her hands and gives a big, fifth-grade-picture-day smile. Sometimes Kelly is funny.

Jesse laughs. “I guess I’m just trying to find the resemblance.”

“We sneeze in threes,” I say, tartly. Maybe if my hair were its natural color and my thighs didn’t touch, Jesse would see the resemblance. Stephanie pays a bitchy therapist a lot of money to exorcise her demons and she once tried to play armchair with me, proposing that in high school, I gained weight and covered my arms in tattoos as a defense mechanism against comparisons to Kelly. Kelly was the pretty one, the smart one, the one who was going places. Sabotaging my looks, failing in school, disappointing my mother for sport, it was all less of an emotional risk than trying to measure up to Kelly’s legacy and failing.

And by the way, Stephanie added,the average woman in America wears a size eighteen. So you’re not fat.If everyone could stop assumingthat I care about being skinny that would besogreat.You’re showing young girls that you don’t have to be thin to be beautiful, many a freshly body positive women’s mag editor has started off an interview with me, causing my pelvic floor to seize up in a fit of fury.No, I correct them,I’m showing young girls that you don’t have to be beautiful to matter. The thinking that women of all shapes and sizes can be beautiful is still hugely problematic, because it is predicated on the idea that the most important thing a woman has to offer the world is her appearance. Men are raised to worry about their legacies, not their upper arm and thigh fat, stretch marks, crows-feet, saggy elbows, ugly armpits, thin eyelashes, and normal-smelling genitals. This is how society keeps us out of the C-suite—it booby-traps the way to the top with self-loathing, then reroutes us on a never-ending path of self-improvement.

“Did you find a space?” Jesse asks us.

“We found a space,” I say.

“Oh!” Jesse turns to me. “Where?”

“You know where Puff ’n’ Putt is?” Kelly interjects, annoyingly.

“The mini golf place?” Jesse asks.

Kelly nods. “We arerightacross the street. That hardware store shut down. It’s such a great location.”

“And we hardly have to do anything to it,” I rub my fingers together, signifyingmoney, “which is good because I’m going to be eating a lot of ramen during this expansion.” Kelly pierces my thigh with a fake fingernail under the table. I wrap a fist around her finger and twist, doing my best, one-handed, to inflict an injury with a very racist name that wasn’t yet considered offensive when we were kids in the nineties. It was in the nineties that Kelly and I should have outgrown the roughhousing, only it intensified with age, and now it’s like we’re adult thumb-suckers or something else worthy of a spot on TLC’sMy Strange Addiction.The longest break we’ve ever taken from our weekly wrestling matches was ten years ago, when Layla was two, and only because we realized we were scaring the shit out of her. She would come running in when she heard the rumbling start, sobbing and shrieking, “No hurt! No hurt!”

We never talked about stopping. We just did, for a while. Thenone day, while Layla was napping, Kelly opened the refrigerator to find that I drank the last can of her Diet Coke. She dragged me off the couch by my ponytail and we went at it silently until it was time for Kelly to wake up Layla. And that’s been our routine ever since—quiet, private violence. We know it’s perverse. We know we should stop. But it’s an outlet for words that would hurt more to say.

Kelly bumps the table trying to wrestle her finger free from my death grip, and Jesse trains an eye on both of us, curiously. We sit up straight and give her our bestYou imagined itsmile.

“We’re doing okay for ourselves,” Kelly says, rubbingherfingers together coyly. “Most Series A capital efforts raise between two and fourteen million dollars. We did almost triple that.”

“I’m not surprised,” Jesse says. “SPOKE is such a great concept.”

“Yeah, but that has less to do with it than you’d think,” Kelly says. “The key to breaking that fourteen-million-dollar glass ceiling is a unicorn valuation of the company, and, because it’s a private company, making sure that the valuation is disseminated publicly to create a bidder’s urgency in the private equity firm world.”

Jesse blinks like she’s been spun around on the dance floor one too many times. “Jesus,” she says to me, “she’s like John Nash with a great rack.”

I feel a ridiculous spear of jealousy. Jesse has been known to make somewhat lecherous comments to young, pretty women, but I prefer to be the target of them, thank you very much. “Kelly has whatever the opposite of mom brain is,” I say, pettily. Kelly makesShut up!eyes at me for bringing up Layla again. I make them right back at her.

Kelly would prefer everyone think we’re on the up-and-up now that our funding has been so widely reported in the press. She thinks this makes her a more desirable candidate, even though being broke is what got me my job on the show in the first place. The producers didn’t initially conceive of aDiggerin financial straits, but finding an enigmatic gay millennial proved a harder task than they realized, and Jesse was not about to cast the show without at least one of her people represented.

Once I was in the mix, the producers realized that I added some much-needed texture to the group. I’m the Greek Chorus, the one the audience is rolling their eyes with when Lauren sets off the airport metal detector because she forgot to remove both—count them,both—her Cartier Love bracelets.

Erin or Erica or whatever the fuck her name is was right that the power dynamics are about to shift this season, and I’m nervous about how that’s going to play out in terms of audience reception. I’ve always been the little guy, the relatable one, the favorite, and I want to make it clear that as I move up in the world, my triumph comes not from being able to afford rent on an apartment with a dishwasher, but in being able to give back to the women who need it most.

Jesse arches an eyebrow, sexily. She’s a forever bachelorette, a serial model dater who throws pizza parties on this very cliff with the likes of Sheryl Sandberg and Alec Baldwin. Viewers are always calling in to her aftershow, wanting to know when the two of us are just going to admit we’re having an affair. I have something to admit, but it’s not that. “In any case,” she says, “with aunicorn valuation,” she directs her smile at Kelly, “I don’t think you’ll be dining daily on ramen much longer.”

I point to the sky. “From your lips. But that money doesn’t go to us yet. It’s all for the new studios and our e-bikes.”

“Brett is being modest,” Kelly insists, tucking her hair behind her ear to pass off my girlfriend’s diamond huggie as her own. Neither of us draw a salary from SPOKE yet, but I make my living through speaking engagements and brand extensions like the book. The show pays less than five thousand a year and for good reason—producers wanted to attract young women who were already established, not those looking for a lily pad.

“The money will come if you keep doing what you’re good at,” Jesse says. She raises her glass. “Cheers. To the new yoga studio and the book deal and the Series A moneyandthe new girlfriend. Jesus,chica. You’ve got a few things going on, huh?”

I do a little dance in my seat and Jesse laughs. “When do I get to meet her?”