Page 54 of The Favorite Sister

CHAPTER 14

Brett

“The weak are always trying to sabotage the strong.”

“Huh?” Layla shouts.

“Shhhhhh.” I can’t help but laugh, slouching farther down in my seat. I tap the ear of Layla’s headset, reminding her that on a plane she has to speak at a volume she can’t hear. Layla has never been on a plane before. The passengers around us don’t seem at all bothered. A few actually chuckle. Because even on a red-eye to London in seats that don’t recline all the way back, Layla beguiles. How could she not? She looks like an off-duty model on her way to walk her first runway at London Fashion Week, and unlike her mother, she chose to fly coach so that an Imazighen woman could afford a loaf of bread to feed her children tonight.

“It’s a quote from this movie,” I tell her, touching the screen of her airplane TV. “You should watch it. It’s about female ambition, and the lengths people will go to extinguish it.”

Layla’s lips travel the synopsis ofElection, silently. She mumbles an intriguedhuh, and selects the play now option. Thank God. Aunt Brett needs some adult talky time with her ole buddy ole pal Marc, who is stomping his foot in the aisle seat, trying to get the blood circulating.

“This sucks,” I sympathize, tearing open a bag of sour cream ’n’ onion chips and offering it to him first.

Marc sticks his hand in the bag and rustles around. “I can’t believe you’re not in first.”

“I can’t believetheyare. We are about to meet some of the most disenfranchised women on the planet. It’s like”—I explode a hand by my brain—“total disconnect.”

Marc snorts, popping a chip into his mouth. “Did you really think Queen Simmons was going to slum it in coach? She’s probably allergic to cloth seating.” He dusts his hands together, sending onion powder into the air.

I slide a chip into my mouth, unsure if a white guy calling Stephanie a queen is racist but unwilling to go to bat for her even if it is. I need something from Marc right now. I twist my Standing Sisters ring with slippery chip fingers, trying to figure out the most artful entry into this conversation. As director of photography, Marc sees and hears everything on both sides of the lens. If there are any rumblings, and if anyone is willing to share them with me, it will be Marc. “What, um. What do you think was going on with Steph and Vince back there?”

Marc sighs, sounding disappointed.

“What?” I ask, wide-eyed and innocent.

“Don’t do that, Brett,” Marc says. “If you want to have a real conversation about this, then let’s have a real conversation about it. But don’t pretend like you don’t know what Vince and Steph were fighting about back there. You’re not like that. That’s why we’re friends.”

Something about Marc that everyone knows but not everyone appreciates is that on the weekends, he plays bass in an eighties cover band called Super Freaks. This detail is traded mockingly by the otherDiggers, but what they don’t know—because they would never deign to ask the crewanythingabout their lives—is that his band used to regularly sell out the Canal Room, and that twenty-two-year-old girls line the stage whenever they open at Talkhouse in Amagansett. My ex and I went to see them once, and afterward, we’d eaten slices at Astro’s with Marc and his boyfriend, who plays drums. I did all of this because I like Marc. But what if I didn’t like Marc? Would I still have sought him out like I did, knowing theproducers can’t edit, for better or for worse, film that doesn’t exist? The answer floors me: Probably. Definitely. I am exactly like that.

“You’re right,” I say. “I’m sorry. I’m just... I don’t know what you know. What anyone knows. And, well,” I glance at Layla, making sure she’s watching the movie and not listening to us, “something happened that shouldn’t have happened, and I’m not sure what to do about it.”

Marc smiles at me, kindly. “Everyone makes mistakes, Brett. That doesn’t make me love you less. It makes me love you more.” He reaches for my hand and I let him hold it for a few moments, smiling back at him gratefully, marinating in my full stink.

Marc cranes his neck, making sure the passengers in our immediate vicinity are asleep or otherwise occupied. Determining that we have our privacy, he says in a low voice, “Lisa doesn’t think that you and Stephanie were fighting about you not passing on her book to Rihanna or whatever it is you’re saying.”

I swallow, tasting bile in my throat. I can barf in the chip bag if I need to. “What does she think it’s about?”

Marc bites his lip, checking our surroundings again. This time, he reaches into his pocket, pulls out his phone, and opens up the Notes app. I am practically in his lap, watching as he taps out the answer:She is starting to think you and Stephanie had a thing while you were living with her and it ended badly.

The words on my tombstone blur and come into focus, blur and come into focus. This is bad. This is really, really bad. I’mengaged. Steph and Vince might have the sort of marriage where they trade hall passes every other week, but Arch thinks more highly of herself than that. She will leave me if she gets wind of this.

Marc is opening the camera icon on his phone now, thumbing through pictures of his niece at the beach and expertly captured sunsets, arriving finally on a grab of what appears to be a page in a book. He offers me his phone, and I spring my thumb and index finger apart, zooming in.

It’s the title page from Stephanie’s third novel. The one I thoughtI had trashed in the clean-out of my old apartment.To the love of my life, she had written to me.Sorry, Vince!

“Where did you get this?” I ask Marc, my ears roaring.

“Lisa sent it to me. It was on the bookshelf at your old place. Where Kelly and”—he signals Layla with his chin—“are living. We were there to film and Lisa noticed it. She thought it was weird it was there, and she opened it, and then, well, she read that, and it just got her thinking and then—”

I hold up a finger to Marc—press pauseon that thought. I motion for Layla to remove her headphones.

“Layla?” I ask, in a quiet, stern voice. “Remember that copy of Stephanie’s book that I put in the recycling bin?”

Layla swallows.

I nod. “Tell me the truth.”