Page 66 of The Favorite Sister

From far away, the village looks like it was built out of mountain-colored Legos. We pass an ancient man straddling the neck of a white donkey, two rattan bags attached at the flank. Why don’t they just ride the donkey to the well?

“It’s a mule, first of all,” Brett says, and I’m startled to discover I voiced the thought out loud. “Only the wealthy families can afford to own them and it’s tradition that the men use them to transport food and supplies.” Brett turns around in her seat and adds, “ ‘Wealthy’ being a relative term.”

A revulsion bucks me, that I am expected to care about these poor village women denied a mule. I am not heartless. My heart is enlarged with caring thanks to the mess my mother made out of raising me. My mother loved me, and she didn’t mean to ruin me, but she did, by teaching me that I am responsible for how other people feel. Between her and Vince and Brett and the twenty-four-year-old blond viewers who don’t want to be made to feel guilty that their ancestors owned slaves because they don’t even, like,seecolor, I have performed my job so well I deserve a raise and a corner office.

We descend slowly to the lowest tier of the village, where the stone-stacked huts are squat and windowless. Brett explains thegitesare grouped politically by association, and asks Layla if she notices anything as we pull into what is going to have to pass for the village center.

“There aren’t any guys,” Layla says, after a minute. Brett reacts to this glaringly obvious observation as though Layla has just defined a parabola.

“That’sexactlyright. Most men between the ages of sixteen and forty temporarily emigrate to North African cities to find jobs, and send the money back home to their families.”

Then who is raping them?

We come to a running stop in the hard dirt, attracting a ring of filthy, curious children. A woman approaches the driver’s-side window, wearing a headscarf and sweatshirt, both sound-the-alarm red. The color choice is not a coincidence.

Brett unbuckles her seat belt and squeezes between the driver and front passenger seat. “Salam!” she calls through the open window, and I think about swallowing my fourth Valium in fourteen hours. There is only so much of Brett’s ham-fisted Arabic I can take. “Salam, Tala!”

“As-salam alaykam, Brett!” she returns. She rattles off directions in rapid-fire Arabic to the driver, pointing and waving like a crossing guard with tiny balls and a big blowhorn. I thought women here were oppressed little wallflowers who spoke only when spoken to. I thought these bikes were built to save the hymens of preyed-upon preteens.

We reverse into a narrow sod alleyway, deep enough so that the second van can plug us in. Through the front windshield, I watch Marc push open the back doors and blunder to his feet, rolling his neck and stretching his arms above his head. All warmed up now, he hoists the F55 onto his right shoulder. I take one last sip of tea. Wait for the jump.

Oh, it’s exhausting. Meeting all these grateful women. Watching happy children be happy with so little, the way they pogo in front of Marc, their scalps momentarily clearing the lens. We visit a hut where women weave rag rugs, where Tala explains the spirit ofcreative reuse, how when a rug is old or torn, the women cut it and sew it into colorful wool and cotton scraps.They never throw anything away, she says, and I glare hotly at Layla. For a time, these rugs were only considered fit for local homes, a practical solution to chilly mud floors in winter. Today they sell for thousands of dollars in a store on La Brea Avenue in Hollywood. Layla takes hundreds of pictures of toothless smiling women holding up their tatty designs, while Brett explains to Tala in pidgin Arabic that Layla is the curator of Qualb, an online boutique that sells home goods made by Berber women.

“The heart?” Tala curves her hand around her breast.

Brett nods. “We have an expression in the States: Home is where the heart is.”

Tala parts her dry lips with anahof understanding. “That is very clever.”

Layla is on her knees, fingering the fringe end of a rag rug in progress. “Thank you,” she says in a courtly voice that sets my teeth on edge. Who does she think she is, repaying a compliment with a thank-you?

On a sunny stoop we come across an older woman, her face ravaged by the sun, and a young girl with her knees around a pottery wheel. They look like they’ve dunked themselves in a mud bath at an expensive California spa. Layla cries out a name—Kweller?—and the girl glances up, shading her eyes.

“Layla,” she determines. The girl allows the potter’s wheel to come to a stop and stands, clasping her wet hands at her pelvis, unsmiling. She’s tall and angular, like Layla, and what she’s wearing is the closest I’ve seen to anoutfitsince we’ve arrived: a long-sleeved navy and white top, bulky bright blue jeans, and a burnt orange headscarf, pushed far enough back from her head that I can see she parts her hair deeply to the side. Nautical top, denim, pop of color, hair flip. I had no idea the basic hos of Starbucks had such far-reaching influence.

Layla squeals. “Can you believe I’m here?”

I set my molars to work again.Can you believeI’mhere. Starting her young on themake it about metrain, which is all reality TV is. Narcissist training.

Kweller closes her eyes and nods, shecanbelieve it. It’s like watching two people meet off Tinder for the first time when one of them is so clearly out of the other’s pay grade. Kweller has more composure in the tip of her dirty pinkie than the entire hoodwinking Courtney family.

Layla slides her eyes to the left—I see it! She’s checking to make sure Marc is getting this!—and approaches Kweller, arms flung open like Kate Winslet on the bow of theTitanic. Kweller doesn’t look like she wants a hug, but as a pawn in the shoddy SPOKE empire, she’s getting one.

“Kweller is one of our top sellers on Qualb,” Layla tells us, her arm around Kweller’s waist. “She makes the most beautiful painted vases.”

I expect Kweller to blush beneath the dry clay on her cheeks and pass the compliment to the elderly woman who taught her everything she knows. But like Layla, all she says is, “Thank you.” This is the new guard of girls. They take ownership of their accomplishments. They don’t cover their zits in concealer. They like themselves. We hate them because we ain’t them. That’s something they say too, right?

I cannot take one more second of the Layla and Kweller show, so I slip back to the van while the rest of the women go on to meet the bread makers and olive oil pressers. The driver is perched on the front bumper, smoking a cigarette. I start to explain to him that I’m looking for the MiFi router because I’m expecting important news from back home, before realizing he doesn’t understand me nor does he give a shit.

I haul myself into the front passenger seat and turn on the router. I’m sweating so hard my sunglasses keep sliding down my nose, and I set my face with powder, watching and willing the signal light to stop blinking.

At long last—aconnection. I refreshThe Smoking Gunreport onthe screen of my phone, and there it is, top of the page.Digging Deep intoGoal DiggerStephanie Simmons’s Bullshit. I actually laugh. That is someNew York Postlevels of puniness.

An Oscar-nominated female director has been had.

A few months ago, she anointed theGoal Digger’smemoir “her next great passion project,” calling it “shocking, heartbreaking, and important.”

But an investigation into Simmons’s number one bestseller, which has sold close to one million copies in just five months, reveals that the most shocking thing about Simmons’s memoir is that it’s not a memoir at all.