Page 67 of The Favorite Sister

Hospital records, police reports, and interviews with personnel at the rehab center where Simmons claimed to have checked her mother in after pawning her adoptive mother’s diamonds have called into question many key sections of Simmons’s book. After months of diligent fact-checking,The Smoking Guncan be the first to report that the thirty-four-year-old embellished and, in some cases, wholly fabricated details of her relationship with her birth mother, and the Pennsylvania neighbor she claims she entered into an abusive relationship with while searching for her.

Simmons appears to have gotten away with sweetening her backstory given the fact that she is an orphan herself. Her adoptive mother passed away in 2011. Earlier this year, Simmons was quoted in theNew York Timesas saying, “I felt I was finally able to unload my story after I was no longer saddled with protecting the feelings of my adoptive mother. She would have been horrified to know the truth.”

While Simmons claims that her birth mother passed away in her arms when she was just seventeen years old, hospital records show that Sheila Lott died at the South Ridge Rehab Facility in Newark, New Jersey, in 2003, when Simmons was twenty and enrolled in her sophomore year at Colgate.

Another whopper of a discrepancy involves “A.J.,” the eighteen-year-old neighbor of Sheila Lott, whom Simmonsalleged was her lover and abuser. Simmons claims that on the day she first sought out her biological mother, she met and began a tumultuous eight-month affair with the local high school football star who lived on her mother’s cul-de-sac. Simmons has been widely heralded for her bravery in coming forward as a survivor of domestic abuse when black women are both statistically more likely to suffer at the hands of a romantic partner and less likely to report their abusers. Thus far,The Smoking Gunhas been unsuccessful in our efforts to identify “A.J.”

I reach a scroll of ads and click next. There are six more pages to go, and the screen goes white for too long. I glance at the MiFi. The light is red. The battery is dead.

“There are your friends,” the driver says, gesturing with his cigarette at our moving spectacle, like one of those Chinese dragon parade floats, Brett the flamboyant head and Lisa the stinger tail. Marc films Kelly and Jen as they start to unload the bikes from the back of the cargo van, Lauren looking on, helpfully. Brett plays bouncer, her hands spread wide to keep jumping children at bay.Be patient.She’s laughing.You’ll get to ride them. Just be patient.

On a plot of young grass, framed by the old craggy bluffs, I spot two girls in orange headscarves taking a selfie. It’s Layla and Kweller, who must have gifted her pushy American friend a matching wrap. From here, they could be sisters. On any other day, it could be sweet.

I set to work making a happy place lunch out of a Valium and Lauren’s traveling handle of vodka. I’m too close to caring.

Slightly north of the village, we come upon a brindled valley, studded sparsely with the sort of Christmas trees that pass as status symbols in New York City. You should see Whole Foods in December,everyone chomping at the bit to get to the front of the line and declare their need for an eight-footer, their ceilings arethathigh. TheDiggers oohandahover the mountaintops, which loll before us, flexing an occasional dirt road, not that great. We could be on Mars, everything so brown and dry.

“Isn’t nature majestic?” Jen marvels at my shoulder. I turn to her with flared nostrils. I decide against informing our sole Jewish castmate that there is a Hitler smudge of dust above her lip. Lane-swerving bitch.

It was only a ten-minute walk to get here under the mild-mannered sun, but I’m heavy-footed with malaise, greased in a gritty solution of sweat and dust. There is no place to rest but on a bike. I puncture the dirt deeper with the kickstand and swing a leg over the seat. I wish I could say the SPOKE electric bikes look like every other bike I’ve ever seen, nothing special about them, but it wouldn’t be true. The body is a glossy, lacquered red, the seat baby pink leather, with a rear rack designed to transport two jerricans of fresh water. The handlebars look like stitched leather ram horns, like something an old Texan oil baron would hang above his fireplace after a luxury safari. Fuck me, they’re gorgeous.

“Okay!” Brett claps her hands twice to get everyone’s attention. There is a gaggle of children surrounding her. Periodically one will reach out and wind her fingers in Brett’s long hair, and Brett will gently untangle them without losing a beat. “I thought it would be fun to have a race! Who can make it to the river, fill up her container, and get back here the fastest.”

Tala translates, and the kids titter excitedly. One girl raises a grubby arm, and another clamps it down with a bucktoothed laugh, waving her arm wide.Shewants to go.

“Grown-ups first,” Brett says, and there is a collective outcry of disappointment when Tala translates.

“Looks like Steph here is our first competitor!” Brett says, noticing me slumped on a bike.

I yawn without covering my mouth. “Nah.”

“But you said you couldn’t wait to ride one last night!”

I did? I try to remember last night as I dismount the bike, but it’s as though the memory has been placed in a cement-sealed file.

“Scared you’ll lose to me?” Brett’s smile is playful and infuriating.

The bolt of competitiveness is absurd, vehemently childish, but it’s in my lungs, sharp as if I had just sprinted to the best, fullest, tallest Christmas tree. I reclaim the pink leather seat with aplomb. “Winner gets her book given to Rihanna,” I say, because I can be funny too.

Brett plunks a helmet on her head, and in a voice so serious she can only be joking, says, “You’re on, sister.”

I don’t like things that go fast. I don’t like Jet Skis and I don’t like Vespas. I don’t even like speed intervals at Barry’s Bootcamp, which I took up again joyfully once Brett and I were no longer friends. (SPOKE might make you cool but it will not make you skinny.)

Lauren starts the race, ripping off her new headscarf and throwing back her chin like she’s Cha Cha inGrease. Brett zips ahead of me, too fast too soon. The Big Chill’s got no strategy. She has to keep slamming on the brakes to avoid crashing into the trees. After a few hundred yards, I catch up with her by maintaining a steady pace. The idea of a race is mostly fallacy, as we don’t have any idea where we’re racing to and we have to follow Tala—at least on the way there.

It’s a rocky, uphill climb, the elevation subtle then ungracefully steep, and I can’t help but imagine what it would be like to walk this, day after day, year after year of my life. At least it’s downhill with the jugs of water, though I remember the older women I saw as we wandered the village, their backs curved like boomerangs. How bitter they must be, watching these young girls with the bikes, going to school, making their own money. Why wasn’t there a better way in time for them?

I have barely moved my legs to get here and yet this film ofsweat has turned cold, has drowned gnats in the creases of my elbows. Maybe I’m a little bit sick. Maybe I’m a little bit dying. There is something waiting for me on the other side of these mountains, something happening back in New York that will not leave me unscathed. I should never want to leave, and yet I’m dying to know how bad it is. I’m dying to know what I’m going to do about it. It’s past time to locate my spine.

“Careful!” Tala calls ahead of us, and then she drops off the horizon.

The descent is straight out of a stress dream. Something seasoned hikers would consider rappelling. Even Brett idles at the top, removing her feet from the pedals and stemming the earth for a moment.

“She’s doing it,” I say to Brett, unsure, as we watch Tala bump around boulders and sparse, scraggly bushes.

“It’s amazing,” Brett says, watching her, and I realize she hasn’t stopped because she’s scared. She’s stopped to take it all in. “You lose touch, back in New York,” she continues. “You know you’re doing something that matters, but it’s never more real than when you come here and see it with your own two eyes.”

With that, she twists her handlebars and navigates her way downhill fearlessly, her hair flipping sweetly in the wind. I wonder what would happen if I bumped her tire on the way down. If the back would flip over the front, if her top teeth would go through her bottom lip, as easily as a knife parting hot butter.