Page 68 of The Favorite Sister

It’s greener by the river, obnoxiously, Irishly so. Brett expresses her disappointment that the camera crew was unable to follow us down here. “This is Morocco,” she declares, sucking in a torrent of fresh air, and I want to tell Tala that I won’t say anything if she holds Brett’s face in the shallow river until she stops struggling.

“Oh, come on, I’ll do it,” Brett says, when she notices me daydreaming her death at the river’s seam. Tala has already waded upto her waist and has her jerrican submerged, the water at her side bubbling greedily.

“I’lldoit,” I say, but Brett has already snatched the jug out of my hand and joined Tala. She doesn’t bother to take off her five-hundred-dollar sneakers, which, if you want a tell that someone is newly flush, watch how they treat their expensive things.

I’m about to remove my sandals and join them, prove to Brett that I’m not too much of a priss to get wet, when my pants pocket purrs once, shortly, before going off like a pager at some godforsaken Cheesecake Factory.

My cargo pants are thin silk, adhering to my damp skin like Saran Wrap to Saran Wrap. There is a horrible moment when my phone gets trapped in the lining of my pocket, and my hand writhes like a cat trapped under a bedsheet.

“Oh myGod,” Brett judges. “Look where we are! Ignore it!”

“There is a mobile tower over that hill,” Tala says.

“Stopit.” Brett clucks, making apparent her disapproval that underprivileged people should be able to make a call that won’t drop.

“It’s true. There is a well closer to home than this, but everyone comes here because they can find a signal.”

“I left my phone in the car,” Brett boasts as I free my own and open my email. It was as if I’d set a Google alert for “weight loss.” Try it sometime. You’ll see what I mean. My screen is a scroll of vitriol, hit after hit, a greatest collection of pun-y insults. Goal Digger“digs” her own grave?The New York Timesremoves StephonySimmons’s “memoir” from bestsellers list, citing fraud. Simmons’s life story is fake news, Fox is the most happy to report.

“Who died, Steph?” Brett laughs, tipping her head back and wetting her hair.

Gwen is coming, Vince has texted me.Call me when you can.

Why is Gwen coming? Where is Gwen going?I open the conversation and thumb back, feeling faint.

At 1:16:A reporter from theDaily Newsjust knocked on the door. I said you weren’t home. Just wanted you to know.

1:47:Okay. A few more have knocked on the door. I didn’t answer.But now there is a small crowd gathered outside the apartment. I’m assuming you are somewhere without service.

I call him immediately, but the connection fails, again and again. I text back,What’s going on? Is Gwen there? I won’t have service much longer.I hit send, but the message doesn’t go anywhere. I growl a curse.

“Can we ride the bikes closer to the tower?” I ask Tala.

Brett wrings out her hair, watching me concernedly. “What’s going—”

We both freeze, terror-eyed, when we hear the ominous rustling in the brush. In an instant, I’ve catalogued every gruesome talking point of Brett’s cause célèbre: the fourteen-year-old girl raped and murdered by four men, the twelve-year-old girl who escaped her rapist only to deliver his baby nine months later, the young mother raped and tortured by a gang, leaving four children behind. At least the Internet will remember me kindly. These days, a woman is forgiven everything when a man kills her.

Tala, shouting a bizarre chant, charges out of the river and joins me on the shore, stomping her feet ferociously.

“Hey-hey. Hoo-hoo!” Tala shouts, and motions frantically for me to mimic her odd dance. But I cannot move a muscle for fear that my brain may stop changing shape, that my synapses may stop spinning this gossamer: A woman is forgiven everything when a man kills her.

“Oh my God.” Brett doubles over with a laugh when a ferret-looking thing sticks his whiskered nose out of the shrubs.

“Jesus,” I say, relieved, and maybe a little bit disappointed. “I was thinking about all those women who have been raped and murdered out here.”

Tala is picking out sharp-edged shells from the soles of her feet. She stops. “What women were raped and murdered here?”

Brett sloshes out of the water, her caftan melded between her thick thighs. “Shouldn’t we go? I thought wherever there are little animals there are bigger animals tracking them.”

I look down at my phone. The text still hasn’t been sent to Vince.

“It’s only a weasel,” Tala says, as Brett plops her big dump on the bike. I’m tempted to go over there and rip her dress from shoulder blades to ankles, check to make sure there’s no butt pad under there. Not a thing about her has turned out to be true.

I smoke Brett on the way to the top, but she gets me on the down, even though we’re both creeping. The other side of the hill is unduly treacherous with a couple gallons of water at our backs, like shooting down a water slide attached to an anchor. A few times I grip the handlebars out of fear, causing a sudden surge forward.How counterintuitive, I think, smug at last knowing Brett has been running game too. Brett upped the stakes of SPOKE’s mission—the bikes will certainly improve the quality of life for the women of this village, but they aren’t the getaway vehicles for fourteen-year-old virgins she made them out to be. But you know what? Of all people,Iget it. It’s not tragic enough that boys get to travel to big cities to learn and work and experience life while illiterate women mule tanks of water on their backs in their third trimesters. The truth won’t make people listen unless it is sufficiently awful.

It wasn’t awful enough that I grew up fearing every day would be the day I wouldn’t find my mother’s car in the school pickup line, would be the day she decided it was all simply too complicated. It wasn’t awful enough that I used to change the channel whenFamily Matterscame on afterFull Houseon Friday nights, telling my mother,I don’t really like this onebecause I was afraid it would hurt her feelings if I showed any interest in the mores of this nice, normal black family with the pretty daughter just a few years older than me. I put that memory and others like it on the page—the constant, small indignities and my constant, asphyxiating silence. It didn’t feel like lying when I said I was choked, though I only said that later, after I handed in those first few honest chapters and my editor’s response was unequivocal:It’s a little slow.

So I self-inflicted some battle wounds, no worse, no better than my best friend.