Lisa slaps the page of her production packet. “Morocco,” she says, impatiently. “We are thinking last week of June. We start filming June first so that’s enough time for everyone to get their feet wet, work through their shit”—she points her pen at me—“and come together for a big, bleeding-heart getaway. My rough understanding is that we start the trip in Marrakesh, and then head out to one of these villages in the mountains.”
Kelly raises her hand, as though she is in school. Lisa calls on her, playing along. “Yes, Miss Courtney?”
“Layla has become pen pals with a girl in the village of Aguergour. She’s one of our top sellers on the shop. I thought it would be a nice moment for the two of them to meet in person.”
There is silence all around, mine sharpest. This is the first I’ve heard of Layla’s pen pal. Kelly learns fast. She always has.
Jen, of all people, is the one to say, “That sounds like a really powerful moment.” But then she keeps talking. “The thing is, I don’t think I can go in good faith. The CDC recommends a hepatitis A vaccination for Morocco, the makers of which are on PETA’s list of companies that test on animals. They use baby bunny rabbits.” Her chin quivers.
Lisa holds her hand up to silence me, though I haven’t spoken. “Is that right?”
Jen dips her finger into a tub of lip balm free of parabens, sulfates, and phthalates and dots it on. That was a quick recovery—from almost crying over the baby bunny rabbits to an act of personal grooming. “But just because I can’t make it doesn’t mean it’s not a great idea.” She smiles at me, like she had to grease her lips just to get them to do that.
Now Lauren raises her hand. “I hate to pile on,” she says. “But we’re in app development for the new version of SADIE that’s tailored for the LGBTQ community. My CEO is worried about me going to a country that prosecutes gays and lesbians for their sexuality.”
Lisa works her pen between her thumb and index finger, index and middle, holding Lauren accountable in a thousand-yard stare. “Weren’t you in Dubai over the holidays?”
Lauren dips her finger into Jen’s tub of lip balm. “For one night.” She rubs her lips together. “You can’t fly direct to the Maldives.”
I snort. “And where do the Maldives stand on gay and lesbian rights?”
Lauren gapes, opening and closing her shiny mouth a few times before a few sober brain cells bump into each other. “I read that your investor had his daughter’s wedding at Trump Bedminster!” she cries, completely out of context. A field producer covers her mouth with the production packet in horror and I’m tempted to do the same. What she just said is true, but Lauren has never come for me before. A two-fingered chill walks my spine. What is happening here?
“People! People!” Lisa chirps in a way that makes Kelly bow her head and plug a finger in her ear. “Enough. Everyone is to mark June twenty-third to July second on their calendars. We will find a location that works for the group.”
“Lisa,” I sputter, “I have to go to Morocco this summer.”
Lisa curls her lip, disgusted by my desperation. “We’ll figure it out, Brett.” She waits for Jen and Lauren to turn their attention back to the production packet. What the fuck? she mouths, jerking her head in their direction. I exaggerate my shrug to show I’m just as baffled as she is. Lisa rolls her eyes and mouths Fuck my life, both because she is almost fifty and doesn’t realize that no one is saying that anymore and because what’s my problem is Jesse’s problem is Lisa’s problem. That’s always the way it’s been. So why does this time feel different?
CHAPTER 4
* * *
Stephanie
“When I was sixteen, I entered an essay-writing contest at a major women’s magazine and won. In the contest’s half-century history, I was the youngest woman ever to take home the honor. You have a voice beyond your years, the editor in chief told me in a handwritten note, and because of that we are willing to bend the rules for you. I had lied about my age on the application form. Contestants had to be eighteen to enter. To this day I keep that note in my top desk drawer, reading it whenever my confidence wavers. It’s a reminder that I once believed in myself so much that I, Stephanie Simmons, broke a rule.
“There were prizes. Publication, of course. Five thousand dollars, though that was incidental. I would have left all of it on the table for the trip into the city to meet with a literary agent. Mary Shelley began writing Frankenstein before she turned twenty. S. E. Hinton published The Outsiders when she was just sixteen. I had the first two chapters of my novel already drafted and an outline of the rest, and I planned on not just meeting with Ellen Leibowitz of the Ellen Leibowitz Agency to find out how the publishing world worked, but on pitching her and leaving with representation.
“?‘We’ll make a day out of it!’ my mother exclaimed after reading the letter from the editor in chief. Breakfast at the Plaza. Shopping at Bloomingdale’s. She would get a manicure while I was no doubt signing with the Ellen Leibowitz Literary Agency on Lexington Avenue (‘Lexington Avenue is a very upscale street,’ my mother said with authority when she looked up the address on the Internet.) We’d end the day with a celebratory drink at The Ritz Carlton in Battery Park, watching an orange sun glaze the Hudson. I would order an iced tea and my mother a glass of champagne, and when the bartender wasn’t looking, we’d swap. ‘Oh, Stephanie,’ my mother said, pinning the letter to the refrigerator with a magnet from Baltusrol Golf Club (I was a single-digit handicap by the time I entered high school). ‘Aren’t you so proud of yourself?’ Her blue eyes brimmed with tears, the effect infuriating and depleting all at once. Let me have this, I remember thinking, incapable of parsing what I wanted more: to break something or to sleep.
“I understand my anger and my exhaustion now. As a child, my mother was constantly asking me to perform for her, to reassure her that I was doing well, that I was thriving, that I was happy. That she was a good mother and that she had made the right choice in adopting me, defying all those who counseled against it. She was single, they told her. She was fifty. She was white. Did she have any idea how much work it took to raise a child in a two-parent family? Sure, she could afford help, but wasn’t it a little bit cruel, wasn’t it a little bit selfish, to bring up a black girl in a town as homogeneous as Summit, New Jersey, just because she missed her window to have a baby of her own? My mother was married briefly in her thirties, the ink barely dry on her divorce papers before her own mother was diagnosed with an aggressive and intractable form of breast cancer. She put her life on hold—thirteen years of it—to take care of her mother, and her death left a void for a new dependent. She was volunteering at a women’s shelter when a counselor mentioned a friend’s troubled teenage daughter had gotten pregnant, and that the family was looking to put the baby up for adoption. ‘I didn’t care if you were black, white, green, or polka-dotted’, my mother told me the only time I asked her why I didn’t look like her. ‘I wanted you.’ It was the closest we ever got to acknowledging my race.