I plop onto a sand-colored linen couch in the lobby, scrolling through my phone and rereading reminder texts from Lisa. REMINDER: talk to Lauren about how you feel about Jen and Kelly pairing up today. I know you and Jen have made peace, but she has talked so much shit about you over the years. Kelly is your SISTER. How does this not bother you??
I drop my phone into my lap, running my hands over my face and sighing. Of course it bothers me that Kelly is under the spell of a holistic hack, but I have bigger things on my mind. Like the fact that Lauren has noticed Vince’s fixation on Kelly, and that Stephanie seems very much on the verge of defecting.
On the other side of the lobby, there is a bit of commotion that catches my attention. Kelly, Jen, and Layla appear beneath an olive arch with a second camera crew in tow. Kelly and Jen are both wearing flesh-colored pillowcases that Jen probably had commissioned from her own exfoliated skin cells. I start to lift a hand to get Layla’s attention, but I’m stopped cold by what I witness next. Kelly, noticing that the tag on Jen’s dress is sticking out, reaches out and tucks it in, her fingers grazing the back of Jen’s neck. Jen, walking a few steps ahead of my sister, is clearly startled by my sister’s touch. Startled and something else that changes her face in a single, sneering flash: repulsed. She wrangles her reaction not even a second later with a grateful smile.
The axis of my world shifts, just enough for me to review everything I know about Jen and Kelly’s infuriating friendship in a new light. I’m happy with that. Jen had said to Kelly when she found out they were rooming together. Why, then, did my sister’s touch just cause her to recoil in disgust? It makes no sense, unless it is not that Jen is happy to spend more time with her new friend—but that she’s been coached to spend more time with her.
And who would coach Jen to spend more time with my sister? I wake my phone and reread my reminder texts. Lisa. Lisa must have shared her suspicions about Vince and Kelly with Jen. Of course she did. Lauren knows, and if Lauren knows, her overlord does too. I watch Jen wind the diameter of the lobby’s central fountain, wondering what her reminder texts from Lisa say. Ask Kelly how she’s getting along with the other women. How are things going with Steph? It doesn’t seem like Steph has taken to her—any thoughts as to why? My best friend’s husband and my booby sister—it would make for a luscious storyline.
Marc says, “Check out the Bobbsey Twins.” He zooms in on Kelly and Jen, who are now swishing out of the lobby in their long, shapeless dresses. Kelly doesn’t look like the new girl anymore. She looks like an original. Like she could be wearing my ring.
I didn’t know it could be possible, but I feel worse after Lauren and I get back to the hotel. Based on our conversation as we roamed the market with our guide, it’s clear that she has been instructed to ask me questions to help shape Kelly’s impending storyline as a husband-stealing harlot.
“So, what’s the deal with Layla’s father?” Lauren had asked as we perused the stands of leather slippers and Moroccan saffron and tin lanterns.
“He’s not in the picture,” I’d replied with a friendly note of finality in my voice.
“So, like, has anybody been in the picture for Kelly over the last—how old is Layla?”
I took my time examining a SPOKE-red beaded gandoura. I asked how much in my spotty French. The merchant rattled a response too quickly for me to understand.
“He said four hundred and forty dirham for one, eight hundred dirham if your sister wants one too,” Lauren translated for me. Lauren speaks French like a rich college girl dripping in Patagonia and Van Cleef, which is who she was once. Even I can hear that her accent is a travesty.
“Rude,” I joked, hoping for a pardon.
“Right?” Lauren agreed, playing along. “Like we could be sisters.”
“Mother, daughter, maybe,” I said, grinning, and Lauren gasped, truly stricken I would say such a thing on camera.
We continued on our way after bargaining down to seven hundred and sixty dirham for two caftans, red for me and virgin white for Lauren.
“So how old again?” Lauren asked.
I stopped to admire a pair of sandals. “How old again what?”
Lauren smiled at me, patiently, while the camera looked on. “Layla.”
“Twelve.” I held up the sandals. “What do you think of these?”
“Cute,” Lauren said without looking at them. “And so, has Kelly been with anyone in all that time?”
I bartered with the vendor before answering her. “I really don’t like to think about my sister being with anyone, Laur.” I shuddered as if to say, Kelly? Naked? Ick.
“She must be pretty lonely then.”
I shrugged, counting out thirty dirham.
“She must be pretty pent up. I can’t even imagine going that long without the D.”
I handed the money to the vendor without answering, trying not to think about what happened the last time Kelly felt pent up, right here in Marrakesh.
When I open the door to my hotel room, the lights are off, an episode of Keeping Up with the Kardashians on but muted. It’s an old one; Khloe still has her original face.
Stephanie is asleep on top of a creamy, sequined Moroccan wedding quilt, barefoot but dressed in the same clothes she’s worn from L.A. to New York to London to here. The pink polish on her toenails is chipped, which brings me to a full stop. I’ve only ever seen Stephanie with a perfect pedicure. She wraps her toes in plastic before going to the beach in the Hamptons, to keep the sand from dulling the topcoat. It used to drive Lisa crazy. Cut the princess off at the feet, she’d tell Marc, at a pitch dogs could hear.
Steph’s phone is charging on the floor next to the bed. I check my battery—16 percent—and drop to my heels. When I unplug her phone, the screen lights up long enough for me to read a text message from Vince. If anyone asks me about it, I’m telling the truth. I’m done lying for you, Steph.
The hair on the back of my neck stands to attention, as though summoned. I look up. Stephanie is in the exact same position she was in when I entered the room, only her eyes are wide open, watching me.
“Steph!” I fall back with a startled gasp. “Sorry. Can I . . . ? Do you mind?” I hold up the cord of her charger because the way she is looking at me has rendered me incapable of speaking in complete sentences.
Stephanie reaches for her phone. She skims the message from Vince, then regards me, coldly. “Help yourself.”
“I was going to shower,” I tell her, standing unsteadily. All the blood rushes to my head, blinding me for a moment. I put my hand on the cool lime wall until my vision clears. “Unless you want to first?”
Stephanie closes her eyes. “You go.” She slips her phone under her pillow, like you would a gun.
The women are sitting cross-legged on a smattering of quatrefoil-printed pillows, facing the cameras with their backs to the fire. When I came to Morocco for the first time at fifteen—twelve years ago now!—I was surprised to find that a fire would be necessary at night. When I pictured Morocco, I pictured rolling orange dunes, wavy in the heat, men in turbans hallucinating pools of fresh water. Basically, a dumb American’s caricature of a country that I found later to be as diverse in geography and climate as my own. In June, in Marrakesh, the weather is what my mother would call pleasant. A far cry from New York, right now a festering septic tank of loogies and dog piss and two million colony-forming units of bacteria per square inch. Bless its yucky heart, I miss it.
The clover-shaped windows are open, calling the flames west. Maybe north. I’m such a girl when it comes to directions, though I know better than to say so out loud and perpetuate such a stereotype. Lisa holds up a hand in question, wanting to know where Stephanie is. I mime applying mascara while one of the sound guys mics me up.
Lisa rolls her eyes. “So another two hours then?”