Layla looks fairly heartbroken. I reach for her hand on the floor.
“I’m glad you’re here, little mama.” Lauren winks at Layla. Lauren may be a drunk pitbull but at least she’s kind to kids. Turning to Stephanie, she responds, “And for your information, I don’t mind partaking in physical activity when the piece of equipment is, like, the Hermés bag of the fitness world.”
“What a ringing endorsement!” Stephanie cries, her tone swinging from nasty to bubbly faster than I can think, how many milligrams is she on? The waiter returns with her wine. “Sir,” she addresses him formally as he sets the glass in front of her, “could you go into the basement or storage unit or mummy tomb or whatever and look for our bikes? You’ll know they’re our bikes because they’re SPOKE bikes. They are the most beautiful bikes in the whole wide world. They came in first place at the Omaha county bike beauty pageant in ’09. They beat out Christy Nicklebocker and she motorboated all of the judges, including the three-hundred-and-seven-pound church lady who is related to her through marriage.”
The waiter turns to me, dumbstruck. “Madam?” he asks.
Everyone is looking at me, waiting for me to do something, to say something. “Just a joke.” I laugh haltingly to the waiter, offering him the plate of food Layla put together for Stephanie and Lauren, so that he has an excuse to take it and leave the table. I have to keep nodding at him as he backs away, you can go, it’s okay.
“I’ll make sure you’re the first to ride one tomorrow,” I say to Stephanie, desperate to placate her. Just hold out on going completely crazy until the trip is over. “When we get to Aguergour.”
“When we get to A-grrr-gorrrr,” Stephanie repeats with ridiculing concentration. “A-grrr-gorrrr.”
“Yeah,” I say, pretending like she isn’t making fun of me. “It’ll be better anyway. We’ll have more room to see what the bikes can really do in the country.”
Layla sighs longingly, turning to my sister with big, pleading eyes. “If I promise to stay under a certain speed limit, can I try them?”
“Layla,” Kelly says in her scary mom voice, “what did I say?”
Stephanie works a back molar with her tongue, dislodging a lump of wet food, her eyes darting from Layla to Kelly, Layla to Kelly. “My mother never let me do anything either,” she says, her gaze settling on Layla.
“Excuse me,” Kelly laughs, testily, “but she is in Morocco.”
Stephanie rises to all fours, trying to untangle her legs from her caftan to get into a more comfortable position, but for a moment, I think she might spring across the table and attack Layla. “I hid everything from her,” Stephanie continues, leering at Layla like a lecherous old man. “You’ll learn how to do it too. You’ll have to because your mother will never truly understand what life is like for you. You’ll become little negro Nancy Drew.” She giggles, queerly. “I should do a children’s series. Negro Nancy Drew.”
“Hey!” I say, more startled than angry. I have never heard that kind of language from Stephanie before.
“Don’t use that word about my daughter,” Kelly says, voice quivering with indignation.
Layla grumbles, looking absolutely humiliated. “Mom.”
Stephanie only laughs. “You don’t get to tell me anything about that word, Miss Teen Mom.”
I gesture desperately at the riad’s butler, who has been waiting on the sidelines for a moment to intervene. Now is the time, the wave of my hand says. Now. Now. Now.
“Ladies,” he says, his hands clasped in prayer, “dessert is served on the Atlas rooftop, along with a special treat.” He holds out an arm, leading the way. “If you will.”
The Atlas rooftop is so named for its unobstructed views of the High Atlas mountain range, its djebels brown and snowcapped in the winter, but only brown now. I stay close to Layla as the rest of the Diggers fan out on the quiet, twinkle-lit rooftop. I can tell she’s reeling after what happened downstairs.
“That’s where we’re going tomorrow,” I tell her, pointing at the mountain range. Tucked into the crests and valleys are mud-thatched Berber villages where the women sing as they weave pom-pom rugs and knead dough for bread, celebrating their emancipation from the walk to get water, their freedom to work.
Layla aims her phone at the view width-wise, snapping a picture for an Instagram story. She attempts a few different captions before giving up with a dispirited sigh.
“You okay?” I ask her.
“Why doesn’t Stephanie like me?” Her mouth tightens and twists to the left, a sign she’s about to cry. Kelly and I used to take videos when she was a baby, her mouth a little raisin on the side of her face, the veins in her temples straining against her skin. You can hear us giggling in the background, Oh, oh, there she blowwwwws.
I lean against the clay ledge of the rooftop, so that I’m facing her. Under the fat Christmas tree lights, Layla’s face is arresting save for a humdinger of a pimple in the corner of her chin. Marc electric-slides around us, capturing us in a profile shot. “It hurts when it feels like someone doesn’t like you, especially someone you might admire.” I rove my head around, until I find an angle where I catch her eye. “Right? You admire Steph?”
“I do admire her, but I thought . . .” She exhales with enough force to blow out the candles on a birthday cake, as if frustrated she can’t find the words to explain.
“What?” I ask gently, reaching out to smooth her hair.
Layla ducks out from under my hand. “You wouldn’t get it.” There is something on that word—you—that I have never heard before, at least not directed at me.
I blink, stung. Kelly is the one who loves Layla but doesn’t get her. That’s my job. That’s what I do—I get people. I try to make her see that I understand. “I admired Stephanie too, and it was important to me that she liked me,” I say. “But something I realized, Layls, is that—”
Layla doesn’t let me finish. “Stop telling me you understand because you don’t. You don’t know what it’s like not knowing anyone who looks like you.”
The statement feels like a concrete barrier erected on a previously open border. I’m shook to my core realizing that Layla feels like this and didn’t tell me. Of course I have worried about her, being one of a handful of black students at her school, but Layla is so far from an outlier. She’s one of the most popular girls in her class. Everyone who meets her falls in love with her. I guess I assumed that being liked was the same thing as belonging. I never stopped to think how meaningful it would be for Layla to meet someone like Stephanie, someone who would understand what life was like for her better than anyone, but who instead has taken a visceral dislike to her. “I feel really stupid for not realizing you might feel like that,” I tell her apologetically. “And for assuming you would just volunteer those feelings if you did. I’m the adult. I’m the one who should be asking if you’re doing okay.”
Layla gives me a half-hearted shrug. “It’s fine. Mom is always asking me anyway. It gets annoying.” But she doesn’t sound annoyed at all.
On the other side of the rooftop, where white benches pen in a short table set with a platter of sour fruit tarts and a mosaic-styled ice bucket, Lauren cries, “A fortune-teller? Maybe she can tell me which one of you hussies planted the Post story.”
“Shut the fuck up about the Post story,” Steph roars. “Everyone is so fucking bored of the fucking Post story.”
I can practically hear the air being let out of Lauren’s sails from across the rooftop, but I ignore the heated exchange for Layla’s sake. I will do anything to cheer her up. I pop my eyes at her as if to say, A fortune-teller? Fun!
“Come on,” I say, leading her over to the sitting area, where the evening’s special treat has turned out to be a plump, fifty-something woman with a sheer yellow scarf draped loosely around her head, shuffling a deck of tarot cards.