Kweller closes her eyes and nods, she can believe it. It’s like watching two people meet off Tinder for the first time when one of them is so clearly out of the other’s pay grade. Kweller has more composure in the tip of her dirty pinkie than the entire hoodwinking Courtney family.
Layla slides her eyes to the left—I see it! She’s checking to make sure Marc is getting this!—and approaches Kweller, arms flung open like Kate Winslet on the bow of the Titanic. Kweller doesn’t look like she wants a hug, but as a pawn in the shoddy SPOKE empire, she’s getting one.
“Kweller is one of our top sellers on Qualb,” Layla tells us, her arm around Kweller’s waist. “She makes the most beautiful painted vases.”
I expect Kweller to blush beneath the dry clay on her cheeks and pass the compliment to the elderly woman who taught her everything she knows. But like Layla, all she says is, “Thank you.” This is the new guard of girls. They take ownership of their accomplishments. They don’t cover their zits in concealer. They like themselves. We hate them because we ain’t them. That’s something they say too, right?
I cannot take one more second of the Layla and Kweller show, so I slip back to the van while the rest of the women go on to meet the bread makers and olive oil pressers. The driver is perched on the front bumper, smoking a cigarette. I start to explain to him that I’m looking for the MiFi router because I’m expecting important news from back home, before realizing he doesn’t understand me nor does he give a shit.
I haul myself into the front passenger seat and turn on the router. I’m sweating so hard my sunglasses keep sliding down my nose, and I set my face with powder, watching and willing the signal light to stop blinking.
At long last—a connection. I refresh The Smoking Gun report on the screen of my phone, and there it is, top of the page. Digging Deep into Goal Digger Stephanie Simmons’s Bullshit. I actually laugh. That is some New York Post levels of puniness.
An Oscar-nominated female director has been had.
A few months ago, she anointed the Goal Digger’s memoir “her next great passion project,” calling it “shocking, heartbreaking, and important.”
But an investigation into Simmons’s number one bestseller, which has sold close to one million copies in just five months, reveals that the most shocking thing about Simmons’s memoir is that it’s not a memoir at all.
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 Gun can 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 the New York Times as 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 Simmons alleged 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 Gun has 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 are that high. The Diggers ooh and ah over 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. She wants 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.”