It could be late, time to go to bed, but it could also be time for lunch. The blackout shades are still drawn and Lisa has pocketed my phone. The dark, hourless room has sedated me, lowered my inhibitions like alcohol, weakened my judgment, made me say things I never would have said sober.
“You didn’t hear them come home from Talkhouse?” Jesse asks.
“I slept through it all,” I say, grateful for a question I can answer honestly. After Brett and Stephanie snuck out, Jen had gone into Lauren’s room and returned with a light blue oval the size of a stud earring. What is that? I asked, when she offered it to me. It’s only five milligrams, she said. Enough to take the edge off. I had taken Xanax before in college, but I was already drunk, and I didn’t remember feeling a difference. I got it into my head that pills just didn’t work on me, that I was too Type A to be felled by such a diminutive capsule. Never trust a first impression, came the gooey, giggly thought right before the benzo dropped me into sleep like a stone into a stream. Plunk. Bye.
I wish I could say that I told Jen the truth in a mentally altered state, but it was in the opposite order. The Xanax was administered to calm me down after I told Jen the truth about Brett. I am always so levelheaded, so restrained, until I’m not. It’s the reason Layla exists.
Following the near-violent end of the Mrs. and Mrs. game, I was relieved to hear Jen behind me on the stairs. I needed to vent to someone who didn’t see the good in Brett. Sometimes you just have to bitch about someone you love to someone who really hates her, okay? My hands were still clawed in the shape of my sister’s neck and throbbing with the unmet need to strangle her. I opened my mouth to say the things I almost said before Lauren’s hair caught on fire but Jen had raised her finger to her lips, lifting her shirt to display a rib cage that looked like a ladder of sharp elbows. She pointed at her mic, reminding me that it was strapped beneath my bra band too. She picked up my duffel (I ordered the same one as Brett because I’m unoriginal. Is that what she wanted to hear me say?) and gestured for me to follow her, down the hall, to her bedroom. There, we took turns unwiring the other, and then Jen stuffed the mics under a European sham and sat on top, to be sure.
“I could destroy her if I wanted to,” I said to Jen, finally free to speak. “With just a few words on camera, I could destroy her. But I haven’t. I have been loyal, thinking I would be rewarded for it.” I laughed bitterly at my own naiveté.
“What was that about?” Jen asked. “Did I miss something? I don’t get what happened down there.”
I told her about the text message I read on Brett’s phone.
“She wouldn’t actually fire you, would she?”
She saw my expression and said, “Right.” She rubbed the thin skin on her forehead, thinking. I was about to tell her to stop, she’d give herself wrinkles, when her eyes suddenly flared. “Oh my God!” She slapped the upturned sides of her thighs with both hands, as though she had it. “You can come and work for me! Think about that storyline. I poach you from my number one frenemy.”
“I don’t give a fuck about a storyline!” I thundered. “I care about what’s right and what’s fair. SPOKE wouldn’t exist without me! It’s so arrogant of her to think that she could get rid of me and that I wouldn’t even put up a fight! With what I have on her.” I wanted to go on, but I bit my tongue, like I always do.
Jen crossed her ankles in her lap, perched lightly on the pillow as though she were about to levitate. “Does what you have on her have something to do with her and Steph? Because everyone thinks they had an affair.”
I shook my head, more to myself than to her. No. You’ve kept it this long. Don’t tell it now.
Jen had shrugged. Not a whatever shrug. There was understanding in her narrow brown eyes. Brett never missed a chance to describe them as beady, but to me Jen always looked focused, like she was listening to what you had to say. “I get it,” she said. “She’s your sister. You love her and your loyalty is to her. I just want you to know, Kel.” She had stopped, blushing a little. “Look. I’m a pretty solitary person. You know, you run a holistic-minded company and people expect you to be this sort of soft, nurturing earth-mother type, but it is serious business what I do. Do you know that at the first advisory meeting for Green Theory, eight out of my ten shareholders passed me the résumés of qualified men who could take over as CEO? One told me I had developed a great product but I had taken it as far as I could take it. I learned early on to say I didn’t need help. It felt like a sign of weakness if I admitted that. And it’s made me lonelier than I’d like. I was really excited when I was asked to be a part of the show. I really thought I had found my tribe.” She rolled her eyes and made a sound that was not quite a laugh. “I couldn’t wait to meet everyone and swap war stories. But Steph, she’s a writer and she didn’t really get it. And Lauren, I mean, she’s fun to hang out with, but we all know her rich dad put up capital and she’s not doing any of the heavy lifting. Honestly, I was most excited to get to know Brett. But it quickly became apparent to me that Brett was a very good self-promoter but she had no idea what she was doing. I tried to have a conversation with her once about the new state tax law and she was clueless. I always thought she was hiding something, and now I realize it was you.”
I felt as though I had just been proposed to by the man of my dreams. It was the validation I had been waiting for since the inception of SPOKE. Finally, someone saw me. Not only that, but someone had been looking for me all along. The only way I could think to repay this kindness was with the truth.
It starts, as it always does, with what seems like a harmless white lie, only it became the foundation on which to lay larger beams of deceit. When NYU pays my sister’s 50K lecturing fee, Brett tells the Stern students that she read about the entrepreneurial contest that ultimately funded the first phase of SPOKE in a doctor’s waiting room. She tore out the page from the magazine and brought it home to show me, and I laughed at her. The truth is, Brett didn’t vandalize a magazine in a doctor’s waiting room—she vandalized a magazine at the nail salon, where she was getting a pedicure on a Tuesday morning, because she wasn’t in school and she didn’t have a job, but she did have her cut of our mother’s life insurance policy to blow through and endless time to while away.
Something she didn’t lie about? My reaction. I did laugh at her, but not because I didn’t believe in Brett or her vision, which is how she likes to spin it now (Look at all the people who doubted me along the way, kids!). I laughed because my sister had no business applying for a grant reserved for aspiring LGBTQ business owners given the fact that she is not lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, or questioning. My sister very much likes the D. No questions about that.
I told her not to do it. I begged her not to do it. And so of course Brett went ahead and entered the contest anyway, penning a heartbreaking application essay about what happened when she came out to our mother her freshman year of high school. She woke up the next morning to find her hair had been sheared off in her sleep. If you want to be a dyke, then you can look like a dyke, our mother told her when she stumbled downstairs, clutching her hair in both hands and crying.
It was fiction. Bad fiction that the judges devoured.