Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

I still had two years of high school to get through. I tried on some different things, too: I started listening to a lot of punk music and wearing band T-shirts, and then I tried out for and managed to get on the baseball team. Both of these worked out sort of okay — no one thought I was a loser, and I made a couple of new friends. But I didn’t get a girlfriend or become extremely cool, and I felt kind of cut loose, like as soon as I left school in the afternoon, I didn’t know what to do or how to be. I missed my sister. I kept starting a sentence in our silent house and realizing she wasn’t there to hear.

When I got into Drucker, it was obvious I’d go. I’d gotten into a couple of other schools, and I made a show on the phone with my sister of weighing my options, but all she said was, “You should probably come here,” so I did. I remembered how she’d been in high school, but I’d heard that college was supposed to change people — my friend Tyler’s brother had come back a Jehovah’s Witness — and I thought there was a chance Sophie had become cool. When I sent in my acceptance letter, I imagined her talking about me to a bunch of girls in black clothes, who played it cool because they were artists but who were all secretly excited to meet me.

But Sophie was even weirder in college than she had been in high school. She’d started wearing old-lady floral dresses that didn’t fit any better than the men’s shirt had, and it seemed like she wasn’t washing her hair. As far as I could tell, she had never taken more than one class in any given subject. She still had no friends. Every night she came to my room and sat on my bed for hours, not talking to me, just drawing stick figures in a notebook she had. Nothing I said about my classes seemed to interest her much — I was planning to declare premed, so I was taking mostly science — but she perked up when I mentioned Intro to Cinematography. This was an elective I’d picked because it wasn’t full, but soon it was my favorite — I’d always assumed that people who made movies just tried to make them look as much like real life as possible, but I was learning that movies could make life look different, could make time go faster or slower, make the world seem flat or deep, put a woman in red far in the background and let her draw everyone’s eyes. Whenever I talked about that class, Sophie would listen really closely, and sometimes she’d write something down. It made me feel proud of myself, that I could teach her something for a change. Then, after a couple of weeks, she said, “I need a video camera.”

“For what?” I asked.

“I’m going to make a movie about Daniel,” she said.

Daniel Vollker was the guy my sister was in love with. He was on the basketball team and lived in an off-campus house full of jocky guys, and he looked like the star of a sci-fi movie about genetic engineering. He had a beautiful (though supposedly slightly crazy) girlfriend who was the vice president of the campus Christian fellowship, and he routinely hooked up with equally beautiful but less wholesome girls who then cried about him in campus bars and made him famous. He didn’t go for unconventional-looking women, and he didn’t move in the same circles as my sister, who as far as I could tell moved in no circles at all. The only reason he knew she existed, it turned out, was because she’d been following him around for weeks, even skipping her own classes so that she could go to his. And now she wanted to film him.

“Why?” I asked.

“I took a lot of pictures of him,” she explained. “But I want to show him moving.”

Sophie had gotten a little point-and-shoot camera for her fifteenth birthday, and she’d taken photos off and on since then. She’d taken one of me when we were both in high school that I still love — I’m sitting on our front steps eating an ice cream sandwich, and I look more like myself than I’ve ever looked in any mirror, a little bit angry but a little bit hopeful, too, like I’m looking forward to not being mad. Now she was cutting most of the few classes she was actually enrolled in to take pictures. They were different from the ones I’d seen when we were kids — sometimes she’d take ten or twenty shots of a crowded quad or a person sitting in the corner of the student union, and she’d always just shrug when I asked about them, like she was trying an experiment she couldn’t or wouldn’t explain. But photography was a thing normal people did, unlike drawing people for spare change on the street, so I was happy to encourage it if I could. I was starting to worry that my sister and I were falling down a misfit hole we’d never climb out of.

“Just make sure you don’t break it,” I said. “We got a big lecture on how fragile they are.”

“Oh,” she said, “you’re coming. I don’t know how to work the camera by myself.”

Right away we ran into trouble. We spent a Saturday standing outside the big, dilapidated row house where Daniel lived, waiting for him to come out. It was October, not cold yet but getting there, with that gold pretty light that falls across the Midwest right before winter, and for a while I felt good, standing out there with my sister, showing her the few things I’d learned. But Daniel never came out, and the next day in English the guys who sat in the back made fun of me.

“I hear your sister’s a stalker,” said one.

That was not what either of us needed.

“Can’t you make a different movie?” I asked her.

“Why?” she asked.

“Daniel’s friends are starting to talk shit,” I said.

We were at her place for once, an apartment above a bar that she shared with a med student. Her kitchen was clean and organized, with a bowl of fruit on the table next to a loaf of her roommate’s homemade bread. Sophie’s food tastes had stalled out around age ten, and she kept all her own food — oatmeal packets and canned fruit and white bread and sugar — in her bedroom, which looked like a homeless person’s shopping cart, like if she didn’t keep everything she owned in a giant pile right next to her body, someone would steal it or throw it away. She cleared a space for herself amid all the papers and socks and candy wrappers on her bed and sat down.

“Are you worried about this because you want to hang out with those guys?” she asked me.

Sometimes I assumed that because Sophie didn’t care what was going on around her, she didn’t understand it either. I was always wrong.

“No,” I said. “I just— Why don’t you make a movie about someone who wants to have a movie made about them?”

Sophie cleared a space for me to sit, too. Her messy room looked and smelled like home, and I missed the years when I couldn’t sleep and she’d make a space for me on the floor next to her bed. Sometimes she was the one who couldn’t get to sleep; she had night terrors that made her howl in fear with her eyes wide open, and I was the only one who could comfort her. I’d put my two hands around her head and squeeze gently, like I was holding her brains together, and slowly she’d calm down and sleep.

“If you want to try and be friends with them,” she said, “you should go ahead. They have a lot of parties. They get a lot of girls.”

From someone else this could’ve been manipulative, but Sophie always meant what she said. And she was right — I did want parties and girls. The closest I’d come to sex was a party senior year of high school when Tracy Schneider stuck her hand down my pants and stroked me until I was hard, then mysteriously lost interest and walked away. What I didn’t understand was why Sophie didn’t want the same things. She might not care about making friends, but she did care about Daniel. Sophie was weird, but I was old enough to know she wouldn’t be the first person to fake being normal in order to get laid.