Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“Maybe you should go to parties,” I said. “Talk to people. Talk to Daniel. That’s a better way of getting his attention than stalking him with a camera.”

Sophie got a crumpled look on her face then that I’d only seen a handful of times before.

“You think I don’t try,” she said, “but I try.”

She pulled her knees up to her chest and rested her head on them.

“When I first came here,” she went on, “I decided I was going to fit in. I got a haircut. I got a short skirt.”

I tried to imagine my sister dressing like the other girls. I tried to imagine her looking like them, her face all happy and nervous as she laughed with them on the way to class.

“And what happened?” I asked.

“It worked. I had girlfriends. I had these girls, and we went out for pizza together, and we went to the bars and tried to get older guys to buy us drinks, and afterward we talked about which guys were cute and which ones liked us. I even went home with a guy once, who I didn’t even like, just so I could tell the girls about it at breakfast the next morning.”

It almost made me jealous, my sister having a social life I knew nothing about.

“Where are they?” I asked. “How come you’re not still friends?”

Guys were yelling in the street outside the window. There was a football game that night, and the tailgates were starting.

“Two of the girls had a fight. Jenny and Carla. Carla wasn’t speaking to Jenny, and I met Jenny for coffee — that was something we used to do, meet each other for coffee, even though none of us liked it — and Jenny was crying because Carla wouldn’t talk to her. She said she kept thinking of things she wanted to tell Carla, just little things that only Carla would understand. She said the feeling of having no one to tell those things to was so terrible, and she said it like she knew I’d understand, but I’d never had a thing I’d wanted to tell any of them that badly. To me, hanging out together was like acting — putting on the right face, laughing at the right time. It was interesting, and I liked it in a way, but I didn’t need it like Jenny did. That’s when I knew that I could spend time with people but I was never really going to be friends with them the way they were with each other. And so I just stopped trying.”

Sophie pushed some T-shirts off her pillow and lay back with her hands behind her head. Now she looked relaxed, or resigned. I was mad at her for giving up, and also I was worried — if those girls had been so easy to give up, would she be able to drop me like that, too? When she went off to college and I was back in high school, she never called home. At the time that had made it easier for me to imagine she was cool, but now I wondered if she’d forgotten I existed.

“You’re acting like you can never feel close to people,” I said. “Does that mean you don’t feel close to me?”

She looked upset then, like I’d insulted her. “That’s different,” she said. “You’re my brother.”

“How is it different?” I asked her.

Now she was annoyed. She got up, went to the kitchen, came back with a glass of chocolate milk.

“It’s different because I love you,” she said.

It didn’t explain anything, but still I was relieved. I didn’t have to say it back; I knew she wouldn’t even want me to.

“Can I have some?” I said instead, and she handed me the glass.

NEXT WE FOLLOWED DANIEL to a basketball game. It was a preseason game against a college somewhere in Missouri that was even smaller than ours, whose players looked kind of dazed on the court, like they’d just come up from underground. I didn’t know anything about basketball, but it was easy to see that Daniel was dominating the game. Over and over he drove down the center of the court and put the ball in the basket with total ease, leaving the Missourians just standing there blinking. Daniel didn’t yell or pump his fist after a basket, but you could tell he was enjoying himself. He was light on his feet, like my high school friend Tyler the day after he slept with his girlfriend for the first time. Daniel looked as if the ball and the basket and his team and the crowd were all pouring energy into him and he was radiating it back out.

By the half we were up twenty points. I thought Sophie would want to take a break from shooting, but she started pointing the camera into the crowd, shooting kids high-fiving and eating M&M’s and talking about the game. People were looking at us, and I tried to get her to stop so we wouldn’t draw attention to ourselves, but she ignored me. Then I saw two girls stepping over the bleachers to get to us. They had long, shiny hair, one blond and the other dark, and they were wearing tight jeans and T-shirts with our college’s name and looking pretty and confident and carefree. I’m not proud of it, but I moved a little farther away from my sister as they got close, so I could plausibly pretend I wasn’t with her, but the blond one sounded interested when she pointed to the camera and asked, “Are you making a movie?”

Sophie didn’t answer, but she swung the camera around to shoot them. The dark-haired one giggled and waved, but the blond girl stared straight at the camera like she thought there was something hidden inside it.

“Yeah,” I said. “You want to be in it?”

“What’s it about?” the blond girl asked.

My sister didn’t say anything, so I answered for her. “It’s a documentary about Daniel Vollker. Do you have any… uh, thoughts about him?”

The dark-haired girl didn’t hesitate. “He made me care about basketball,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about sports when I came here, but he’s just so good, and you can tell he’s also a really good guy.”

The blond girl rolled her eyes. “He’s overrated,” she said. “I mean, he’s good and all, but good for our school doesn’t mean that much. He doesn’t really have a shot at the NBA.”

We were drawing a crowd. More and more people came swarming toward us, crowding in front of the camera and yelling. Sophie peeled her face away from the viewfinder and looked at me with knitted brows.

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Any minute someone was going to have the idea to beat us up.

“Okay!” I shouted. “Everybody who wants to be in the movie, get in a line behind me!”

For a second, everyone just yelled more. I started to plan a path to the exit. Then a girl hopped over a row of bleachers to stand behind me. And another. And a third. And then a pack of guys, still yelling. Pretty soon there were twenty people all lined up behind me, just because I’d told them to. Sophie swung the camera around to capture them — shoving and joking and eating Skittles but waiting their turn.

I didn’t have a chance to interview any of them, though, because two security guards in windbreakers came up the bleacher steps to ask us if we were authorized.

“Yes,” said Sophie, still filming.

“Okay,” said one of the guards, big and balding, with those brown bits of hair clinging to the sides of his head that made me scared of getting old. “Show us your form.”

Sophie lowered the camera and looked at the guard blankly.

“You can’t record a game without the permission of the athletic department,” the balding guard said. “You’re going to have to leave.”

All the way back to my dorm, I felt pleased with myself, like I’d gotten away with something. In a way we had — they’d kicked us out, but they hadn’t taken the tape.

AFTER THAT, things were different for me. The kids in film class heard about the movie and were either curious or dismissive in a way that let me know they were actually curious. They’d all been doing just the class projects, things like “record something that is moving.” Some of the more advanced kids started talking to me in the lab room where we signed out the camera — one of them volunteered to help us edit. The girls in my English class still ignored me, but the blond girl from the basketball game started saying hi to me around campus. She told me her name was Andrea and she was a sophomore, a history major. She had a sad edge to her voice that made me like her hair even more.