Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

I was on my second or third drink when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Robbie,” said Andrea, “I’m so glad you’re here.”

Her cheeks were flushed; she had dark circles under her eyes. Her hair fell around her face all tangled and pretty. I wanted to stick my hand in it and pull her against me. I thought there probably was a kind of guy who would do that, and girls probably liked him. Instead I was the kind of guy who said, “It’s great to see you. You look great.”

She laughed, a sad laugh that made her seem older.

“I look like shit,” she said. “Will you come outside with me? I kind of need someone to talk to.”

“Of course,” I said.

The yard was wide and deep and sloped down until it met a stand of oak trees. Close to the lights of the house were clusters of people drinking and laughing, but as we walked farther down the hill, the crowd thinned out until it was just couples half hidden in the shadows. The bottom of the yard smelled like rain and fallen leaves, and it made me think of home, of the green places near the creek where it smelled like rain all year round. Andrea sat down on the grass in a single fluid motion, and I sort of stumbled into a squat beside her.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

She gave that laugh again. “I’m getting divorced.”

She held up her left hand, and now I saw two rings sparkling on it, a gold one and a diamond. I’d never thought to look at anybody’s hand before — it had never occurred to me that someone my age could be married. All I could think to ask was, “Why?”

“It’s my fault,” she said. She wrapped her arms around her knees. “In high school we were so in love. We thought no one understood us. And when we were eighteen, we got married as this, like, fuck-you to everyone who said we couldn’t do it, that it wouldn’t last. And now, surprise, it hasn’t. My parents said I’d want to date other people, and I do. I just want to be a regular girl.”

She stretched her feet out in front of her. She was wearing purple sneakers with a heart drawn on the left toe. I had no idea what to say.

“Maybe it’ll be good,” I said. “I mean, now you can do what you want.”

She looked up at the branches above our heads. I saw a bat flick between them. When she looked back at me, she seemed indignant, almost mad.

“Yeah,” she said, “but wouldn’t I be a better person if I didn’t care about that? Shouldn’t I just care about the person I love and the promise I made and not anything else? Isn’t that how really good, strong people are?”

Right then I got extremely tired. The vodka was turning heavy in my head, and it seemed suddenly very clear that I wasn’t going to do anything more than talk with Andrea that night. I thought about her husband and their teenage wedding and how much they must’ve loved each other to do something nobody I knew would ever think of doing, and I wondered if she was right. Maybe if you loved someone that much, you should do everything you could to defend that love, even against yourself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but why are you asking me this? I’ve never been in love. I haven’t even kissed a girl.”

I hadn’t planned on admitting that, and once I did, I knew I’d really given up on sleeping with Andrea that night, or whatever quasi-sexual thing I’d been hoping to do with her in somebody’s weird yard. I just wanted to go home.

But she didn’t seem upset or surprised.

“I had a class with your sister last year,” she said. “Once I asked her how she was, and she just stared right through me like I didn’t exist. She was so strange and mean, and nobody liked her. Then you came, and now she’s this celebrity. That made me want to be your friend, that you could do that.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It was her idea to make the movie. I just talk to people sometimes.”

“Whatever you do,” she said, “you’re helping someone else live in the world, and that’s more than I’ve ever done.”

I remembered the summer when I was seven and Sophie was ten, and one day she refused to eat and hid in her closet, shivering like our cat right before it died.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“My stomach hurts,” she said. “Don’t tell Mom.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not going to the doctor,” she said. “They ask all these questions, and then they send you to another doctor, and they ask more questions. I’m never going to the doctor again.”

This was around the time of the IQ test, which led to an appointment with a psychologist, which led to an appointment with a psychiatrist who prescribed Sophie a drug that kept her up all night chewing on her hair until she refused to take it anymore. From each visit she came home mad and exhausted, complaining about questions like “How do you feel around other people?”—which to her had no answer.

“I don’t think it’s that kind of doctor,” I told her, but she didn’t care.

“I’m not going,” she said, waving me away.

That night I tried to bring her dinner, but she was curled in the fetal position with her cheek on the floor. Her skin was a bad color like cooked fish, and her forehead burned.

“I’m getting better,” she said, but I knew she wasn’t.

“We’ll tell the doctor you can’t talk,” I said, “because it hurts too much. And if he asks any questions, I’ll answer them for you.”

She looked up at me and her eyes were dull with hurting.

“Okay,” she said, and let me lead her out.

I only had to answer a couple questions. Soon they took her away into a part of the hospital where I wasn’t allowed to go. It turned out that her appendix had burst and filled her belly with infected fluid — another day and the infection would have spread throughout her body.

She didn’t thank me — I’d never seen Sophie thank anyone before or since — but after she came home with her stomach all bandaged up, she did look at me over her bowl of Jell-O and say, “Without you I could’ve died.”

It wouldn’t be so bad, I thought, to be the one who took care of Sophie, who made it so the world would know her.

I was feeling warm toward Andrea now. I was grateful to her for making me feel useful, and I wanted to do something to help her.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said. I tried to think of something smarter to tell her, but she seemed satisfied. She scooted up next to me and laid her head on my chest — her hair smelled clean and sweet. I put my arm around her. I felt peaceful and hopeful, and as I fell asleep with her there against the tree, I didn’t wonder where my sister was or whether she’d gotten home safe.

We woke up sometime in the early morning when it was too cold to be outside anymore. It was still dark out, and I walked Andrea most of the way to her house. We were sleepy and still kind of drunk, and we didn’t talk much, but it felt easy and right to be walking close to her, brushing up against each other sometimes and not apologizing or moving away. I didn’t kiss her because I was afraid of looking like an opportunist, but after we hugged good-bye at the edge of the little creek, she squeezed my upper arm and said she’d see me soon. After that I ate a Snickers I had in my desk drawer, and then I went back to bed to redo the night’s sleep, which had been full of half dreams, half hallucinations in which gray figures crossed the yard to tug lightly on my hair and clothes. It was afternoon and I was just waking up when someone knocked on my door.

My sister’s left ear was higher than her right. Her mouth sloped down a little to the right side, and her cheekbones flared out of her thin face like wings. I had never noticed any of this before, and I might’ve gone my whole life without knowing it, if she hadn’t come to my door that day with her head completely shaved.