Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

She looked hurt and embarrassed, and I immediately felt guilty.

“Sorry,” I muttered as I turned to go.

Before she shut the door, Leigh said shyly, “I think your sister’s cool.”

For the next month, Sophie barely spoke. She spent as much time as she could in the editing room, and when they kicked her out to lock it for the night, she’d either go home or come to my dorm, where she’d eat my snacks and resist my attempts to talk to her. She didn’t seem angry. She just seemed checked out, like she was trying to pretend she wasn’t at school anymore.

When she got the fellowship in New York, I couldn’t be happy for her. At first I didn’t even understand what it was.

“How can you go to grad school when you haven’t graduated yet?” I asked her.

“It’s not grad school,” she explained. “It’s a fellowship. They teach you how to make a movie.”

“And you hate it here so much that you’re just going to leave with a whole year left?” I asked.

“I don’t hate it here,” she said. “I might come back and finish my degree later.”

I didn’t believe her.

“This is my fault,” I said. “I let you get hurt, and now you’re just going to leave.”

She smiled at me then and shook her head, like she was just a normal big sister and I was a kid who was being silly. Her hair was growing back in; she had a quarter inch of dark fuzz on her head now.

“Not everything has to do with you,” she said, still smiling.

SOPHIE SCREENED DANIEL the last week before winter break. She reserved a room and a projector from the film department without my help. The room was packed — Andrea and I sat in the front and watched it fill in behind us, people standing along the walls. CeCe didn’t come, which didn’t surprise me. Neither did Daniel.

The first few minutes of the movie were familiar. I saw the footage I’d shot in front of the row house — it looked jerky and amateurish, and I was embarrassed, but Andrea squeezed my arm and whispered that it was great. The first few scenes Sophie had shot looked shaky too, and I started to relax, thinking that was just how the camera was. But the scenes she’d shot later — Daniel practicing and people talking about what they thought of him — looked like a different person had made them, somebody older and more confident. About ten minutes in was a scene I didn’t remember, Daniel in the park all by himself, spinning around and shouting like a little kid. It was funny to watch, and a couple people laughed, but the footage itself was beautiful — the blue-gold light, the swings squeaking in the distance. Even Daniel looked different, his breath in the cold air like a halo around him.

I remembered when I was five or six and Sophie taught me to draw. We set out my Batman action figure on the kitchen table, and both of us sketched him in pencil. I started off okay — the cape, the double-pointed hood — but then I got off course. Batman’s arms ended up too long, his legs too short, like he was a crime-fighting orangutan.

Sophie shook her head. “You drew Batman like he looks in your head. You have to draw what you see. Just think of it as shapes. Don’t even think of it as Batman.”

“Then it won’t look like him,” I said.

But I looked again at my drawing — I’d tried to draw Batman leaping in the air, even though the action figure was just standing on the table. And Sophie’s Batman was perfect, down to the dents where his plastic joints came together. I never learned to draw as well as she did; I realized I probably wasn’t going to be as good at making movies either.

Then I saw my sister’s face. She was on the screen, her head freshly shaved. The camera jerked all over the place — whoever was shooting didn’t know how to work it.

“Say it,” a male voice said.

Sophie just looked around her. She was in a badly lit room with a flowered plastic curtain behind her — a bathroom. She looked scared.

“Say it,” the voice said again, louder.

Sophie stared down at a piece of paper in her lap. She read in a monotone.

“‘My name is Sophie Stark,’” she said. “‘I am a worthless nobody. No one gives a fuck about me or my ugly, rotten cunt.’”

Then a female voice spoke. I recognized CeCe.

“Don’t just read it,” she said. “Say it like you mean it.”

Sophie looked up at the camera then. She didn’t look scared anymore. She looked like she had when she was nine years old, examining Batman.

“‘My name is Sophie Stark,’” she said again. “‘I am a worthless nobody. No one gives a fuck about me or my ugly, rotten cunt.’”

“Say it again,” CeCe hissed.

Sophie lifted her chin high. Her bald head looked regal now. Her voice was loud and strong.

“‘My name is Sophie Stark,’” she said. “‘I am a worthless nobody. Nobody gives a fuck about me.’”

She paused there and looked away from the camera. I assumed she was looking at CeCe, and I imagined her standing there, digging her fingernails into her skin, trying to figure out why she wasn’t getting what she wanted.

“Say the rest of it,” she said.

“‘Or my ugly, rotten cunt,’” Sophie said, and the movie was over.

I immediately shoved my way to the front to talk to Sophie. I was angry — at CeCe, at Daniel’s friends, who I now knew must’ve been with her, but at Sophie, too. I didn’t understand how she could put something so gross and humiliating in her own movie and seem so happy about it.

Sophie was surrounded by people — at least ten girls and a few guys, too, were crowded around her, asking questions and trying to get her attention. She didn’t seem panicked; she was answering, even smiling.

“How did you get the courage to put yourself out there like that?” a girl with purple acne asked.

“I don’t really think of it as courage,” Sophie said. “I just wanted to make an interesting movie.”

I realized then that Sophie did care what other people thought — at least, she liked to be praised. I shouldn’t have been disappointed — I’d kept glancing over at Andrea during the movie to see if she was impressed — but I was. I waited awhile for the crowd around Sophie to thin. When it didn’t, I went home.

A FEW DAYS LATER I helped Sophie ship her things to New York. She’d gotten rid of almost everything — her apartment was clean and empty, and four boxes were stacked neatly on the floor. We borrowed her roommate’s car and drove to the post office without talking. It was a beautiful winter day — perfectly clear, face-burningly cold. In line at the post office, everyone else was shipping Christmas presents and grad-school applications. When we took our spot all the way back by the entrance, I asked Sophie, “Why would you want to put something like that in your movie?”

“Oh,” she said, “that was my plan all along.”

The line moved forward, but I didn’t move.

“You planned that?” I asked her.

“Well, not the shaving part. But as soon as they started filming, yeah, I knew I had to use it.”

A guy with a stack of manila envelopes had lined up behind us, and now he was looking nervously at the gap that had opened in front of us. I still didn’t move.

“Why?” I asked.

“I needed something big to happen. I had all this good footage of Daniel, but I needed something more to make it a real story. I don’t know how people do that, like how screenwriters make a story out of nothing. I was kind of worried. And then they just stepped in and made a story for me.”

“So the whole time, while they were making you say that awful shit, you were just thinking what a great ending this would be?”

The guy with the envelopes cut ahead of us.

“Basically,” said Sophie. “I mean, they weren’t holding me down or anything. I could’ve run, but I waited so they could finish the scene.”