Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“It has,” I said. I didn’t know what to say next. I hadn’t thought beyond walking up to the table, looking at Bean, and seeing what he did.

“Allison was my best friend back in Burnsville. Allison, this is my fiancée, Sarah Beth.”

Sarah Beth extended her hand and I saw the ring sparkling on the other one. Bean had come up in the world. He was wearing a sweater and a collared shirt. He looked like he had stopped dealing drugs.

“What are you doing here?” I asked him.

“Sarah Beth and I just bought a house in Sunflower Court,” he said. “I’m working at Alton Kenney.”

Alton Kenney was the biggest real-estate agency in Charlottesville. I looked at Sarah Beth and then back at Bean and thought: rich father-in-law, job, house, wife, life. I wasn’t disgusted — I just felt like I’d slipped into some other universe, one that had even less justice than the one I’d grown up in. I felt like I was moving through water. I took their drink orders and told them about our specials and even remembered to smile. Bean smiled back. I went back and got the drinks — white wine for her, red for him — and I took their meal orders and brought them their pasta, and then I went in the kitchen and stood for a minute staring at the wall.

That’s when Bean found me. He touched my elbow — not hard, not a grab, just a tap — and he asked me if I’d come outside with him for a minute. I thought about whether he would kill me too, just snap my neck the way he’d snapped hers, but I didn’t think he’d do that with his fiancée so close, sipping her wine and thinking he was normal. And I wanted to hear what he had to say. I let him lead me out to the parking lot.

“You know why I wasn’t surprised to see you?” he asked.

“Why?”

I kept my back against the kitchen door so I could let myself in quickly if I needed to.

“Because I’ve been keeping track of you. I knew when you moved here, and I knew where you worked, and I came here to see you.”

“Why?” I asked again.

“Because I wanted you to know that I can always find you.”

And then he reached behind me and opened the door and went back inside.

That was three years ago. I quit that job, I changed my name, I moved here. But I still check behind me every time I let myself in my apartment. I still have a panic attack every time I see someone his height, his build. I’ve never told anyone this story before. I guess I keep hoping I’ll forget it, but I never do.

After I finished, everyone applauded. A blond girl with perfect teeth came up to tell me how great I was. A guy who said he had a magazine gave me a homemade business card and told me to send my story to him. I was sleeping with this guy Barber at the time, who was in a band and who everyone thought was going places, and he put his arm around me and kissed me on the head and said, “That was so powerful, dude.”

Sophie waited until I was alone — Barber and Irina had gone off to get drinks when she came over. She was tiny, wearing a boy’s button-down shirt and jeans rolled up above scrawny ankles. Her hair was slicked back and her face was pale, pointy, wide-eyed. She looked about sixteen years old.

“That’s not a true story,” was the first thing she said to me. “Is it?”

“Excuse me?” I said. But she was right.

Bean was actually my best friend in high school. Everybody called him that because in third grade he’d gotten a bean stuck up his nose and had to go to the emergency room and his dad beat him so hard that he had to stand in the back of the classroom for a week instead of sitting down. He was six-foot-four and skinny as a bug, with this desperation about life that made him talk so fast his words turned into nonsense, or show up at my house in the middle of the night so jazzed and agitated about zombies or racism or the terrifying infinity of the universe that I would have to shout to get him to settle.

It was true that sometimes when Bean and I drove around at night in his gold Buick with the windshield wiper that stuck straight up like a clock striking midnight, I did feel like we were the only people in the world — especially after he calmed down a little and started to talk more slowly, and I could listen to his voice and watch the dark going by around us like it was a blanket that would wrap us up and keep us safe. But of course eventually he’d have to take me home, and my stepdad would be screaming in his nightmares or trying to drink them away at the kitchen table with his face like a deflated balloon, or my fourteen-year-old sister would be having sex with her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend, who my mom liked because sometimes he brought over hot dogs or oranges from his job at the Kroger, or my eleven-year-old sister would be sleeping in my bed because she was afraid of something she couldn’t name that lived in the hills behind our house and came in at night to lie on top of her, invisible and terribly heavy, trying to crush the breath out of her lungs.

I’d seen the real Bean angry plenty of times. I saw him rage about his dad, who tried to toughen him up by putting him in headlocks and calling him a pussy when he couldn’t get out of them, about our stupid high school he couldn’t wait to escape, about the hard guys who played football and shot deer with their dads’ guns and wrote “FAG” on his locker. About how all the girls wanted to go out with those guys instead of him. Bean’s rages weren’t scary — if anything, they made me sad. He was like a dog running in circles until it tires itself out; he was like a kid all out of breath from crying who’s just discovered the world is unfair.

There was no Tommy, there was no Stacey. There was no Stabby. It was just me and Bean in the woods that night. We used to go there when he was really worked up, because the trees and the silence and the smells of the long-dead campfires would slow him and calm him down. But that night he was really going off — he and his dad had gotten into a fight about the garbage, and his dad had shoved him and then laughed when he fell down. Bean went pacing and pacing in circles, and finally I got him to sit down and I was rubbing his back a little, the way you rub a kid with a bad chest cold. I’d done this for my sisters in the fall and spring, when the phlegm would catch in their throats and stick in their lungs and they would beg for lemon tea and Vicks cough drops and someone to sit up with them at night and sing. But my sisters had never wheeled around and kissed me hard on the mouth. My sisters had never held me tight when I tried to pull away and stopped my mouth with their tongues when I tried to yell. My sisters had never pushed me to the ground and unbuttoned my pants.

The whole time Bean was raping me, I kept my eyes shut and tried to pretend he was someone else. Not someone I wanted, someone I’d agreed to have sex with, but someone evil and mean who I could completely hate. It didn’t work. When he came, I opened my eyes and saw Bean, panting, an awful guilt dawning in his eyes, and I wrapped my arms around him and held him for a long time, because it seemed so important to let him know that he hadn’t lost me, that I would still be his friend.

Bean and I didn’t avoid each other after he raped me. Instead there was a weird energy between us, a brightness. We laughed too hard at each other’s jokes and argued loudly over nothing and ambushed each other from behind with big bear hugs. Some of my other friends asked me if we’d started sleeping together. And then we did.

At first I thought it was a way to erase what had happened. I thought that making it okay to have sex with him now would reach back in time and make it okay then. It didn’t, and once I knew it wouldn’t, the sex got violent. I banged my body against him, I bit his chest, I dug my nails into his back until he bled. He was rough with me too — he’d hold me down, grab big handfuls of my hair and yank my head straight back. It reminded me of the first time and I got scared, but I never told him to stop. I thought everything we did was fair somehow — in some way through this a score would be settled. Afterward we didn’t hold each other. We lay side by side sweating and panting, like boxers.