Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

Talk soon, I hope,

Daniel

Sophie showed me those photos the first time I ever went to her apartment. She’d been stalking me with her camera for weeks by that point, and then she just stopped all of a sudden. I figured she was probably playing hard to get — I’d had some girls freeze me out like that before, just to get me to call them — but after a couple of days I really missed her. I caught myself getting excited when I saw her out of the corner of my eye, then getting disappointed when it was some more normal girl. I found out where she lived from this girl Andrea I knew who dated her brother. When I knocked on her door I thought she wouldn’t be there — I was sort of surprised she even lived in an apartment at all. I always imagined her in a weird old house or a tent or something. But she answered, and she looked surprised and maybe sort of annoyed to see me, but when I asked if I could come in, she said okay.

Her room looked like the kind of nest my sister’s hamster used to make out of shredded newspaper. Her bed was covered in clothes — these weird dresses she used to wear and jeans and T-shirts and some plain white panties that looked like a little girl’s. There were papers and old food wrappers and magazines with the pages torn out all over the floor, except for a narrow little path to the bed. The only thing that wasn’t totally buried in crap was the desk, which had some kind of a diagram or comic strip on it and nothing else. As soon as I came in, Sophie shoved it in a drawer.

“I haven’t seen you around lately,” I said. I was trying to sound casual.

“The movie’s finished,” she said.

“That doesn’t mean you can’t come say hi sometimes,” I told her.

“That doesn’t seem like a good idea,” she said. She ran a hand over her head — her hair was just starting to grow back in. I’d heard what had happened to her at the party, or part of it anyway — a couple of the guys had told me they played a trick on her by shaving her head. I didn’t find out CeCe was in on it till much later; I guess they were covering for her. I told them I thought it was a shitty thing to do, but they just said it was a joke and what, did I like Sophie or something? I let it go. I used to put up with people being dicks then; we all did. I’m not proud of it.

“I’m sorry about those guys,” I said. “They’re assholes to everyone, but they don’t mean it.”

She just looked at me. I didn’t know what to say, so I said the first thing that came into my head, which was, “Why did you make a movie about me?”

She didn’t miss a beat. “Because I had a crush on you.”

“Do you make movies about everyone you have a crush on?”

She looked at me like that was a stupid question. “No,” she said. “I just learned how to make movies this year.”

“What did you do before that?” I asked.

I realized I was flirting with her. I wasn’t sure if I was into her, but I could hear that tone in my voice that I used on other girls when I decided I wanted them to go home with me. But that was one thing that was different: I always took girls to my room, even though I knew CeCe could come by unexpectedly and catch us. I just liked being in my bed, with my Michael Jordan poster on the wall and my coat over the chair and all my other stuff in the places I liked to keep it. It made me feel like I could leave them easily. I felt like if I went to their rooms they’d have a hold on me somehow. I hadn’t been in a girl’s room that wasn’t CeCe’s since high school. I didn’t know how to act. I sat down on the edge of the bed and then stood up again.

“If it was a boy,” she said, “I gave him a blowjob. And if it was a girl, I just stared and stared.”

She said it the same way she said everything, just facts. I’d never heard a girl say “blowjob” like that — not sexy, just plain. Most girls didn’t use the word at all, just kissed down your stomach until their mouth was there, and all you had to do was not stop them. Most girls didn’t admit to liking girls either — sometimes at a party when it got really late, two girls would start making out on the dance floor, but usually you could see them looking off to the side the whole time, making sure the guys were watching. I couldn’t imagine Sophie doing that. I realized something else that made her different: I didn’t think she cared how she looked to other people. I thought about game nights, how I got so embarrassed if I missed a free throw, thinking about all the girls shaking their heads, looking around for someone better to root for. I couldn’t imagine being like Sophie.

“Do you still have a crush on me?” I asked.

I knew it sounded like I was just angling for that blowjob, but I wasn’t — or at least it wasn’t just that. Her plain voice and her warm weird messy room were doing something to me, and I didn’t know if I even wanted to take my clothes off. I really wanted to know what she thought of me.

“I’m not sure,” she said. And then, “It’s nice that you came over.”

It sounded wrong coming from her, a polite thing normal people said. It was the kind of thing CeCe might say to my mom or some other person she was supposed to be nice to, but when Sophie said it, she sounded like she was reading off a script.

“I think you’re good-looking,” she went on, “and I like watching you play basketball. But I guess I don’t know if you’re really that interesting.”

I was mad, of course. I’d never thought about being interesting before, but hearing Sophie say I wasn’t made me feel like nothing, worse than when my high school coach told me I had shitty instincts or when the first girl I ever slept with called me a year later and told me she’d just had her first orgasm.

“I think I’m pretty interesting,” I said.

I hated how it sounded, like I was begging, but I wanted her to believe me.

“Yeah?” she said. “Show me.”

I felt like I was on a game show and the host had just asked a question I didn’t know the answer to, a question that wasn’t even a question. I looked around the room, desperate for something to jump out at me. I saw some balled-up socks on the bed.

“I can juggle,” I said.

“I don’t care about that,” she said. “Tell me the scariest thing that’s ever happened to you.”

For a minute my mind blanked. I thought about saying, “This,” but I didn’t want Sophie to know how much she rattled me. Then I thought of a story I could tell.

One day when I was eleven, I was playing with my sisters and my brother down by Gormans’ Pond. The pond was all slimy with algae, and our mom always made us promise just to play along the bank, never go into the gross water. But I always had to be doing things my sisters and brother wouldn’t do, so that everyone would remember I was the oldest and the best, and when I was eleven I was starting to worry because my brother was getting tall and good at soccer, and my sister Cassie was getting a reputation as scary for stealing things and hitting other girls. So that day I told them the new game was jumping right in the pond, and I got a running start and cannonballed in.

The water rushed into my nose and mouth and it tasted bad, not just normal bad but like rotten dead things, and I knew my mom was right that this was a place we shouldn’t be. Cassie and Brian and my shy littlest sister, Emmeline, jumped in after, and I felt guilty for making them all do it, but I was the only one who got sick. It started with a fever that made me sweat all over and see things that weren’t there, and then when my mom called me from another room, I realized I couldn’t move my head. They took me to the hospital that night and even though the doctor talked to my parents in a low voice behind a curtain, I heard “meningitis” and that if they weren’t able to bring the fever down I could die or be paralyzed for life.