Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

By the time graduation rolled around I started to worry I’d do something to really hurt Bean — gouge his eyes with my thumbnails while he fucked me, tear his lips off with my teeth. Something scary was awake in me and I wanted to put it back to sleep. I bought a bus ticket to New York with money I stole from my stepdad’s wallet over the course of a month, and I told my fourteen-year-old sister where I was going and that she was in charge now. Then I saw Bean one last time.

I don’t know why I told him where I was going. I know I wanted to get away from him — that night in bed my body was itching to leave. But also our fucking was less angry than usual, almost tender, and I came, and afterward he held me and I felt not peace but some kind of stillness. The next day I left town for good.

My first days in New York were like a bad dream. I moved into a basement apartment with no floor, just dirt under our feet, which my three roommates thought was funny. They were an NYU student whose parents had supposedly cut him off but still called every day demanding to talk to him; a part-time art restorer named Lady; and a forty-year-old guy named Charles who did odd jobs and might’ve been a drug dealer, but not a very good one, because he never had any money. Charles had adopted a cat with a broken jaw but he couldn’t afford to take her to the vet, so he mashed her food up in water into a runny paste, some of which always leaked out of her mouth as she ate and for a while afterward, so when she sat on your lap you ended up with little drops of spit and mashed cat food on your pants. No one I knew back home lived like that, not even the Mastersons, whose mom was schizophrenic and made them wear surgical masks to school every day to keep the chemicals out. I worked at a diner until my manager started stealing my tips, and then as a bar waitress until a customer tried to follow me home, and then at a bodega where I had to stay because I had no ideas left, even though the owner always pressed his crotch against my ass when he walked behind me and yelled at me for not selling expired food. I felt like I’d come to a place for people who didn’t know how to be people, and if I was there I must not really know how to be a person either.

After a couple of weeks I started expecting Bean to call. I hadn’t given him my phone number but my sister had it — he could easily ask her. At first I just wanted him to call me up and talk to me like nothing had happened, like he was just an old friend reminding me where I came from, that I’d once had a real floor and a dog instead of a fucked-up cat and a life that, even if it wasn’t that good or that happy, still made a little bit of sense. When it had been a month and still he hadn’t called, I started wanting him to say he missed me. I wanted him to tell me that he’d been stupid to let me go, that he wanted to see me again and he thought we could work things out. I felt terrible for the whole two months or so that I thought this way, and at the same time I imagined myself saying I missed him too, and yes, and yes, and yes.

And then I started wanting him to apologize. By this time I’d managed to get a job waiting tables at a decent place in Williamsburg, and I was making enough money to move to the house with Irina, which was also dirty and crowded and full of cats, but at least it had real floors. I started to feel a little bit more in charge of my life, and I found myself standing on the subway platform or walking down Atlantic Avenue or carrying a slice of birthday cake to a customer, shielding the candle’s little flame with my hand, and suddenly wishing, as hard as I’d ever wished for anything in my life, that Bean would say he was sorry. I didn’t want him to explain, I didn’t want him to tell me he loved me or he missed me or he wished things were different — I just wanted him to say those two words and never talk to me again.

The night I told the story it had been almost two years since I’d left Burnsville, and I still hadn’t heard from him. It had gotten weaker, but I still had the feeling that he had something of mine that he needed to give back, and that I couldn’t rest until I had it.

Maybe that’s why I told the story about Bean that night, instead of one of the others I could’ve told — he still had a hold on me, and my mom and dad and my sisters and my stepdad didn’t, or at least I thought they didn’t at the time. But I wasn’t about to tell the real story and have everybody know my business, and I guess I thought I could fool people — usually Brooklyn kids would believe anything you told them about West Virginia. I hadn’t expected this little stranger standing in front of me, acting like she knew something about my life.

“When people lie about their past,” she said, “they push their chests out and stand up straight, like someone’s going to challenge them.”

“And I was doing that?”

She nodded. “But some of it was true,” she went on, “because sometimes your whole body relaxed, like you knew the story in your sleep.”

I was annoyed with her for pegging me so well. I told all kinds of little lies about my life to Barber and Irina, to people I met, making my family and my town sound better or worse than they really were depending on the situation. I’d always gotten away with it, and I was happy to be able to make my own past and have people accept it. But I sometimes hoped somebody would catch me out, so I could feel like they really knew me. And the first person to do it was a girl who didn’t know me at all.

“What are you,” I asked, “some kind of psychologist?”

“I make movies about people,” she said, “and I’d like you to be in one.”

I thought she was fucking with me then. The arty kids I knew put on shows in crappy bars or made websites with a few cartoons on them — no one made movies. Either it was a joke, I figured, or she was one of those people who always had a crazy plan and never followed through. Plus Barber came back just then with a beer for me and wound his arm all the way around my back so he could touch the side of my left breast.

“Sure,” I said. “I’ll be in your movie, whatever.”

“Good,” she said. “I’ll come by next week.”

I DIDN’T KNOW HER NAME, and I hadn’t told her where I lived, and I figured I’d never see her again. But there she was the following Monday, at my door.

“I’m Sophie,” she said, and sat down on my bed without asking.

She kicked off her sneakers — her feet underneath were sockless, long and thin and graceful. She smelled good, like the dark valleys back home, cool even in the summer and full of ferns.

“We start shooting in three weeks,” she said. “I need to raise a little more money, but I already know where I’m going to get it.”

“Okay,” I said. I started to take her a little more seriously. My friends with their shows and websites rarely talked about raising money.

“You’re going to star, so you need to be there pretty much every day.”

“Hold on,” I said. Over the weekend Barber had told me that we needed to have an open relationship, because he and the bass player of his band, a tall blond girl named Victoria, needed to have sex.

“It’s not even about the physical,” he said. “She’s just such an amazing artist.”

I didn’t care that much about the open relationship — I hadn’t really been aware we were in a relationship at all. But I was jealous that he was so impressed with her; after my story I’d quickly gone back to being unimpressive.

“I’m not an actress,” I told Sophie. “I can’t star in a movie.”

She waved her hand in the air like she was swatting away a fly.

“That doesn’t matter,” she said. “You’re the one I want.”

She was staring at me. She reminded me of the boys I liked in high school, the pretty, intense boys with their fake swagger, their soft mouths. They wrote bad songs and sang them well, and their girlfriends talked lovingly about how fucked up they were, how they should’ve been born in another place, another time. They always had girlfriends; those had never been the boys who liked me.