Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

He looked at her for a hard minute, and when she didn’t break her gaze he did drop his shoulder, but slowly, like it was a favor. Then the camera was ready; Sophie sent a couple teenagers we’d paid ten dollars to be extras down the hallway first, and I followed, carrying a backpack. People always talk about what a “natural” actor I am, like I don’t actually have any skills and I just grew out of the ground like this, some prized tomato. But really I have to think carefully all the time, because I don’t have any formal training. You learn a lot of things in drama class that I had to teach myself. Especially back then I was thinking constantly, because I wanted so hard to show Sophie she wasn’t an idiot for picking me, and also because I wanted everyone to see how great we both were, how well we worked together. That day in the hallway I was thinking about how I was in high school, ornery and impatient but starved for the feeling of being liked, for the feeling of somebody seeking you out to spend time with, not because you were making them dinner or fixing their broken doll or telling them no, they didn’t mess their life up. I thought of how it was to walk down the hall and see the real Bean, before he hurt me, the pleasure of running into somebody I didn’t have to make any effort with, and how it might have been to see fake Bean, who was supposed to be cool and scary and who I would have wanted to impress, and I tried to mix those things in my face and my body and the way I walked. It felt like a long walk down that short hallway with cameras on me for the first time ever, and when I reached Peter, I was relieved.

But his face looked funny, like he was lost or something, and instead of saying his line he growled, “What are you looking at?”

“That’s good,” Sophie called out. “But your line is actually, ‘Come here a minute, Marianne.’”

What about that was good? I wanted to ask.

But Peter just rocked back on his heels and slipped his thumbs into his pockets and said, “I know. I was just messing with Allie.”

I hated when people called me that, but I thought Peter was trying to get a rise out of me, and I didn’t want to let him. I knew something else was going on too. Peter looked nervous. He took his hand out of his pocket to scratch his nose. I wondered if he was on drugs. I walked up again, and this time he said the line right, and I said, “What’s up?”—which was my line — and then he just said, “Not much,” and I looked up at Sophie because that wasn’t his line either — he was supposed to say, “How well do you know Stacey Ashton?”

“Okay,” Sophie said. “Take a minute and look over the script again.”

The skinny kid who was our production assistant handed Peter a copy of the script, and then Peter did something weird. He flipped through the whole thing for a minute, not even stopping on our scene at all.

“Okay,” he said, “I’m ready.”

We went through it again, and this time instead of bringing up Stacey he said, “I have to talk to you about something.”

Sophie was getting frustrated.

“Just stick to the script,” she said. “You don’t need to ad-lib.”

But I knew Peter wasn’t ad-libbing. I’d seen that lost, defensive face before, on Arnie Phelps, who finally got passed to seventh grade because he was too big for the grade-school chairs. Peter couldn’t read.

He must’ve known I knew, because he dropped the script on the floor and mumbled, “Whatever, this is bullshit,” and walked down the hall and out the door.

Sophie stood empty-handed in the hallway. She looked as lost as he was.

“What just happened?” she asked me.

“He can’t read,” I said.

“That doesn’t make any sense,” Sophie said. “He was reading the script.”

“He wasn’t,” I said. “He was pretending. Where did you find him anyway?”

“He was working at this bakery I go to,” she said. “I liked the way he looked. Why would somebody pretend to know how to read?”

“He’s embarrassed,” I told her. “He doesn’t want anyone to find out.”

“Why?” Sophie said. “Who cares if he can’t read?”

I was quickly learning that even though Sophie seemed to understand me so well at times, there were things she didn’t understand at all. That day I didn’t feel like explaining how normal people cared what everyone else thought of them or how if you weren’t good at school you always felt nervous around people who were, like any minute you might have to prove you really were as smart as them.

“He thinks you’ll think he’s stupid,” was all I said.

Sophie had a habit when she was frustrated — she would rake her fingers through her hair and pull it back hard from her face. It made her look like a hawk, diving.

“It’s okay,” she said, more to herself than to the rest of us, who were gathered around looking confused.

“It’s fine. We’ll just explain the story to him and let him ad-lib it.”

She waved at the production assistant. “Chris, come here, we’ll make some notes. Allison, you want to go out there and get Peter?”

I didn’t. I didn’t like Peter, and I didn’t like that Sophie did. I didn’t like that she liked the look of him, all skinny and hard everywhere that I was soft. We hadn’t talked much about men but I knew she’d been with them, and I thought maybe what she liked in them was the opposite of everything about me. I was worried that one day she’d be with a man and tell him I was disgusting — my big ass, the way I submitted to her without question. I loved her in that headlong way that makes people jealous and anxious and greedy.

But loving her also meant I loved it when she was strong and in charge, when she knew what she wanted and she took it, even from me. And she wanted Peter to be in our movie.

“Fine,” I said.

Peter was outside, leaning against the dirty wall of the community center, smoking a cigarette. Across the street was a park where the grass was dead for the winter, and some starlings were pecking at it. He was watching them.

“Hey,” I said.

He jumped a little bit, and I felt good that I could startle him.

“What?” he asked.

“I came to tell you that you don’t have to read off the script,” I said. “You can just ad-lib from now on. Sophie says it’ll be fine.”

He dropped his cigarette on the sidewalk and ground it out with his shoe. “No,” he said. “I’m done with this shit. I told her I wasn’t an actor.”

There was a wooden bench pushed up against the wall near where he was standing, and I sat down on it. I wanted to show that I wasn’t afraid of him.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t know you. I don’t know if you can act or what. But Sophie wants you to be in the movie, and she knows what she’s doing.”

He didn’t say anything.

“She’s going to be a big deal someday,” I added.

I hadn’t thought about this before I said it, but I realized it was true. Right then I imagined the day I would be talking about Sophie in the past tense, when people would ask me about her. I hoped I’d say, That was the beginning of our life together . But Peter didn’t ask anything. He ran a hand through his oily hair. That’s when I saw the tattoo, black-green on his white inner arm. It was an amateur job — a tiger with a head way bigger than its body, and one leg all long and wiggly like a hairy snake. The edges were blurring — ten years and it’d just look like a bruise.

“Where’d you get that?” I asked him.

He looked at me then, and his mean mouth had gone a little bit soft, and I realized he wasn’t much older than I was, probably twenty-five. He didn’t answer, but he seemed like he wanted to, kind of.

“Prison?” I asked.