Anna North - The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

“This is stupid,” Sophie told me. “I don’t need a doctor. I’m not sick.”

It was evening, June, hot and humid. In the old house where Reese and I lived, all the doors were swollen open.

“I don’t know how to help you,” I said. I was getting scared of the way her face looked.

“You are helping,” she said, and at dinnertime she made ravioli for us, which we ate even though she’d overcooked it. Then she let me make her watch Sunshine and listened patiently while I pointed out all the best parts, although her favorite scene was the very end, with the Sydney Opera House surrounded by snow.

I thought it would be a good idea for her to come visit my class. She liked talking about movies, and when she had a chance to explain things to people, she got very confident and authoritative. I wanted to see that side of her again. I asked her to talk a little about what it was like to be a director, and I showed the kids Marianne beforehand — I knew she was feeling sensitive about Isabella .

It got off to a decent start. She stood up straight, and her hair was clean. When she introduced herself, she put air quotes around “director,” but she seemed good-humored about it, and the kids laughed. The first person to ask a question was Mandy, who was always the first person to ask a question. She matched her sweaters to her socks and her pens to her notebooks, and I suspected the other kids didn’t like her.

“How did you know you wanted to be a director?” she asked.

I didn’t know the answer to that question. All I knew was that she’d shown up one day and demanded to use my camera. Sophie nodded and answered right away.

“There were things I wanted to talk about in the world,” she said, “but I had a hard time expressing them in words. So I learned to draw, and I did that for a little bit, and it was closer. And then I learned to take photos, and that was even closer, but it still wasn’t right. Finally when I was in college I learned how to make movies, and that was the closest, even though there’s always a gap between what I want and what’s on the screen. I think that’s just how life is, but it still makes me sad.”

I’d been hoping she’d mention me, and even though I knew it was stupid, I was hurt when she didn’t. The students, though, were intrigued.

“Is it hard to get the actors to do what you want?” asked Tim, whose essays always compared movies to things that had happened in his frat.

“Sometimes,” she said. “But sometimes they know what to do better than you do.”

She sounded so sad when she said it that Tim looked shocked, like she’d flashed him. I’d read the reviews; I knew what people were saying about Allison. I’d read her interview in Conversation , and I thought she sounded stuck-up — she never acknowledged that she’d be nowhere without Sophie. But I had to admit she was talented; her face held your eye, and she knew how to tell a story with her hands, her shoulders.

Amy raised her hand. She was my youngest student, a seventeen-year-old trying to get a head start on her freshman year. She still had braces on her teeth, and she stuttered when Sophie called on her.

“What’s it like being famous?” she finally got out.

I thought it was sweet, but Sophie was stone-faced.

“I’m not famous,” she said, “so I wouldn’t know.”

Amy tried again. “But, I mean, what’s it like having people talk about you and stuff?”

Sophie looked right at her with that raptor gaze. Amy blinked back, innocent.

“It’s like having everybody mispronounce your name, every day. And at first you try to correct them, but they keep fucking it up, and then you start to wonder if maybe you’re the one who’s wrong and that really is how to pronounce your name. And after a while you start to wonder if you even have a name. Are you even a person? Do you even exist? Who fucking knows!”

Amy was confused. My other students stared down at their notebooks or turned to one another looking freaked out and maybe pitying. I shot Sophie an expression that said, Stop it , but she wouldn’t look at me.

“Well,” I said with fake lightness, “if there are no more questions for Sophie, I guess we can move on to discussing Frankenstein .”

Then Helen raised her hand. Helen was a senior, black-haired, dark-eyed, still growing out of a bad case of acne. She wore the same thing to almost every class, a loose black dress that was nothing like what the other girls wore, and I’d never seen her laugh or gossip or check her phone. She didn’t talk much, but I felt more connected to her than I did to the other students, and now that she was in the same room as my sister, it was easy to see why.

For a minute I ignored her, though, hoping she’d give up and the Q& A would be over without Sophie saying anything sadder or more embarrassing. But Helen kept her hand up.

“I have a question,” she said in an uncharacteristically loud voice.

Sophie looked her up and down, then nodded.

“I read your interview in Conversation , where you talked about not fitting in when you were younger. I was wondering if you had any advice for people who feel like that now.”

A couple of the other kids smirked at each other — one of them wrote something in her notebook and showed it to the boy next to her. I wanted Sophie to give Helen something, some piece of wisdom that would salvage what had clearly been a bad idea.

When Sophie spoke, her voice was a little kinder than before.

“If I did,” she said, “I wouldn’t be here. I’d probably be off having a nice life somewhere.”

The rest of the class was getting bored and uncomfortable, but Helen didn’t give up.

“I don’t want to be clichéd,” she said, “but what about art? Haven’t you used movies as a way to kind of get through to people?”

Sophie shook her head. “Nothing has driven me further away from people than making movies,” she said.

“So why do you do it, then?” Helen asked. “What’s the point?”

Sophie was quiet. She was quiet for so long that the kids started putting their books away and zipping up their backpacks. She was quiet for so long I started to worry something was wrong with her, but she didn’t look sick or upset. She looked like she was figuring something out.

“I don’t know,” she said. “But maybe that’s fine. Maybe it’s for other people to figure out what the point was.”

Helen nodded like she understood, but I didn’t understand.

“What did you mean by that?” I asked Sophie when we were safely in the car. “You say you’re okay but you really don’t sound okay.”

Sophie rolled down the window. A storm was gathering; I could smell the ozone.

“When did I say I was okay?” she asked.

“You said you didn’t need a therapist.”

A flock of crows flew over the road, squawking about the storm.

“I don’t need a therapist,” she said.

“Then you have to talk to me. I don’t even get what you’re so upset about. A couple of bad reviews? What do you care? You don’t even give a shit about people.”

I immediately felt guilty, but she didn’t look mad. She had that unreadable face that used to drive me nuts when we were kids. We reached the house. Out the back window of the car, the sky was black and low.

“Did you know I didn’t talk until I was three?”

“I didn’t know that,” I said.

“I learned to talk when you were born,” she said. “I never wanted to before.”

I didn’t know what to say. A rabbit paused on the lawn, looking at the sky.

“But you were just a baby,” she said. “You didn’t understand anything.”

“Is this seriously a guilt trip for not getting you when I was an infant?” I asked.