Anna North: The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

People who have been raped talk about flashbacks, and I believe them. But that’s not what I felt while Peter was holding me against the door and mashing his lips against mine. What I felt was pure shame. I’d gone to such trouble to tell a good story about my life, a story that was exciting and didn’t make me look bad, and now the cast and crew and anyone who saw the movie would see the other story anyway. They would see me letting Peter do something I didn’t want; they would see me fearful and helpless and struggling. And even though it was just a movie, even though I was supposed to be Marianne and he was supposed to be Bean, Peter was taking my dignity away, and everybody knew it.

It went on for a long time before I remembered I could stop it, and I felt even worse that I’d forgotten. I took the retractable knife from my apron pocket and jabbed him in the ribs, hard enough to bruise. He fell back, crushing the blood packets in his shirt; the red paint bloomed from his body, and I wished it was real. After the cameras stopped rolling, he asked me if I was okay, but I ignored him. I left the set and walked down the street in the cold to a coffee shop. I ordered a mocha, which I’ve always hated, and I sat at the table staring at it. After a while Sophie came in. She sat down across from me and put her hand over mine on the table, but I pulled away.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m fine.”

I hated girls who pretended nothing was wrong when they were obviously mad, but if Sophie actually didn’t understand why I was upset, I didn’t think she deserved an explanation.

“That’s not true,” she said.

I shrugged. The whipped cream on top of the mocha was melting.

“Are you upset about how Peter played the scene?”

She said it slowly, in that way she had of puzzling out things that would’ve been obvious to any normal human, and this time it made me furious.

“You think?” I asked. “You think I might not like how he held me down and kissed me without any warning, in front of everyone? You think I might be a little upset about that?”

I realized then that I’d never really yelled at her before. I didn’t know what was going to happen. Maybe she’d break up with me. Maybe she’d cry. I was scared, but I was excited too, like I’d climbed up to a high place and I was looking down. But she didn’t cry, and she didn’t yell back. She just looked at me for a minute, and then she said, “I’m sorry. I didn’t know he was going to do that. I should’ve stopped him.”

This was also the first time she’d ever apologized to me. The words sounded weird coming out of her mouth, like a foreign language, but hearing them made my heart crack open a little bit. I felt like I was seeing a part of her I’d never seen before, a part that wasn’t totally sure she was right all the time, a part that could admit she’d fucked up. And seeing that made me love her more than I had the whole time we’d been working on the movie, when she’d seemed so perfect and competent and impenetrable.

“It’s okay,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault.”

“I’m sorry anyway,” she said. “I wish I could’ve protected you.”

This time I reached out and took her hand. “It’s okay,” I said. “You didn’t know.”

We still had a few scenes to shoot, and they went easily. Sophie promised to edit the kiss out of the final cut, and I felt closer to her than ever. She’d moved into my room at the house with Irina by then, and we started talking about what we’d do when the movie was finished, how we’d enter it in festivals where everyone would see how great it was. We talked about winning at Cannes, how we’d go up together to accept the award. We talked about how I’d look in my red-carpet dress.

I didn’t see Peter again until after the shoot was over. The last day had been odds and ends in what was supposed to be Burnsville, footage of me sitting on bleachers, waiting for the bus. It made me laugh, how little it was like home — the cameras in my face, the bright light, the city poking out through the smog on the horizon. Later I’d see the movie and shake for days at how real it looked, and forever after the fake memory would lie on top of the real one in my head, covering it over. But that day the air was sweet with the beginning of spring, and I was happy, and Peter came to the house to see me.

I was in our room, drinking wine from a jar and trying to hang the pretty Indian cloth I’d just bought for curtains. Sophie was in the editing room, and I’d just started to wonder when she’d be home. These days I wanted her to spend all her time with me, lazy in our bed, like I imagined she’d do if I were pregnant. But it was more like she was having the baby, and she had to work hard every day to make sure it got born right.

One of our housemates must have let Peter in. I heard someone on the stairs and I ran to the door with my face all shining, ready for Sophie, and when I saw Peter I turned away. I was embarrassed to let him see me so happy, like I was waiting for him.

“Hi Allison,” he said.

“What do you want?” I asked.

My mother always said good manners were for people who deserved them. This attitude used to get her in a lot of trouble, but it was one of the few things I ever learned from her that I liked.

“I want to talk to you,” he said.

“Well I’ve got nothing to say to you.”

It wasn’t true. Really I wanted to ask him why, why he thought he could act that way to me, just shove himself against me without warning when we’d already gone over the scene. I was worried there was something about me, something that said, Do what you want with this one , some kind of smell on my skin. That’s why when Peter said again that he wanted to talk to me and asked if he could come in, I moved aside and let him sit at the edge of the bed. I stayed standing, holding my wine, looking down at him like that would give me the advantage somehow.

“First,” he said, “I want to say I’m sorry.”

“A little late,” I said.

He went on. “I’m sorry because I knew you’d be scared when I kissed you, and I did it anyway.”

He was talking fast and flat, like he’d written the speech out beforehand, and he wasn’t meeting my eyes. I didn’t want to give him any more power than he already had; I didn’t want him to know how much he’d rattled me.

“I wasn’t scared,” I said. “It was just a shitty thing to do, that’s all.”

He looked up at me then. “I knew it would scare you,” he said, “because Sophie told me it would.”

Sometimes when something bad is about to happen, I get this rushing feeling, almost like joy. Right then I wanted to jump in the air or throw my jar of wine across the room. Instead I sat down on the bed next to Peter.

“What did she tell you?” I asked.

He stared at the floor. I was embarrassed about the T-shirts and panties and wine corks that lay there, all the evidence of the months we’d been fucking and drinking and sleeping and loving in that room, but it was too late to clean anything up.

“She said she didn’t like the way things were going. She wanted the last scene to be different.”

“What do you mean?” I asked. “What didn’t she like?”

He paused. I could tell he was choosing his words and that he wasn’t very good at it.

“It wasn’t that she didn’t like your performance. She liked it. It’s just, she wanted something more intense for the end.”

I could feel acid rising up my throat. Ever since the beginning, Sophie’d had only good things to say about my acting. She was always talking about how we were going to make so many more movies together. I wanted to kick Peter out, tell him he had no idea what he was talking about, but I also wanted to hear the rest of the story.