The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (14 page)

“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.

The first one didn’t bother me that much. I didn’t lie awake worrying about death like Cassie, who had to go to special meetings with our pastor because she couldn’t make herself believe in heaven. I didn’t think about things like that. But already everything I cared about in life was about moving, being strong and fast, and I knew if I couldn’t move anymore it wouldn’t be worth being alive. I was weirdly calm, and while my mom was crying behind the curtain I made a plan. If I couldn’t walk, I wouldn’t be able to jump off the bridge like Trevor Dunston’s uncle or walk onto the railroad tracks like the Whites’ alcoholic oldest kid. But I knew my dad liked old-fashioned razors with replaceable blades, and when I went to the bathroom (I guessed my parents would have to wheel me there), I’d lock the door and slit my wrists.

After a couple of days my fever cleared, and after a week I went home. My parents were relieved, and nobody really talked about my meningitis after that, but it still came back to me late at night sometimes, how easy it had been to decide to end my life.

As I told Sophie the story, I tried to see if I was passing her test, if I was being interesting. I still don’t know what the answer is—I know that afterward she just nodded and looked at me until I got so embarrassed I wanted to hide in the dirty clothes piled on her bed, and finally I just stood up and said that I should go. The only hint I
got that she didn’t think I was boring or crazy was when she said, “You can come back tomorrow if you want to.”

Now I have a different story to tell her. One night I was driving home from a meeting with some suppliers and thinking about what I’d say in my follow-up e-mail to them to get a lower price. I remember it was a clear night in November, that part of fall when you can smell winter coming. I remember that I was annoyed about the suppliers who talked to me like I didn’t know anything about manufacturing, about how I didn’t actually know much about manufacturing, about how Lauren wanted me to spend more time with her parents even though her parents always acted like I wasn’t in the room. The back of my neck was tense and I was doing this singing thing I sometimes do to calm myself down. Then I saw a pair of headlights move in a way that headlights shouldn’t, veering across the center of the road and lining right up with my eyes.

Afterward they told me that I probably had retrograde amnesia, where you lose your memory of the minutes or even hours before you were knocked out, but that’s not exactly true. I remember the moment when I knew we were about to hit, when I felt weirdly, totally calm. I remember a scraping sound that seemed to go on and on. I remember I saw white lights shining in on me from everywhere, and then the lights turned red and I realized I had blood in my eye. I remember that someone pulled me out of the warm car into the cold air and I saw a woman lying in the road, and she looked pretty with the light on her hair, and a man was kneeling next to her, holding her hand and screaming.

Then for a long time I felt like I was swimming in deep water, and sometimes I would come to the surface where there was yelling and beeping and pain, and then I would go back under again. Finally
one morning I woke up for real, and snow was falling outside, and they said I’d been in a coma. I could see that there was just a stump where my leg should be, but it didn’t hit me then, not really. Everything was so easy somehow. I did what they told me—I ate and took my pills and did my exercises—and even though I couldn’t walk and sometimes the words I wanted to say got lost somewhere inside my head, it was mostly like being a little kid in school, where if you just follow the rules nothing bad will happen to you.

And then one day it was time to go home. They gave me a walker like I was an old man and I hopped my way out the door. Lauren and Emma made a big banner for me that stretched all across the living room wall, and Lauren cooked spaghetti with homemade meatballs, my favorite, and I ate with a real fork in my own house, and I felt like I was at a party for someone else. That Sunday at church the pastor gave a sermon about miracles, and people kept grabbing my hand, looking into my eyes, hugging me too long and too hard. The ones who had been to see me in the coma talked about how bad I’d looked and how I’d almost died, and finally I got Lauren to tell me that the other driver, the woman with the bright hair, actually had died, even though the doctors had done an experimental operation to relieve the pressure on her brain. Her name was Annie and she was an elementary school teacher and the single mom of a boy, three years old. The police said she’d probably fallen asleep at the wheel. By the time I got out of the hospital, they’d already had her funeral.

T
HE NEXT TIME
I e-mailed Sophie was when the big article in
Conversation
came out. I didn’t usually read that magazine but I’d set up a Google Alert on Sophie’s name. I knew it was maybe a weird
thing to do, but I told myself she was the only person I’d ever known who got famous and it wasn’t that weird that I was interested. The article had a picture, bigger than the one on her website. She was wearing a gray shirt, with her hair slicked back, and she was looking up a little bit like there was something above the camera. In the bigger picture I could tell she’d aged since college—her face was thinner and more tired—and I thought about all the ways I’d changed since then too. My hair was getting thinner in front, and I’d put on some weight in my belly and my face. My dad had gotten all jowly in his fifties like an old dog, and I was worried I was going that way too. I wondered if Lauren still thought I was good-looking or if she was just having sex with me out of habit or even pity. The thought scared me, and I told myself I’d start eating healthier, try and lose a few pounds.

The article was called “Into the Woods with Sophie Stark”—the writer had gone to Sophie’s house and just talked about her day a lot. It said Sophie and her husband lived in a “light-filled” apartment in Brooklyn and that when the writer came over, Sophie was eating chicken. I wondered what it would be like to be famous enough that someone would come to your house and write down everything about you, down to what you had for lunch. When Sophie and I were together, I don’t think I ever saw her eat. We never went to a restaurant or anything like that. I felt bad then that I’d never taken her out.

When the writer quoted Sophie, I could hear her voice almost like we were together again. She sounded more grown-up but also the same. She talked about how she got into making movies in the first place: “I started getting really interested in how people move, and you can’t really show that in still photos—or you can, but it’s
difficult, and you can only get little pieces of it. So I decided I wanted to make movies, and I made
Daniel
.”

It made me shiver to read my own name, even though it was the name of the movie. I hoped she’d thought about me when she told the writer that. Next he asked her about Allison Mieskowski, the actress who played Marianne. He said there was a rumor that they had been lovers and the movie had broken them up. I tried to imagine Sophie with Allison, who I thought was not pretty but sexy—the gap between her front teeth, all that red-brown hair. It had always been hard for me to picture Sophie with girls—I’d asked her once if she was the man or the woman, and she just rolled her eyes. Another time, also early on, I’d asked if she’d ever gone all the way with a girl, and she said of course she had. Later I wasn’t sure. It took me three visits to Sophie’s room before I got the courage to lean over all the junk on her bed and kiss her on the mouth. When I did, she didn’t melt like other girls but pushed back strong and hard, and she tasted smoky like there was a fire inside her. I thought she was different because she’d been with girls or because she was so experienced in general. But the next time I came over, we took her clothes off, and she was rough and strong until the moment I got inside her, and then she squeezed her eyes shut and held on to me like she was scared. She kept saying I wasn’t hurting her, but I couldn’t finish, and when we stopped, there was blood down the insides of her thighs. I asked her if it was her first time and she said no, just her period, but the next time and the next it still seemed to hurt her, and I always wondered if she’d been lying.

“Jacob wants me to get a publicist so they can tell me what to say to questions like that,” Sophie said when the writer brought up
Allison. “But I’d probably still forget and mess up, and then they’d get mad at me. I guess what I want people to know about Allison is sometimes you see someone and it’s like, ‘There, that’s the face, that’s what I’ve been looking for all this time.’ And then everything they do becomes interesting. It’s not always the face, though—it could be the way they move, or the way they stand, or even just one of their ankles. It’s like someone walking over your grave when you meet that person, and after that it’s the best feeling, like fitting puzzle pieces together.”