The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (6 page)

Sophie pushed some T-shirts off her pillow and lay back with her hands behind her head. Now she looked relaxed, or resigned. I was mad at her for giving up, and also I was worried—if those girls had been so easy to give up, would she be able to drop me like that, too? When she went off to college and I was back in high school, she never called home. At the time that had made it easier for me to imagine she was cool, but now I wondered if she’d forgotten I existed.

“You’re acting like you can never feel close to people,” I said. “Does that mean you don’t feel close to me?”

She looked upset then, like I’d insulted her. “That’s different,” she said. “You’re my brother.”

“How is it different?” I asked her.

Now she was annoyed. She got up, went to the kitchen, came back with a glass of chocolate milk.

“It’s different because I love you,” she said.

It didn’t explain anything, but still I was relieved. I didn’t have to say it back; I knew she wouldn’t even want me to.

“Can I have some?” I said instead, and she handed me the glass.

N
EXT WE FOLLOWED
D
ANIEL
to a basketball game. It was a preseason game against a college somewhere in Missouri that was even smaller than ours, whose players looked kind of dazed on the court, like they’d just come up from underground. I didn’t know anything about basketball, but it was easy to see that Daniel was dominating the game. Over and over he drove down the center of the court and put the ball in the basket with total ease, leaving the Missourians just standing there blinking. Daniel didn’t yell or pump his fist after a basket, but you could tell he was enjoying himself. He was light on his feet, like my high school friend Tyler the day after he slept with his girlfriend for the first time. Daniel looked as if the ball and the basket and his team and the crowd were all pouring energy into him and he was radiating it back out.

By the half we were up twenty points. I thought Sophie would want to take a break from shooting, but she started pointing the camera into the crowd, shooting kids high-fiving and eating M&M’s and talking about the game. People were looking at us, and I tried to get her to stop so we wouldn’t draw attention to ourselves, but she ignored me. Then I saw two girls stepping over the bleachers to get to us. They had long, shiny hair, one blond and the other dark, and they were wearing tight jeans and T-shirts with our college’s name
and looking pretty and confident and carefree. I’m not proud of it, but I moved a little farther away from my sister as they got close, so I could plausibly pretend I wasn’t with her, but the blond one sounded interested when she pointed to the camera and asked, “Are you making a movie?”

Sophie didn’t answer, but she swung the camera around to shoot them. The dark-haired one giggled and waved, but the blond girl stared straight at the camera like she thought there was something hidden inside it.

“Yeah,” I said. “You want to be in it?”

“What’s it about?” the blond girl asked.

My sister didn’t say anything, so I answered for her. “It’s a documentary about Daniel Vollker. Do you have any . . . uh, thoughts about him?”

The dark-haired girl didn’t hesitate. “He made me care about basketball,” she said. “I didn’t know anything about sports when I came here, but he’s just so good, and you can tell he’s also a really good guy.”

The blond girl rolled her eyes. “He’s overrated,” she said. “I mean, he’s good and all, but good for our school doesn’t mean that much. He doesn’t really have a shot at the NBA.”

We were drawing a crowd. More and more people came swarming toward us, crowding in front of the camera and yelling. Sophie peeled her face away from the viewfinder and looked at me with knitted brows.

I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to do. Any minute someone was going to have the idea to beat us up.

“Okay!” I shouted. “Everybody who wants to be in the movie, get in a line behind me!”

For a second, everyone just yelled more. I started to plan a path to the exit. Then a girl hopped over a row of bleachers to stand behind me. And another. And a third. And then a pack of guys, still yelling. Pretty soon there were twenty people all lined up behind me, just because I’d told them to. Sophie swung the camera around to capture them—shoving and joking and eating Skittles but waiting their turn.

I didn’t have a chance to interview any of them, though, because two security guards in windbreakers came up the bleacher steps to ask us if we were authorized.

“Yes,” said Sophie, still filming.

“Okay,” said one of the guards, big and balding, with those brown bits of hair clinging to the sides of his head that made me scared of getting old. “Show us your form.”

Sophie lowered the camera and looked at the guard blankly.

“You can’t record a game without the permission of the athletic department,” the balding guard said. “You’re going to have to leave.”

All the way back to my dorm, I felt pleased with myself, like I’d gotten away with something. In a way we had—they’d kicked us out, but they hadn’t taken the tape.

A
FTER THAT
, things were different for me. The kids in film class heard about the movie and were either curious or dismissive in a way that let me know they were actually curious. They’d all been doing just the class projects, things like “record something that is moving.” Some of the more advanced kids started talking to me in the lab room where we signed out the camera—one of them volunteered to help us edit. The girls in my English class still ignored me, but the
blond girl from the basketball game started saying hi to me around campus. She told me her name was Andrea and she was a sophomore, a history major. She had a sad edge to her voice that made me like her hair even more.

We couldn’t shoot at games anymore, and we couldn’t shoot at Daniel’s house, but we could shoot at the outdoor courts on the edge of campus where Daniel usually showed up early in the morning to practice on his own. And we could shoot at the bars that the team liked to hit on weeknights, Jacky’s and Bar 9 and the Sports Page. Daniel always ignored us, and his girlfriend stared at Sophie like she wanted to skin her, but other people came up to ask questions and try to get on camera. Everything I’d hoped for at the end of high school was coming together. I felt famous and important; I felt like Sophie’s ambassador.

I was in my dorm room, not out filming, when Daniel’s girlfriend came to see me. CeCe was tiny and honey-blond, and everybody said she was the hottest girl in school, but to me her face looked prematurely old, like she was a mom with a lot of worries already. I offered her a seat and a Coke—I was learning to be polite and generous in my fame—but she said no to both. My roommate was out; I sat in my desk chair, and CeCe leaned against the desk. She looked down at me like she was kind of annoyed that circumstances had forced us to interact.

“You need to keep your sister away from my boyfriend,” she said.

“Why don’t you talk to her?” I asked.

“I did,” said CeCe. “She doesn’t listen. She just looks at me like she’s retarded or something.”

“Sophie’s not retarded,” I said.

Actually, Sophie had been IQ-tested in fourth grade, because she
couldn’t or wouldn’t answer questions in class. She’d done so badly that she was briefly placed in special ed and put back in the mainstream class only after the first math test, on which she’d not only scored perfectly but also drawn a series of geometric diagrams she wasn’t supposed to learn about for another four years. Later, when I asked her about the IQ test, she said, “They tell you stories that don’t make sense and ask you questions where the answer could be anything. It scared me. I just decided not to say anything.”

“Whatever she is,” CeCe said, “she doesn’t have the right to keep following us around like this.”

“Daniel hasn’t said anything,” I said.

I actually had no idea how Daniel felt about the movie. For all I knew, he liked being the center of attention—I’d like it, I thought, if my sister decided to make a movie about me.

“Of course he wouldn’t,” she said. “He’d never admit how much it bothers them.”

She was digging her fingernails into the flesh of her arms. It looked like she did it a lot; the skin there was covered with little scabs. I wasn’t sure why she was so upset. I didn’t know why Daniel’s friends were mad either, now that I thought about it. I didn’t really care. Sophie and I didn’t need to suck up to people. The life I’d dreamed about for us was starting, I could feel it.

“Look,” I told CeCe, “you’re not his mom. If he has a problem with it, he can talk to Sophie. You don’t have to do it for him.”

She leaned closer to me. She smelled like vanilla perfume and something I couldn’t place, something metallic.

“You don’t get it,” she said. “Everyone just wants to take and take and take from Daniel. They see how great he is, and they just want to take advantage.”

“And you’re so different?” I asked. “You’re not enjoying being with the most popular guy in school, having everyone jealous of you?”

I thought she’d yell, but instead she got really quiet.

“You think I don’t know what goes on?” she asked. “I know he fucks other girls. I know that when I go home to see my brothers and sisters, he’s got freshman chicks with big tits coming in and out of his room all weekend. And I put up with all that because I know he needs me to. He needs me to support him and let him be who he is and not try to control him, so that’s what I do. Who else would be there for him every day like that, unconditionally, no matter how much he hurts them?”

I felt like I got her then. I’d gone to school with girls like her, girls with big families who had to take care of other people all the time and who got hard from it instead of soft. I remembered when Todd Hayward had sex with Ashley Lindstrom’s little sister and then broke up with her the next day—Ashley caught Todd by the lockers and left bloody scratch marks all down his face and arms, like some kind of tiger. I could see that hardness in CeCe. She’d gotten out of her hometown and come to college and found somebody to take care of who actually made her important, and she wasn’t going to let that go.

“He’s lucky to have you,” I said. “But maybe this time you need to step back, let him handle his shit himself.”

She rolled her eyes. “Oh, fuck you,” she said. “Don’t fucking condescend to me.”

She picked up her purse. “I’m going to tell your sister I tried to talk to you but you didn’t listen.”

“Tell her when?” I asked, but she turned and walked out the door.

.   .   .

W
HAT
C
E
C
E SAID
stuck with me, and I meant to tell Sophie about it, but the next time I saw her, she just wanted to make plans. There was a party at an off-campus house over by the cemetery, the last big party before Thanksgiving, and she thought if we could get some footage of Daniel there, the movie might be finished. I thought maybe I’d see Andrea there, and I was excited for her to see me again in my capacity as co-director. I told myself CeCe was just a jealous girlfriend; I told my sister nothing.

The house was tall and dark and falling apart. It was nice out, one of those warm fall nights that makes you sad because it might be the last one, and guys in suspenders were out on the front porch barbecuing corn.

“Watch out for the loose board,” one of them said as I tripped on it and fell into the kitchen.

Inside, people were floating in thick smoke like ghosts. I saw a pretty girl with hair down to her ass stirring wine on the stove. I saw a wedding cake with a fist-size hole punched in it. I saw a tray of brownies labeled “nuts” and a tray of brownies labeled “party.” I saw a bowl of water full of rose petals and a guy dip a cup in it and drink. I saw three girls wearing see-through white dresses like nuns from a cool religion. I saw their six nipples and I got embarrassed and turned away.

Sophie was already shooting. People were getting used to her—one guy waved at the camera, and another lifted his beer bottle like a toast, but mostly they just ignored us. I didn’t see anyone I knew. I was jealous of Sophie—she always had the camera to put between herself and other people, but I had to talk right to them out of my
own stupid face. I found a punch bowl full of something and ladled it into a plastic cup. It tasted sweet and a little bit poisonous, and I drank it very fast.

I didn’t have all that much experience with alcohol. My only source of booze in high school had been the liquor cabinet at my friend Tyler’s house, but we were always scared to take too much in case his dad found out—Tyler had to go to the hospital sometimes for shadowy reasons, and once when we broke his bike doing gravel races, his dad yelled so hard he cried—so I’d never really been drunk before, but now I could feel whatever was in the punch slamming into my brain. My muscles relaxed. I felt like I was part of the party, like I belonged to it. I started to recognize people. A guy in my English class who had always seemed too cool for everything waved at me, and then I was standing with his friends and actually talking and laughing, although I couldn’t really hear anything they said. I could still see Sophie with the camera, but we were drifting farther apart, and then I couldn’t see her anymore, and I didn’t worry about it.

I was on my second or third drink when I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“Robbie,” said Andrea, “I’m so glad you’re here.”

Her cheeks were flushed; she had dark circles under her eyes. Her hair fell around her face all tangled and pretty. I wanted to stick my hand in it and pull her against me. I thought there probably was a kind of guy who would do that, and girls probably liked him. Instead I was the kind of guy who said, “It’s great to see you. You look great.”

She laughed, a sad laugh that made her seem older.

“I look like shit,” she said. “Will you come outside with me? I kind of need someone to talk to.”

“Of course,” I said.

The yard was wide and deep and sloped down until it met a stand of oak trees. Close to the lights of the house were clusters of people drinking and laughing, but as we walked farther down the hill, the crowd thinned out until it was just couples half hidden in the shadows. The bottom of the yard smelled like rain and fallen leaves, and it made me think of home, of the green places near the creek where it smelled like rain all year round. Andrea sat down on the grass in a single fluid motion, and I sort of stumbled into a squat beside her.