The Life and Death of Sophie Stark (7 page)

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

She gave that laugh again. “I’m getting divorced.”

She held up her left hand, and now I saw two rings sparkling on it, a gold one and a diamond. I’d never thought to look at anybody’s hand before—it had never occurred to me that someone my age could be married. All I could think to ask was, “Why?”

“It’s my fault,” she said. She wrapped her arms around her knees. “In high school we were so in love. We thought no one understood us. And when we were eighteen, we got married as this, like, fuck-you to everyone who said we couldn’t do it, that it wouldn’t last. And now, surprise, it hasn’t. My parents said I’d want to date other people, and I do. I just want to be a regular girl.”

She stretched her feet out in front of her. She was wearing purple sneakers with a heart drawn on the left toe. I had no idea what to say.

“Maybe it’ll be good,” I said. “I mean, now you can do what you want.”

She looked up at the branches above our heads. I saw a bat flick between them. When she looked back at me, she seemed indignant, almost mad.

“Yeah,” she said, “but wouldn’t I be a better person if I didn’t care about that? Shouldn’t I just care about the person I love and the
promise I made and not anything else? Isn’t that how really good, strong people are?”

Right then I got extremely tired. The vodka was turning heavy in my head, and it seemed suddenly very clear that I wasn’t going to do anything more than talk with Andrea that night. I thought about her husband and their teenage wedding and how much they must’ve loved each other to do something nobody I knew would ever think of doing, and I wondered if she was right. Maybe if you loved someone that much, you should do everything you could to defend that love, even against yourself.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “but why are you asking me this? I’ve never been in love. I haven’t even kissed a girl.”

I hadn’t planned on admitting that, and once I did, I knew I’d really given up on sleeping with Andrea that night, or whatever quasi-sexual thing I’d been hoping to do with her in somebody’s weird yard. I just wanted to go home.

But she didn’t seem upset or surprised.

“I had a class with your sister last year,” she said. “Once I asked her how she was, and she just stared right through me like I didn’t exist. She was so strange and mean, and nobody liked her. Then you came, and now she’s this celebrity. That made me want to be your friend, that you could do that.”

“I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It was her idea to make the movie. I just talk to people sometimes.”

“Whatever you do,” she said, “you’re helping someone else live in the world, and that’s more than I’ve ever done.”

I remembered the summer when I was seven and Sophie was ten, and one day she refused to eat and hid in her closet, shivering like our cat right before it died.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“My stomach hurts,” she said. “Don’t tell Mom.”

“Why not?”

“I’m not going to the doctor,” she said. “They ask all these questions, and then they send you to another doctor, and they ask more questions. I’m never going to the doctor again.”

This was around the time of the IQ test, which led to an appointment with a psychologist, which led to an appointment with a psychiatrist who prescribed Sophie a drug that kept her up all night chewing on her hair until she refused to take it anymore. From each visit she came home mad and exhausted, complaining about questions like “How do you feel around other people?”—which to her had no answer.

“I don’t think it’s that kind of doctor,” I told her, but she didn’t care.

“I’m not going,” she said, waving me away.

That night I tried to bring her dinner, but she was curled in the fetal position with her cheek on the floor. Her skin was a bad color like cooked fish, and her forehead burned.

“I’m getting better,” she said, but I knew she wasn’t.

“We’ll tell the doctor you can’t talk,” I said, “because it hurts too much. And if he asks any questions, I’ll answer them for you.”

She looked up at me and her eyes were dull with hurting.

“Okay,” she said, and let me lead her out.

I only had to answer a couple questions. Soon they took her away into a part of the hospital where I wasn’t allowed to go. It turned out that her appendix had burst and filled her belly with infected fluid—another day and the infection would have spread throughout her body.

She didn’t thank me—I’d never seen Sophie thank anyone before or since—but after she came home with her stomach all bandaged up, she did look at me over her bowl of Jell-O and say, “Without you I could’ve died.”

It wouldn’t be so bad, I thought, to be the one who took care of Sophie, who made it so the world would know her.

I was feeling warm toward Andrea now. I was grateful to her for making me feel useful, and I wanted to do something to help her.

“You’re going to be okay,” I said. I tried to think of something smarter to tell her, but she seemed satisfied. She scooted up next to me and laid her head on my chest—her hair smelled clean and sweet. I put my arm around her. I felt peaceful and hopeful, and as I fell asleep with her there against the tree, I didn’t wonder where my sister was or whether she’d gotten home safe.

We woke up sometime in the early morning when it was too cold to be outside anymore. It was still dark out, and I walked Andrea most of the way to her house. We were sleepy and still kind of drunk, and we didn’t talk much, but it felt easy and right to be walking close to her, brushing up against each other sometimes and not apologizing or moving away. I didn’t kiss her because I was afraid of looking like an opportunist, but after we hugged good-bye at the edge of the little creek, she squeezed my upper arm and said she’d see me soon. After that I ate a Snickers I had in my desk drawer, and then I went back to bed to redo the night’s sleep, which had been full of half dreams, half hallucinations in which gray figures crossed the yard to tug lightly on my hair and clothes. It was afternoon and I was just waking up when someone knocked on my door.

My sister’s left ear was higher than her right. Her mouth sloped down a little to the right side, and her cheekbones flared out of her
thin face like wings. I had never noticed any of this before, and I might’ve gone my whole life without knowing it, if she hadn’t come to my door that day with her head completely shaved.

“You cut your hair off,” I said without thinking. Then she lowered her head, and I saw it was covered in cuts and pink, raw patches and tufts of leftover hair—she hadn’t done it herself.

“What happened?” I asked.

Sophie never cried—I’d seen her do so exactly once, at nine, when a Frisbee we were playing with hit her square in the face. Even that seemed more like a physical reflex than sadness. When we were kids, she would sometimes scream with rage, her eyes crazy, but by the time she was fifteen or so, the only indication she was upset was her breathing, which would go sharp and shallow, her nostrils flaring. She was breathing like that now. She didn’t answer my question.

“Here,” I said, “come in.”

She sat on my bed. She wasn’t wearing one of her usual dresses, but a white T-shirt and a baggy pair of jeans. Her neck and shoulders were painfully skinny; her scalp was pale.

“Do you want anything?” I asked. “I have Sprite.”

She nodded. I was glad I had something I could give her. She popped the can open and drank, and her breath slowed down.

“I finished the movie,” she said.

It was such a left turn that I wasn’t sure I’d heard her. “Sorry?”

“I mean, I still have to edit it. That’ll take a while. But I finished shooting.”

She sipped again, reached up as if to smooth her hair, found nothing, and brought her hand awkwardly down.

“Sophie,” I asked again, slower this time, “what happened to your head?”

She shrugged. “It’s not a big deal,” she said. “I didn’t like my hair that much anyway.”

I put two and two together, finally. “Did CeCe do this?” I asked.

Sophie scratched her raw scalp. “I still don’t get why she’s so mad,” she said. “I don’t want anything she wants. I’m not going to stop her from marrying him or whatever.”

I was still trying to make sense of the logistics.

“CeCe found you at the party, and she shaved your head?”

Sophie looked at her Sprite. “More or less,” she said.

So while Andrea had been telling me what a great brother I was, CeCe had been taking a razor to my sister’s scalp. Or maybe it was earlier, when I was trying to maneuver my way into Andrea’s pants. Or earlier, when I was using my status as Sophie’s helper to ingratiate myself with people. I hadn’t even managed to warn Sophie beforehand, because I was too excited about going to the party. I felt like calling Andrea and asking her to come over. I wanted to punish myself by showing her how useless I was.

“I’m so sorry,” I said. “I should’ve been there.”

Sophie shrugged. “She kept saying she warned you. Like that would mean something to me.”

“She did warn me,” I said. “I could’ve helped you. Instead I was off being a dumb-ass.”

The fact that I’d failed her because I was hoping to get laid was especially gross to me. I was ashamed of myself, like she’d caught me masturbating.

But Sophie looked at me sharply, anger in her eyes.

“I know you think I can’t take care of myself,” she said, “but it’s not your job to protect me.”

“I know you can take care of yourself,” I said.

“No,” she said. “You don’t. You’re always trying to run interference for me. What do you think I was doing before you came here? Do you think I was just curled up in a ball somewhere?”

I thought of what Andrea had said about Sophie snapping at people in class. Wasn’t she nicer now? Didn’t people like her more?

“No, but—” I started.

“But what?” she asked. Her bald head made her anger scarier—she looked like a dying person, with a dying person’s feverish eyes. “I’m not crazy, and I’m not retarded. I’m not blind. I don’t need you to be my guide dog.”

Now I was angry.

“All I’m trying to say is I feel bad that you got hurt,” I said, “and I wish I’d been there. Sorry if that makes me such an asshole.”

She sighed. She reached up to touch her scalp; her hand was already learning to expect bare skin there.

“You’re not an asshole,” she said. “I just don’t want you to think you have to keep me safe. That’s my job.”

I was still feeling angry, and guilty, and I could tell the second one was only going to get worse. I wanted to push some of the blame off onto Sophie.

“You’re not very good at it,” I said.

She just shook her head. “I am,” she said. “It’s just really hard.”

She drained her Sprite, scratched at her ankle. She was wearing sneakers with no socks. She looked like a twelve-year-old boy. I remembered a kid I’d played with when I was about that age, a scrawny boy who came around when my friends and I were playing tetherball after school. The kid was wearing a plain T-shirt, which marked him as different, because we all had shirts with our favorite cartoon characters or sports teams on them. He said his parents
were spies, which I didn’t believe—in retrospect, since it was spring, they were probably migrant farmworkers. As proof he taught us some phrases he said were French—they were actually gibberish, I knew even then, but I remembered them for years and used to repeat them to myself when I couldn’t sleep. After that day, though, I never saw the kid again. I wondered if Sophie wanted to be like this, showing up in my life just for a second, asking for nothing.

“If I’m not supposed to help you,” I said, “what do you want me to do?”

“Can I sleep in your bed?” she asked. “I didn’t get much sleep last night, and I don’t want to be in my apartment right now.”

It surprised me that she didn’t want to be alone, and that she’d admit it, but I was glad to have something to do. I cleared the textbooks off the bed; she kicked off her sneakers and crawled in, but she didn’t lie down. Instead she lowered her head.

“Can you?” she asked.

I put my hands to her scalp. It was hot and smooth. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d touched her bare skin. As a kid I’d imagined I could read her thoughts through her head, but now I couldn’t even guess. She shut her eyes, and I took my hands away. As she slept, her face got calm—even with her shaved head she looked so normal, somebody’s twenty-one-year-old sister who needed a place to stay.

Sophie slept for hours with no sign of waking up, and I couldn’t stop myself from going to find CeCe. I knew where she lived—she and her two equally high-maintenance roommates, both of whom were dating slightly-less-popular versions of Daniel, had exclusive pre-parties there on Friday nights, and even people too cool to want an invite or too uncool to ever get one (until recently I’d been the
latter) knew where they were held. I didn’t know what I’d do when I got to her—I knew I couldn’t hit her, even though I wanted to. I thought maybe there was something I could say that would make her cry, and then Sophie, sleeping soundly in my bed, would have the upper hand.

CeCe’s roommate Leigh, a tall girl who was dating the heir to a pesticide fortune, answered the door. I could see behind her into the living room—there were actual framed pictures on the walls, landscape prints and photos of the girls laughing. Leigh’s hair was wet. The air around her smelled like shampoo and perfume.

“CeCe’s not here,” Leigh said. “She went home to see her family.”

“When will she be back?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” she said. “It might be a while.”

I felt stupid and powerless. What was I supposed to do, leave a message? I looked down at my empty hands.

“Look,” she said. “We’re all sorry about what happened. If we’d been there, it wouldn’t have.”

“Well, you weren’t, were you?” I shot back.

She looked hurt and embarrassed, and I immediately felt guilty.

“Sorry,” I muttered as I turned to go.

Before she shut the door, Leigh said shyly, “I think your sister’s cool.”

For the next month, Sophie barely spoke. She spent as much time as she could in the editing room, and when they kicked her out to lock it for the night, she’d either go home or come to my dorm, where she’d eat my snacks and resist my attempts to talk to her. She didn’t seem angry. She just seemed checked out, like she was trying to pretend she wasn’t at school anymore.