The Life and Death of Sophie Stark Read online

  The Life and Death of Sophie Stark

  ANNA NORTH

  Dedication

  For my family

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Allison

  Burnell College Mongoose

  Robbie

  Grimble Bay Daily Herald

  Jacob

  Culturator.Com

  Daniel

  Conversation

  George

  Allison

  New York Star

  Robbie

  From The Collected Essays of Ben Martin

  Allison

  Acknowledgments

  More on W&N

  Copyright

  Allison

  WHEN SOPHIE FIRST SAW ME, I WAS ONSTAGE. THIS GIRL IRINA who I lived with at the time had organized a storytelling series at a bar in Bushwick, and after a couple weeks of watching I decided I wanted to tell a story too. I wasn’t like the other kids in the house; I’d never assumed I’d be an actor or a writer or anything creative. When I was growing up, everybody figured I’d stay in Burnsville, West Virginia, and have some kids. But there I was in New York and for ten minutes I could make people listen to me and treat me like I was important. The theme that week was “scary camping stories.” I was wearing my only pretty dress, a blue halter with a full skirt that I’d bought for seven dollars at a vintage store, and I got up onstage after some girl talked for twenty minutes about seeing a possum. Here’s the story I told, the one that started everything for Sophie and me.

  My school had some good kids, Christian kids, kids who got married at eighteen before they started popping out babies. But my family was one hundred percent trash for five generations back, and I didn’t fit in real well with the church crowd. Instead I used to hang out with this guy named Bean.

  Bean was a couple years older than me, and he’d dropped out of high school to sell weed, and he made enough money to rent half a run-down old farmhouse outside of town. He was nice—he always shared his weed, especially with girls, and he’d give me a place to stay when things got bad at home. But he had an edge to him—his dad was a Marine and he had taught Bean this trick where you snap someone’s neck in a single motion. And Bean always made you feel like you were so cool, part of this secret club with just him, and you wanted to do exactly what he said so you could be in the club forever.

  I never saw a girl turn Bean down until he decided he was into Stacey Ashton. Stacey was my only friend who was a good girl. She was in the French club and she didn’t smoke weed and she wanted to go to Emory someday—she had a sweatshirt from there and everything.

  Maybe that’s why Bean liked her, because she was so different. But she wasn’t interested. He’d go up to her at a party and she’d just be polite and then turn away, talk to some other guy. It made Bean really angry. I’d never seen him mad before—things usually went so well for him. But now every time Stacey turned her back on him, he got that look on his face like pressure building up.

  Bean convinced me to talk to Stacey for him—he said maybe she’d go out with him if we double-dated. I didn’t like the weird, angry Bean, and I wanted to bring the happy one back. Plus, he promised me an eighth of weed. Stacey wasn’t easy to sway—she kept saying he creeped her out, there was something off about him. I said she was crazy, everybody loved him—anyway, me and Tommy, this guy I was sort of dating, would be there the whole time. Finally I told her that if she didn’t have fun, I’d buy her these butterfly earrings she liked at the mall. Stacey loved all that girly shit.

  So Bean showed up that Friday and him and Stacey and me and Tommy drove to the campground where we usually went to drink and make out without anybody bothering us. There had been a lot of stories about this serial killer that summer, not in our area but in Virginia and North Carolina. He used a bowie knife to kill his victims, mostly girls in their teens or twenties. The paper called him “The Charlottesville Stabber,” but we called him “Stabby,” and whenever we went out in the woods, we’d tease each other that Stabby was going to get us. On the car ride I kept poking Stacey in the ribs to make her shriek, and then I’d yell “Stabby!” When we got there, we roasted hot dogs and drank beer and had a good time, and I could tell Stacey was kind of loosening up. Bean moved closer to her, and she didn’t move away, and then he put his arm around her, and she didn’t stop him. The night got colder, and she actually snuggled up against him a little bit. Then Bean winked at me, and I turned and started kissing Tommy, and I heard Bean say, “Let’s go for a walk and give them a little privacy.” Then I heard them both walk off toward the creek.

  I didn’t love Tommy but I liked fucking him, and since we both lived in houses full of kids and stepdads we were pretty used to doing it on the ground at the campsite or in the backs of pickup trucks or on football fields or wherever we could get a minute to ourselves. So we were all sweaty and happy and pulling on our clothes when Bean came walking out of the bushes by himself with a look on his face I’d never seen before.

  “We need to leave,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked. “What’s the matter? Where’s Stacey?”

  “She went off to pee,” he said, “and then I couldn’t find her. I called and called. I looked all over.”

  “We can’t just leave,” I said.

  I started calling Stacey’s name.

  Bean took my arm. He looked at me, and I saw fear in his eyes for the first time.

  “I think we need to get the police,” he said. “I mean, I’m sure she just got lost or something, but in case . . .”

  He trailed off, but I knew what he meant. None of us wanted to bring up the Stabber’s silly nickname. I told Bean to give me another minute, and I walked just a few steps outside the campsite, but I started to get scared, and we all drove to the police station where we told our stories to Officer Gray, who spent most of his time breaking up our parties or arresting my stepdad when he tried to drive home drunk from Red’s on a Tuesday night.

  The police searched with dogs for miles around the campsite, but they didn’t find her body. Sometimes a thing like that brings people together, but this just blew the three of us apart. Tommy and I didn’t hook up anymore after that night. Bean didn’t come to high school parties anymore, and then he moved away without telling anybody or saying good-bye. The Stabber killed another victim, this one in South Carolina. I felt the joy drain out of me. I dropped out of high school, left my sisters and my brother to fend for themselves, and took a job waiting tables at a pasta restaurant in Charlottesville.

  I’d been working there about six months when I saw in the news that they’d found Stacey’s body. She’d washed up on the shore of Moncove Lake, about a half mile from the campsite. The police said it was probably the work of the Stabber, since Stacey fit the profile of his other victims. But they noticed a change in his MO—Stacey’s neck had been snapped.

  Another year passed. I turned twenty. I was just marking time in my life. And then—I remember it was a Friday, the restaurant was crowded with students ordering carafes of our gross wine—he showed up. He had a woman with him, a pretty, thin girl with strawberry-blond hair. She was well dressed, well cared for, nice skin and expensive shoes. She looked the way people look at that time in their relationship when they’re absolutely sure the other person loves them and they haven’t started to love that person any less yet. The hostess seated them at one of my tables, and I went to take their drink orders. I didn’t even think about running away. I wanted to see what Bean ordered, what his girlfriend’s voice sounded like. It was more than curiosity—as I walked over, I had the feeling of finishing something.

  And then he saw me, and we looked right at each othe
r for just a moment, and he didn’t look frightened all. His face had no expression on it. For a second I thought he might pretend not to know me, but instead he smiled wide and said, “Allison! It’s been forever.”

  “It has,” I said. I didn’t know what to say next. I hadn’t thought beyond walking up to the table, looking at Bean, and seeing what he did.

  “Allison was my best friend back in Burnsville. Allison, this is my fiancée, Sarah Beth.”

  Sarah Beth extended her hand and I saw the ring sparkling on the other one. Bean had come up in the world. He was wearing a sweater and a collared shirt. He looked like he had stopped dealing drugs.

  “What are you doing here?” I asked him.

  “Sarah Beth and I just bought a house in Sunflower Court,” he said. “I’m working at Alton Kenney.”

  Alton Kenney was the biggest real-estate agency in Charlottesville. I looked at Sarah Beth and then back at Bean and thought: rich father-in-law, job, house, wife, life. I wasn’t disgusted—I just felt like I’d slipped into some other universe, one that had even less justice than the one I’d grown up in. I felt like I was moving through water. I took their drink orders and told them about our specials and even remembered to smile. Bean smiled back. I went back and got the drinks—white wine for her, red for him—and I took their meal orders and brought them their pasta, and then I went in the kitchen and stood for a minute staring at the wall.

  That’s when Bean found me. He touched my elbow—not hard, not a grab, just a tap—and he asked me if I’d come outside with him for a minute. I thought about whether he would kill me too, just snap my neck the way he’d snapped hers, but I didn’t think he’d do that with his fiancée so close, sipping her wine and thinking he was normal. And I wanted to hear what he had to say. I let him lead me out to the parking lot.

  “You know why I wasn’t surprised to see you?” he asked.

  “Why?”

  I kept my back against the kitchen door so I could let myself in quickly if I needed to.

  “Because I’ve been keeping track of you. I knew when you moved here, and I knew where you worked, and I came here to see you.”

  “Why?” I asked again.

  “Because I wanted you to know that I can always find you.”

  And then he reached behind me and opened the door and went back inside.

  That was three years ago. I quit that job, I changed my name, I moved here. But I still check behind me every time I let myself in my apartment. I still have a panic attack every time I see someone his height, his build. I’ve never told anyone this story before. I guess I keep hoping I’ll forget it, but I never do.

  After I finished, everyone applauded. A blond girl with perfect teeth came up to tell me how great I was. A guy who said he had a magazine gave me a homemade business card and told me to send my story to him. I was sleeping with this guy Barber at the time, who was in a band and who everyone thought was going places, and he put his arm around me and kissed me on the head and said, “That was so powerful, dude.”

  Sophie waited until I was alone—Barber and Irina had gone off to get drinks when she came over. She was tiny, wearing a boy’s button-down shirt and jeans rolled up above scrawny ankles. Her hair was slicked back and her face was pale, pointy, wide-eyed. She looked about sixteen years old.

  “That’s not a true story,” was the first thing she said to me. “Is it?”

  “Excuse me?” I said. But she was right.

  Bean was actually my best friend in high school. Everybody called him that because in third grade he’d gotten a bean stuck up his nose and had to go to the emergency room and his dad beat him so hard that he had to stand in the back of the classroom for a week instead of sitting down. He was six-foot-four and skinny as a bug, with this desperation about life that made him talk so fast his words turned into nonsense, or show up at my house in the middle of the night so jazzed and agitated about zombies or racism or the terrifying infinity of the universe that I would have to shout to get him to settle.

  It was true that sometimes when Bean and I drove around at night in his gold Buick with the windshield wiper that stuck straight up like a clock striking midnight, I did feel like we were the only people in the world—especially after he calmed down a little and started to talk more slowly, and I could listen to his voice and watch the dark going by around us like it was a blanket that would wrap us up and keep us safe. But of course eventually he’d have to take me home, and my stepdad would be screaming in his nightmares or trying to drink them away at the kitchen table with his face like a deflated balloon, or my fourteen-year-old sister would be having sex with her twenty-two-year-old boyfriend, who my mom liked because sometimes he brought over hot dogs or oranges from his job at the Kroger, or my eleven-year-old sister would be sleeping in my bed because she was afraid of something she couldn’t name that lived in the hills behind our house and came in at night to lie on top of her, invisible and terribly heavy, trying to crush the breath out of her lungs.

  I’d seen the real Bean angry plenty of times. I saw him rage about his dad, who tried to toughen him up by putting him in headlocks and calling him a pussy when he couldn’t get out of them, about our stupid high school he couldn’t wait to escape, about the hard guys who played football and shot deer with their dads’ guns and wrote “FAG” on his locker. About how all the girls wanted to go out with those guys instead of him. Bean’s rages weren’t scary—if anything, they made me sad. He was like a dog running in circles until it tires itself out; he was like a kid all out of breath from crying who’s just discovered the world is unfair.

  There was no Tommy, there was no Stacey. There was no Stabby. It was just me and Bean in the woods that night. We used to go there when he was really worked up, because the trees and the silence and the smells of the long-dead campfires would slow him and calm him down. But that night he was really going off—he and his dad had gotten into a fight about the garbage, and his dad had shoved him and then laughed when he fell down. Bean went pacing and pacing in circles, and finally I got him to sit down and I was rubbing his back a little, the way you rub a kid with a bad chest cold. I’d done this for my sisters in the fall and spring, when the phlegm would catch in their throats and stick in their lungs and they would beg for lemon tea and Vicks cough drops and someone to sit up with them at night and sing. But my sisters had never wheeled around and kissed me hard on the mouth. My sisters had never held me tight when I tried to pull away and stopped my mouth with their tongues when I tried to yell. My sisters had never pushed me to the ground and unbuttoned my pants.

  The whole time Bean was raping me, I kept my eyes shut and tried to pretend he was someone else. Not someone I wanted, someone I’d agreed to have sex with, but someone evil and mean who I could completely hate. It didn’t work. When he came, I opened my eyes and saw Bean, panting, an awful guilt dawning in his eyes, and I wrapped my arms around him and held him for a long time, because it seemed so important to let him know that he hadn’t lost me, that I would still be his friend.

  Bean and I didn’t avoid each other after he raped me. Instead there was a weird energy between us, a brightness. We laughed too hard at each other’s jokes and argued loudly over nothing and ambushed each other from behind with big bear hugs. Some of my other friends asked me if we’d started sleeping together. And then we did.

  At first I thought it was a way to erase what had happened. I thought that making it okay to have sex with him now would reach back in time and make it okay then. It didn’t, and once I knew it wouldn’t, the sex got violent. I banged my body against him, I bit his chest, I dug my nails into his back until he bled. He was rough with me too—he’d hold me down, grab big handfuls of my hair and yank my head straight back. It reminded me of the first time and I got scared, but I never told him to stop. I thought everything we did was fair somehow—in some way through this a score would be settled. Afterward we didn’t hold each other. We lay side by side sweating and panting, like boxers.

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; By the time graduation rolled around I started to worry I’d do something to really hurt Bean—gouge his eyes with my thumbnails while he fucked me, tear his lips off with my teeth. Something scary was awake in me and I wanted to put it back to sleep. I bought a bus ticket to New York with money I stole from my stepdad’s wallet over the course of a month, and I told my fourteen-year-old sister where I was going and that she was in charge now. Then I saw Bean one last time.

  I don’t know why I told him where I was going. I know I wanted to get away from him—that night in bed my body was itching to leave. But also our fucking was less angry than usual, almost tender, and I came, and afterward he held me and I felt not peace but some kind of stillness. The next day I left town for good.

  My first days in New York were like a bad dream. I moved into a basement apartment with no floor, just dirt under our feet, which my three roommates thought was funny. They were an NYU student whose parents had supposedly cut him off but still called every day demanding to talk to him; a part-time art restorer named Lady; and a forty-year-old guy named Charles who did odd jobs and might’ve been a drug dealer, but not a very good one, because he never had any money. Charles had adopted a cat with a broken jaw but he couldn’t afford to take her to the vet, so he mashed her food up in water into a runny paste, some of which always leaked out of her mouth as she ate and for a while afterward, so when she sat on your lap you ended up with little drops of spit and mashed cat food on your pants. No one I knew back home lived like that, not even the Mastersons, whose mom was schizophrenic and made them wear surgical masks to school every day to keep the chemicals out. I worked at a diner until my manager started stealing my tips, and then as a bar waitress until a customer tried to follow me home, and then at a bodega where I had to stay because I had no ideas left, even though the owner always pressed his crotch against my ass when he walked behind me and yelled at me for not selling expired food. I felt like I’d come to a place for people who didn’t know how to be people, and if I was there I must not really know how to be a person either.