What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha Read Free Book Online

school,” my mother said that Sunday before sending me off for my train. “Why don’t you stay down there next weekend?”
    â€œI don’t mind,” I told her. “I can come back up.”
    â€œCharlie,” she said, her tone soft but insistent. “I don’t want you to come back up.”
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    On campus I discovered that my classmates had been working tirelessly. Unlike course work, constructing a social life required sustained attention. You couldn’t hang around one Saturday out of three or four and expect to follow along with others who had been doing all the reading and taking all the notes. My roommate, Dean, a friendly but somewhat awkward kid from Cleveland who had not struck me as a social adept, invited me to a party in another freshman’s room. When it finished, I followed him to the fraternity houses.
    â€œDo you have any blues?” he asked as we stood in a line outside a Tudor-style mansion filled with drunk kids.
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œJesus, man,” Dean said. “You can’t get in the door without a pass. They rotate the colors. Tonight it’s blue.”
    â€œNo, I don’t have any blues.”

    â€œI’d like to help you out,” he said. “But I’ve been hustling all week to get three passes, and I told this cute girl from Orgo that I’d get her and her roommate in.”
    Dean looked at me as though I had presented him with a serious ethical dilemma.
    â€œNo big deal,” I said. “It’s just a party.”
    So I passed the balance of another night reading alone in my room.
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    This all changed when Max arrived the next weekend. Like Dean, he took me to a room party, but this one was in an upper-class dorm, where we drank beer from a half keg lodged behind two couches in case of an inspection by the campus police. Max reintroduced me to his old friends, two guys I’d known vaguely at St. Albert’s. When the crowd started to thin, we sat in a circle getting stoned from a six-inch plastic water pipe.
    â€œCharlie, man,” one of Max’s friends said. “I knew you were here, but I never see you. We need to hang out.”
    â€œI’ve been working a lot lately,” I said. “But I’m starting to go out more. I mean, yeah, we should do something.”
    As we walked out to the fraternity houses, I realized that I didn’t have any passes, didn’t even know what colors would be accepted. But the issue never came up. We walked to the front of a line stretching off the porch onto the manicured lawn and were ushered inside. I had found my way into a few of the houses by then, but none of the more popular ones, which seemed to serve some related but separate population.
    We were in the basement, standing near a Ping-Pong table, when I felt the tap on my shoulder. Before I could turn around, Sophie had wrapped her arms around my neck and kissed me on the cheek. “You’re here!” she said,
as if it were a great shock that I should be out with everyone else. Which to me it was, though I wouldn’t have expected her to notice it. We’d walked back from class each week for a month, but otherwise we hadn’t spoken much. Now I was stoned and she was drunk, and for a moment we stood stupidly regarding each other. I tried not to be disappointed at how well she fit in with the others, how wholly comfortable she looked among them. She seemed to be thinking the same about me. I wanted to explain that it wasn’t so. Max introduced himself and his friends, and Sophie introduced the girls who stood beside her. A few minutes of conversation passed, the kind of empty talk such situations demand, at which Max has always excelled. All the while Sophie and I looked at each other as if to say, We aren’t really like this, are we?
    â€œWhat’s her story?” Max asked, when we were alone again.
    â€œJust a girl from my writing