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

together did I regret the decision. I couldn’t wait another week to talk to her.
    When I heard the knock half an hour after the end of class, I opened the door with a mixture of panic and relief. She presented herself to me as if I’d been expecting her. Which, I suddenly felt, I had. She walked past me into the room, heading right for a poster on my wall of a model in a bikini, drinking a bottle of beer.
    â€œI like it,” she said after a moment of consideration. “It adds a quiet dignity.”
    â€œMy roommate put it up. She belongs to him.”
    â€œToo bad.” She leaned over and picked up the book I’d set on the floor when she knocked. “Perhaps you can work
out a swap, one half-read copy of Within a Budding Grove for one young girl in flower.”
    â€œSeems like a fair trade.”
    She sat down on the windowsill where I’d been perched reading before her arrival, and I took a place on the couch.
    â€œWe missed you in class,” she said, still holding my book. “It’s dreadful being literary without someone there to appreciate it.”
    â€œI was falling behind on my education.”
    â€œYou should have started with Nabokov. He’s a bit more concise.”
    â€œI did.”
    â€œReally, which one?”
    â€œ Pale Fire . Ada . A few of the early Russian novels.”
    She seemed pleased but embarrassed to learn I’d been following her reading course, and she turned away to set down the volume of Proust.
    â€œHave you gotten far enough to know the truth about Albertine?”
    â€œThere have been hints,” I said. “But the narrator seems a bit obtuse.”
    â€œMaybe I can offer some insight, then.”
    Â 
    Of insight, Sophie had plenty. She had been a senior in high school when her parents were killed in a car crash while driving home from a party just a few miles from their house. She told me this as if describing the plot of an unconvincing book she’d been forced to read for class. She’d already been accepted by New Hampton at the time, but both the admissions office there and her high school counselor urged her to defer for a year. They must have assumed that she would spend that time with family, but she had no family to speak of. Since she was already eighteen—
“I’d reached my majority,” she told me, in a faux-clinical voice—she was free to live by herself in her parents’ house. She wrote for days on end. When she wasn’t writing, she haunted the local bookstore, run by a woman in her thirties who’d dropped out of grad school to take over the store when her parents, the owners, retired. The woman’s name was Lila. She gave Sophie a reading list, and they conducted a kind of seminar together.
    â€œNow here’s the sordid, predictable part,” Sophie told me. “It wasn’t just a literary education I received. If a certain kind of author were telling the story, we would turn the sign on the door from ‘open’ to ‘closed’ and fall into passion right there at the foot of the shelves. It wasn’t quite like that. But close enough.”
    By the time the next fall came around, Sophie was ready to give up on college entirely. But a few weeks into the semester, Lila decided she didn’t want Sophie’s future on her conscience.
    â€œI was completely in love with her. She told me I could stay at home or come here, whichever was right for me, but either way things were through between us. I’ve called her a few times since I got here. She chats politely, but she doesn’t want to give me ideas. To be honest, I’m not really sure that I like girls. I know that I like her, but she won’t have me.”
    What little I already knew about Sophie—that she wrote better than the rest of us, that she had read more and better books, that she was somehow not of this place—now made sense. I pictured her alone in her