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

needed. We never doubted that we would both make it. It had to happen, because we wanted it so badly. The certainty of that wanting left us free to ignore everything else around us, to give ourselves entirely.
    I miss that about those days—the freedom to want; the belief that our desires could never disappoint us, so long as we remained loyal to them; the sense that we could choose
our fate, as though the absence of choice weren’t exactly what made it fate.
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    For all that, I shouldn’t make it sound as though we spent three years in a hothouse together. In most ways, we lived like everyone on campus. At meals we sat with our classmates and had predictable dining hall conversations. We went to class when the spirit moved us and during those points in the year when it became unavoidable if one wanted to pass. On sunny days near the beginning and end of each school year we joined the world out in the courtyard, lying on blankets in the shade of our fake-Gothic dormitory, taking surreptitious sips from cans of warm beer. On weekends we sometimes went drinking with everyone else. But when Monday morning came, we began the week together, reading and writing on Sophie’s couch, and days passed when we hardly spoke to anyone else.
    Every few months, she closed her door to me. She might look up casually from a novel she was reading and ask, “Don’t you think you ought to leave?” Or else, at the end of our usual walk she would announce that she was returning to her room in a tone that made clear I wasn’t invited back with her. The first few times this happened, I asked if I’d done something wrong. She looked at me as though I was being ridiculous. Was it really so strange for her to want a bit of time to herself? Of course it wasn’t, but it wasn’t the deal I thought we had worked out.
    Eventually, I came to see these breaks—the shortest a few days, the longest a few weeks—as part of the rhythm of time. They even brought some relief. Once away from her, I realized how constricting our life together could be. And yet I fell eagerly back into that life as soon as she was ready for me.

    In the meantime, there were certain rules I came to understand. After she shut me out, I couldn’t go to her. I had to wait for her to come to me, which she eventually did, usually in the middle of the night. She’d wake me gently, and then I would find her on top of me.
    I knew she slept with other guys during our time apart. They were blond, sunny, unserious boys, business majors and players of squash. They seemed good-natured but perplexed by her sudden attention. She never made any attempt to conceal them from me, which would have been impossible at a school that size. Impossible, too, to avoid running into each other. I could be sure of seeing her every few days, walking to class with a group of other girls or even with the boy she was briefly trying out. She would wave or smile as if I were just another friend, and the latest boy, who knew that Sophie and I had been “together” in some amorphous way, would duck his head deferentially.
    What I felt then wasn’t as simple as jealousy. She lost focus for me. I saw her through the eyes of those others, for whom she was a figure of comic caprice or just an average girl. Worse, I felt myself come out of focus when I didn’t have her attention. It wasn’t just my writing but my entire life that I had come to compose with one reader in mind.
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    As we crossed Washington Square all those years later, back to our walking ways, we both came into focus again. I had the idea that we might be on the edge of a new life together, as though the past few years had been one of those regular interludes, and her marriage to Tom just another fling with a boy she’d picked out from nowhere. The crowd around the break-dancers had grown to include us, and Ginger ran tight circles around my legs, wrapping me in her leash as