Sophie’s World (12 page)

Sophie pulled a strand of hair under her nose. “I don’t want to talk about it right now.” She closed her eyes and imagined Jesus. He was as kind as ever. She felt worse.

What do I do?
Sophie said to him.
I don’t think what we just did was right—but I don’t know what to do. If I call Maggie back, Fiona will be mad at me. She probably won’t want to be my friend anymore.

She waited, just as Dr. Peter had told her to, but there was no sudden burst of inspiration. There was only Fiona saying, “Come on—that was the bell.”

Sophie climbed off the swing, but Fiona stayed on hers.

“Soph?” she said. “Are you mad at me?”

“No!” Sophie said.

They gave each other weak smiles and walked back to the building together.

But for the rest of the day, Sophie felt more alone than she had in a long time. The office lady bringing her a note last period from Mama didn’t even help:
Your mother is going to be about ten minutes late picking you up. She wants you to wait on the playground, and she will find you.

“They must have told her in the office that’s the safest place to be after school,” Fiona said. “There’s always a teacher out there.” Fiona tilted her head almost shyly. “I wish I could stay with you.”

Sophie said she wished she could too, but secretly she was glad to be alone as she headed for the swings. She needed to badger Jesus until he showed her something. Sophie pulled up her sweatshirt hood. The thought of her lost black cloak stabbed her.

“Jesus?” she whispered. “Did we do the wrong thing, kicking Maggie out?”

There was a scream—though Sophie knew right away that it wasn’t Jesus answering her. It was coming from across the playground, where a small group was streaming away from the fence, leaving behind a lone figure who was waving her hands and screaming. It was Kitty.

The group walking away from her was the Corn Pops. Not a single one of them looked back.

Sophie took off toward Kitty, but Julia planted her tall self right in Sophie’s path.

“Don’t go there,” Julia hissed. “Just leave it alone, or you are going to be so sorry.”

Twelve

J
ulia kept looking at Sophie through hardened eyes—until Willoughby gave a stifled squeal and B.J. pulled at Julia’s elbow.

“Mr. Denton is coming!” she said in a hoarse whisper.

“Just leave it alone,” Julia said to Sophie one more time. Then she was gone, with her train of Pops behind her.

Do they really think Mr. Denton isn’t going to see Kitty over there freaking out?
Sophie thought.

“Everything all right out here?” Mr. Denton called.

“Yes!” Kitty called back. “I’m fine!”

Mr. Denton waved and sat down on a bench by the door. Sophie hurried over to Kitty and squatted down beside her.

“Why did you tell him you’re fine?” Sophie whispered to her. “What did they do to you?”

Kitty’s face was smudged with dirt on both cheeks, except where tears had left their trails on the way down her face.

“Please don’t tell anybody,” she whispered. “Please.”

“But
why
?”

“Because!” Kitty rubbed her eyes with the backs of her hands, leaving them smeared with dirt.

Sophie grabbed one of Kitty’s dirty hands. “What happened?” “You have to promise you won’t tell anybody else—and you can’t tell Julia and them that I told you either.”

Kitty hung her head until all Sophie could see was the top of her ponytail. “I had to crawl on the ground. They told me that if I crawled across the playground on my hands and knees, they would take me back into their group.”

“What?”

“And then after I did it, they laughed and said they were only joking. They never wanted me back in their group at all!”

Kitty shook her head so hard, Sophie was afraid she was going to break her neck.

“Stop!” Sophie said. “They aren’t even worth it! They’re just—cruel. They’re evil—they’re heinous!”

A whistle echoed across the playground. Sophie whirled around—but it was only Mr. Denton. Mama was standing next to him with Zeke, waving at her.

“I’m coming!” Sophie called to her. She turned back to Kitty.

“Please don’t tell anybody,” Kitty said. Her eyes were pleading. “If you do, they’ll find out about it—they know
everything
—and they’ll do worse to me.”

Sophie didn’t know what to say, and Dr. Peter had told her to wait if she didn’t know.

When she got home, Sophie went straight to her room. Her stomach was tying itself into a knot as she sat cross-legged on the bed.

“Jesus?” she whispered. “I saw two people get really hurt today. I think I have to do something about it. I’m just going to ask you what to do, and then I’m going to wait until I know. Because somebody has to do something. And I think it’s supposed to be me. Is that why I’m feeling so sick?” She swallowed hard. “Or is it because I was hurting somebody else myself?”

Sophie kept her eyes closed and waited. Just as always, there was no answer she could hear from Jesus. She wiped her wet face. “It’s
wrong
,” she whispered.

After she somehow got through dinner, Sophie called Fiona.

“There’s something we have to do,” Sophie said when she had Fiona on the line. “But you have to promise not to tell a single other person, or Kitty is going down.”

“Kitty?” Fiona said. “Do we care about Kitty?”

“Yes,” Sophie said. “We do.”

Sophie told Fiona everything she had witnessed on the playground.

“So what are you saying we should do?” said Fiona.

“I think we should rescue Kitty.”

“What?”

“And I thought about something else,” Sophie said. “What the Corn Pops did to Kitty is no different from what we did to Maggie.”

“It wasn’t like we just stopped being her friends! We were
never
her friends!” Fiona’s voice was winding up. “She pushed herself right on us. She was making us pay her back for something she did for us, and we paid her back. We’re done.”

“I just don’t like the way we did it,” Sophie said.

“It was
your
idea!”

“I know. And that’s why I think we should tell her why we got mad at her and give her one more chance.”

“No,” Fiona said. “And you know what else? I’m not helping Kitty either. Has she ever once been nice to us?”

“I don’t think that makes any difference,” Sophie said. “We should do the right thing.”

“You
do the ‘right thing,’” Fiona said. “Not me!”

Suddenly there was a click in Sophie’s ear. Fiona had hung up.

Sophie flung the phone onto its cradle and climbed the stairs in a blur. But when she tossed her glasses onto the bedside table and threw herself face down on her bed, her chest was pulled in so tightly she couldn’t cry. She could only lie there with hurt all around her until a knock sounded at her door.

“It’s seven thirty,” Daddy said. “You only have an hour and a half before lights out. Did you get your homework done?”

She really wished he would go away. She was afraid she was going to either throw up or cry, and she would have to explain either one. Dr. Peter had told her Daddy might understand if she just talked to him calmly—but now just wasn’t the time to try that.

“I’m about to, Daddy.”

“Okay. Well, let’s get it done.” Daddy opened the door a crack. “You want to keep that camera, right?”

Sophie nodded.

“Now that you’re on track, I want to see some steady improvement. Let’s make that the rule starting next week.”

He ran his hand over her hair and left, whistling. Sophie felt as if a steamroller had just knocked her down. She couldn’t do her homework. She couldn’t even think about how she was going to rescue Kitty all by herself, or even how she was going to apologize to Maggie.

All she could think about was never being friends with Fiona again. Never having lunch together, never meeting on the stage behind the curtains with homemade breakfast burritos, never hanging out on the monkey bars and planning brilliant films.

She finally snapped off the light and crawled under the covers.
Is everything going to go back to the way it was before Fiona?
she asked Jesus.
If you love me, why would you let that happen? Help me get her back, please.

Just one more thing
, she said to the kind-eyed man in her mind.
I won’t crawl in the dirt for Fiona, okay? Please don’t let her ask me to do that.

And then she started to cry.

The next morning, being-scared nausea swept over Sophie as she walked through the school hallway alone.

What am I supposed to do now?
she thought.
Fiona isn’t waiting for me backstage. I can’t go there by myself.
She put her hand to her mouth.
I wouldn’t be able to bear it!

Instead, she turned toward the language arts room. Maybe Mr. Denton would let her come inside and sit. Although what she was going to do or think about or dream up, even she couldn’t imagine.

Sophie hadn’t taken more than two steps when a skinny figure was beside her, sniffling.

“You’ve been crying,” Anne-Stuart said in her clogged-up voice.

Sophie tried to ignore her and set her sights on Mr. Denton’s door.

“Is it about Fiona?” she said. “She’s been crying too. Julia’s trying to help.”

Anne-Stuart pointed a shiny-nailed finger. Sophie nearly tripped on the carpet. Fiona was against the wall, across from the language arts room, and Willoughby and B.J. stood in front of her, leaning in as if Fiona were giving them the ultimate secret to popularity. But it was Julia who astounded Sophie the most. She was standing next to Fiona—
with her arm around her
. And Fiona wasn’t even flinching.

Thirteen

S
ophie pushed open Mr. Denton’s door and made her way to her table. She sank down into her chair, her backpack thudding the floor beside her. She put her head on her arms and tried to let Antoinette take over and push away the heinous sight of Fiona joining the Corn Pops.

Antoinette sat down beside her and pulled the black velvet cloak around both of them. “I’m so sorry, my gentle friend, ” she said, “but I am not your answer. The good doctor, the
brilliant
doctor—he gave you the answer. You must follow that now.”

Sophie squeezed her eyes tighter.
You’re leaving me too, ntoinette? NO—come back!
But Antoinette didn’t, and Sophie felt more alone than she ever had. Maybe if she called Mama and told her she was really in trouble, they could go to Dr. Peter right this minute. He could tell her what to do. And then Sophie knew something: he already had told her what to do. With her eyes squeezed shut against the hot tears, she prayed.

The kind face was there in her mind—the Jesus face she always imagined. Not Antoinette’s face. Not Fiona’s face. Just Jesus’. And he had already shown her what to do.
If I have to do it on my own—then please will you help me?

The bell rang, jangling her face up from her arms. The room filled with jabbering students followed by a substitute teacher. Sophie couldn’t look to see whether Fiona would sit with the Corn Pops. Instead, she looked for Maggie.

I have to tell her I’m sorry
, Sophie thought. She didn’t know anything else at the moment, but she knew that.

As Sophie watched, Maggie settled herself into a corner and opened a book. Sophie glanced around and realized that on the board the sub had written:
THIS IS A FREE READING DAY.

This is my chance
, Sophie thought.
But what if I apologize and Maggie just yells at me?
And then she could almost hear Dr. Peter in her head:
She gets in your face anyway. What have you got to lose if you talk calmly and honestly to her? You’ll never know unless you try.
Sophie wove her way through people who
weren’t
reading. Maggie slammed her book shut just as Sophie sat down next to her.

“Hi,” Sophie said. “What are you reading?”

“What do you care?” Maggie said.

Sophie squeezed her hands together. “I do care. Fiona and me, we made a huge—an
immense
—mistake when we wrote you that heinous letter. I hope you’ll forgive me.”