What Happened to Sophie Wilder by Christopher Beha Page B

matter. And I’m sorry for coming to you to clean up the mess.”
    â€œAbout that part,” I said. “I’m sorry, too.”
    She nodded, and that was all we said about it. I never asked what she’d done about the pregnancy.
    â€œI thought you might like to stay with us for Christmas,” I said. “It’s become something of a tradition by now. And maybe we can work some things out, get ourselves back on track.”
    The invitation seemed to surprise her.
    â€œI appreciate it, Charlie. But I have plans.”
    â€œYou have plans?”
    â€œI’m spending the break at Tom O’Brien’s place,” she said. “With Tom and his aunt.”
    Like that, she floated back out of reach.
    In a certain way, I was glad that she’d chosen Tom, of all people. I’d been in a few classes with him, known him a little over the years. He was a quiet kid. Unimaginative, he seemed to me. He would not have impressed me even as one of her two-week indulgences from earlier years, and I doubted that he would last long.
    â€œYou guys are serious?”
    â€œWe’ve been together since fall break.”
    People had been keeping it from me, which suggested that my struggles over Sophie had been more apparent than I’d thought.
    â€œYou’d like him if you got to know him.”
    I doubted it.

    â€œSure I would,” I said. “I’ve always followed you in matters of taste.”
    Â 
    It took time to understand that Sophie wouldn’t pass so quickly out of the Tom phase. I spent the rest of senior year trying to figure out what kind of person I was going to become, now that she wasn’t watching. I dated a girl in the class below ours, one who still keeps in touch and who deserved better than the person I was that year.
    One day I ran into my old roommate, Dean, who told me his parents had visited that weekend. They’d all gone to mass together, not at the campus chapel but at the church in town.
    â€œI saw Sophie Wilder there, sitting in the back by herself. I didn’t know she was Catholic.”
    â€œShe’s not,” I said. “It must have been someone else.”
    â€œI know what she looks like,” Dean said. “The two of you were inseparable when we lived together. It was Sophie.”
    I considered the possibility.
    â€œIt’s probably for some story she’s writing.”
    Later I would hear from others that she was going to mass regularly, never with other students, always in town. Some said she had spoken with the local priest about getting baptized, but this sounded like a rumor and I didn’t think much about it.
    After we graduated, Sophie published her story collection, which she dedicated to the memory of her parents. My name came right after Tom’s on the acknowledgements page. The collection made her briefly famous, in the local, limited way that was all we could have wanted. The object of this fame was a girl I didn’t really know anymore, but the occasion for it—those stories—I knew better than anyone, better perhaps than the author herself did. It was strange
to watch it happen, to watch it pass, and to be left waiting just like any other fan for the big book to come out.
    We sometimes wound up at parties together, but I didn’t spend much time with our college friends, preferring the disaffected literary crowd that circled around Max. Amid that crowd Sophie’s name came up occasionally. Some of them had met her the summer before and knew what had happened between us, but to others she was just the girl with the big book contract. They talked about her in the vaguely suspicious way we talked about young writers we hadn’t read but whose reputations we’d decided were undeserved.
    â€œWe went to school together,” I’d tell them. “We used to be good friends.”
    People remembered this, I guess, because as time passed they started to ask me,