Queen Sophie Hartley

by Stephanie Greene

  Before Sophie could say “I’d rather have padding than be a sour old thing like you!” the way she wanted to, Dr. Holt looked at her with what Sophie could have sworn was a sparkle in her eyes and said, “Made you mad, didn’t I!”

  Sophie’s mouth dropped open with surprise.

  With a loud “Ha!” Dr. Holt jiggled a lever on the handle of her chair, spun it quickly around, and glided away from them toward the ramp at the side of the house.

  “Don’t just stand there,” she called back over her shoulder. “Let’s get started on that garden.”

  For the second time in that long, tiring day, Sophie was too surprised to protest.

  Her mother’s spaghetti and meatballs cheered her up soon enough. Sophie didn’t care whether the meatballs had faces or not; she popped them in her mouth with her eyes closed so she didn’t have to look. They were delicious. The spaghetti was delicious, too, and the garlic bread.

  For a while, everybody was too busy eating to talk. Then Nora said she wasn’t going to eat any more because she didn’t want to be fat for her audition in three days, and Mrs. Hartley said that if she didn’t finish what was on her plate, she wasn’t going to the audition. Then Nora said if she didn’t get to go, she would lock herself in her room, to which Sophie said, “You’d better not lock my side,” which made Mrs. Hartley tell her to “Just keep eating, Sophie,” so Sophie took another piece of garlic bread.

  As she sat there chewing happily and listening to her mother and Nora, she was glad to think that as hard as it was to be kind, she didn’t have to give up eating to do it.

  “Three meatballs are not going to make you fat,” Mrs. Hartley was saying. “And if that’s how ballet makes you feel, perhaps you’d be better off not taking it.”

  “Fine.” Nora jabbed a meatball furiously with her fork and stuffed it in her mouth. She chewed it for a minute, then jabbed another meatball and chewed that.

  “If I didn’t eat, I’d fall over dead on the soccer field,” said Thad. He made a muscle. “Got to get those carbs!” he shouted.

  “Oh, shut up, Thad,” said Nora.

  “Nora...,” their mother said in a warning voice.

  “Sorry.”

  “It’s just a dance, Nora,” Mr. Hartley said jovially. He usually stayed out of arguments between Nora and Mrs. Hartley, but Sophie saw that his plate was clean, which meant he was getting impatient for dessert. “A lovely dance you do on your tippy-toes.”

  “It is not just a dance,” Nora said tightly. “It’s my life.”

  “Oh, your life,” her father scoffed good-naturedly, and then he snorted, which made Mrs. Hartley start signaling madly with her eyebrows for him to stop.

  He ignored her. “A bunch of young girls running around in their underwear is your life,” he said.

  “Tom...,” implored Mrs. Hartley.

  Sophie and her brothers kept eating. They were used to their father and Nora bickering. Mrs. Hartley said they both had short fuses. That was her diplomatic way of explaining they both got mad easily. Mr. Hartley’s idea of helping was to crack jokes, which always ended up making Nora mad. Then when she talked back to him, he got mad.

  Sophie was glad she had a long fuse herself.

  “They’re called tutus, as if you didn’t know,” Nora said.

  That was a mistake. Mr. Hartley’s face split into a grin. “Tutus!” he cried. “How serious can you be about a sport that requires tutus?”

  When John said, “Too-too!” like a train and Thad and Mr. Hartley laughed, Mrs. Hartley stood up. “Thad. John. Clear the dishes,” she said. She untied Maura’s bib and lifted her out of her high chair. “Sophie, take Maura into the den and play with her for a while, that’s a good girl.”

  Sophie was glad to get away. Nora and her parents were just going to argue for a bit more, and then Nora would storm up to their room. She didn’t cry, Nora, but she could slam a door with more emotion than anyone else in the family.

  Sophie carried Maura into the den, where she built towers out of blocks and let Maura knock them down. Then she put on some music and leapt around the room while Maura jiggled up and down on her bottom. When they were both tired of that, Sophie got a book and pulled Maura onto her lap. Maura stuck her thumb in her mouth, and Sophie began to read. With Maura’s solid weight resting trustingly against her, Sophie couldn’t help thinking how much easier it was to be kind to someone who couldn’t talk.

  Chapter Five

  “Peanut butter and jelly, please,” said Sophie.

  “What, again?” her mother said with surprise. She held the knife covered with mayonnaise poised in the air over a slice of bread. “No tuna fish today?”

  “Peanut butter and jelly.” Sophie sighed.

  “My goodness,” said Mrs. Hartley. She put the knife down and opened the cupboard door. “Ever since the day we ran out of cereal last week and I had to give you all peanut butter sandwiches for breakfast, you’ve asked for it every day, Sophie. You never even used to like peanut butter. Get the jelly out for me, that’s a good girl.”

  Sophie did, and then rested her elbows on the counter and her chin on her hands while she watched her mother slather peanut butter on one piece of bread and jelly on the other. When Mrs. Hartley turned away to pull a sandwich bag out of a drawer, Sophie quickly dunked her finger in the jar and stuck a wad of peanut butter in her mouth.

  “Any more of that and I’ll have to send you back up to brush your teeth,” Mrs. Hartley said as she turned back around. “You did brush your teeth, didn’t you?” she asked, looking Sophie hard in the face.

  Sophie breathed at her.

  “Peanut butter,” said Mrs. Hartley.

  That’s exactly what Heather had said the morning Sophie ate the peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. It was a few days after they had eaten lunch together for the first time. Jenna and Alice had stopped waiting for Sophie in their usual spot, so she was walking into school as slowly as she could, trying to think how she was going to hide her chicken breath from Heather, when Heather jumped out in front of her.

  Sophie was so startled she forgot to cover her mouth, which was the only idea she had come up with, and blurted out, “Hi, Heather!”

  “Peanut butter,” said Heather. She smiled the biggest smile Sophie had ever seen on her face. “I love peanut butter,” she said. Then she said, “Oh, Sophie!” in such a way it made Sophie feel as if she had given Heather a present of some kind. “I almost like you a lot,” said Heather.

  Heather talked about it all during lunch. About smells and pores and how the smell of what a person ate oozed out of them all over their body. Sophie thought it sounded very strange, but Heather said that if Sophie ate enough peanut butter, she would not only smell of it when she talked, but even when she walked. She made it sound like a wonderful thing and beamed at Sophie as if she really liked her.

  Sophie was amazed to see what a change a few days of kindness could make in a person. But even though she was glad Heather was happy, Sophie wasn’t at all happy herself. She missed eating with her friends.

  “I’ll go get Jenna and Alice,” she said at one point, recklessly interrupting Heather’s lecture. “They’d love to hear about all of this.”

  Heather stopped and pursed her lips to let Sophie know she was being rude. “Not yet,” she said. She gave a delicate little sniff. “I’m allergic. My nose is still too sensitive.”

  “Your nose?” said Sophie.

  It seemed that Heather’s nose missed California. It needed time to get used to Ohio, she said. The air in California was so much cleaner; her nose needed time to adapt. Sophie, who had listened to her father rant about the smog in California every time he had to move a family out there, thought maybe Heather had it backwards. But she wasn’t about to get Heather started on air in addition to smells. And food. She kept quiet.

  “Maybe I could try in a few weeks,” Heather said. “But then,” she added quickly, “only one at a time.”

  For one desperate second Soph
ie considered crying. Or even just letting tears well up in her eyes to let Heather know how disappointed she was. But almost the minute the idea came to her, it died. If she saw tears, Heather would only think that Sophie had allergies, too. It would give them even more in common than she thought they had now.

  Then, of course, judging from the way Jenna and Alice had been acting the past few days, Sophie was pretty sure they didn’t want to be Heather’s friends. Or even Sophie’s anymore. They were actually being very mean about it, she thought indignantly. Every time she had tried to talk to them, they’d turned their backs on her. She thought that maybe if she could get Alice alone, she could get her to talk. But Jenna was always by Alice’s side. It was beginning to feel very unfair to Sophie that she was the only one who was trying to be kind.

  She was thinking about the problem as she watched her mother put the sandwich in her lunch box. At least eating peanut butter sandwiches every day had given her one less thing to worry about; Heather had stopped sniffing around her like a guard dog. She couldn’t help wondering, though, if maybe peanut butter was starting to give her bad thoughts.

  “That’s a very big sigh,” her mother said. “Are you sure you don’t want to switch with John? He won’t mind.”

  “That’s okay. At least I won’t smell like meatloaf.”

  “Really, Sophie,” said Mrs. Hartley. “You say the strangest things.”

  “We should be about fifteen minutes,” said Mrs. Hartley. “I’ll send Dr. Holt out when we’re through if she’s feeling up to it.”

  Sophie ran around to the backyard. The gardening tools were still lying where she had left them two days earlier. She dropped to her knees at the edge of the flower bed and picked up a trowel. It was lovely to be out here by herself; she dug away at the soil for a while, finding plenty of worms and dropping them into the coffee can her father had given her that morning.

  “All right, you win,” he had told her as he climbed into the cab of his truck. “Seven cents a worm, but not a penny more. I still say it’s highway robbery.” He gave two short blasts on the truck’s horn, and was gone.

  As she worked, Sophie quickly realized that adding sevens was going to be much harder than adding fives. She hated the sevens times table. And the eights. The nines, too, if she was being truthful. But the tens were easy—all you did was add a zero—so she counted off the worms by tens and lined up a stick on the grass for every group of ten she found. She could figure out exactly how much money her dad owed her when she got home.

  She had three sticks so far, and was happily working away when she heard a door open behind her and a too-familiar voice say, “Your mother said she’ll be back in half an hour.”

  Dr. Holt came rolling across the terrace toward her and stopped just short of the grass. “I wouldn’t do it that way if I were you,” she said shortly.

  Sophie sat back on her heels. “What way?” she asked.

  “Digging a trench like that. That’s not the way it’s done.”

  “I’m not planting the flowers yet,” Sophie said. “I’m looking for worms.”

  “What do you need worms for?” said Dr. Holt.

  “My dad said...” Sophie stopped. She suddenly felt very odd. This morning it didn’t feel as if there was anything wrong with taking worms out of Dr. Holt’s garden. But she didn’t like the way Dr. Holt was looking at her. It made her feel as if she was doing something wrong.

  “Well, what did your father say?” Dr. Holt said impatiently.

  “He said he’d give me seven cents a worm,” Sophie said.

  “And who said you could sell my worms?” said Dr. Holt. She sat up straight and glared down her nose at Sophie like a judge in a courtroom. “Were you going to give me a cut of the profit, or keep it all for yourself?”

  It did sort of sound like a crime the way Dr. Holt put it. Sophie suddenly felt guilty. That wasn’t the way she had meant it at all. It was mean of Dr. Holt to make her feel so bad. Sophie could tell she was enjoying it, too.

  “Worms don’t belong to people,” Sophie said stiffly.

  “Whom do they belong to?”

  Sophie didn’t want to say she thought they belonged to God; Dr. Holt would probably make it sound silly. But she wasn’t going to stand here, either, being glared at as if she was a criminal.

  “Fine.” Sophie turned the can upside down and dumped the worms into a squirming pile on the soil. “You can keep your silly old worms,” she said. “You’re a mean old lady to call me a thief.”

  “I never said any such thing,” said Dr. Holt.

  “Well, that’s how you made me feel.” Sophie started picking things up—the trowel, the rake, anything she could find. She didn’t know what she was going to do with it all. But standing here in front of Dr. Holt was horrible.

  She clanged everything together as noisily as she could so she wouldn’t have to talk. She was tired of being kind. It didn’t work, anyway. All it did was get her in deeper and deeper trouble. First Heather. Now Dr. Holt. She was sick of it.

  When she couldn’t hold another thing, Sophie turned back around.

  Dr. Holt was looking down at her lap, picking away at the fabric of her skirt with her gnarly hand. When the clanking noises stopped, she turned and looked at the side of the house, as if looking at bricks would be better than looking at Sophie. “Well, then, I’m sorry,” she said in a stiff voice.

  It was so surprising, it stopped Sophie cold. Dr. Holt hated to apologize, she could tell. So when she finally did, she really meant it. It was so much like Nora, Sophie stopped feeling mad immediately.

  “I suppose this means you’re going to quit,” Dr. Holt said to the bricks in a gruff voice.

  “I don’t know,” Sophie said slowly. That was surprising, too. She couldn’t quit; her mother would be angry at her. The rest of the family would laugh at her, too, when she told them about the worms. And then, of course, she would have to add “kind” to the list of things she wasn’t good at just when the list of things she was good at seemed to be catching up.

  But it was nice to think Dr. Holt would miss her if she did quit. Sophie could tell from Dr. Holt’s voice that she would. Anyway, it was fun planting flowers. Sophie liked it. And sometimes—only sometimes—talking to Dr. Holt was interesting.

  “You’ve never even given me anything to eat,” said Sophie.

  That made Dr. Holt look at her. “You never asked.”

  “Asking’s not polite.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” said Dr. Holt. “All right, then...” She spun her chair around so that she faced the house. “Let’s go get something to eat.” She started moving. “Strawberry shortcake all right with you?” she called.

  “Oh, yes,” said Sophie.

  “I made it myself,” said Dr. Holt. She stopped her chair and waited while Sophie dumped her armload of tools in a corner of the terrace and opened the door. “I bet that surprises you.”

  “I can’t imagine you making anything sweet,” admitted Sophie.

  “First, you call me a mean old lady, and then you tell me I’m a sour old goat,” grumbled Dr. Holt.

  “I never said any such thing,” said Sophie.

  “Ha!” Dr. Holt shot her an amused glance as she rolled past her into the house. “You’re a fresh kid. I don’t know why I’m even cooking for you.”

  But Sophie knew why: she had earned it.

  The strawberry shortcake was sweet, very sweet. She ate two pieces.

  Sophie tried not to watch Nora making bird faces at herself in their mirror after dinner, but it was impossible not to. She pretended she was doing her spelling homework, which her mother had threatened to start testing her on if she didn’t work harder, but she was really keeping a close eye on Nora.

  First, Nora would crane her head one way and lift her chin in the air to see what she looked like out of the corner of her eye. Then she craned it around the other way and did the same thing. Sometimes she pushed her lips out as if she was about to kiss someone.r />
  She was trying to see which was her better profile. Sophie knew, because she did the same thing. But while Sophie was always checking to see how she was going to look with a tiara, she knew that Nora was imagining how she was going to look with a wreath of beautiful white feathers on her head when she danced the role of the swan in her ballet performance. It was the lead role; Nora wanted it more than anything. She hadn’t said as much to Sophie, but Sophie knew. There was only one other girl in Nora’s class who might get it. Her name was Lauren.

  Lauren used to help teach the beginners’ class. She was the oldest girl in the school, two years older than Nora. She was taller than Nora, too, which mattered in ballet. Her straight blond hair was always pulled back into a perfect chignon at the nape of her neck that never came unraveled. Her shoulder blades stood out under her leotard and her legs were as long and thin as a colt’s. Even her fingers were thin.

  All the little girls in Sophie’s ballet class started out wanting to be just like Lauren. Sophie had, too. But then something about the way Lauren looked at her and talked to her had made Sophie stop wishing she could dance as well as Lauren and started making her realize she’d never be as good. No matter how hard she tried. Sophie didn’t know how Lauren did it, but she could still remember the feeling.

  It wasn’t simply that Lauren wasn’t kind, Sophie realized, it was that Lauren was mean. She was suddenly very worried for her sister. It gave her a terrible feeling in her stomach to see the way Nora’s damp hair was curling around her face, even though she had it pulled back into a pony tail. Hair mattered, too, in ballet, Sophie thought. Tall snobs with straight hair would be very hard to compete with.

  She felt the surge of fierce protectiveness she always felt when an outsider was mean to anyone in her family. It was one thing when her brothers and sisters were mean to one another, but another thing altogether when someone else was. Sophie felt she just had to say something to make Nora feel better.