Sophie Hartley and the Facts of Life

by Stephanie Greene

  But she was definitely passionate.

  Another book said gorillas had brains like people and were very smart. At one zoo, a scientist named Dr. Pimm was teaching a baby gorilla how to communicate using sign language.

  Because Sophie didn’t know sign language, and because all these animals seemed to do so many things with their feet, she decided to teach herself how to write with her feet, so she could communicate with her gorilla when she got it.

  The idea was a little confusing, even to Sophie, but she kept at it. Her mother wouldn’t be able to resist when Sophie told her that gorillas didn’t scratch furniture or dig holes, and that Sophie was going to be able to write notes to her gorilla telling it what not to do.

  She was about to dot the i in her name when two arms wrapped themselves around her neck and a high-pitched voice demanded, “Wide! Wide!”

  “Not now, Maura,” Sophie said. She grabbed her baby sister’s hands and tried to pry them from around her neck. Maura promptly lifted her feet off the ground, dangling her entire sixteen-month-old body weight down Sophie’s back.

  It was Maura’s newest trick, and very effective. Sophie could barely breathe.

  “Maura, no!” she cried, wrenching her sister’s hands apart and dumping her on her bottom. Maura wailed and kicked her heels against the floor.

  Sophie ignored her.

  It was the only thing to do when Maura had a temper tantrum. She had them a lot these days. Mrs. Hartley said it was because Maura was going through the “terrible twos.”

  “What do you mean?” Sophie had said. “She’s only sixteen months.”

  “Well then, she’s ahead of herself,” her mother said. “Gifted. All of my children are gifted.”

  Sophie personally thought Maura was spoiled. She’d refused to walk for the longest time because so many people in the family were willing to carry her. When Mrs. Hartley made them stop, Maura had started staggering around the house, pulling magazines off tables and books from bookshelves.

  Nothing was safe from her grasping hands: pots and pans, dishes on the table, toilet paper, which she delighted in unrolling until all that was left was the cardboard tube. All Mrs. Hartley ever did was say “No, Maura” in a lot nicer voice than she used with everyone else in the family.

  For Sophie, the final straw had come the week before. When Maura walked across one of Sophie’s wet paintings in her bare feet, Mrs. Hartley had made it sound as if it were Sophie’s fault.

  “For heaven’s sake, work at the kitchen table!” her mother said as she sat Maura on the edge of the sink and held her red, blue, and green feet under the tap.

  “But I always paint lying on the floor,” Sophie protested. “I think better when I’m on my stomach.”

  “Well, you’ll just have to think sitting up until Maura’s older,” her mother said. “Honestly, Sophie, use your head.”

  Sophie was insulted. She went straight up to her room and drew a picture of a baby with a red face, a huge circle for a mouth, a few teeth, and waterfalls of tears gushing out of both eyes. She wrote DANGER: FLOOD ZONE under it and taped it to Maura’s bedroom door.

  She also decided that since it was obvious her mother wasn’t going to teach Maura any manners, she’d have to do it herself.

  Lesson number one would be patience.

  “You can’t have everything you want, the minute you want it,” Sophie said, crouching over her paper again. “I’ll give you a piggyback ride when I’m finished.”

  Maura stopped kicking the floor and started kicking Sophie’s back instead. Sophie scooted sideways on her bottom until she was out of Maura’s reach and, using her best teacher-like voice, said, “I’m not going to play with you until you learn patience.”

  “Patience? Who’re you kidding?” Sophie’s older sister, Nora, had made her entrance. She tossed her backpack on the couch and made for the family computer. “Number one, you don’t know what patience is, Sophie,” she said scornfully. ‘And number two, Maura’s still a baby.”

  As she sat down, Nora frowned at the pencil between Sophie’s toes. “What’re you doing?” she asked. Then, very quickly, “No. Don’t tell me. I don’t want to know.”

  It was too late.

  Sophie was so used to Nora’s not wanting to hear what she had to say that she took even an idle question as encouragement. If Sophie stopped talking whenever someone in her family wanted her to, she’d never get to explain any of her ideas.

  Sophie thought her ideas were interesting.

  “One of the biggest differences between primates and Man is that primates don’t have thumbs,” she explained to her sister’s back. “No, wait. Gorillas do have thumbs. They even have thumbs on their feet.”

  Sophie cheerfully bopped herself on the forehead a few times and shook her head to rattle her ideas into their proper place in her brain before she went on. “But they can’t write, so scientists are teaching them how to speak.”

  She cheated a bit by steadying the pencil with her hand as she wrote. “Well, not speak, exactly, but make signs people can read. Sign language, it’s called. I thought I’d try to write using my feet to make it equal.”

  Nora had stopped typing. She was sitting with her fingers poised above the keyboard, staring at Sophie over her shoulder. When Sophie felt her sister’s eyes on her, she looked up and smiled.

  It was gratifying to think Nora found gorillas as interesting as she did.

  “When I get my baby gorilla, I mean,” Sophie told her. “For my birthday.”

  “Do you have any idea how little sense that makes?” At thirteen, Nora had a way of disdainfully curling her mouth whenever Sophie talked, as if Sophie were saying something ridiculous. “Gorillas are learning sign language, so you’re going to write with your feet?” she said. “I mean, like, none, Sophie.”

  Sophie tried to think back to what she’d actually said. She’d been so intent on putting a little smiley face over the i in her name that she couldn’t remember. It had sounded all right inside her head.

  “I don’t know why Mom doesn’t have you tested,” Nora said, sighing heavily as she turned back to the keyboard. “Half the time, the front part of what you say doesn’t have anything to do with the end part, and the rest is so insane, none of it makes sense.”

  “Tested for what?” Sophie said gamely. She found tests interesting. If she didn’t always answer the questions the way she was supposed to, it wasn’t her fault. Lots of times, there seemed to be more than one answer.

  On those horrible end-of-grade tests, Sophie didn’t do nearly as well as she thought she should. She blamed the tests.

  “I don’t know, but there’s got to be an explanation.” Nora was typing furiously in response to the little boxes popping up all over the computer screen like tiny message bombs. “It’s as if you’re not dealing with a full deck or something,” she said, pecking away.

  “Mom said I was gifted,” said Sophie. “So there.”

  “Idiot savant is more like it.” Nora typed a bit more, then suddenly jumped as though the seat had shocked her and cried, “Omigod!” in a pleased voice. “I don’t believe it!”

  “What? One of your boyfriends again?”

  “It’s none of your business!” Nora cried, plastering her arms and upper body across the computer screen. “Stop reading my mail!”

  It wasn’t as if she were holding a pair of binoculars to her eyes, Sophie thought disgustedly. Nora had been acting nuts lately. It was all because she had become boy crazy over the past few months.

  She and her friends giggled and shrieked about boys so much, you would have thought they’d never seen one before. Sophie didn’t understand why Nora found them so interesting. Especially after living with their brothers, John and Thad.

  Boys were—well, boys were either boring or annoying, as far as Sophie could see. The boys in her class walked around flapping their arms with their hands in their armpits to make farting noises. They read joke books, too, then told dumb jokes that nobody laugh
ed at except other boys.

  “I don’t see why you make such a big deal about boys,” Sophie said. “They’re exactly the same as girls. You’re being sexist.”

  Sexist was a new word some of the girls in Sophie’s class were using. It meant someone who thought boys were better than girls. The girls said boys were sexist. And here was Nora acting sexist herself.

  “Right, Sophie. Exactly the same,” Nora said. “That shows how much you know, you baby.”

  Sophie was about to defend herself when Maura grabbed a fistful of Sophie’s hair and tried to pull herself to her feet. Sophie yelped and yanked her hair out of her sister’s hands, sending Maura onto her bottom again. At that second, their mother appeared in the doorway.

  It was Thursday, which meant Mrs. Hartley had started work at 7:30 in the morning, picked Maura up at daycare at 4:00 and dropped her at home, and then gone to pick up John at his tae kwon do class at 4:45. She was always tired by the time she got home on Thursdays.

  “Oh, for heaven’s sake, Sophie,” her mother said. She snatched Maura up before she could utter her first scream and took a quick sniff of Maura’s diaper. “You’re getting too old to fight with a two-year-old.”

  “She pulled my hair,” Sophie said, rubbing the back of her head.

  “That’s because you dig in.” Her mother glanced at the pencil between Sophie’s toes as she turned to leave. “What on earth are you doing?”

  “Communicating with apes,” Nora told her.

  “That, I can believe,” said Mrs. Hartley.

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  Visit www.hmhco.com or your favorite retailer to purchase the book in its entirety.

  Visit www.hmhco.com to find all of the books in the Sophie Hartley series.

  About the Author

  STEPHANIE GREENE is the author of close to two dozen books for children, including picture books, chapter books, and middle-grade novels. Her Clarion titles include the Owen Foote books and the first three books about Sophie Hartley. The recipient of the MFA degree in writing for children and young adults from Vermont College, Ms. Greene lives in Durham, North Carolina, with her husband.