Sophie’s Secret Read online

  “It doesn’t say anything about his father,” Dr. Peter said.

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “That’s it.”

  Sophie opened her eyes. “But what happens after that?”

  “The next time we see Jesus is when he’s about thirty and he gets baptized by John the Baptist.”

  “Oh.” Sophie could feel her eyebrows twisting. “So he didn’t ever make his parents understand? He just had to find other people who did? And he didn’t find them until he was THIRTY?”

  Dr. Peter pulled out the magnifying glass and applied it to the page, brow furrowed. When he looked up at Sophie, he shook his head. “That’s not what I see here.”

  “What do you see?” Sophie said.

  Dr. Peter nodded for her to look on with him as he traced the lines in Luke with his finger. “Looks to me like he went home with his parents and obeyed them. And that’s how he grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and men.

  Women too, I’m sure.”

  “What’s ‘stature’ ?” Sophie said.

  “Height.”

  “Oh, well, forget that,” Sophie said. “I’m underdeveloped.” She looked at him from under the brim of her helmet. “Does this mean if I obey my parents I’ll actually grow? Maybe need a bra someday?”

  She could see that Dr. Peter was trying to smother a smile. “No, I think God’s in charge of that,” he said.

  Sophie looked at the Bible again, and she could feel herself pulling back.

  “Talk to me, Loodle,” Dr. Peter said.

  “I don’t think I like this part,” Sophie said. “It’s like it’s saying I have to obey my parents even if they—well, Daddy—don’t even understand me.”

  “That’s what Jesus did.” Dr. Peter pulled a canteen out of the daypack and offered it to her. “Drink?”

  Sophie shook her head. As Fiona would have said, she was completely despondent.

  Dr. Peter took a few chugs out of the canteen and wiped his lips with the back of his hand, just like a true explorer, but there was no magic in it for Sophie.

  “You’re not a happy archaeologist right now,” Dr. Peter said.

  Sophie pulled off her helmet and handed it to him. “I don’t think I want to dig anymore,” she said. “Not if this is what I’m going to find out.”

  Dr. Peter looked her right in the eyes.

  “Sometimes I don’t like what Jesus is trying to tell me the first time I read it, either,” he said. “But if I follow it, it never fails me.”

  Sophie didn’t answer.

  “Have I ever steered you wrong, Loodle?” he said.

  “No,” Sophie said.

  “So you’ll try it? After all, you and Jesus have a lot in common.”

  Sophie glared at the Bible. “I wish it gave more details about HOW he did it.”

  Dr. Peter’s eyes twinkled. “Those you’ll have to get from him,” he said. “So keep on digging.”

  Seven

  Sophie kept telling herself that she HAD to do it—that she HAD to obey everything Mama and Daddy said, even if they, or at least Daddy, WERE trying to turn her into Lacie.

  She prayed with her eyes scrunched shut that Daddy wouldn’t decide to make her go out for basketball or require her to get straight A’s. Or worse: make her be friends with Aunt Bailey and wear a padded bra.

  That was why it was SO easy to throw herself completely into the excavation of the attic when Wednesday afternoon finally came and she and Fiona and Kitty were gathered in front of Grandma Too’s trunk.

  They had taken Kitty’s suggestion and dressed up like archaeologists. Kitty might not have been the best pretender in the Corn Flakes, but she had the best costume.

  While Sophie and Fiona were basically in khaki shorts and white T-shirts and floppy hats (Boppa had obviously not forked over for genuine digging hats), Kitty looked as if she could go to work at Jamestown that very minute.

  She had on khaki cargo pants with lots of pockets, and a bright red hard hat—a real one—and hiking boots. The best part was the canvas vest with zippered pockets that held everything, including a neat little pad, a pencil, and a pair of glasses with the magnifiers attached to them.

  “Where did you get all this cool stuff?” Fiona said.

  “My daddy took me shopping,” she said. “We went to that sporting goods store at the mall.”

  “Wow,” Sophie said. She couldn’t keep the envy out of her voice.

  “Even my Boppa doesn’t spoil me that much,” Fiona said.

  “This isn’t spoiling,” Kitty said. “He hardly ever buys any of us anything unless it’s Christmas or our birthday.”

  Sophie could understand that. There were six girls in Kitty’s family.

  “He just said he’s glad to see me do something with people besides Julia and them,” Kitty said, “because all they ever did was put on makeup and call boys and watch PG - 13 movies. And make me cry.”

  “Are you glad you’re a Corn Flake now?” Sophie said.

  “You guys don’t make me cry,” Kitty said.

  Sophie decided that was good enough for now. They had important work to do.

  First Sophie showed them all the things she had pulled out of Grandma Too’s trunk and put on her list. Fiona nodded approvingly.

  They decided that Grandma Too had had an extraordinary life—though Kitty still didn’t understand why a woman would get married in boxer shorts—and that they wanted to know more about her descendants.

  “How do we do that?” Kitty said.

  Fiona waved an arm over the plastic containers she’d been peeking into. “It’s all right here,” she said. “In all these photo albums and scrapbooks.”

  Kitty wrinkled her nose. “That sounds boring to me.”

  “An archaeologist is never bored,” Artifacta informed her. “Even with the most tedious work.”

  “Huh,” said Madam Munford.

  “I know what,” Sophie said quickly. Then she cleared her throat and adjusted her glasses. “Madam Munford, I suggest that you learn to operate the video camera so that you can record the amazing discoveries as we make them.”

  “Cool!” Kitty said.

  “Do archaeologists say ‘cool’?” Fiona said.

  “Oh, yes,” Sophie said. It was clear they weren’t going to transform Kitty into Madam Munford in just one digging session.

  So as Kitty examined the camera and climbed all over the attic like a spider monkey taking shots of them, Dr. Demetria Diggerty and Artifacta Allen pored over the infant pictures of dozens of LaCroixs and Castilles, which had been Mama’s last name before she married Daddy.

  They made a packet for each one and created a sheet to go with the baby picture, on which they described how they thought that child had turned out, based on the documental evidence they were finding. They also lapsed into Sophie and Fiona now and then to try to guess who the babies were before they turned the photos over to read the names on the back.

  It took them until late Saturday to go through all the plastic containers, as well as Grandma Too’s trunk. By then, they had thirty packets, on everyone from Grandma Too herself—born in 1916!—to Zeke, and every conceivable cousin, aunt, uncle, and grandparent in between.

  As they held up their flashlights to gaze at their work—and Kitty got it all on film—something suddenly struck Sophie.

  “Hey,” she said. “We don’t have a packet for me.”

  “You musta missed a box,” Kitty said.

  “No, we didn’t,” Fiona said in her Artifacta voice. “Our work has been very thorough.”

  Sophie nodded—as professionally as she could—but her Sophie-self was plunging into a strange place. She sat down on top of Grandma Too’s trunk.

  “I’m sure your stuff is around here someplace,” Fiona said. “You all just moved last summer. Maybe it’s in a box in the garage or something. Or maybe it got lost in the moving van.” Fiona wiggled her eyebrows. “Maybe we should trace the path of the van and try to find it in a ditch alo
ng the road.”

  Sophie tried to smile, but even her mouth was sagging. It was as if she were seeing right in front of her what she felt so often in her house: that everybody counted but her.

  “Hey, I know,” Kitty said. She put down the camera and perched on one of the plastic containers. “Maybe you’re adopted.”

  “What?” Fiona said. “I know we’re supposed to examine every theory—but that’s just—”

  “My oldest sister was adopted,” Kitty said. “And then, BAM, my parents had five kids of their own.”

  “No offense, Kitty,” Fiona said. “But that is just ridiculous. Sophie’s the middle kid. Why would her parents adopt another kid when they already had one, and then HAVE another one—”

  Sophie was glad when Mama called up the steps that Boppa was there to pick up Fiona and Kitty. She was also glad that Mama and Daddy went to the NASA Christmas party that night, and Lacie was “babysitting,” so Sophie could take her piece of pizza up to her room and not eat it in the kitchen.

  She tried to dream up Dr. Demetria Diggerty and perhaps have her argue that there was no possible way Sophie was adopted. The physical evidence didn’t point to that; people were always saying that she looked so much like Mama.

  But Dr. Diggerty refused to cooperate, and Sophie knew she should go to Jesus.

  He was kind of adopted, she thought. God was in heaven and he lived with Mary and Joseph.

  But his mother—she was his birth mother. Every Christmas as far back as she could remember, she’d heard that story—how Mary gave birth to him in the manger. Somebody else didn’t have him and then find other parents for him —

  Sophie closed her eyes so tightly her forehead hurt. Jesus was there. His eyes were kind. But all she could think of him saying was, “Be obedient to your parents.” And it sounded like Dr. Peter’s voice.

  She wished Dr. Peter were there right then. She had some questions for HIM:

  Like—Do I have to be obedient to people who aren’t even my parents—who have been lying to me ever since I was a little kid—even though they’re always telling ME I have to be honest? And I always AM!

  Sophie could hear Zeke and Lacie on the other side of the big square hallway in Zeke’s room, where Lacie was reading Zeke the five hundredth book so he would go to sleep. She could picture them with their dark thick hair—not like her own wispy brown—and their sharp faces—not like her own elfin look. They were so much alike—and so much like Daddy —

  Sophie suddenly bolted from the bed and ran to the corner of her room, where she wrapped her arms around herself and scrunched her eyes tighter and tried to cut off the thought that was filling her up: No wonder Daddy will stand up for Lacie and not me. She’s his own flesh and blood. And I’m not.

  Sophie knew she was in the land of No-God. And even the picture of Jesus’ kind eyes couldn’t seem to pull her out.

  For the next several days, she pretended she wasn’t in No-God Land, and the only way to do that was to spend every spare moment with the Corn Flakes, developing their babies’ stories and finding more information. Fiona brought them a perfect notebook for all the packets. It was purple with plastic daisies and a tab that snapped shut. Sophie knew Boppa had bought it, and she tried not to wish that she could go live with HER grandfather. She really didn’t know him —

  And besides, if he’s Mama’s father, then he isn’t my flesh and blood—and Grandma Too wasn’t either —

  That hurt so much in the middle of her chest, Sophie dove back into their project with double-deep energy.

  One of the things that WAS good was that Kitty was getting into it. When she got bored with filming them going through boxes and writing things down, she decided to draw pictures of the babies from their photos, and have them grow up and put them in the situations Sophie and Fiona were describing in their stories.

  “You are an excellent artist, Madam Munford,” Artifacta told her one day before school when they sitting on the stage in the cafeteria behind the curtain, looking through their purple notebook for the thousandth time.

  “I am?” Kitty said.

  “I suggest that we follow these drawings and our pictures and our stories—”

  “Based on our historical findings, of course,” Sophie put in.

  “Oh, yes—and I suggest we put them all into film form.”

  “Like a real movie?” Kitty said. Her big blue eyes were the size of dinner plates. Excited dinner plates, if that was possible.

  Sophie, however, didn’t jump up and hug the idea right away. She drew a circle over and over in the dust on the floor with her finger. “I think we need to do some more digging,” she said. “Dr. Demetria Diggerty has more work to do.”

  The early bell rang, and Kitty scrambled for her backpack. When she was gone, Fiona leaned close to Sophie.

  “I know what you’re doing,” she said.

  “What?” Sophie said.

  “You want to dig in your attic some more because you’re obsessed with being adopted.”

  “What does obsessed mean?”

  “It means you can’t think about hardly anything else! And it’s lame, Soph! Just because there aren’t any pictures of you when you were a baby doesn’t mean your parents aren’t your birth parents!”

  Sophie squinted at her, through her glasses, through the dimness. “If it were you,” she said, “wouldn’t you want to know for sure?”

  “I think there are some things you just don’t have to know,” Fiona said.

  Sophie couldn’t settle in with that idea, even though it had come from Fiona, who knew almost everything. She was glad it was a Dr. Peter day, so she could at least talk to him about it.

  But when Mama came to pick her up that afternoon, she said Mama and Daddy were having a session with Dr. Peter instead.

  “You get to go home and relax,” she said. “I made snowman cookies today, so you can have all you want. I think it’s about time we got into the Christmas spirit around our house. Boppa’s watching Zeke over at their house, so you have time to yourself for a while. Just keep the doors locked. You have my cell phone number—”

  Mama was rattling on as if she couldn’t get control of her tongue. Sophie didn’t hear half of it. Once she got over being disappointed that she wasn’t going to see Dr. Peter, she couldn’t wait to get into the attic by herself and see if she could discover something new.

  But it was what she didn’t find that made the attic seem darker and darker. There was a box covered in what looked like a baby quilt, pushed back into the corner. Sophie knew they hadn’t looked in this one, and her heart pounded as she opened it.

  But inside were only two baby books—with things written in them about first teeth and first words and first birthday cakes. One was about Lacie. The other one was about Zeke.

  Sophie was about to close the lid on them when she noticed that there were a bunch of pictures scattered in the bottom of the box. She scooped them out and leaned with them against Grandma Too’s trunk with her flashlight.

  They were all of a little girl, from about two years old until maybe five. She was a tiny thing, with skinny wrists and legs and hardly any hair, but Sophie could tell she wasn’t a BABY baby because she was standing up and looking at books and hauling a huge stuffed rabbit that was even bigger than she was.

  “That’s Harold!” Sophie said out loud.

  It was the bunny Mama’s father had sent her one Christmas, and she’d had it until they moved from Houston and Mama said she was sure it would fall apart if they tried to pack it. Mama had told her that Sophie had insisted on naming him Harold, after Grandpa, because she’d heard Daddy say when she pulled him out of the wrappings that Christmas, “Why did Harold send her that? It’s bigger than she is!”

  Sophie shone the flashlight on the photo of her dragging Harold up a flight of stairs.

  Then that must be me, she thought. They did take pictures of me!

  That gave her a sudden burst of energy, and she plowed through the rest of the a
ttic, searching for other boxes they might have missed. But there was nothing.

  Sophie sat against the trunk again with the Harold snapshot in her hand. It’s like I didn’t even exist until I was two years old, she thought.

  Maybe to them, I didn’t.

  Eight

  Sophie didn’t go up to her room as usual after supper that night, but instead she hung around with the rest of the family, and she studied them each carefully for signs.

  She watched Zeke while he was tucked into the big chair in the family room with Daddy, together looking at the sports page.

  Like Me: small for his age (but, then, so is Mama); brown eyes, only darker than mine; cute little turned up nose (but a lot of people have that).

  Not Like Me: dark, thick, coarse hair that sticks up in all directions—like Daddy; half a smile, like Mama; a dimple in each side of his chin, like nobody; and very expressive eyebrows.

  Sophie had never noticed that he even listened with his eyebrows. He was such a cute little brother, it made her want to cry.

  She also surveyed Daddy as he told Zeke what teams were probably going to be in the Super Bowl.

  Like Me: nothing.

  Not Like Me: everything.

  She moved on quickly to Mama, who was spread out on the couch writing out Christmas cards.

  Like Me: light brown hair (like about half the people in the world); brown eyes (like about MOST of the people in the world); petite (because she exercises and she eats like a canary—hello!); high-pitched voice (who wouldn’t with three kids?).

  Not Like Me: pretty; nice; gets along with Daddy.

  It wasn’t looking good by the time she went upstairs to observe Lacie. It didn’t help that the minute she stuck her head in the door, Lacie said, “If you’re going to sit here and look at me like you’re doing to everybody else, forget it. You’re freaking me out.”

  Sophie switched to Plan B. “No—I wanted to ask you a question.”

  Lacie got her eyes about halfway rolled, and then she seemed to catch herself. She got up from her desk and flopped down on her bed and patted her mattress.

  “Okay,” she said. “Have a seat. I’ll tell you anything you want to know.”