The Short Second Life of Sophia Peletier
She lived her entire life in fear. Even before the end of the world – the walkers and chaos and complete anarchy – Sophia knew about the existence of monsters. She faced them every day. She lived with one she called "Daddy."
Sophia was twelve years old and innocent. While the other girls on the playground traded in their Barbies for lip gloss, whispering in clusters near the school doors, teetering their high-pitched adolescent giggles, and shooting her dirty looks over their shoulders, Sophia occupied a small corner and of the yard and amused herself with silent games of imagination. Sophia was good at that – pretending. Dreaming. In her mind's eye she created castles in the sky and magical fairy kingdoms. She imagined a king on a white steed riding onto the playground, scooping her off the ground where she created happy houses from sand, and carrying her off into the sunset. She just wanted someone to take her away from her miserable existence.
"What are you doing, loser?"
Sophia glanced up. The glare from the sun temporarily blinded her. Her watery blue-gray eyes focused on the formidable figure of Jenny Brown standing before her. The girl stood to the full height of her meagre 52 inches, but she seemed to tower over Sophia, sitting cross-legged on the ground, blissfully oblivious in her imagination.
Jenny's hands rested on her thin pre-pubescent hips, her lips turned down in a disapproving snarl. There was a familiar hatred and disgust in her eyes Sophia had never been able to fully account for. Sophia rested her hands in her lap and inspected her dirty fingernails. She wasn't sure what Jenny wanted from her. She wasn't bothering anyone. Why couldn't she just leave her alone? She did not ask Jenny these questions, of course. Jenny didn't really want to talk to her. Whatever she did want, Sophia was incapable of giving her. She averted her eyes from the tiny preteen bully and her posse of gum-popping, boy-giggling teeny-boppers who were never far behind their leader.
"I asked you what you were doing, weirdo." Jenny pestered, sneering down at Sophia. Sophia was quiet. You couldn't reason with malice and ill intentions. She knew that better than anyone. At a young age, Sophia had perfected the art of silence.
"She never speaks," one of the nameless flock scoffed.
"Maybe she doesn't know how," another girl stupidly suggested.
Jenny rolled her eyes. "Of course she can speak, idiot." The other girls giggled at their shamed friend; Chrissy Spicer snorted. "She's just a weirdo who doesn't talk. Who knows what goes on in that screwed up head of hers, other than that terrible haircut."
"I heard she goes to the guidance counsellor twice a week."
"Is that true, retard? You need 'special' help? I always knew you were a little psychopath. I bet you still play with dolls and wet the bed. Don't invite her to your house, girls. She'll stain your sheets and probably slit your throats while you slept." Jenny sneered down at Sophia again, noticing the carefully shaped piles of dirt. "Playing in the dirt like a dumb kid. Pathetic." Jenny kicked and scattered. Sophia's carefully crafted sand palace was invaded and demolished. Stomped under heels. Flattened under pretty floral sandals and sparkly pink painted toes. Pieces of Sophia's castle flew into her face. She choked on the dust, attempted to cough it back up. Bits of sand caught in her eyelashes. She rubbed at her already sore eyes, which were filling with tears.
"What a baby." Jenny turned on the perfect fleshly apple of her heel, hardly dirtied by her destruction. She flipped her long hair over her shoulder and sighed, having already bored of Sophia. "Come on girls, let's go."
Like a perfectly in-sync herd - the sheep that they were - the girls turned and followed. "What a freak!" An indistinguishable voice threw out cruelly. And that final devastating blow: "Everyone knows her mother is a freak and a whore. Her own husband says so."
Such was the educational experience of young Sophia's life. She did not expect school to improve as she entered middle and high school. Nor did she hold it against the girls who hurled hurtful words at her like stones and the boys who tripped her in the hallways. She could forgive them their thoughtless pettiness and their narrow minded views of the world. They were, after all, only children. Kids who, once upon a time, had invited her to birthday parties and sleepovers, had partaken in the homemade cookies her mother baked for soccer practices and after-school snacks. Once upon a time, before he father had gotten drunk and mean. Before he had ripped chunks of hair out of her mother's head and Carol had been forced to shave her hair to the scalp. Her beautiful penny-colored hair tumbling from the razor to the bathroom floor; inspecting herself in the mirror through the bruises around her eyes, and declaring "It doesn't look so bad." After that she had started cutting Sophia's hair short too. "Easier to manage," Carol had declared - which was true. But Sophia knew, in her grownup wisdom, that it also meant no one would ever be able to grab her hair during a fight and use it against her.
If school was a daily struggle, home was worse.
The couple hours between the end of class before supper, when she went home, and it was just her and her mom, were the best of her life. Sometimes they baked cookies or sewed clothes for her dolls. Sophia would sit at the kitchen table and finish her homework or draw, as her mother cooked supper. Sometimes Carol told her stories from her childhood in Vermont; sometimes they sang songs together when the radio played. Sophia loved hose moments with her mom, when she could pretend they were the only two humans in the world, and the man named "Ed" was just a figment of her imagination. A monster from her nightmares dispelled by the late afternoon sun. She could even pretend the bruises on her mother's warm skin, the arms that had rocked and held and loved her, were the result of heroic acts: saving people from gangsters and car accidents, bungee jumping and skydiving and horseback riding. She liked to imagine her mother off having adventures during the day, while she was away at school.
However, at exactly 5:30pm each evening, fun ended and even the memory of laughter was forgotten. Nightmare became reality. The screen door would slam shut, and the grumbling would begin. The first beer would be extracted from the fridge. A tense meal followed, as she quietly chewed her supper, her mother gently asking her questions about her day and attempting to make small talk. Her father would complain about the assholes in his company, how he was overworked and under paid. Another beer would follow, and a third. He would nag at his wife, finding little, unimportant excuses to tear into her, calling her lazy and good-for-nothing.
After supper, Ed would collapse into his chair, kick his feet up, and gulp down another couple beers. If they were lucky, he would watch the news, Wheel of Fortune, and Jeopardy, with his usual amount of sexist, homophobic, and racial slurs, end the evening by falling asleep in front of the television, and stay there all night in the flickering light, awaking in the morning cussing and complaining about his swore back, and berating Carol for not waking him up and leading him to bed. (She had tried to get her husband to bed in the early days, but she had eventually given up, taking his complaints in stride and offering painkillers).
If they were unlucky, which seemed to be more and more often lately. The cursing and complaining would escalate into screaming. He would pull grievances out of thing air, like a magician, and blow up at the slightest mistake or indiscretion. He was a ticking time bomb, and they never knew what would set him off. No matter how quiet, how placid, how compliant, how small they made themselves, Ed always exploded.
Some nights Carol sent Sophia to her room in time. She would sense when the rage was mounting into violence, and she would send her daughter upstairs to brush her teeth or finish the homework that had been completed hours ago. On those nights, Sophia would lie on her bed under the blankets, curled up into the fetal position, surrounded by an army of stuffed animals to ward off the fear, her hands pressed firmly against her ears, the tears running from her eyes, the snot from her nostrils, as she tried to block out the sound of her father abusing her mother.
The other nights were the worst, when there was no warning, no time to prepare, and the eruption caught them off-guard. Plates smashed and lamps shattered. Sophia's diagram of the solar system she and her mother had worked so hard on dashed to the floor and pulverized under foot. Her mother actively turning herself into a target to direct the abuse away from her little girl, her pleading cries that Ed's fists would find a home in her skin, her rib age, her skull, and not the tender flesh of her daughter. The baby of her womb. The most precious piece of herself.
Watching was worse than hearing. Punches were worse than words. She remembered hearing a song about "Daddy's hands," and thought how foolish. How absurd. These were the only paternal hands she had ever known.
Sophia Peletier's young life was one long drawn-out nightmare. When the end of the world finally came, she was not surprised. She rather expected it would come soon. And she felt no change in her level of fear, only now there were new, more horrifying monsters, and everyone in the world could see them.
What grieved her most was leaving her home. The doorway in which her mother had used a pencil to mark her height every birthday since she was two. The matted carpeting of their living room floor, and the oak tree in the backyard with the most perfectly arranged branches for climbing. She missed the toys her father forced her to leave behind - "Stop acting like a child! You're 12 years old, for fuck sakes! Time to grow up!" And grow up she did, robbed of everything she had ever known, trapped in a car with volatile father and increasingly silent mother, frightened by the dual threats of starvation and walking, rotting corpses. How could she remain a child in that world?
Somehow she did. Bound by her love of her mother and the submissive innocence of children from broken homes. An introverted introvert - quiet on the outside, but inside a storm, screaming to be heard. Ironically, it was Atlanta that saved her. Carl Grimes helped her retain her childhood, and the Morales girl. It took the end of the world for Sophia to make two true best friends.
Carl and his pretty, strong mother welcomed her into their fold and loved her. Carol and Lori attempted to continue their children's education, that one slim shred of normalcy, reading books in the shade of trees at campsites, while Dale kept armed watch from the roof of his RV. It was the best school Sophia had ever attended.
Of their group, she had her favourites. Lori, who exhibited feminine strength and power of will. Amy, who was pretty, intelligent, and kind. The first young woman Sophia had ever looked up to in hopes of being just like her one day. Glenn, who was funny and nice, and always offered to help her with her homework. Dale, a grandfather of sorts, with his wide fishing hat and big words she didn't understand. Secretly she liked Carl best. Not romantically, like the girls in the movies other kids her age watched, but in a pure way. She loved him as dearly as if he were an extension of herself. He wasn't like other boys she knew. He was good and strong and understanding. He saw the world through a lens of wisdom, practicality, and passion. He was a child in so many ways, and yet an old soul. In him, Sophia discovered the existence of kindred spirits.
Sophia love for Carl was tainted in only one respect: she was jealous of his wonderful father.
When Rick defied the odds and appeared at their campsite, supposedly back from the dead (in a good way), Carl had thrown himself into his father's arms, and Sophia had selfishly wished she had a father like that. Ed would never have risked his own life to find his wife and child. Even with hell on earth, he never failed to remind them what burdens they were to him.
She wasn't proud of it, but when her father was killed, she was relieved. She was happy they wouldn't have to worry about him anymore, and his fists would never again touch her mother. She was glad too that her mother had been the one to beat in his skull. He deserved it. She was not ashamed of not having loved her father. He should have been ashamed of having never loved her.
She wasn't exactly happy, but between the fear and the rough lifestyle, Sophia felt something akin to contentment. Life was still terrifying, unpredictable, and exhausting, but she had found more love than she had known her entire life. She didn't know it was possible to be cared about by so many people. To have a family. She had even begun to dream again of a life when the zombie apocalypse ended, when she and her mom could go with the Grimes to see the Grand Canyon, and they could all live together in the country, in a little white house with a sunny kitchen and yellow curtains and horses in the field and a white picket fence.
She was dreaming of life beyond surviving, and then the horde came. She hid under the car and bit her tongue to keep in her sobs. She could see her mother's terrified face pressed against the asphalt, and her mother's terror magnified her own.
She waited. She kept silent when everything inside told her to scream. She followed instruction. She kept her eyes on her mother and on Carl, only one car away.
The shuffling footsteps seemed endless, but finally they stopped. The walkers were gone. She was safe. She thought she was safe. But one found her. Crawling after her like the monster underneath the bed. A rotted face with bloody jaw and sunken eyes. The scent of rancid, decayed flesh filled her nostrils. Panic overwhelmed sense. She screamed. She ran. She knew only the need to survive.
Branches scratched. Thorns cut. Leaves crunched. Still she ran. Ran and ran and ran. Down the slope, into the forest, away from that dreaded highway. Away from safety and her mother. She didn't know where she was going. She knew only she had to escape.
A tree snagged her shirt, and she screamed. She imagined undead fingers grabbing her and dragging her down. She could hear them crashing through the brush behind her. Their heavy breathless pants. She could feel the suffocating stench of their hunger.
Sophia ran. Jumped into the creek, remembering her father's long ago advice that it's difficult to track through water (guess he was good for something). They were upon her. Then: Rick. Carl had boasted that his father was a hero, and Sophia believed it. She jumped into his arms, like Carl had done, and wrapped her legs around him. Despite the sweat and grime, he smelled good, like man and sunshine and strength. She clung to him and never wanted to let go. His arms closed around her like a hug. But then he let go. Why did you let go, Rick?
The words he said, his plan, made sense. But she was a frightened little girl. What were strategy and practicality to a fearful child? What were actions? She knew only that she didn't want to be alone, and that he was leaving her.
Hide, he told her. Hide. And other instructions. Meaningless words. Highway. Sun. Shoulder. He started yelling to distract the walkers - even yelling his voice was kinder than her father's had ever been, because in it was the desperate need to protect her - and he led them off.
She watched. She waited. She did as she was told. Unlike Carl, she was good at obedience. She emerged. She attempted to find her way back to her mother, heading south. Pushing through trees to the highway – God, they all looked the same. Abandoned cars represented safety. She would see windshields against the sky line, glittering like beetles in the sun. Close, she was so close. The sun was warm and hopeful, and she thought foolishly of sunblock.
Suddenly, from her left, a groan, only louder. Spooked, she ran. It blocked her path. Was it her fault she couldn't follow Rick's directions. Only one coherent thought: run, run, RUN! She crashed through foliage. Behind her those horrible sounds she heard in nightmares, surrounding her in the dark. But it was daylight now. How could anything bad happen in the light?
She lost track of time and space. Her legs burned and bled from cuts. She thought she heard voices calling her name, but it may have been her imagination. She dropped her doll and left it behind. Abandoned, like her. Alone. She prayed her friend would forgive her her negligence, for not being able to take care of her precious doll.
Sophia hid under the cover of trees. She panted and listened, trying to catch her breath. She had lost it! She had actually lost the walker. She was going to be okay! She was going to be okay!
She heard a branch snap, but her mind registered the noise too late. She whirled around. A walker, a different one – a brown haired lady in blue jeans who must have been young and gorgeous in her previous life – sank its teeth into her shoulder. Piercing throughput flesh and muscle to bone. It ripped out the chunk. Pain, blinding searing hot pain – what was this hell? Blood spurted. And Sophia watched the bloodied hunk of her flesh tumble around inside – chomp, chomp, chomp – the putrid, decomposed jaw. She screamed, and the walker was upon her again.
Sophia died in terror and agony. She died alone and bloody. Choking on her own gore. She died without purpose or warning or thought or friend. She died, and when she closed her eyes for the final time, she welcomed death as a release.