DEALING WITH SOPHIA'S PAST (Chapter 25)

Three weeks into the school year, Sophia couldn’t believe how well things were going. She had all new teachers, except one, and they didn’t know Sophia Daniels, Troublemaker, so she got a fresh start—and she was taking advantage of it. She was studying, trying to do well, because dating Warren for 6 months had made her realize something—she wanted a future. Now that it looked like she could have one, she wanted one. She had read up on meteorology, and found that she had to do well in math and certain types of science. That made her concentrate on math, and she found out that she really liked it. She was doing well in Chemistry, too. And Warren had truly re-awakened her love of reading, so English was coming along fine.

The big problem was history. It was never her favorite subject to begin with—that had been her one C on her fourth quarter report card last year—and that was also the class where she had the same teacher as last year, Mr. Doherty. She imagined in her mind Mr. Doherty looking at his class lists, seeing the name Sophia Daniels, and banging his head against his desk crying "Not again! Not again!" Since her class last year had been chock-full of her buddies, that was where she had caused the most trouble. But this was a new year, and she was trying to make amends.

It wasn’t working. She raised her hand, and Mr. Doherty would just smirk at her. Someone caused trouble, and she got lumped in with the blame. He made sarcastic comments all the time. Sophia understood why, she really did—he must have spent all last year seeing her face in front of him and wanting to kill her. But she was trying to change. And he wasn’t getting it.

She’d discussed it with Warren, who advised her to talk to the man. Good advice, and she was considering it, but it was difficult.

She hoped today Mr. Doherty might notice, because they had had a quiz the day before, and she felt she had done well on it. If she had, maybe then he might notice that, this year, she was trying.

Mr. Doherty waited until close to the end of the class to pass out the quizzes. He went from desk to desk, making a comment on each. Then he came to her. "And, now we have Miss Daniels. I corrected this paper twelve times, because I kept looking for my enormous math error, but it wasn’t there. Miss Daniels, you got a 93 on this quiz. Congratulations."

Sophia was thrilled. She was so proud of herself. That didn’t last long.

"So, Miss Daniels, which of your neighbors were you copying from? Both of them? Or did you smuggle crib sheets into the quiz? C’mon, Sophia, confess." He stopped then, walking away with a smirk on his face, but the damage was done.

Sophia sat there as he passed out the rest of the quizzes, staring down at her desk, saying to herself, "I will not cry. I will not cry." She cried far too often lately, she thought. She used to be able to shrug this stuff off. She felt everything much more than she used to. It was sometimes annoying—this was one of those times.

The bell rang, and the class flew out—it was the last period of the day—but Sophia didn’t trust herself to stand, yet. She sat there, trying to control herself, hoping her continued presence in the classroom would somehow manage to go unnoticed. It didn’t.

"Is there a problem, Miss Daniels?" Mr. Doherty asked.

Maybe Warren was right. Maybe this would never be solved until she said something. She was still looking down at her desk, but she controlled herself, and said, "Mr. Doherty, I would like to ask you a favor. I would like you to try to forget that you had me in your class last year."

"But, Miss Daniels, how could I ever do that?" he said with the smirk in his voice that Sophia had come to expect. "I mean, your presence in my classroom last year was so unforgettable."

"Forget it, anyway. Please."

He heard something in that plea he did not expect. "Miss Daniels, are you crying?"

She nodded no, but squeezed her eyes tighter.

"Why on earth are you crying?"

Sophia just pointed at the quiz, still on her desk.

"Oh, I get it," said Mr. Doherty. "All upset that I called you out on your cheating, eh?"

Then, Sophia did something that she didn’t often do. She got mad.

"I did not CHEAT! I studied for this! I worked for this! I sit in this class every day, I do your assignments, I pay attention, I try to contribute, I do everything I can think of to try to show you that I am not the lost little girl that was in your class last year, and you refuse to notice! Then we have a quiz. I knew I did well on it. I figured, now you’ll notice. And you give it back to me, with that grade, and I get to feel proud of myself for a whole THREE SECONDS before you accuse me of cheating!" Sophia crushed the quiz into a little ball, threw it in the general direction of the wastebasket, and started storming out of the room.

"Sophia, wait." She stopped. Mr. Doherty retrieved the quiz from the floor, smoothed it out, and looked at it. "You did this? All on your own?"

Her back still to him, she nodded.

"Oh, shit. Jesus Christ," he said. Sophia turned back towards him, surprised. "Sophia, I am sorry."

"Thank you for saying that."

"I told myself when I first started teaching, that I’d never give up on a student completely, that kids can change. I’ve gotten jaded because I’ve seen so few of them change."

Sophia grinned slightly. "Well, you’ve got one."

"It seems so. I really am sorry, Sophia. And, considering where you were last year, you have every right to feel extremely proud of this." He handed over the crumpled quiz. Sophia laughed and tried to smooth it out more. "What happened?"

"Let’s just say that a lot of very, very bad things that were happening to me stopped. And a lot of very, very good things started."

"They must have been very bad."

"Yeah, they were." Sophia said. And, since she had told herself she was going to try to speak out about what happened to her, she told him. "I spent two years being a victim of boyfriend abuse. It was particularly bad from last October until March."

"Oh, Sophia, now I really am sorry. I should have been able to tell,"

"How?"

"I’ll tell you that in a minute. Let’s just say I’m around abused teenagers a lot, especially those that are being abused by a friend or boyfriend. Anyhow, what I wanted to ask was, how did you get out of it?"

"I met someone who said the right things at the right time, and ended up taking a few punches for me from the asshole."

"Boyfriend?"

"Now he is. Back then he was just a good friend. He kept telling me things, and somehow they got through. And, when I knew I needed to get out of this, and was having trouble finding the courage, he showed me his, which made it easier to find mine."

"And he helped you build your self confidence back up."

"Bingo."

"Which made you want to fix parts of your life you had neglected, including do well in school."

"Well, that, plus the fact that I somehow happened to fall in love with a studyaholic genius preppy nerd who’s ranked third in his class—at St. Michael's, no less. A girl has got to keep up, you know."

Mr. Doherty laughed at that. "Now that is something I never would have put even a penny on."

"You are not the only one."

"So, let me ask you, Sophia—how are you dealing with the ramifications of your abuse? Are you in any therapy?"

"I was, over the summer. There were still some things I needed to work out, and I needed to find out if I was too dependent for my self-confidence on Warren—that’s my boyfriend. I also went with my mother a few times, because we needed help in repairing our relationship."

"How’d the therapy work for you?"

"It was helpful, although a lot of what the guy told me I had figured out on my own. "

"You and your mother?"

"Better than ever."

"What did he say about Warren?"

"He said I probably am a little over-dependent on him, but Warren came with me a couple of times, and the therapist also said that it was the healthiest relationship he had ever seen between two high school sophomores."

"That’s fantastic." Mr. Doherty smiled. "Now, I come to why I asked you all this, and why I am kicking myself for not spotting this last year."

"Don’t kick yourself, Mr. D. I was extremely good at erecting walls. You didn’t notice, because you didn’t give a shit about me last year, and that’s because I made damn good and sure that you didn’t give a shit. You weren’t the only one I did that to. How Warren got through my walls is something I will never completely understand."

"Did Warren have any walls you had to get through?"

"Some. He was a social misfit. He was also terrified of girls." Mr. Doherty laughed at that. "I was completely the aggressor in the beginning. I asked him out. I told him I loved him first. I kissed him first. Heck, I even got physical first." Mr. Doherty laughed louder. "Listen, socially inept boy genius preppy is a wall, too. Not as bad as mine, for sure, but it was definitely there."

"And you got through it."

"Yeah."

"Sophia, I’m going to ask you if you feel like breaking down some more walls, walls you know a lot about." He had been sitting on his desk, and now he hopped down and walked over to where he was standing. "I am the faculty advisor for a group here at the school. It is the Peer Counseling group. It’s students, like you, advising other students about problems. We take all comers to volunteer—anyone with some empathy and willingness to listen and try to help—but volunteers who have been through something—and have gotten through it—are especially welcome. We would love to have someone like you helping, because I can’t tell you how many girls we see that are suffering from abuse at the hands of a boyfriend or friend."

"Really?"

"Yeah. Now, you have to be willing to talk about what happened to you. You have to be open to sharing that. That’s the tough part, for a survivor of abuse. And if you don’t think you can handle that, I completely understand. I’m asking you to volunteer to do something that you may find difficult. Now, I know you work after school—that’s fine, we have plenty of volunteers that only come in one or two days. But you will be known to the faculty as a peer counselor, and you might be called out of class in a crisis. You don’t get paid for this. All you get is the undying appreciation of your honored Faculty Advisor"—Sophia laughed at that—"and the satisfaction that you did your best to help some of your peers out of a horrible situation."

"Does peer counseling work?"

"I’d be lying if I told you it worked all the time. It might not even work most of the time. But, yes, we have had enough success stories for me to be proud of the group."

"Y’know what? If I can get one girl out of the kind of hell I was in, that’s enough. I’ll do it."