Sophie and the Scoundrels

Chapter One

Solar rays, Sophie corrected herself. If she was going to make a movie about outer space, she was going to have to start thinking more scientifically.

Her dad grabbed her elbow - just before she stepped off the curb into the employees' parking lot.

"Let me at least get you to the car before you go off into La-La Land," Daddy said.

Sophie gave him her wispy smile. Not because he was right about La-La Land. Her daydreams were much more sophisticated than that. She grinned because he was grinning, instead of scolding her for not paying attention to her surroundings, the way he used to do.

"Sorry," Sophie said. "Did I almost get run over?" "Not this time," Daddy said. He imitated her high-pitched voice, but that was okay, too. His eyes were doing the good kind of teasing.

Sophie hoisted her pretty-skinny, short self up into Daddy's black Chevrolet pickup that he called the Space Mobile and whipped the light brown strands of her down-to-the-shoulders hair off her face.

I'm going to have to wear it in a braid if I'm going to play an astronaut in the movie, she thought. You can't have a bunch of hair flying around in your space helmet.

Did they call them helmets? Would hair actually fly around with that gravity thing they were talking about?

Sophie sighed as she adjusted her glasses. There was so much she was going to have to find out.

"All right, dish, Soph," Daddy said. "Your mind's going about nine hundred miles an hour."

"No, the speed of light - which is faster than anything."

Daddy arched a dark eyebrow over his sunglasses as he passed through the NASA gate. "Somebody was paying attention."

"Okay, so what does NASA stand for again?" Sophie said.

"National Aeronautics and Space Administration."

"Oh." Sophia spun that out in her head. "Then it should be NAASA."

Daddy shook his head. "That would sound like a sheep. NAAAAA."

"What's 'aeronautics'?" She knew she could ask her best friend, Fiona, who knew what every word in life meant, but there was no time to waste. There was a film to be made.

"It's anything that has to do with making and flying aircraft," Daddy said.

Sophie decided she and the Corn Flakes would probably stick to the space part, which had real possibilities.

"Anything else you need to know for your report?" Daddy said.

"My what?"

"Your report. You know - Kids Go to Work with Dads Day. Don't you have to write up something for school?"

"Oh," Sophie said. "Yeah."

Daddy gave her a sideways glance. "Don't think I don't know what's going on in there," he said. He tapped her lightly on the forehead. "You can make your movie. Matter of fact, I WANT you to so you won't leave the planet when you're supposed to be doing your schoolwork."

Sophie nodded. The only reason he had given her the video camera was so she would spin out her dreams on film instead of letting them draw her right out the window when she was in class.

"Can I trust you to do your report as soon as you get home, without my having to check it?"

"No," Sophie said. "You better check it."

Dad chortled. That was the way Fiona always described it when Sophie's dad laughed.

Yeah, Fiona was definitely good with words. Sophie wanted to get her started writing the script right away. And Maggie would need plenty of time to work on costumes. And Kitty had to get the graphics going -

"Earth to Sophie." Daddy landed the truck in the driveway, and Sophie reentered the atmosphere.

"The report. By nineteen hundred hours."

Sophie did a quick calculation in her head. "Seven o'clock," she said.

"Roger," Daddy said.

"Over and out."

Sophie tried to keep a very scientific face on as she ran into the house, headed for the stairs. If she didn't stay completely focused, nineteen hundred hours was going to come and go - and so would the video camera. "Hi, Mama, how are you?" Sophie's mom sarcastically said from the kitchen doorway. "Let me tell you about my day."

Sophie turned around, hand tight on the banister. Mama's brown-like-Sophie's eyes were shining at her, right out of the halo of her curly frosted hair. She looked impish - the way people often said Sophie herself did.

"Hi, Mama," Sophie said. She edged up another step. "I'll tell you all about it later. I have to get my report done."

"Sorry, Mama," Daddy said from behind Sophie's mom. "She has her orders."

Sophie's hand got even tighter on the banister as she watched the happy elf go back inside her mother, to be replaced by a stiff face.

"I see," she said. "You go on then, Dream Girl."

And then Mama turned back to the kitchen without even looking at Daddy.

Sophie hurried up the steps so she wouldn't have to hear the silence that was going to freeze up the whole kitchen. Every time Mama and Daddy were in the same room lately they turned into popsicles. It had been way back before Thanksgiving that she'd last heard them laugh together, and this was January. Sophie closed her bedroom door and headed for her bed with the purple bedspread - the best place for thinking in the whole entire galaxy. As soon as Daddy looked over her paper, she would have the all-clear to dream the dreams that had to come before Corn Flakes Productions - Sophie, Fiona, Kitty, and Maggie - could start on the film.

She sighed happily to herself as she pulled out her notebook, selected the blue-green gel pen - a very aeronautical color, she thought - and went to work.

At least it was Mr. Denton, the language arts teacher, she was writing for. He liked it when she wrote about things just the way she saw them. In blue-green words, she took him all the way through the huge telescope where you could see the craters of the moon like they were right next door - and the robotic arm they were building to capture satellites from space shuttles and work on them - and the plants that had actually been grown in space.

She polished it off with the best part: the simulated space station. She'd learned that "simulated" meant it was a fake but it was just like the real thing. She'd been allowed to go into that and see how it orbited all the time and what kind of experiments they did in there in microgravity. She hadn't even heard of that before, and now she could imagine herself there - and that was when it had hit her - what she was supposed to do next.

I know now, Sophie wrote in her final paragraph, that I am called to make a major film about a brave girl astronaut named - Sophie paused, gel pen poised over paper. She didn't quite have the name yet. Daddy would still let it pass without that one detail.

It is my responsibility to put what I have learned on film, she wrote on, so that others may have their eyes opened - THAT was brilliant - to the wonderful world of outer space.

She signed her name with a flourish and sank back into the pillows to survey her work. There were probably some words spelled wrong, she knew that. She wasn't that good of a student yet - even though she had come a way-long way since she'd started at Great Marsh Elementary back in September. Then she had been failing. That was before she started seeing Dr. Peter. He was her therapist, and he was a Christian like her, and he could help her with ANY problem.

Sophie sat up and cocked an ear toward her door. On the other side of it, she could hear her older sister, Lacie, clamoring up the stairs with her basketball and her gym bag and her backpack full of honors classes books. In the way-far background, her five-year-old brother, Zeke, was watching SpongeBob and yelling out "SquarePants" every couple of minutes.

But other than that, the house was too quiet.

I wonder if Dr. Peter could tell me why Mama and Daddy don't seem to like each other that much anymore, Sophie thought.

But it was a cold thought she couldn't hold without feeling shivers.

Tossing her glasses aside and closing her eyes, Sophie went back to NASA in her mind, back to the space station where the girl astronaut had come into her imagination straight out of the stratosphere - the absolute highest part of the earth's atmosphere -

Stratosphere! Sophie thought. That's her - my - last name. No, too long. How about Stratos for short?

Perfect. After that the first name came easy. Stellar. Like the stars. No, make that Stella.

Stella Stratos. Astronaut Stella Stratos.

Astronaut Stella Stratos looked up from the complicated calculations on her computer screen to see one of her assistants standing in the doorway of the simulator.

"Can't you see I'm working?" Stella said to the clueless young woman.

"No, I can see you're going loopy again."

Sophie blinked. It was Lacie, combing out her wet, curly dark hair and giving Sophie her usual you-are-such-an-airhead look from narrowed blue eyes.

"Who are ya today?" Lacie said. Then without waiting for an answer, she said, "Come on; Mama's got dinner ready."

I wonder what they eat when they're traveling in outer space, Sophie thought as she followed Lacie downstairs. There was so much to learn.

Which was why she was ready to get the Corn Flakes right on it the next morning when they met, as always, at the swings before school when it was good weather - and it was perfect for thoughts of filming - a way-rare thing in Virginia in January.

Before they were all even settled into their swings, Sophie was spilling out everything that had happened at NASA. She skimmed the soles of her boots over the slushy puddle that had formed under her swing.

"What's going on?" she said. "Y'all are looking at me weird."

"It isn't weirdness," Fiona said. "It's envy."

She cocked her head at Sophie so that one panel of golden-brown hair fell over a gray eye. Her usually creamy-coffee skin was chappy-red with the cold.

"Envy?" Sophie said. That was a stretch, seeing how Fiona was way rich and had more stuff even than the Corn Pops did. Those were the popular girls who practically wore their clothes inside out so everybody could see their labels.

Fiona tightened the hood on her North Face jacket. "I had the most boring day in life yesterday. I couldn't go to work with my dad, so I went with my mom."

"But your mom's a doctor," Kitty said. Her blue eyes were wider than they were most of the time. Everything surprised Kitty. She really was like a cat.

Fiona twitched her eyebrows. "That means she sees patients all day Long - and that means I had to sit in the office with her receptionist and see her like once every twenty minutes. At lunchtime, I called my Boppa to come pick me up."

"Yeah," Maggie said. "That's boring." She spoke in her thud-voice, so that every word came out like the final say on just about anything. Sophie sometimes wondered if that was because Maggie was Cuban, and English wasn't her native language. Fiona always said it was just because Maggie was bossy.

"Mine was even boringer than yours," Kitty said. She was starting to whine, and she flipped her ponytail. She did both of those things a lot. "I didn't get to spend that much time with my dad, either, since he's a pilot."

"You didn't get to go up in a plane?" Sophie said.

"She couldn't," Maggie said. "It's the Air Force. They don't let civilians fly in their planes."

"How do YOU know, Maggie?" Fiona said.

It's only 8:15 in the morning, Sophie thought, and they're already getting on each other's nerves.

"What about you, Maggie?" Sophie said.

Maggie shrugged. "I don't have a dad. I went to work with my mom, but that was no big deal because I go to work with her every Saturday."

"But she does such cool stuff!" Sophie said. Maggie's mother was a tailor, and she made all the costumes for their films. Sophie thought Senora LaQuita was the most talented Cuban woman she'd ever met. Actually, she was the only Cuban woman she'd ever met.

"So you see why we have father-envy, Soph," Fiona was saying. "You had the best day of any of us."

"I bet I know what you're going to say, Sophie," Maggie said.

"No, you don't, Maggie," Fiona said. "Nobody knows what somebody else is thinking."

"She's going to say she wants to make a movie about astronauts," Maggie said.

Sophie looked at Fiona. "That WAS what I was going to say."

The bell rang, telling them they only had five minutes to get to first period. "You don't get to say anything now," Maggie said. "We have to go."

"She KNOWS that," Fiona said.

But she didn't get to say anything else, either, because as Sophie gave one more swing before she got out - the earth seemed to give way under her.

Actually, it was the seat of the swing, and before Sophie could even imagine herself falling through space, she was sitting - hard - in the ice-slushy puddle.

Chapter Two

"Oh, man!" she wailed. "This feels disgusting!"

"Are you okay?" Kitty said. She was whining louder than Sophie.

"I just feel gross!"

"It isn't that bad," Fiona said - without even looking at the back of Sophie's jeans.

Maggie did. She looked soberly at Sophie and said, "Yes, it is. You've got mud all the way down to your ankles. It even got on your coat."

"Enough already!" Fiona said. She glared at Maggie as she peeled off her jacket. "Tie this around your waist and nobody will even notice 'til we get to the office."

"Yes, they will," Maggie said. "She's dripping on the ground."

"That's gonna leave a trail," Kitty put in.

"Would you two cease and desist?" Fiona said. Sophie knew she meant "Shut up!"

"Just walk tall and stare straight ahead," Fiona whispered to Sophie as she guided her through the doors into the school.

"This is so embarrassing," Sophie whispered back.

"Not if nobody even looks at you."

Fat chance. Of course the first people they saw were Anne-Stuart, Willoughby, B.J., and Queen Bee Julia - the Corn Pops. They were popular - which was why the Corn Flakes called them Pops - and as far as the CFs were concerned, they were pretty corny, as well. When the Corn Pops had once referred to Sophie and her friends as "flakes," they adopted the name proudly. At least it made them different from THOSE girls.

THOSE girls were currently staring with their hands over their lip-glossy mouths.

Continues.