Books for Kids: The Little Sophia Vol.1

Chapter 1

     “Go straight to your room, young lady!” Mr. Belfort said loudly, almost shouting. “This is not a conversation we will be having.”

        “But we always don’t have any conversations at all!” Sophia retorted. “It’s always what you want. It’s always what you tell me to do!”

        This time, Mr. Belfort stood from where he sat at the living room couch. He gritted his teeth and threw the paper he was reading to the side. “What did you just say to me, Sophia?” he asked. His voice was so soft it was barely audible, and both Sophia and Mrs. Belfort knew he was about to become really angry.

        But Sophia didn’t care. She had about enough of his father’s consistent attempt to control her life. Besides, she didn’t understand just what was wrong with going to a summer camp. It wasn’t as if she was asking for permission to stop seeing her psychologist. She just wanted to go, just like the other kids, so she would feel like she actually belonged somewhere.

        So she stood a little straighter, put her hands on her hips, raised her chin and said to her father, “You... are... a... big... control... freak.”

        Mrs. Belfort dropped the dish she was currently drying and it shattered loudly against the tiled kitchen floor. The sudden noise almost unbuckled Sophia’s knees but she remained standing tall. This was her only chance to have a “normal” summer, instead of sitting inside the house all the time and being monitored like she was a baby incapable of taking care of herself. She was aware she was still a ten-year-old kid and needed her parents just like any kid would, but her parents were just too much – especially her father, who rarely talked to her about anything if it wasn’t related to getting straight A’s or winning gold medals.

        After a second, terrified Mrs. Belfort rushed to the living room to calm her family down. “Dear,” she said talking to Mr. Belfort, “sit down. Please, let’s not make this any worse.”

        “Why don’t you say that to that ungrateful daughter of yours?” Mr. Belfort said not sitting down.

        The tough show Sophia was putting on almost broke when she heard her father say what he just said. Her father had always been really hard on her but this was the first time Mr. Belfort said anything mean to her. It only made her want to go to camp even more.

        “Henry!” Mrs. Belfort reprimanded her husband but the damage had already been done.

“What? She’s the one saying all this nonsense about seeing the world in summer camp when she wasn’t even able to pass her homework in Math class.” Mr. Belfort looked back at Sophia. “Do you understand how hard we’re working just so you can go to school? And you want to waste a whole summer in a camp doing what? So you can’t get an easy A in Math? Is that really how you’re going to pay us back?”

“But it wasn’t because of the camp! I forgot about the assignment because I was reading Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women!” she tried to explain. “Isn’t reading books what you always tell me to do?”

“Okay, sure. But that still doesn’t make missing a schoolwork okay. And it still doesn’t justify allowing you to go to that summer camp. It just proves you’re an irresponsible girl who can’t even tell which things are important and which are not. Now, do you still expect me to send you off to some place I don’t even know of? Tell me what you would do if you’re the parent and you have such an irresponsible daughter like yourself.”

“Henry, stop!” Mrs. Belfort said. She was shaking because of her husband’s words but still thought he was right. It was true that Sophia was too young to be allowed to go away from home for two whole weeks. Although it didn’t change the fact that Mr. Belfort could have handled the situation better. So she turned her head towards her daughter, her eyes filled with worry and said, “Sophia, please. Just go to your room now.”

        Sophia scoffed. “Of course, you’re going to take dad’s side,” she said to her mom in disbelief before she marched off to her room, banging the door behind her after she went inside.

        Sophia really wanted to talk back. She wanted to push her dad until he let her go to summer camp. But once her mother told her to stop, she knew she had no other choice but to let the matter go. It was already bad that her father was mad at her that she didn’t want her mom to feel bad towards her as well.

        “They just never get it, don’t they?” Sophia muttered to herself. “They just see me the way they want to, not the way I really am.”

        And it was somehow true. Ever since she was diagnosed as a child prodigy when she was two, her parents decided everything for Sophia so that she would become the girl they wanted her to be. They were the ones who wanted her to finish school early, so at age six, Mr. and Mrs. Belfort asked the school if she could be accelerated. She was put in the third grade after several IQ tests, which someone else would have wanted, but it was extremely hard for Sophia to cope with her classmates. In the middle of the school year, she was forced to be homeschooled because the difficulties she was having about getting along with the other kids were affecting her grades.

        It was also her parents who wanted Sophia to go back to an ordinary school when she was eight. She wanted to stay with the homeschooling program she was in but her dad said it was “time to be a grown up.” Back then, Sophia didn’t understand what he meant, especially when she was only eight and was still technically a kid. So she got back to school, and the same thing that happened to her when she was six and in the third grade happened when she was now in the fifth. Kids teased her because she was “too smart” and “too young” as if being so was such a bad thing. But Sophia was able to adjust to her environment better this time. She did a good job hiding the way she felt towards the bullies now that she was a little older, and her grades weren’t affected by the bad kids anymore.

        Maybe it was the way she was treated in school that ultimately lead her to become a mean girl, but she always blamed her parents for putting her in that situation in the first place. To Sophia, if her parents didn’t force her to act and think older than she really was, she wouldn’t have had to deal with the bullies in school. She wouldn’t have had to feel so out of place all the time. She wouldn’t have had to feel desperate every time she wasn’t asked to go to things, like summer camp.

        Almost every girl in her class was going so she really wanted to go. It was supposed to be her time to prove to these twelve-year-olds that she was one of them. But when she told her parents about possibly going, well, the after-breakfast fight happened and now she was in her room alone and sad.

        Sophia took one of her pillows and put it over her head. She tried her best to stop them, but the tears were now flowing continuously from her eyes.

        “I just want to be a kid,” she said as she cried. “I just want to be like those kids in those books with happy endings. Why can’t I be like that?”