What Lies Beneath

Chapter Eleven: Sophie

There is a moment in everyone's life where they either learn to fly or they plummet to their deaths. Sometimes you don't realize that it's your moment until years have gone by and then suddenly you remember the exact moment when everything changed. It was like this for Sophie.

You see all her life she had been hit with a string of bad luck and I don't mean not getting the job she wanted or being super klutzy, no, her bad luck was different. She had spent most of her life alone because she could never keep a friend or family member. It wasn't because she was mean or because they just didn't like her. The sad truth of it was that every time she opened up or got close to someone, they would meet with a horrific accident.

In the first few months of her life she lost her parents to a gruesome car accident on their way home from the store after buying some diapers. Sophie was then sent to live with her grandparents.

On the second night that she stayed with them there was a mysterious carbon-monoxide leak in their home which incidentally killed both of her grandparents in their sleep. Baby Sophie was found unharmed in the nursery in the morning when their other daughter came over to help with the baby.

Sophie was then sent to live with the aunt who had found her. There isn't much known about what happened to her, only that she went out one evening and never returned. No trace of her was ever found.

Since she was unmarried and there were no other family members to take in the orphaned child, Sophie was placed in the foster system.

Now, most people would normally jump at the chance to adopt a baby so that they can raise it from the very beginning, and for a while they did, but after the fifth adoption she was blacklisted. Soon there were rumors spread around the orphanage that she was cursed.

Sadly, the deaths or mysterious disappearances of her foster and adoptive parents only added to the tale.

Since there was no hope of her ever being adopted, they sent her to boarding school when she turned five. Unfortunately, the curse followed. In the time that she attended that boarding school there was a recorded death toll of 223 students and faculty members.

On the day that Sophie received a mysterious letter in the mail inviting her to a home just outside of Connecticut, she had just been kicked out of school. They couldn't say that it was because of the curse, so some students with their teacher's permission snuck into her room and planted drugs and other such things that would get her immediately expelled.

She opened the letter while waiting for her social worker to show up and take her back to the orphanage while they figured out what to do with her. After she read the words on the page she was confronted with a decision. Should she go to a place where no one knew of her or her curse, or should she head back to the orphanage where they would treat her like a pariah until they could figure out a way to get rid of her?

Little did she know at the time that this was her defining moment. It was this choice that would set into motion the domino's that would lead her to her destiny.