20. The Little Kid. Cody writes his own entry about his trip with Sophie to Wood Island. He says that he felt the presence of ghosts when he was there, but when he asked Sophie, she denied seeing or sensing any ghosts, and said they were all in Cody’s mind. While they were walking along, Cody decided to ask Sophie what happened to her original parents, but she said that nothing had happened to them, and that they were in Kentucky. She then starts to tell a story about a “little kid” whose parents weren’t with them any longer, and so the little kid had to go live with other people.
The “little kid” of Sophie’s story bears a striking resemblance to Sophie herself—a young child who lost their parents. It seems that Sophie has invented the character of the little kid in order to project her own past onto another’s story, thereby disowning the truth of her past. Yet the fact that she feels the need to talk about the little kid shows that, on some level, her past is still with her—it’s not totally forgotten or repressed.