Amanda Michalopoulou: Why I Killed My Best Friend

“Glasses are always pretty,” Anna says, and I sigh with relief.

“You’re an owl, Teapot!” Angeliki says.

“An African owl,” says Petros.

Anna and I pinch them as hard as we can so they’ll stop, but they just put their hands over their mouths and dissolve into laughter.

“You’re an ugly four-eyes!” Angeliki shouts.

“She has inner beauty!” Anna shouts back.

“Only inner?” I ask, but Anna is busy pinching the others and doesn’t respond.

“I’m sure Angelos will fall for you,” she says when the bell rings at the end of the day. “You look older, more mature. A ripe fruit!”

“And when a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls.”

Anna loves it when I use Gwendolyn’s proverbs. She gives me a sloppy kiss on the cheek.

“You’re my best friend!”

“And you’re mine!”

“Want to go pee?” she says.

When we’re best best friends, like today, we go and pee in a parking lot on the next street over from our school. We slip between the cars, pull down our underwear and a little fountain of pee spurts onto the ground, splashing our socks and shoes. We never pee at the same time, so that whoever’s not peeing can be the lookout. Anna wiggles her tush and sings Françoise Hardy. I don’t move at all and only sing on the inside, Well then, I’ll say it, I love a boy . . I always take off my glasses, too, so they don’t get splashed.

Only today there’s a man in the car next to us. He slowly opens his door and says, “Girls, do you want to see my ice cream?” Anna vanishes, but I feel like it wouldn’t be polite to run away. The man is holding his ice cream down low, between his legs, a reddish-brown rocket pop with a little cream at the top. Something isn’t right. I take a few steps backward. When I’m far enough away, my heart starts beating loudly in my ears. Now is the time to use a phrase only good-for-nothings say. I make my hands into a megaphone and shout, “Fart on my balls!”

Anna holds out her hand. She’s pale as a ghost. We wrap an arm around each other and run in no particular direction.

“All men are monsters,” Anna says.

Merde, merde. All of them?

“ He tricked you, Paraskevoula, the mayor’s son. . ” We’re dancing a kalamatiano in the schoolyard. We’re still so upset about the perversion of men that we’re not really paying attention to the words. The song gets stuck in our heads. The whole way home, all the way to Plaka, we dance the kalamatiano instead of walking. Our favorite bit is the little leap at the beginning when you lunge at the sidewalk and stomp your foot. At home, too, while Antigone is making us lunch, we’re in the living room dancing. Suddenly she rushes into the room holding a half-peeled potato and a knife.

“What is this nonsense?”

We don’t understand.

“Who taught you that?”

We shrug.

Antigone says that the kalamatiano was what people who supported the junta used to dance. And that the song we’re singing is about a rich man taking advantage of a poor girl and if that’s the kind of thing we like, we deserve whatever we get. Haven’t we come into this world to fight hypocrisy? She’ll take us to the Peroke Theater and give us something to think about: they’re presenting two one-act plays, Chekov’s A Marriage Proposal and Brecht’s A Respectable Wedding .

We eat somberly, in silence. After lunch I go to the bathroom to wash my hands and through the open door I see Antigone sitting at the dressing table in her bedroom. Should I tell her I’m sorry for dancing the kalamatiano? She’s fixing her hair, only her shiny braid is lying on the bed, and there’s a little bun at the back of her head full of hairpins and clips. Antigone has short hair! The braid is a wig!

Then why did she tell us we’ve come into the world to fight hypocrisy?

Antigone takes us with her to the anniversary of the events at the Athens Polytechnic, when the dictators sent in tanks to kill the students who’d occupied the building. We bought red carnations to bring with us to the peace march. I told Mom I was going to Anna’s house to do my homework, because she doesn’t like demonstrations. She won’t join the League of Democratic Women, either. She doesn’t have time, she’s too busy knitting her blanket for the contest in Woman . “Such a waste of time,” Mom says. “Anna’s mother has her head in the clouds.” I still like Antigone, even if she’s lying about her braid. She’s skinny and she’s fighting for justice, working to make the world a better place. Sometimes I dream that she’s my real mother, and I always feel proud when strangers in the street say, “What lovely daughters you have.”

“You should take off your glasses,” Anna whispers. “There might be trouble.”

Trouble? Like a state of emergency? Like with the Igbo and Hausa, people setting fires? What if someone grabs Antigone by the hair and her secret is revealed?

A man tells us that people are throwing stones over by the American embassy. But outside the Polytechnic things are calm. The huge bust in front of the building is festooned with carnations and the protesters are singing a Mikis Theodorakis song in unison: “ Life keeps climbing upward, life keeps climbing upward. With flags, with flags and drums .” Luckily Anna already taught me that song. I don’t want to sing about boys and love anymore. I could care less! We sing ourselves hoarse, red in the face from trying to sing louder than anyone else. We’re the biggest revolutionaries in all of Athens! That’s the only way we’ll get a scholarship from the Institut Français to go study painting in Paris for free. Anna doesn’t want to be a lawyer like Gisèle Halimi anymore. She decided to study art, too. She wants us to be exactly alike.

We play our anti-junta skipping game all the way home. Then, at the house in Plaka, Anna puts on a Manos Loizos record while Antigone peels carrots.

“What would you like for your birthday?” Antigone asks me.

I’m happy that she remembered my birthday. “I don’t know, whatever you think. .”

“You don’t want anything in particular? Come on, tell me.”

Her knife flashes like lightning, she’s barely scratching the peel, since that’s where all the vitamins are. What I’d like most of all is to be able to peel carrots as gracefully as Antigone, then to toss them in water, boil them, and make a yummy sauce with lemon.

“Okay, then, I’d like a tea set, or dishes.”

“A tea set? Oh, don’t disappoint me, Maria. I’ll get you The Carousel , okay?”

“What’s The Carousel ?”

“It’s a record. The text is by Georges Sarri.”

I’m ashamed of having disappointed her by wanting a tea set. It’s easy to disappoint Antigone. She yells at us if she catches us reading Patty’s World . But what does Patty do that’s so terrible? She just loves Johnny Vowden, goes around town with her friend Sharon, and wants to be a nurse when she grows up. Antigone doesn’t like women who become nurses and take care of men.

Sometimes I wish I were a boy.

I blow out all ten candles at once. Anna does a wolf whistle, Fotini and Martha clap. It’s too bad Angelos didn’t come. I wipe my sweaty palms on my velvet dress with the cherries. I’m more grown-up than ever now!

Dad takes pictures. Mom holds out a tray of bite-sized cheese pies to Kyria Pavlina. Mom is happy, the way she used to be, because she won second prize in the knitting contest. She hung a photograph from the awards ceremony in the hall, next to the coat rack.

Aunt Amalia doesn’t want any cheese pies. Antigone doesn’t, either. She puts on The Carousel and tells us to listen carefully to the lyrics: “ If all the children of the world held hands, boys and girls all in a row, and began to dance, the circle would grow and grow until it hugged the whole world .” We girls form a circle and dance around the dining room table with all the other kids all over the world. When we’re out of breath, we crawl under the table and play house. Anna is the dad, I’m the mom, and Martha and Fotini are our kids. We live in Africa, not in a house but in the jungle with the tigers. Then we live in Paris and drink coffee at Café de Flore. Martha starts whining because she wants us to live on Aegina, too, but Anna says, “Merde, we’re not rednecks!”