Amanda Michalopoulou - Why I Killed My Best Friend

“I want you to understand why I did it,” she says. “Why I left, then.”

“I do understand.”

“No, you don’t. You’re still angry with me.”

“I can understand and still be angry.”

“What can I say, Maria, I was scared. It was like an earthquake for me. As if a house had fallen on top of me.”

“You’re still afraid of earthquakes?”

“It’s fine, I’ve got it under control. But what about you? Tell me what you did.”

Well, I returned to the favorite occupation of my teenage years: staring at the ceiling. After a while I convinced myself I could hide out on Aegina, at Martha’s house, with Stella in my arms. It worked for a while, and then it stopped working. So I went to Paris, then to Berlin. I lived literally without anything, in squats in East Berlin. I ran into Michel after all those years. We shared a helping of pasta with spoiled tomato sauce that we found in a tin pot.

“Michel! How did you recognize him?” Anna asks.

“People have a way of sniffing one another out. He still had that same wreck of a bicycle.”

“How was he? As sad as ever? Did he have a girlfriend? Tell me everything!”

“How should I know, Anna? Michel is a zombie, it’s impossible to get him to open up. Anyhow, that situation had gone on too long. I went to New York, to Kayo. I couldn’t stand it there, either. So I came back to Exarheia. Oh, and Kayo followed. We live together in the blue building.”

“You live with Kayo?”

“Kayo has his life, I have mine.”

“What about men?”

“Men? Rarely. . I didn’t go to therapy. I never learned how to plug up the holes.”

It’s not a complaint, it’s a statement. But Anna reaches out both arms and literally falls onto me. Apparently she still has that same need for dramatic reconciliations. Her body is lighter than I had imagined. Lighter than she was when that thing happened. She strokes my hair, and I stroke hers. She probably dyes hers; it’s brittle in the way hair is that’s been damaged by dyes and hair dryers.

“Dirty lesbians!” a man hisses as he walks past our table.

“Ever since they started to feel like they’re Europeans and stopped hitting on foreign women all the time, they’ve become so aggressive. .” Anna says and sighs, without relaxing her hold on me. Her breath sends waves of warmth down the nape of my neck. Just like back when we would smoke to keep warm during recess, curled up in one another’s arms. Or in the double bed in Aegina, when she would wrap herself around me and beg me to forgive her.

Odiosamato.

We’re smoking in the girls’ room of the Varvakeio middle school, all in a tizzy. Our school is supposedly “experimental,” but Anna calls it a “bastion of phallocentrism.” And she’s right. The boys can wear whatever they want, but we have to wear the same blue smock every day. “Stupid old magpies! They’ve blinded themselves willingly, they’ve scratched their own eyes out — and now they want to turn us into good little housewives, too!” Today she’s got it in for Sartzekaki, our home economics teacher. Anna refused to make the little crocheted cap that keeps the dust off the extra roll of toilet paper, and she got what was coming to her. “I pity the man who marries you, Anna Horn,” Sartzekaki said. “And I pity the one who married you,” Anna replied, and got a slap on the face for her trouble. She ran out of the classroom, bright red with rage, and I ran after her to calm her down.

Anna is even more beautiful when she’s flushed. She’s sitting on the window ledge with her hands on her waist, giving me one of her looks, like lightning cracking. Will she get angry if I try to cheer her up by saying how smart we look in our uniforms with the Mao collar? “We’re perfect little Maoists,” Anna says when she’s in a good mood, “full of contradictions.” That’s how she talks this year. She reads Hegel and Marx and uses words like “alienation,” “capital,” “problematics.” But before leaving school each day, we always touch up our lip gloss in the girls’ room and run a hand through our bangs. At least this year we have a girls’ room. In the eighth grade we just had to hold it in until we got home. With thirteen hundred boys and only sixty-five girls, it wasn’t easy for us to convince them that we have bodily needs, too.

“Come on, Anna, don’t pay any attention to that woman, she’s just taking her own problems out on us. .”

“Don’t pay attention? People like her are going to decide our future!”

As dramatic as always. I just bite my lip if someone insults me. When they first sent us for gym class to the square by Agios Nikolaos church — sit-ups on the sidewalk, between parked cars — I made a face, and our harpy of a gym teacher saw me and said, “Are you too high-class for us, Maria?” I just bit my lip and kept quiet. But Anna is touchy, a fly landing on her sword is enough to set her off.

“I’m going to tell Antigone,” she says.

“What do you think she can do?”

“She’ll come to school and teach that fool how to behave. First of all, she has no right to lay her paw on me.”

Antigone comes to school at the drop of a hat — because the religion textbook says The working wife fills the house with tension and worry, as she is unable to fulfill all of her duties , or Many people, including young people, followed the illogical ideas of Sartre , or Foreign tourists bring into our country the unbridled liberties of their own lands (morals and customs, sexuality, the absence of public shame, styles of dress, etc.) . In the end she asked for Anna to be excused from religion class altogether. I watch through the window as Anna walks around in the schoolyard and am annoyed that I’m missing out on so many hours of conversation with her, just so I can sit there and listen to crap about Jesus. But what can I do? Mom turned religious. She spends whole days going from church to church making offerings. She’s even fatter now, and puts all her faith in God and Weight Watchers. As for Dad, he has no faith in anyone or anything. He opted for early retirement and spends his days in the coffee shop on the ground floor of our building, Sundays at the stadium. Fortunately I have school during the day, and afterward I have French lessons at the Institut Français, so I can forget for a while that my parents have become religious and weak, respectively. When I get home I call out a hello, then head straight for my room. I read whatever I can get my hands on, and listen nonstop to The Cure. The world could crumble around me and I still wouldn’t leave my room.

No matter how wrong things go in the world, salt never gets worms.

Now why did I remember that again?

“Stop making faces! Don’t be so squeamish,” Anna says.

Over the summer we used pillows, or put our hands over our mouths. Now she insists on our kissing for real, with our tongues, so we’ll know what it’s like. Locked in the bathroom in Plaka, Anna is perched on the washing machine, and I’m standing in front of her.

“Close your eyes, merde! It’s not the end of the world.”

First her lips, like kissing a peach. And then a cool tongue, which gets warm and soft when it touches mine. Just when I’m starting to get used to it, Anna pulls back. She wipes her lips furiously with her hand.

“What’s wrong?” I ask. “Why did you stop?”

“You liked it, huh?” she says, and laughs. “Aren’t you the least bit ashamed?”

“Give me a break! It was your idea.”

“Yeah, so we don’t seem totally inexperienced. But we don’t have to turn lesbian!”

She says we should place bets on who’ll be the first to kiss a boy from the Varvakeio. “There are so many of them! We can experiment, a different one each day.”