Amanda Michalopoulou - Why I Killed My Best Friend

Anna starts her experiment the very next day, when school lets out. She’s completely shameless, goes right up to a boy from the high school, Philippos, and asks if he’ll take her home on his motorbike. Then she lingers there, straightening and unstraightening the mirror on his bike, laughing at nothing, stroking her elbow. I’m perched on a low wall across the way, biting my nails, because the bet is only good if the other person actually sees the kiss. Anna slides onto the seat of the motorbike, up on her knees with her legs crossed under her. Philippos is very tall, but that way they’re more or less the same height. And of course they kiss. What else are a boy and girl supposed to do when their noses are practically touching? Anna makes the victory sign at me behind Philippos’s back. She won, merde.

I hope I find someone before my birthday.

His name is Kostas! He’s in my French class at the Institut Français.

“What a boring name,” Anna says, sighing.

“Yeah, but he’s a good kisser.”

“Like how?”

First he holds your face between his hands. He concentrates, looks at you with a smile in his eyes, as if telling you not to be afraid. And he kisses slowly and gently: first with closed lips, then they part a little, then they’re totally open, and finally there’s his tongue. Then he does it all in reverse and ends with a gentle kiss on your lips. Then he puts his arm around you and you walk together down Sina Street with all of Athens glittering in the background.

“What kind of crap is that?” Anna says.

“He’s so polite, Anna, like a real Frenchman. Maybe, you know, it’s because he’s learning French. .”

“First of all, it doesn’t count. We said a boy from the Varvakeio.”

“But he’s the one I found!”

“And you can lose him again just as easily. We’re not going to turn into your mother. I mean, really! One man for your whole life?”

“But I like him!”

“He’s already given you whatever he had to give. If you can’t dump him now, when will you? After your third child?”

Kostas waves to me from his desk during our next French class. I see him in church, too, with the priest chanting, Mom wiping her eyes with her monogrammed handkerchief. But it’s all ruined; kisses aren’t just a game anymore. They lead to something else, something serious and scary.

“This is our last kiss,” I tell him after the service, just at the point when he’s kissing me gently on the lips, about to put his arm around me so we can walk together down the street. It’s nearly winter, the days are getting shorter and a person naturally has a greater need of hugs and kisses. But even more than my ears, it’s my heart that has frozen, at the idea of marriage. I’m not even fifteen!

“What’s wrong?” Kostas asks. “Did I do something?”

“No, I just don’t like you anymore.”

It sounds harsher than I would have liked, but there’s no way of taking it back.

It’s February, a night like any other. I’m curled up in bed reading a novel by Albert Camus that I borrowed from the library of the Institut Français. Outside stray dogs are barking, the sky is faintly red. Suddenly our apartment starts to shake as if everyone had cranked the music up to full blast in every apartment in the building all at once. A few of the books fall from my shelf into a heap on the floor. Out in the living room, Mom’s wooden elephants from Africa drop one by one from the cabinet. There’s a humming sound and then all the lights go out. It’s as if a wind picked up our apartment and set it down on a beach where huge gusts are whipping up enormous waves that threaten to engulf it. Mom lets out a cry—“My God!” Dad bursts into my room, shouts at me to hurry. I run barefoot down four flights of stairs. I’m clutching Camus to my chest as if the book were a living thing, like a kitten.

The whole neighborhood is out in the streets. Women in slips are looking around frantically. Men wrapped in sheets are deep in conversation, gesticulating, like Roman senators. So it wasn’t just our apartment. Maybe it’s the beginning of World War III? “An earthquake, an earthquake!” my mother cries as if she needs to repeat it to believe it. So that’s what a real earthquake is like.

Maybe I should cross myself every now and then and try to believe in God. Maybe I shouldn’t kiss just anyone.

Anna is in a terrible state. White as a ghost with fear, curled up into a ball in the garden. Our whole family has taken refuge at the house in Plaka because Mom is afraid the roof of our building will fall and crack open her skull. Wrapped in a blanket on a deck chair in their yard, Mom drinks the coffee Antigone brings her and repeats: “6.6 on the Richter! My Lord, how awful!” Dad and Antigone are the bravest of us all. They sit in front of the television, coming out every so often to relay the news: “The epicenter was the Halcyon islands.” “So many dead!” “Devastating property damage.”

I’m sitting on a stool beside Anna, trying to calm her down.

“It’s over, Anna, it’s over.”

“But can anyone say for sure that it won’t start up again?”

“Come on, would a real revolutionary be afraid?”

“Give me a break, Maria! Merde!”

She’s sitting on the edge of her chair, ready to leap to her feet at any moment — to go where? There’s an aftershock, practically imperceptible; Anna screeches, Antigone brings her half a tranquilizer. We all sleep outside in the yard, in sleeping bags or on mattresses we bring out from the house, except for Dad, who sleeps in the car. Under normal circumstances Anna and I would be up giggling until dawn, or would sneak off for a cigarette. But Anna isn’t Anna anymore. In the morning she wakes up with red eyes and scans the yard as if the earthquake were a wild beast lurking in some dark corner. I’ve forgotten my own fear, because I’m wrapped up in Anna’s. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen Anna afraid. And her fear makes me stronger.

“I’m going to go live in France, that’s it.”

“Are you crazy? What about me?”

Anna is hunched over on the toilet, a wad of toilet paper in her hand. Even the way she pees is different: hesitant, not as noisy. She’s always prepared to jump up and race out of the house at the slightest notice.

“There are no earthquake zones in France. I’ll go live with my dad. You can come, too, if you want.”

I’ve never met Anna’s father, because he never sets foot in Athens. He and Antigone are separated, something it took me ages to figure out. They’re supposedly all modern about it, and still go out to eat together in France. “If I got a divorce from your father, I wouldn’t ever want to see him again, not even in a painting,” Mom says. “But they’re friends,” I say. “Friends? How can they be friends? It’s completely unnatural, child.”

This is one of the rare occasions on which Mom and I agree. Anna and I never talk to our exes, we call them “stuffed shirts.” We’ll go out with a boy from the Varvakeio for ten days, two weeks at most, and let them kiss us and touch our chest. Next year we’ll see about more than that. We still like peeing together, but not in parking lots anymore, in the bathroom. We shut ourselves in for hours and talk about how this or that boy kisses, or how boys unbutton your shirt, with trembling fingers.

After the earthquake, though, Anna doesn’t talk much about stuff like that. Actually she doesn’t talk much about anything. She just sits on the toilet with a wad of paper wrapped around her hand looking as if she might cry at any moment.

“How am I supposed to come to France, Anna? My family is here.”

“Aren’t I your family?”

We hug and lean silently to this side and that, Anna with her underwear around her knees, I fully dressed and strong. She smells like fear.