Amanda Michalopoulou - Why I Killed My Best Friend

Raoul opens the door and kisses us the French way, three times, on alternating cheeks. He lives by Blanche station, in a tiny room with an unmade bed, posters for the band Bazooka, and books about Fassbinder, Godard, and Pasolini. His window looks onto the rooftops across the way and while the two of them kiss, I stare out at the depthless, tiled horizon. He’s really very handsome and he’s a university student, too, studying graphic design. From the very beginning, with Apostolos the plumber, I knew Anna would go for older guys. He’s twenty years old, just imagine!

Raoul is very polite to me. “Anna talks about you all the time,” he says, then opens a beer with his teeth and offers it to me. It’s eleven in the morning and we’re drinking beer; the day is off to a strange start. We go out into the freezing Parisian air, pull our hats down over our ears, and they take me to see Beaubourg. We wear ourselves out with walking, stop every few hours for coffee, mussels with pommes frites, or pear tarte, we climb Montmartre, Raoul and Anna kiss, I stare at my coffee spoon or the hem of my coat.

“We have to find you a boyfriend, too,” Anna says slyly.

They decide to introduce me to Michel.

Michel dresses exactly the same way Raoul does — black shirt, a chain on his pants, a leather jacket with Sex Pistol patches — but his ears stick out and he has a sad look in his eyes. A similarity in dress says a lot about a friendship. Anna and I, meanwhile, are in our goth phase — romantic white blouses with lots of lace, white powder on our faces. It’s not healthy, to consume such large doses of The Cure and Verlaine all at once.

“How did the two of you meet?” I ask.

Raoul tells me they went to the same boarding school. One day, during room check, when they were supposed to be cleaning their rooms, Michel picked up all his trash off the floor and pinned it to the wall, like butterflies. The monitor had no idea how to react. The rumor spread from mouth to mouth and Raoul was impressed. He learned everything about the Sex Pistols from Michel, about the situationists and the Marche des Beurs anti-racism movement, even formed ties with some people in squats in Berlin. I figure all that learning must have happened in sign language, because Michel barely ever opens his mouth. Could I fall for someone so silent? For now it’s enough that he’s active in the anti-racist movement and that he rides his bicycle all over Paris, and if he wants to tell me something he just draws it, as if he were mute. He wears glasses, too, like me. How do two people with glasses kiss, anyhow?

I find out that very same night. They take off their glasses, place them on the table by Raoul’s bed and slowly sink into the pillows, half blind. If you’re nearsighted, the other person always looks better when you’re not wearing your glasses. His skin looks softer, his eyes sort of hazy, as if you’re only dreaming them. Until the others come back bearing pizza, Michel and I kiss, just kiss. I try to unbutton his shirt. “Aren’t we moving sort of fast?” he asks.

We sit on the floor eating pizza and Anna sings “ Avanti Popolo ” at the top of her lungs. Is that really a song that goes with pizza? Is it possible to say yes and no at the same time? I want and don’t want? Can you curse your home economics class while touching up your lip gloss in the bathroom? Dream of freedom but be unable to find your own vagina? That night, when Anna and I crawl into bed in the attic room, I speak to her in a disjointed rush, still tipsy from the morning beers and the vodka we drank at Raoul’s. Anna crosses her arms over the comforter and listens to me carefully. She’s thinking.

“What do you say, Anna?”

She doesn’t say anything. And it’s not because she’s still thinking.

She’s asleep.

I pad downstairs to the bathroom in bare feet. Anna is still sleeping, but her father is awake, sitting in his velvet armchair with the worn upholstery. It’s as if he stepped right out of the photographs: he’s smoking a pipe and reading Liberation .

“So here I am, finally meeting my daughter’s alter ego,” he says, and holds out a hand to me. His handshake is so warm it makes my knuckles crack.

“I propose we go out for breakfast. What do you say? It’s a beautiful day today.” He points out the window at a little café across the street. “That’s my favorite place right there.”

“What about Anna?”

“She’s not a cripple. When she wakes up, she’ll come find us.”

We sit in the window and look out at the passersby, and they look back at us. I order hot chocolate and a croissant, Anna’s father drinks a coffee but doesn’t eat anything. I try to picture him with Antigone, in one of those moments that grown-up couples share. Him putting a finger in her vagina, for instance.

“What are you laughing about?” he asks.

“Nothing, I just thought of something funny.”

“You’re not going to tell me, are you? That’s fine, I respect people who protect their thoughts.”

Anna’s father doesn’t talk about leftist politics all the time, as I had imagined, about separatist movements and revolutionary tactics. He mostly just strokes his beard and tells me funny stories about when he first moved to France, how he got the metro stations confused, or would forget his keys and have to spend the night on the steps of his apartment building. He does tells me a political joke, though: “A leftist gets into a taxi. He tells the driver: turn left here, then left again, then the other way.” At some point his face clouds over. He takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes and stares at me, deep in thought. A minute or two pass before he speaks.

“What’s all this about the earthquake? What do you think, Maria?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never seen Anna so scared.”

“Scared? Just scared? Hopeless is how I’d describe it. Terrified. What did she say to you? Is she going back with you when you leave?”

“We haven’t talked about it yet.”

“It’ll be a shame if she doesn’t. She’ll have to repeat a whole year of school.”

Anna in middle school while I’m already in high school? Impossible!

“How about the two of us make a deal? Can you persuade her to go back? You’re the only person Anna ever listens to—”

Me? Anna listens to me?

“—and when the two of you graduate, I’ll bring you both here to Paris. The two of you can live here with me, all expenses paid. What did Anna say you two wanted to study? Psychology?”

“I haven’t decided yet.”

“Well? What do you say to our deal?”

He shakes my hand again, even more forcefully, and again my knuckles crack. Anna’s father tells me to speak to him in the singular and call him by his first name, Stamatis. The world is suddenly simpler. Free studies in Paris. A warm croissant across the street from the house, Stamatis’s treat. Art school. Boys like Raoul and Michel. A human shield in support of the Arabs. Pizza on the floor. Beer in the morning, as if we’re characters in an avant-garde French film. And my best friend Anna by my side.

Speak of the devil — here she is, wild-eyed, pushing through the revolving door.

“If you ever do that again, I’ll never speak to you!”

She’s not talking to me, but to her father. She doesn’t just love him, she adores him, and wants him all to herself.

Her anger at me, too, doesn’t let up all day. We walk through Buttes-Chaumont Park as if we were racing, Anna deliberately keeping a few steps ahead.

“Anna, I would’ve woken you up if I thought it would matter so much.”

“You should’ve known.”

“But why does it matter?”

Anna can’t explain it to me, she just shrugs her shoulders. She’s perfectly willing to share her only sandwich during recess, but her dad is a different story.