Amanda Michalopoulou - Why I Killed My Best Friend

“I’m sorry,” I whisper.

Mom isn’t crying because of her foot, it’s a different kind of crying. She’s making this high-pitched, inarticulate noise, which sounds as if it were coming from the body she used to have, the thin one, trapped somewhere in the depths of that plastic suit.

“I can’t take it anymore,” she says.

I hug her, not because I want to, but because she wants me to.

“Where did I go wrong with you?”

I wish that for once she would ask where she went wrong with herself.

Mom has to go to the hospital for a thyroid operation. Before she goes, she fills the freezer with biftekia. Dad and I eat silently in front of the television, watching Dallas .

“How’s school?” he asks.

“Fine,” I say.

The rest is silence, except for our chewing and J.R.’s voice: “Don’t think you’ll get away with it. You’ll pay for this!”

I spend my afternoons locked in the bathroom. I’ve got things to do. At night I read Cosmopolitan to learn tricks that Angelos might like, or Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex to learn other things, for myself. It’s past midnight when I finally lie down and watch the reflection of headlights from cars in the street flitting across the ceiling and dream that I’m the perfect woman: a revolutionary, like de Beauvoir, but also just a normal person, like my mother, blond like Anna, and dressed like the models on the cover of Cosmopolitan . Only in real life a woman like that would be strange, almost a monster.

I’ll have to choose.

“Okay, let’s organize a plan of attack.”

Anna is sitting on the bed Aunt Amalia and I used to share. This year it’s Anna’s and mine.

“Nothing works, I’m telling you. All he’s interested in is rocks.”

Angelos isn’t going to be a nuclear physicist in the end. He’s studying geology, since that’s the department his exam scores were good enough for. He goes up hiking in the mountains with his friends from school and they dig up rocks all day. He has a 500cc motorbike and if you run into him on the beach, you can’t take your eyes off him: his curly hair blows in the wind, his white jeans are perfectly ripped at the knee and the leather band on his wrist gives him a wild, romantic air. Angelos is the first right-wing guy I like. Okay, so he’s not exactly right-wing, just apolitical. For him, politics is no match for digging up rocks. We grew up together in the summers. He barely speaks to his sisters, and only ever throws an occasional “Hey” in my direction, but he’s a good guy. He has that stern kindness I admire in boys. He could never be a “stuffed shirt,” like the boys at school. He’s not full of himself the way they are.

When we got to Aegina, Anna gave him the once over. She says she finds him sort of boring, but she respects my choice. And now we’re sitting on the bed making plans.

“I’ll let you borrow my blue eye shadow,” she says. “You’re going to have to dress really carefully if you want to beguile him.”

It always surprises me when Anna talks about clothes or makeup or uses words like “beguile.” I’m still stuck on my old impression of her, totally sexless, still a child. I have to keep reminding myself of how irresistible she is in her khaki shorts and blue eye shadow.

“And stop biting your nails!” she shouts.

Anna’s nails are painted with clear polish. Her hair smells heavenly. She’s wearing a bracelet with green stones and half-moon earrings.

“Just show me what I have to do.”

Anna laughs. She paints a layer of polish on my nonexistent nails. Then she gets her hairbrush from the other room and does my hair, parting it in the middle. Finally, she lends me a pair of earrings and her new denim skirt. No more white face powder, no more dark lipstick. We’re girls again.

“Perfect,” she says.

“What about my glasses?”

“Your glasses are the most beguiling thing about you, Maria!”

She grabs my shoulders, turns me toward the full-length mirror on the closet door. I see her reflection first: that angelic face, her dimple, her eyes, two deep pools. For a second I imagine I’m her. But Anna shakes me back to reality: I’m completely colorless, my eyes and hair are the color of a smushed turd — who was I to make fun of Angeliki? And why does Anna have to be so beautiful? Why couldn’t there be a communist God?

“Say something, merde! Talk to him!”

Angelos comes up to us on his motorbike, rests one high-top on the sidewalk and revs the engine for no reason.

“You girls having fun?” he asks.

“Sure,” I say.

I feel like I might faint. Ever since I discovered those strange reactions my body has I’m shy around boys, I’m afraid they might somehow guess what I do in the bathroom. With Angelos it’s the worst.

Anna comes to my rescue. “Want to give us a ride home?” she says.

She gives me one of her famous pinches so that I’ll get on first and be the one to hug him around the waist. She hops up behind me, and it’s the most wonderful moment of the whole summer: Anna protecting me, Angelos driving me, guiding my way. I dream that we’re flying, that I’m weightless, that I’ve shed all thoughts, even my vagina. We’re bodiless. Angels crossing the sky.

When we pull up in front of the house, Angelos kills the engine and I plummet back to earth. I get off on the wrong side and my leg brushes up against the red-hot exhaust pipe. I refuse to scream, because Angelos is watching. I just bite my lips. There’s a perfectly round red mark on my skin. Angelos’s imprint , I think. Even the pain makes my love grow.

They put burn cream on my leg and wrap it up. I’m an invalid and everyone pampers me. They bring me a sketch pad. Anna reads me some incomprehensible passages from A Lover’s Discourse by Roland Barthes: an ancient sign which. . in the remote days of my earliest childhood. . afflicted me with a compulsion to speak which leads me to say “I love you” in one port of call after another, until some other receives this phrase and gives it back to me . Angelos buys me the latest issue of Mickey Mouse . Martha and Fotini make me chocolate mousse out of a box, then sit at the foot of my bed and chatter about this and that. I like to have them all buzzing around me. They’re my new family. We’ll move to Paris together, Anna and I will study psychology and art, Angelos can do a masters in geology. Martha and Fotini will cook for us.

Maybe God is a communist after all.

“Can I come in?”

Angelos pokes his head in the door.

“Of course,” I say.

He sits on the floor, directly opposite my bed. We start in on one of those philosophical conversations that never go anywhere. Education, people, death, that sort of thing.

“Are you thinking of doing a masters?” I ask.

“It depends. There’s this girl here. .” he says, smiling.

“Do I know her?”

“What do you think?” he crawls on his knees over to the bed, rests his chin on my pillow. “What I’m wondering is if she, you know. .”

“You could ask,” I say, and swallow hard.

“So I’m asking. What do you think?”

“I think she does. I’m sure she does.”

Angelos hugs me tightly, but doesn’t kiss me yet. He’s shy, bright red, and my heart is about to burst.

“So she told you?” he asks, sighing into my hair.

“What?”

“Anna told you she likes me?”

My temperature spikes. Aunt Amalia says I should have dressed more warmly. Kyria Pavlina thinks it’s psychological, the shock of my accident. I’ve found my explanation in the book by Barthes: Sometimes, hysterically, my own body produces the incident: an evening I was looking forward to with delight, a heartfelt declaration whose effect, I felt, would be highly beneficial — these I obstruct by a stomach ache, an attack of grippe: all the possible substitutes of hysterical aphonia . That’s the name for what I’ve got: hysterical aphonia.