Amanda Michalopoulou: Why I Killed My Best Friend

“We’re murderers, murderers!” Anna hisses. Her eyes are wider, bluer than ever.

“It was self-defense, he attacked us!”

“How was I supposed to know he couldn’t swim?”

“The real question is, what do we do now?”

We don’t sleep at all that night. At the smallest noise in the hallway we’re sure that they’ve found our fingerprints. That they’ve come to arrest us.

“I saw this strange image,” I whisper in the middle of the night, nestling my head against her shoulder. Anna is drenched in sweat, her hair practically dripping. The moon casts a macabre, yellowish light on her eyelashes, her cheekbones, the dimple in her chin. “Right before he kicked me, I saw these men in a cave. They were holding me hostage. It was so strange. . as if. .”

Anna sits up, wrapped in the sheet. “What happened next?”

“There was no next. That’s all I saw. Three men with stockings over their faces.”

“But what then?” Anna hugs me, and a shiver runs through me.

“I told you, that’s all I saw!”

“Remember, try to remember,” Anna whispers, gently stroking my hair, as if I were a child.

Gwendolyn is ironing, I can see her clearly. The tropical rains have started, which is why she hasn’t set up the ironing board on the veranda. She irons as if she were dancing, shifting her weight this way and that, in the big basement room where the cleaning supplies are, next to the storage room. Yes, Gwendolyn — her heavy, square body with its smell of salt and humidity; her unruly bun, with tufts of hair always escaping, the softest thorns I know; the whites of her eyes flash each time she raises her head to look at me. Lying on my stomach on the floor, I’m drawing our house with colored pencils. I put banana trees all around. They’re not there in real life, but my picture looks happier with all that yellow. Every so often my eyes drift shut, and I doze on my papers while Gwendolyn’s iron slides back and forth over the ironing board with soothing regularity. The room smells like my father’s shirts, my mother’s embrace. I slowly sink into a dream that’s a faithful copy of my drawing. Suddenly a window up on the ground floor breaks, jolting me awake. Gwendolyn freezes in place, standing there with the iron in the air.

“It’s the wind,” I tell her in English.

“Shhh,” Gwendolyn hisses.

We hear footsteps overhead, furniture being moved. Did Mom come home from Mrs. Steedworthy’s? But she wouldn’t ever come in through the window. Dad usually stays at work until late. And the hobgoblins in fairytales who sneak into stranger’s homes to get warm never break windows, they just slip in on tiptoe. Gwendolyn grabs me and shoves me into the storage room, behind Dad’s wine rack. “Not a peep out of you,” she says. Only in her anxiety and confusion, she trips over a crate of soft drinks and the whole tower of them comes crashing to the floor. The noise on the ground floor stops. Gwendolyn rushes to the telephone; two men come running down the stairs and overtake her. They have women’s stockings over their faces and are holding knives. They’re not very sharp knives, but Gwendolyn starts shrieking anyhow. I come out of my hiding spot to help her; no one would hurt a little kid.

A third man grabs me and hefts me onto his shoulders as if I were a sack of flour. He’s so scary, with his nose and lips smushed by the stocking! His eyes are squinted partway shut, his cheeks are swollen. The men argue with Gwendolyn in African, probably telling her to hang up the phone. Gwendolyn is crying. I’ve never seen Gwendolyn cry before. The men growl, their voices distorted by the stockings. One of them is carrying Mom’s jewelry box of carved wood. Another grabs a few bags of rice from the storage room. The third has me. We all pile into a van. Gwendolyn runs out into the rain after us. The man who had me over his shoulder shoves her and she falls to the ground, in the muddy water. I watch through the window of the van as she gets smaller and smaller, until she disappears altogether, along with our front gate. The men make me lie down on the back seat so that no one will see me. The van — a wreck, smelling of burnt rubber and sweat — bounces around in the mud for a long time. Eventually I forget about the three strange men with stockings over their heads. My eyes wander to the torn cloth on the roof of the van and I listen to the sound of the rain. I start to laugh. I’m thinking about how mad Gwendolyn gets when I say, “Gwendolyn, listen! It’s God peeing!” At some point, the sound of the struggling motor stops. I raise my head. We’re on a deserted beach with a cave at one end. They tell me to go into the cave and sit there. Their English is terrible. All they know how to say is, girl, here, sit here.

“Are you alone?” Anna asks.

“No, there’s another little girl.”

“A little girl?”

“She’s very small. She’s expecting me to save her. But I can’t. They cut off her arm and her head and throw her into the sea. .” A wave breaks inside me, then another. My eyes fill with tears.

“It’s not another little girl, Maria, it’s your doll!”

My doll! Bambi! She has silver hair and a necklace around her neck, a bronze chain that gave Gwendolyn the idea for the story with the two friends. Bambi is no ordinary doll: she talks nonstop. Whenever my parents or Gwendolyn or Unto Punto come into the room, she plays dead, but when we’re alone she purses her tiny red lips and whispers that I’m her savior, that my love broke the spell of her boring doll’s life. I cover her with a blanket my mother made out of an old woolen shawl. I kiss Bambi’s pink cheeks and tell her, “Don’t worry, I’ll protect you.” Bambi comes with me into the storage room, nestles in my arms at the dinner table, sleeps on my pillow. She has straight hair, like Anna’s, blue eyes, and dark, shiny eyelashes. And she’s naughty. She always wants us to do naughty things, like climb up onto the roof of the house, or climb the trees in the garden, or hide in the laundry room and jump out to scare Gwendolyn. Sometimes she overdoes it. She says, “Pour your milk down the sink, it’s gross! Blech!” Or, “Grab one of the goldfish by the tail, let’s see how long it can last out of the water.” The goldfish flops around while Bambi begs me to hold it just a little bit longer. But I’m good to the fish, good to all God’s creatures — I toss it back into the water and wipe my hands on my school uniform. Bambi has a uniform, too. Mom made it for her out of leftover fabric from my white summer school smock. Bambi is always getting dirty, just like me. “Oh, Bambi, what have you gotten yourself into this time?” I say. “Come here, I’ll clean you off.” She likes to roll on the grass, in the dirt, and sometimes goes for a swim in the goldfish pond. Then I have to dry her uniform with the hair dryer. I kiss her on the forehead and forgive her. I always forgive her.

Yes, Bambi is with me when I’m drawing on the floor, when Gwendolyn pushes me into the storage room, when the men with the stockings on their heads shove me into their van. And she’s with me in the cave, too. “Let’s get out of here,” she says to me. “These are bad guys! Quick, let’s run away!” We take off our shoes — Bambi’s are red patent leather with a little strap, mine are black and full of sand. We run across the muddy beach, under the rain, toward freedom. Neither of us realizes that the men are running after us — until they grab us and whisk us up into the air. It’s easy as pie for them, bad guys always run faster than good guys. My bad guy, the one who slung me over his shoulder, grabs Bambi, pulls off her arm and tosses it into the sea. “Don’t, don’t!” I cry. Then he pulls off her head. I rush at him and bite his arm, but instead of behaving, he throws Bambi’s head far off into the waves. Then he hands her back to me, headless, missing one arm, as if he were the judge in Gwendolyn’s story, and I’m the jealous friend who wanted the necklace. “That’s what we’ll do to you if you try to run away again,” he says to me. And to scare me even more, he pulls the stocking off his head. He’s white! The very worst bad guy is white! I would have preferred him to be black, it would be more like Mom’s stories, about how being poor makes black people so crazy that sometimes they do bad things.