Amanda Michalopoulou - Why I Killed My Best Friend

They lead me back to the cave. I put my head in my hands and cry and cry. And since it’s raining, it’s as if all of Ikeja, all of Africa, is mourning with me. Bambi, Bambi, you can’t talk anymore? Did they kill you? Did you turn back into a doll? I dig a hole in the sand and bury her, the same way we buried our baby.

“What baby?” Anna asks. She’s still stroking my hair.

“My little sister.”

She was a tiny baby, like a worm. Before she was born she seemed enormous. She would stretch her legs in Mom’s belly and Mom would put my hand on her belly button and ask if I felt her kicking. “Why is she kicking?” I’d ask. Dad would say that that’s how babies are, they do naughty things, but I should set a good example. I couldn’t wait for her to finally be born, so we could play together in the garden and draw houses and banana trees and peeing gods. In the end she was born prematurely. “She couldn’t wait to meet us, either,” Dad said. In the hall outside the emergency room I kept standing on tiptoe to see our baby better: she looked like a sleeping cat. I made up stories in my head: we would play hide-and-seek with Unto Punto, we would sneak into the storage room and put one another’s hair in ponytails. But the baby wanted to sleep forever. Mom said she went up to heaven to be with the angels. Gwendolyn said they put her in a nice white house, with photographs of us, and lollipops, candies, and teddy bears, and lowered her deep into the ground. “Why?” I asked. “Because the light of Africa hurt her eyes. She was used to the darkness in your mother’s belly.” Mom started to believe more and more in God, and to cry and get fat. Dad stayed at work later and later. Gwendolyn talked more than ever about salt and worms. Mrs. Steedworthy brought me Bambi so I’d have someone to play with. I couldn’t save our baby, but I made Bambi talk, and she told me all the time how I’d saved her from her boring doll’s life.

“It’s not your fault,” Anna says, and hugs me so tightly I think I might break into a thousand pieces. I’m not paying any attention to her. After all these years I’m right back in that cave. Night falls; Bambi is buried in the sand; the men gesture, argue, smoke. I’m little, they won’t see me in the dark. I’ll just go as far as the main road, some car full of good guys will stop and pick me up and give me a blanket so I’m not cold. We’ll go to another beach far away, we’ll light a big bonfire to dry my clothes, they’re gypsies, they’ll tell me stories, and I’ll tell them about my adventures with the burglars and our baby, and the gypsies will have lots and lots of kids, so many that they won’t mind giving me one to be my little sister. In the morning we’ll eat bananas and then they’ll take me back home to Ikeja, and Mom and Dad will cry with joy. We’ll all give the gypsy baby a bath and teach her Greek and English and the salt won’t ever get worms again.

I get up and start to walk. I’m not running as I was before, just walking to go meet my gypsies. But the bad white man catches up with me. “What did I say would happen to you if you didn’t listen?” he shouts in my face, and before I can say a word, he slices off part of my little finger. Just a little bit, not even half, but there’s blood running everywhere. The other two, the black men who aren’t as bad as the white man, punch the white man in the face. One tears off part of his shirt and wraps it around my finger and says, “Sorry, girl, sorry.” Then all three of them leave, disappearing into the dark.

The blood has seeped through the shirt of the better bad guy. It hurts a lot and I’m crying. Eventually I run out of tears, and my voice is gone, too. I sit and listen to the wind howl. The sand is cold from the storm and looks like the crystallized sugar we have in our storage room. Mom will yell at me for not bringing a coat. Something moves in the back of the cave. Is it a snake? A dragon? A hobgoblin? In the end it’s a cricket. It climbs up on my knee, and I play with it, I ruffle its wings. I’m very hungry. What if I ate it? I bite into it and chew as quickly as I can. It tastes good, like a potato chip. The sound of the cricket in my mouth is reassuring, like company.

They find me in the morning. First the Ikeja police come and wrap me in a blanket, since my teeth are chattering and I’m trembling. They ask me about the white man. Then my parents show up in the Mercedes. Mom runs toward me with open arms and kisses me all over, even my eyes and ears. “I was afraid I’d lost my other child, too,” she whispers. When she sees my finger, she lets out the loudest scream! Dad pounds his fist in his open palm like he’s beating himself up. The police say that the white man is an American from the base who went crazy, and that the burglars didn’t think anyone would be home. They took me with them for ransom, and when I tried to run away they panicked. They didn’t know what to do. “Well, I know exactly what I’ll do!” Dad shouts. He curses all the blacks in the world and says we’re going to get out of Africa as soon as we can.

“But, Dad, the murderer was white!”

“What murderer?”

“He killed Bambi.”

I show them where I buried her. Mom is sobbing. Dad asks, “What is that?”

“A piece of cricket, so she has something to eat in her grave. I didn’t have any candy or lollipops.” I made a mistake, again. Bambi’s head is in the sea. She has no mouth to chew with.

This year Walkmans are all the rage. At the beach you see girls with headphones drumming their fingers against their knees. They tap their feet to the rhythm, whistle or sing off-key, in a world of their own. And when they take the headphones off, they look surprised, dazed by the sudden onslaught of reality. That’s how I’ve been living all these years: with headphones on. And then Anna, who always knows better, who’s always one step ahead, comes along and yanks my headphones off: “It’s not another little girl, Maria, it’s your doll!”

“How did you know about any of that?” I ask. It’s past dawn now, and we’re lying in bed, wrapped tightly in the sheets. Exhausted mummies.

“Your mother told Antigone, back when we found you on the beach in Aegina. You know, after Angelos and I. . She was crying because you were eating crickets and grinding your teeth, just like back then.”

“She told you about that, too?”

“How could you eat crickets, Maria?”

“Think of it as practice, for prison.”

“You really think they’ll put us in jail?” She wraps herself even tighter in her sheet, curling into the corner of an imaginary cell and looking at me despairingly. The room smells of mildew, just how I imagine a jail cell would smell. I picture Antigone and Mom sobbing during visiting hours. Anna and I in rags, gnawing on crusts of bread, plagued by guilt. Direct Action has been discovered and the media are distorting our cause in light of our crime. They describe us an anarchist fringe group whose members include fanatic nationalists. They blame us for the recent attacks on Albanians. “Young people with confused ideas and no vision for the future,” the newscasters declare.

“We have to split up,” Anna says. She’s pacing up and down in the room, biting her thumb.

“What?”

“We have to leave here right away, and never speak again.”

“You mean to one another?”

“Yes, to say goodbye forever. Abandon Direct Action. Forget it all. It’s the only way.”

We have to dig a hole in our heads, as Aunt Amalia would say. Put in the Albanian who didn’t know how to swim. And then we’ll bury one another, too. I’ll bury Anna in her marinière , holding her drawing of Patty Hearst. And she’ll bury me in my school uniform with the Mao collar and my Savings Day prize.