Why I Killed My Best Friend

by Amanda Michalopoulou

  Aunt Amalia puts it more simply: “Your friend is a spoiled brat,” she says as she puts curlers in her hair.

  Spoiled is right.

  “She can’t just stay out until all hours without ever telling me where she’s going or where she’s been. What am I supposed to say to her parents?” Aunt Amalia can’t comprehend that there are parents in the world like Antigone and Stamatis, who you can call by their first name, or smoke in front of, or go to demonstrations with.

  I roll over and pretend I’m asleep. Whereas actually I’m picking at the stuccoed wall, scratching into it with my nails. I, too, need to leave my mark somewhere.

  A gentle breeze picks up, stirring the bougainvillea outside the window. Its shadow falls on the sheet, shaping human figures that kiss and part, kiss and part. Anna undresses in the dark and crawls into bed next to me. She wraps herself around me and starts to cry. Her tears trickle down my back, tickling me. With her arms around my waist it’s as if the two of us are speeding along on a motionless motorcycle. As if we’re headed at breakneck speed toward some interior spot, deep inside ourselves. Barthes writes, Jealousy is an equation involving three permutable (indeterminate) terms: one is always jealous of two persons at once: I am jealous of the one I love and of the one who loves the one I love. The odiosamato (as the Italians call the “rival”) is also loved by me: he interests me, intrigues me, appeals to me.

  “Can you ever forgive me, Maria?”

  I pretend I’m asleep. Anna sinks her face into my hair, sighs on the nape of my neck. Her body has an acrid smell, like the silver spoons my mother is always polishing.

  “Please, Maria, talk to me . . .”

  She sticks her knees in the hollows of mine and we’re like two of those spoons in my mother’s drawer—some of that metallic smell rubs off on me, too. She doesn’t relax her grip all night, I keep waking and drifting off again in her asphyxiating embrace. Only in the morning, when she gets up to pee, do I realize that what I was smelling was the smell of sex, her sex. The mussel.

  Odiosamato.

  I throw off the sheets and hurriedly get dressed. I don’t want to be pitied. I throw a swimsuit, towel, my sketch pad and charcoals in a bag, and A Lover’s Discourse. I sneak out of the house on tiptoe, borrow Fotini’s bicycle and ride off, upright on the pedals all the way to Perdika. I’ve got a certain rock formation in mind. That’s where I’ll stay. I spread my towel in the cave, open the pad and start to sketch. I’m still there at sunset, drawing people with tiger tails, portraits of Medusa with snakes for hair, strange animals that don’t exist in nature. When it starts to get dark, I lie down with Barthes: The lover’s anxiety: it is the fear of a mourning which has already occurred, at the very origin of love, from the moment when I was first “ravished.” Someone would have to be able to tell me: “Don’t be anxious any more—you’ve already lost him/her.”

  Him, her. Him, her, himherhimherhim. My teeth are chattering.

  I’m not hungry, or thirsty, or tired. My gaze is trained on a little spotted insect slowly creeping up my towel. I’ve lived this scene before. I know what comes next. I reach out my hand, grab it, and put it in my mouth.

  A helpless insect. Cold, crunchy. African.

  Anna and I have decided on a major change: we’re going to cut our hair. September is hot this year, and besides, we can’t very well start high school with braids and ponytails. Aunt Amalia takes us to a fancy salon in Kolonaki. The hairdresser’s name is Gino. He looks like a rooster, with a coxcomb of dyed orange hair. A red-haired girl hands us a book with pictures of different hairstyles to flip through. There’s a bob we both like, with bangs and wisps framing the face.

  “No,” says Gino. “It’s not right for you girls. You’re young, do something daring for once!”

  He rests his scissors high up on my neck, and with one fell swoop my hair lands in a heap on the floor. I look like one of the convicts Foucault wrote about in the latest issue of Actuel—the ones who try to obliterate the deep division between innocence and guilt. Anna looks like one of Genet’s prisoners. Her face looks naked, almost debased; her enormous, questioning eyes are more prominent than ever.

  “What did he do to us?” she whispers, throwing me a sideways glance in the mirror.

  The red-haired girl finishes us off with an assortment of gels and sprays. We leave the salon looking like aliens, hair stiff with hairspray. Aunt Amalia takes us to her apartment, which Anna and I call “the antique store,” because it’s full of old furniture and taxidermied birds. She makes us spaghetti with meat sauce, but neither of us can eat a thing. We lock ourselves in the bathroom and cry.

  “Girls, for goodness’ sake, don’t make such a fuss!” Aunt Amalia shouts from the other side of the door. “Just wash it a few times and it’ll be longer.”

  We wash it, we pull on the ends, but our hair doesn’t get any longer.

  “How are we going to show our faces at school?” I ask.

  “What’s Angelos going to say?” she says.

  That’s not my problem. From the morning they found me at the far end of the beach at Perdika, shaking with cold, feverish and delirious, I swore I’d never give the two of them another thought. Angelos was dead to me. Anna is still alive, of course, of necessity. She’s my best friend. Odiosamato.

  And as always, she finds a way: she manages to do her hair in a way that looks good. A few wisps tucked behind her ears and she actually looks cute. I don’t. I push my hair back, it falls forward. I brush it forward, it goes wherever it wants. Then one Sunday when we’re hanging out in Monastiraki, by the flea market, my gaze falls on a pair of army pants in a shop window on Adrianou Street.

  “Aren’t they a little too punk?” Anna says, making a face.

  All of a sudden I flash back to Raoul and Michel, the anti-racist movement, the Sex Pistols, the squatters in Berlin.

  Why not?

  In the army pants I feel stronger. I put three pins on my leather jacket, all of Siouxsie and the Banshees. I walk around singing “Christine” under my breath, as if it were my own personal anthem: She tries not to shatter, kaleidoscope style, personality changes behind her red smile, now she’s in purple now she’s the turtle, disintegrating . . . What exactly is kaleidoscope style? Or purple disintegration? The weirdest boys in school come up to me during break and want to talk to me, all because I’m wearing my leather jacket over my uniform.

  Anna, in contrast, is going through an annoyingly pink phase. She says sex is allowed now, since it’ll help us mature. If I push her on it, she quotes Barthes: “In no love story I have ever read is a character ever tired,” she says proudly, as if she thought it up herself. And yet she herself seems tired, tranquil, predictable: she waits for Angelos after school, sits with her legs to one side of his motorbike seat, folded just so, as if we were back in the ’50s and she were Grace Kelly riding off with her prince. They have sex every weekend. As for me, I’m there in the bathroom, alone. I’m dating a guy named Pavlos, we’re still at the hand-on-the-chest stage, but I tell Anna all kinds of stories that I lift straight from the pages of Erotic Harmony. Pavlos has a motorbike, too. But he understands my fear of exhaust pipes and never offers me a ride. He just pushes his bike in the street as we walk side by side, and the whole school makes fun of us for it.

  Pavlos is an active member of the socialist party’s youth movement. Ever since the Rallis administration resigned, he’s been slapping PASOK stickers on parked cars. He wants to convert me.

  “There’s no way I’m turning PASOK,” I tell him.

  “But it’s totally obvious, don’t you see? Papandreou is the only solution.”

  I call Papandreou “Dr. Dolittle,” Pavlos calls him “a charismatic leader.” We usually part ways having fought. On October 15th, during the run-up to the elections, PASOK holds a rally in Syntagma Square and Pavlos climbs a utility pole. I see him on television, waving his plastic flag as if it were a banner for the revolution.

  “How’d he manage to muster such a cr
owd?” my father shouts, slapping his palm against the table.

  “Do you think he’ll get elected?” I ask.

  “Absolutely not, I’d see the world end first.” Dad remains unrepentantly right-wing.

  And yet the world does end. A hundred and seventy-two seats in parliament, 48.6% of the popular vote. How could I forget that moment? The day PASOK wins the elections, I lose my virginity.

  Now that’s what I call a “rendezvous with history.”

  We can see everything from the roof of our apartment building. We can hear the honking of horns, the rhythmic chanting—“PA-SOK, PA-SOK”—and the slogan, “With you, Andreas, we’ll make Greece new.” Dad is seething, Mom just shrugs.

  These are dark days, they’re agreed on that. My parents are a couple, and exhibit the fundamental weakness of all grown-up couples: they respond to things nearly identically. If Anna and Angelos stay together, which will pull the other toward his or her way of thinking? Will Anna move toward the right, drink coffee, and swap cheap romances with Martha and Fotini? Or will Angelos become an activist and follow her to France? Both scenarios seem equally unlikely.

  The downstairs buzzer rings twice.

  “Who could that be, at this hour?” Dad says.

  “It’s Anna! I’m going out.”

  “Two girls, out on their own in this chaos?” Mom’s shrill voice follows me out the door, fading as I run down the stairs.

  It’s Pavlos, and the double ring on the buzzer is our signal for emergency situations. He grabs me and twirls me in the air. “We won, baby!” he shouts. I’m not a baby, I’ve got on my leather jacket with the punk pins, but I like the way his eyes are shining. He wants to go down to Syntagma to be in the thick of the celebrating crowds. I climb onto his motorbike for the first time—today I’m not scared, the atmosphere is electric. Other drivers call out to us, make the victory sign, all because Pavlos has a flag in one hand. Everyone is shouting, “The pe-ople won’t forget—what the right has done,” and honking their horns to the rhythm. That’s something I can shout, too, it’s a leftist slogan. My heart is pounding; I finally feel as if I belong somewhere.

  The rhythmic chanting of “PA-SOK, PA-SOK” imprints itself on me, working its way inside as we drive down to Syntagma, like a refrain by Siouxsie and the Banshees, or the jingle from a Coca-Cola ad on TV. It’s as if the word “PASOK” has come to mean love, or peace, or justice, simply because there are so many of us, and we’re pounding together on the horns of our cars, and we all want for something to change. As if I’m not myself, no longer the same old Maria, I feel my mouth open and that same cry pouring out: “PA-SOK!” A shock indeed! Pavlos drives the motorbike up onto the sidewalk, turns around on the seat and takes hold of me in an entirely different way, pulls up my shirt and bites me low on my belly. His eyes shine in the dark.

  “Let’s get out of here,” he says.

  He spreads a sleeping bag on the roof of his building, behind the water heater. It’s warm here, the cars down below are still blasting their horns, and we’ve put it all on pause. We’ve switched gears from a major revolution to a minor one, though actually I couldn’t say anymore which is which. It hurts, a lot. I feel like my vagina isn’t there, doesn’t exist, or that Pavlos is excavating it as he goes, digging blindly and insistently with his gyrations. A narrow space, all membrane, fights back. I clench my teeth and tell myself that millions of women all over the world do this all the time. To make the torture end, I wrap my legs around his waist and pull him closer, willingly abolishing the slight distance between us. There’s no sound, no pop of a champagne cork. But I know: I’m not a virgin anymore.

  It’s nothing like my experiments in the bathroom, the circular motions, the absolute happiness. Erotic Harmony is perfectly clear about this: It can take a little while, even a long while, for a young woman to learn to enjoy lovemaking. It says nothing about the breaking of the hymen, the relief of that moment. The passage from humiliation to freedom.

  It says nothing, either, about how Aunt Amalia must feel.

  “Why do you girls never button your coats? You’ll catch cold!” Aunt Amalia greets us at the door. I smile. Ever since I stopped being a virgin, I feel like I’m the aunt and she’s the niece.

  “We have to find her a man,” Anna says.

  “Are you kidding? She’s fifty years old.”

  Anna insists that we need to sit her down, do her makeup, buy her a new suit with a slitted skirt, and take her for a walk in the Field of Ares.

  “She’s not a dog, Anna! She’s a person!”

  Anna pays no heed. She whirls into the living room like a tornado and pinches Aunt Amalia on the cheek.

  “Okay, get dressed!” she cries. “You’re coming with us.”

  Aunt Amalia calls her a handful and a spoiled brat behind her back, but to her face it’s as if Amalia is a schoolgirl and Anna her teacher.

  “Where could you girls possibly take me? I’d spoil your fun.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. We’re going to find you a husband!”

  Aunt Amalia laughs.

  “See? She likes the idea!” Anna says, winking at me. We make Aunt Amalia put on some lipstick, take her by the arm, one on each side, and pull her out into the street. Anna is in a fabulous mood. She points to this man or that and says, “Do you like that one? What about him? On a scale of one to ten? A six? Come on, Amalia, you’re too harsh. How about eight?”

  Aunt Amalia is wearing a woolen dress with little black doo-dads sewn onto it. All her clothes are made from dark fabrics. She toys with her corsage and gives a nervous laugh. It’s the first time I’ve ever seen her so happy. She looks the men up and down as if they were vegetables at the farmer’s market, just as Anna wants her to. Then again, isn’t that how she looked at them her whole life long? The king was a perfect ten, an enormous, ripe hothouse tomato, and beside him the poor, scrawny bunches of parsley could only hope for a five at best. For some inexplicable reason I’ve got tears in my eyes. I whisper to Anna to stop the game.

  “What’s wrong with you?” she says. “It’s never too late.”

  But it is. If you don’t discover your vagina at fifteen, you just keep putting it off. You grow old before your time, with your taxidermied birds and your creaky, worm-eaten chairs.

  •

  It’s November, we’re wearing turtlenecks and are opening a bottle of Veuve Clicquot on the grass. We cry “Santé, amour, fraternité!” and sip from Antigone’s best glasses, the ones hordes of famous Greek and French revolutionaries have drunk from. The Field of Ares has never known such luxury. Today I’m turning sixteen, and Anna organized a surprise picnic: chèvre sandwiches, champagne and a cake from the Metropolitan Bakery. I blow out the red candle and some crazy guy passing by laughs and claps his hands maniacally.

  “Great, now get lost,” Anna calls to him. “Beat it!”

  He doesn’t budge. Anna shouts, “I’m coming for you!” and gives him a threatening look, and the man runs off, emitting a series of inarticulate cries. Perhaps in his madness he understood something I haven’t yet? She’s my best friend, but I don’t trust her anymore. She spent her entire allowance on my birthday, and today she hugs me and shouts, “Happy birthday to my best friend!” But tomorrow she might give me the cold shoulder. That’s just how Anna is. Odiosamato.

  The burn from Angelos’s exhaust pipe has faded into a scar. But it’s still there.

  “Any perversion associated with the reproductive system will affect an individual’s psyche, social standing, intellectual development and general progress. Perversions of this sort can cost us dearly in our lives. For that reason, we have to be very careful about what kind of people we choose to spend time with . . .”

  Kyria Kontomina is at her desk, leaning on one elbow, reading the next chapter of our anthropology textbook out loud with somewhat more interest than usual. She must not have done any class prep before coming to school, and didn’t know what would turn up in today’s lesson.

  �
�Look how she’s sitting,” Anna says. “Like a lounge singer on a piano.”

  Poor Kyria Kontomina. She’s pudgy, with a bright red face, and puts her hair back in clips as if she were in elementary school. She always wears black, with a colored scarf around her neck to match that day’s clips. Her glasses hang from a chain around her neck and she’s always fidgeting with them during class: she peers at us over the top of her glasses, or through them, or lifts them up and peers at us from under them. It’s probably because there’s no smoking allowed in the classroom, and outside of class Kontomina smokes like a chimney. Just like us.

  Quickie for a fag? Anna writes on my desk, then winks at me. Ever since I had sex with Pavlos I haven’t had a moment’s peace. Cigarettes are fags, every loose sidewalk tile is a hump, and if I go out with Pavlos she’s concerned the next day about how bushed I look, and can we snatch a moment to talk. She’s always punning on his name, too: she calls him Kavlos instead of Pavlos, from “kavla,” which means having the hots for someone. In psychology class she never misses an opportunity to whisper to me about “Kavlov’s dogs.” Not even Angelos’s mother can escape her wit: Kyria Pavlina is Kyria Kavlina to her now.

  We tell Kyria Kontomina that we have a student council meeting. Anna is our class president and I’m treasurer. We not infrequently abuse the power of our positions to sneak off and smoke in the girls’ room.