Why I Killed My Best Friend Read online

  “Fine, there’s no need to shout. Come sit up front so I can keep an eye on you.”

  I sit all by myself at a desk in the front row. The desk is green, the color of Papoutsanis soap, and covered in doodles and carved notes: lots of names and love forever, the names of the soccer teams Olympiakos and Panathinaikos, and then fuck you and fart on my balls. A high school class meets in the same room in the evening. Someone has written, I’m Apostolos. What’s your name? In beautiful round letters I spell out the only two words I’ve mastered in Greek: Maria Papamavrou.

  Kyria Aphrodite tells us what we’re going to learn in the fourth grade and why it will be a challenging year. We’re going to have to work our very hardest at arithmetic, grammar, penmanship, and geography. Then she gives us a spelling test by dictation: “The children eat their breakfast and go to school. They are diligent students. Mother prepares the afternoon meal. Father works very hard. At lunchtime they eat all together as a family and then relax. In the afternoon they go for a walk in the park.” It’s almost right, except that we don’t all eat together anymore. Mom and I eat on the balcony with the sawed-off railing. Now that no one is there to see, Dad probably eats on the covered veranda in Ikeja with his tie loosened, without washing his hands. And Gwendolyn, standing at the kitchen counter—“Oh dear, like a goat!” Mom sighs.

  Recess is the worst part of the day. The kids gather around me and ask if my father is a black priest, since that’s what my last name means. Someone notices that half of my pinky finger is missing and shouts: “Look, guys! A lion ate her finger!” Petros, the boy who was making animal faces, asks if we brought our hut with us from Africa. Angeliki, who I thought would be my friend, says that there’s no toilet paper in Africa so people poo in the jungle and wipe themselves with leaves from the trees.

  “That’s not true!” I say, stamping my foot on the schoolyard cement. “We have three bathrooms in Ikeja, and pink toilet paper, pink!”

  “Liar! There’s no such thing as pink toilet paper, or a house with three bathrooms!” Angeliki says.

  I pull her hair to shut her up and she starts to cry. “You’re a chicken, Kotaki!” I say, because chicken in Greek is kota. Then I stick out my tongue and run to the other end of the yard where the canteen is. I should really get in line, but I’m so angry I just push my way to the front. The canteen sells zodiac crackers, orangeade, koulouria, which are like bread only round with a hole in the middle, and . . . rocket pops! For only fifty lepta! Two drachmas of pocket money a day equals four rocket pops! I buy my ice cream and sink my teeth into something sugary that’s not at all cold. It only looks like an ice cream pop, it’s actually stale marzipan. I throw it in the trash and feel like crying, for the hundredth time since we came to Athens.

  As soon as we file back into the classroom, Kyria Aphrodite grabs me by the ear and drags me to the blackboard.

  “Why did you hit Angeliki during recess? Why did you tear her sash?”

  “I didn’t tear her sash. I just pulled her hair a little . . .”

  “You pulled out a whole clump of my hair and you twisted my ear and you ruined my uniform, too!”

  “Liar! Your uniform was already torn!”

  “Now listen to me, Maria. You have the greatest number of mistakes of anyone on your spelling test, and let’s not even mention your behavior. I don’t know what your school in Africa was like, but this is a civilized country. Go and stand in the corner until the bell rings, and if you ever do anything like that again, you’ll get what’s coming to you.”

  So now I’m standing in front of the blackboard, facing the world map. It’s the most wonderful part of the whole day. I can stare for hours at Nigeria, which is yellow, like my mother’s dress, or like the banana boats at the beach. In the middle is the flag with its three stripes, two green ones that stand for agriculture and a white one that stands for unity and peace. I don’t know what’s happening behind my back, and I don’t care, either. I’ll become the worst student in the entire school, so I can spend my days standing and staring at the map of Africa.

  “Aunt Amalia, what does ‘fart on my balls’ mean?”

  “Christ and the Virgin Mary!” Aunt Amalia puts her hand over her mouth as if she’s afraid something bad might come out. She’s frozen in place on the path with the statues, in front of the bust of Manto Mavrogenous, who fought in the Greek War of Independence even though she was a woman. Aunt Amalia brought me to the Field of Ares to ride my bike because Mom is busy. Busy means shutting herself up in her room and crying as she strokes her belly and sighs. At the very most she might throw a glance at the biftekia cooking on the stove, then go lie down on the couch.

  Aunt Amalia has her hair in a bun under a net and is wearing her camelhair overcoat with the collar up. I can’t stand overcoats. I wear my yellow raincoat and galoshes even when it isn’t raining. A bird doesn’t change its feathers when winter comes, as Gwendolyn says.

  “Where did you learn that, child?”

  “It says it on my desk. It’s been there since September.”

  “Those are very naughty words, Maria. It’s the kind of thing only good-for-nothings would say. Now listen, I want you to dig a hole in your head, put those words in there, and forget all about them. And tomorrow at school I want you to rub it out with an eraser, you hear?”

  Aunt Amalia looks like one of those actresses who plays the role of the old maid in Greek movies. But she’s a very modern old maid: she goes to the movies alone, takes off one shoe in the middle of the street to scratch her foot with the heel, whistles old songs like “Let Your Hair Down” or “In the Morning You’ll Wake Me with Kisses.” When she was young she got an idea in her head: she wanted to marry Constantine, who back then was prince and later became king. She didn’t want anyone else. When Constantine married Anna-Maria—who’s from Denmark, where they call her Anne-Marie—Aunt Amalia told my parents that she was giving up on marriage: she dug a hole in her head and buried all the bouquets and wedding dresses. Whenever anything bad happens, she digs a hole in her head and shoves it in there. Now she’s telling me to do exactly the same.

  We’re headed to the lake to feed the swans. Aunt Amalia always buys two koulouria, one for me and one for her, but she doesn’t eat hers, just crumbles it up and throws it to the swans. “Pssst, pssst,” she hisses as if they were cats, but these particular swans understand and waddle over. Then they swim back to their little wooden house, fold up their wings and go to sleep.

  “Aunt Amalia, if you dig a hole in your head, how many things will it fit?”

  “Oh, lots. Lots and lots . . .”

  I imagine a hole that’s not very big but not very small, either, maybe the size of the wooden house where the swans live. Only I have to fit all of Africa in there: the goldfish pond, the badminton court, Carnival that isn’t really Carnival, the puff puffs at Mrs. Fatoba’s house. Then I’ll squash it all down and put our apartment on top, and Kyria Aphrodite, and the ice cream that isn’t really ice cream, and Angeliki and Petros, and our spelling lessons in school.

  And I won’t remember anything anymore.

  Kyria Aphrodite is giving us our first penmanship lesson. We copy out the sentence “Andron epifanon pasa gi tafos” in our notebooks with curlicued letters. It’s ancient Greek and I only understand the last two words, gi, earth, and tafos, grave, since they’re the same in modern Greek. I would rather write “I hate Angeliki because she’s a stupid brat,” but I’d get in trouble. So I finish my exercise and write a reply to Apostolos, the boy who sits at my desk during the evening high school. He’s my only friend in Greece. Each Monday we erase our notes from the previous week and start fresh. I told him I was in the sixth grade, because Apostolos is in the ninth grade and wouldn’t want to be writing to a little kid.

  I read over last week’s correspondence one last time:

  Me: I don’t know. I hope we can at least go to Ikeja for Christmas!

  Apostolos: Why don’t you like Greece?

  Me: 1) It�
��s cold. 2) I’m not allowed to ride my bike in the house. 3) There’s school every day. 4) There are too many cars. 5) Our teacher is strict and doesn’t have a parrot.

  Apostolos: Did your teacher in Nigeria have a parrot?

  Me: Yes, our English teacher, Mrs. Fatoba, had a parrot that talked! And she made us puff puffs, which is round fried dough with sugar on top.

  Apostolos: Why don’t you ask your mother to make some?

  Me: Mom is sad, she doesn’t sew anymore, and barely cooks. Only frozen biftekia and lentils, for iron.

  Apostolos: Are you going to the Polytechnic on November 17?

  Me: I don’t know. Are you?

  Apostolos: Of course. Give the junta to the people!!!

  I’m not sure what I’m going to ask him next, but I go ahead and start to erase. Kyria Aphrodite grabs me by the wrist the way Mom does, only harder. The eraser falls from my hand.

  “What are you doing, Maria?”

  She bends down and reads over my shoulder.

  “That’s it, go stand at the board! And tell your mother to come see me tomorrow.”

  Mom and Kyria Aphrodite are standing in the yard, talking. Mom is wearing her denim skirt with the horizontal red stripes, which makes her look even bigger than she already is. Kyria Aphrodite is tiny, half a mouthful, but she gestures as if she’s the boss and Mom bows her head. The whole scene reminds me of one of Gwendolyn’s sayings: The elephant and the tiger don’t hunt in the same place. Mom is the elephant, she’s been getting fatter and fatter since we got to Athens.

  “What did she say?” I ask Mom when they’re done talking.

  Kyria Aphrodite said she’d done her research and discovered that I have “relations” with a seventeen-year-old plumber who goes to night school. She also said that at my age I shouldn’t be getting involved in politics. I feel like showing off, so I tell Mom all the things I learned from Apostolos.

  “But Mom, the dictators killed the students, don’t you get it? They ran them over with tanks!”

  “That’s none of your concern.”

  Angeliki comes over and tries to kiss up to my mother. When there are no adults around I call her Diaboliki. She calls me Teapot, ever since the first day of school with the toilet paper and the jungle. She says “teapot” over and over until it sounds like “potty.” Who’s she to speak, with that smushed turd on her eyebrow?

  “Are you Maria’s mom?”

  “Yes, dear. Who are you?”

  “I’m Maria’s friend, Angeliki.”

  “See, here’s a nice girl for you to be friends with. No more scribbling on desks. Will you promise me that?”

  And that’s how I lose my only friend, Apostolos. I had no idea he was seventeen years old, and studying to be plumber. Now that I know, I invent a dramatic story in my head. He’s Hausa, I’m Yoruba, and we can’t get married because we’re from different tribes. Apostolos climbs onto the gate of the Athens Polytechnic and shouts: “Give the junta to the people!” Then he pulls me up beside him and I shout: “No matter how wrong things go, salt never gets worms!” The police beat us up a little bit, but the worst that happens is that they break my tooth and cut off one of my fingers, and in the end we win. All the dictators from Greece and Nigeria come pouring out of the tanks and run off as fast as they can. Then we climb into one of the tanks, which turns into a house-submarine, and before we even realize what’s happening the current has carried us all the way across the Atlantic and, oops, here we are on the coast of Nigeria. We wring out our clothes, spread them on the sand to dry and eat a couple of bananas. The tank is a tank again and we head toward Ikeja. Dad and Gwendolyn are waiting for us on the covered veranda, under the bougainvillea. Apostolos will help Unto Punto with the plumbing in the house. Until we get married, that is. Because afterward he’s going to be a doctor and I’ll be a painter and we’ll have lots of kids, and Gwendolyn will take care of them. On second thought, we won’t have any kids, because one of them might die and then what would become of us? We would pull our hair and cry and eat nothing but lentils and biftekia.

  A tear rolls down my cheek, then another. I keep forgetting to bring my monogrammed handkerchiefs with me to school.

  When a ripe fruit sees an honest person, it falls, Gwendolyn always said. I decide to forget all the dramatic stories and say an honest person’s prayer. I stand in front of Mom’s little shrine of icons, cross my hands on my chest the way I’ve been taught, and say, “Lord have mercy, the Father and the Son, let us go back to Ikeja and I’ll never ask you for anything else ever again. Amen.”

  One Sunday morning when he’s probably still lying in bed, like me, without much of anything to do, God actually listens.

  “Wake up, Maria! I have a surprise for you!” Mom calls from the kitchen.

  I jump out of bed and run into the hall in my pajamas.

  “Your father can’t come to Athens for Christmas, so we’ll go and see him. How does that sound?”

  I jump up and down and twirl around in circles and dance a dance I made up myself, singing tourourou and lalala and heyhey. Out of habit, I glance up at the ceiling, too, to see if some piece of fruit might be about to fall on my head.

  I’m honest, and Ikeja is my ripe fruit.

  I squeeze my eyes shut and swear I’ll die. It’s another Sunday, we just got back from Nigeria, Mom is making her biftekia, cars are screeching to a stop outside the blue building. I try to hold my breath as if I were swimming underwater at the beach in Tarkwa, only for longer. If I can just die a little, if I can at least make myself turn blue, they’ll bring me back to Nigeria for good. But I can’t: my cheeks burst and I gasp in air through my mouth, my nose, even my ears.

  Christmas vacation is over. Tomorrow school starts again. I feel as if I only dreamed the Mercedes at the airport in Lagos; Dad standing and smiling in the doorway of our house in a new pair of beige shorts and socks pulled up to his knees; Gwendolyn’s hugs; hide-and-seek with Unto Punto behind the badminton court; my blue flippers; diving off the dock at Tarkwa; the New Year’s pie we cut on the beach. My piece had the lucky coin.

  “I don’t see what’s lucky about it,” I said to Gwendolyn. “They’re still making me go back to Greece.”

  “Don’t be ungrateful,” Gwendolyn had replied without lifting her eyes from the iron. “The big iroko tree sprouts from a small seed.”

  The coin is as small as a fingernail. It says 1977, and it’s supposed to bring me luck for this whole year. Mom hung it on the gold ID bracelet I wear on my wrist. I take it off and as I’m lying there snuggled in bed, I use it to pick my nose a little, then put it in my mouth and suck on it. I have no idea how it happens: it just slips gently down my throat, like a fresh, warm puff puff. Oh no, what have I done? I swallowed my luck!

  So it isn’t strange that the very next day Anna Horn enters my life.

  Anna slides into the other seat at my desk in the front row and winks at me. She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen in my life! An angel—blond, with eyes like the waters of Tarkwa Bay and a tortoiseshell clip holding her bangs back. She has a dimple in her chin and half of one of her eyebrows is totally white, as if it’s been dyed, which makes her look wise and just, exactly how a person should look who’s waiting for a ripe fruit to fall on her head. She’s wearing a marinière, as she tells me with a sort of foreign accent—which is to say, a shirt with blue and white stripes.

  “You in the front row, new girl,” Kyria Aphrodite says. I’m glad Anna is here so I’m not the new girl anymore.

  “Yes?” Anna answers imperiously.

  “Make sure to wear your uniform to school tomorrow.”

  “I don’t have a uniform. We haven’t had a chance to go shopping yet.”

  “Perhaps you’ve come from Africa, too, like Maria?”

  “No, I came from Paris.”

  “What am I going to do with all you immigrants?”

  “We’re not immigrants, Kyria, we’re dissidents. My father had a scholarship from the Institut
Français. My mother had me in Paris so I wouldn’t be a child of the dictatorship. Now that Greece is free again, we came home. Well, not my father. My mother and I. My father is so busy he doesn’t even have time to sleep. He has a huge office with over a thousand books, all in French. And he’s read them all twice!”

  The words come rushing out in a torrent. Kyria Aphrodite doesn’t dare interrupt. You could hear a pin drop in the classroom. Anna is a human bee buzzing around, bringing back stories like pollen: about how beautiful the gardens in Paris are, about eating breakfast on Sundays at Café de Flore, or how kind and funny Melina Merkouri is in real life, how you pronounce the French r as if it’s coming from the inside, from a well in your chest. During recess all the kids flock to her. But Anna chooses me.

  “First, because you’re my deskmate, and second, because you came from somewhere else, too. Were you guys dissidents in Africa?”

  “Kind of,” I murmur as we run hand in hand through the schoolyard. Dissidents resist, and resistance is the opposite of dictatorship. Dictators are bad guys, so dissidents must be good guys, and we’re with the good guys, for sure. I holler Apostolos’s slogan in a sing-song—“Give the junta to the peeeeople!”—and Anna hugs me enthusiastically. We play a skipping game where you sing this song with nonsense words, only instead of “one franc a violet” we chant our new slogan. When we get tired we sit down on the steps in front of our classroom and Anna tears her sandwich in half so we can share it. I’m not sure I really want it because it smells like rotten cheese but Anna insists. “Eat! Comrades share everything!” Why on earth did I ever want to be friends with Angeliki, the smushed turd, when there are girls like Anna in the world? All of a sudden Greece feels wonderful, African.

  The big iroko tree sprouts from a small seed.

  Anna isn’t speaking to me. She wants to divide our desk down the middle. I’m not supposed to let even my elbow creep over onto her half.