Read Online Why I Killed My Best Friend by Amanda Michalopoulou - Free Book Online Page A

none of the other kids could say he smelled bad. Kayo smells wonderful, in fact, even when he’s in a funk. I’m the one who always seems to need a shower.
    â€œWhere’d you see her?” he asks, tossing the sheet aside. He sleeps naked, but the sight has long since ceased to affect me. These days I just give him a cool once-over, as if he were soft porn on TV. Or an underwear ad.
    â€œI haven’t seen her. Yet.” The thought of us meeting in person makes me shudder—the thought that she might come in to ask how Daphne is doing in class, or how I ended up there, an art teacher at a private school. She’s presumably living a more noteworthy life than mine, doing more important things.
    â€œWill you just tell me what happened?”
    I tell him about Daphne.
    â€œA miniature Anna? My lord, what a nightmare!” Kayo is one of the few men Anna never managed to charm. After all, he was always even more beautiful, more daring than she. Kayo stretches and yawns beneath the icon of the Virgin, a faded woman with a halo looking down on him from above, smiling a restrained smile. The way the icon artist painted her, she always seems to know more than we do.
    A short while later, Irini and Kosmas show up with a Tupperware of warm potato salad. They hug us tightly, just like every night, asif we haven’t seen one another in ages. It’s nice: their young bodies give us a forgotten energy, a brief dose of electroshock that I otherwise only experience at protests. It must be how Kayo feels on those rare occasions when he approaches young men in bars.
    Irini is nineteen, Kosmas twenty; they’re both students in the Department of Mass Media. They’re tall and skinny and have a healthy glow on their cheeks, though they’re sworn vegetarians. Irini has a small mouth with full lips and teeth even whiter than Kayo’s. Kosmas is like a happy alien. Now that he’s cut his hair short, you can’t help but admire his beautiful ears. The two of them aren’t sleeping together yet, or with anyone else for that matter, and so they shriek and chase one another around the table. They dish out the potato salad, open a bottle of red wine, and wait for us to take a bite before they dig in.
    â€œThat’s what I call respect for the aged,” Kayo says. He’ll be turning forty this year. Like all narcissists, he’s got issues with his age.
    Irini gives him a mournful look. She’s probably a little bit in love with him; I certainly was at her age. When you’re nineteen you fall for people like Kayo. All it tends to get you are some wrinkles around your eyes and a deep well of hopelessness in your gaze.
    â€œDo you want to say grace today, old man?” she asks.
    â€œI’m still sleeping,” Kayo growls.
    â€œOkay, then I will,” Irini says. She clears her throat. Her eyelashes quiver in the light of the candles we always set out on the kitchen table. “We’re not afraid of ruins. We’re the ones who will inherit the earth. So they can go ahead and destroy their world before they walk off the stage set of history. We carry a new world in our hearts.” Some of the words she uses hover midway between sentiment and sentimentality. The word “heart,” for instance. Irini knows how to pronounce it properly, to give it meaning. At herage, if Anna and I ever said “heart” we surely would have burst out laughing.
    She’s less emotional in the texts she writes for Exit , though they come from the heart, too. In an article about the social ecology of Murray Bookchin, Irini dreamed of a society comprised of citizen groups that would take the place of multinational corporations in an attempt to restore social desire in a world that revolves self-complacently around egos and profit margins. People want to reap without first cultivating the earth. They want rain without lightning, the ocean without the murmuring of its waves