Free Why I Killed My Best Friend by Amanda Michalopoulou Page B

the cave. The big witch finds you and says, Do you want to be a witch like me? Yes, yes, la la la . . . And the big witch says: eat these crickets and then we’ll see. Mmmm, mmmm, yummy in my tummy, the little witch says. We’ll take lightning and make the crickets turn blue, la la la. We’ll sell them and make lots of money.”
    â€œThat’s stupid. Who would want to buy crickets?” Natasha asks.
    Daphne looks at her imperiously. “All the vampires and ghosts will buy crickets and then at night they’ll come to your bed and eat you, too! Mmmm!”
    Natasha shrieks. My eyes, meanwhile, have filled with tears.
    â€œWhat’s that on the kitchen table?” Kayo asks. He’s opened his suitcase back up and put his little plastic animals back where they belong. He even made onion soup to butter me up.
    â€œA drawing Daphne did.”
    â€œI guess things are getting serious.”
    â€œI brought it home so I could look at it more carefully.”
    â€œWhat do you think you’re going to learn from it?”
    â€œWhat goes on in their house.”
    â€œDon’t you think you’re overestimating yourself, Maria?”
    Not at all. If there’s anything I know how to interpret, it’s children’s drawings. I’ve read a lot on the subject, but more importantly,I remember. I remember the kind of need that drives you to draw caves and rain. Sure, I may have talked to her about caves and witches who eat crickets, but she was the one who thought up the lightning that slices across the page like tiny swastikas. And she added those reddish-brown splotches of mud—as if the landscape had come down with the chicken pox.
    Daphne draws the way her mother did, with sweeping gestures, practically tearing the page as she goes. She’s not afraid of the color gray. She made the witch enormous and the witchlet microscopically small, suggesting a certain balance of power. A strong female presence in the family—who else but Anna? And the cave, symbolizing protection. I imagine a house ruled by underground terror. Either there’s no father at all or he’s completely powerless, since there’s no sign of him in the drawing. No siblings, either. The mother witch and the little daughter witchlet. They climb onto their magic carpet and head off to help the poor. Another witch, flying by, reaches out a hand and shakes the carpet. The witch and the witchlet grab hold of the tassels just in the nick of time. Come here, my pretty. You thought you could escape me, but you can’t.
    â€œWhat’s wrong, child? Did a bakery burn down?”
    That’s how Mom scolds me for my long absences. It’s a common enough idiom, but the subtext to her irony is that I only come to see them when something’s gone wrong in my life. She’s a busy woman now, fairly well-known as a children’s writer, but she still plays the stereotypical Greek mother to perfection.
    â€œI just missed you guys, that’s all.”
    The house on Aegina, behind the fish market, was built in the ’70s. The yard is like a faint memory of Nigeria: a well instead of a goldfish pond, pistachio trees instead of banana trees. On theveranda—rain or shine—a wrought-iron table with a marble top, just like the one we had in Ikeja. I have no idea how they managed it, but as soon as I set foot in the house, I’m half expecting Gwendolyn to appear, and I’m surprised to see Dad sitting there in his armchair. He was always at work. Now he folds his newspaper and gives me a thorough once-over, from my face down to my shoes.
    â€œDid you wipe your feet on the way in?”
    â€œYes, old man.” I kiss him on the top of his head, the way he used to kiss me once I’d reached the age when you’re too big to be carried, but still too little for an adult to bend down as far as your cheek. It’s as if he shrank. Of course he’s sitting down, and