Why I Killed My Best Friend. Amanda Michalopoulou

la la la. We’ll sell them and make lots of money.”

      “That’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.

      “What’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.

      “A drawing Daphne did.”

      “I guess things are getting serious.”

      “I brought it home so I could look at it more carefully.”

      “What do you think you’re going to learn from it?”

      “What goes on in their house.”

      “Don’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.

      “What’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.

      “I just missed you guys, that’s all.”