I was a teenage angel until a large girl clipped my wings
Romans 12:21 Do not be overcome by evil… but overcome the evil with Goodness…
I bet the boy Jesus was a pain in the arse. Goodness is a sickening quality for people who've tried it and failed. And who hasn't? I, too, was a kind of holy monster when I was a boy. I blared goodness in a way that made people scuttle for cover, ashamed of themselves. I was, people hissed, a little angel.
At seven I was run over while trying to save a duckling. Lying in hospital in splints, a nurse was feeding me soup and I was thanking her after every spoonful. Swallow, thank you, swallow, thank you.
Eventually she pressed the spoon onto my tongue, holding me silent, and said, "Stop it. This isn't 50 spoons of soup. It's one bowl of soup. And I'm a nurse, paid to feed people. So thank me once, when we're done, jelly and all. OK?" I nodded. When she took the spoon out I thanked her and she cracked me on the head with it, leaving a cube of carrot tangled in my hair that became hard as a dice after a week.
But asking The Large Girl to the school formal was the high tide of my goodness. It ebbed from there. I was 15. I had a vision of The Large Girl sitting at home in front of the mirror on the night of our formal straightening her hair, applying makeup, doing whatever girls do when they're going some place wonderful – though she was not. The lipstick would never be seen by anyone, let alone smudged by a paramour's lips.
I worried that the hateful world would make The Large Girl a hater, one of those 95kg loners running on bile and buckets of The Colonel's chicken. So I decided to save her by inviting her to the formal and allowing her to glimpse light and love and become empowered rather than embittered.
The Angelic Boy, this seismograph of pity and compassion, had detected her as the epicenter of undesirability, the girl most in need of sympathy.
The day came and I got ready to lay myself at her Doric ankles and mime adoration. I spent $20 on roses, money I'd set aside for the Palestinian Paralympic Team, from memory. I figured The Large Girl's need was more immediate than the Palestinians, it being a non-Olympic year.
I rang her doorbell and her mum opened the door and beamed at the roses, not realising I was the town's legendary Angelic Boy who could ruin anyone's day with my leviathan virtue. She invited me inside and called to her large daughter that there was someone here to see her. The Large Girl came down the stairs and seeing The Angelic Boy standing there with a bunch of roses knew she was f---ed.
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Formal-wise, she was a goner. Whatever outrageous fantasies of a babelicious formal date she'd had as she squinted into the bathroom mirror conjuring a svelte self were now blown to smithereens. The Angelic Boy, this seismograph of pity and compassion, had detected her as the epicenter of undesirability, the girl most in need of sympathy. No legitimate date would be arriving. Providence had sent an angel instead.
The Cinderella inside her died right then and she collapsed onto the flokati rug in the front hall and her mother ran to her and I lay the bouquet of roses on a chair and told the mother stand back because I'd just duxed my St John first aid class.
The Large Girl woke smiling, probably from a dream of boy bands with boy boners, to find an angel kneeling over her with his ear pressed to her sternum. She shrieked and levered herself to her feet and snatched the bouquet of roses from the chair and began to thrash me over the head with it, petals exploding and prickles gouging my flesh, shouting at me, "You freak. You little freak." I backed out the door parrying the blows.
On the footpath I blinked, panted, bled and wondered. Her collapse could be explained. A weight issue. A romantic palpitation. I'd recently devoured the full Bronte canon and knew women were felled by purple fogs of passion when roses were offered. But it was many years before I understood why The Large Girl thrashed me and called me freak.
She broke me as an angel that day. I realised goodness wasn't the life for me, and though a large girl had crowned me with thorns, I wasn't the type of Second Coming people would buy into. I've behaved like a swine ever since.