As winter semester turned into spring, Jesus became my only friend. The school-wide silent treatment was making it challenging to tell anyone how much Jesus loved them, but I figured that the big leather beacon I carried from class to class would be a signal, just in case someone wanted to talk. I wasn’t winning any friends. The closest I came to socialization was from the gaggle of cheerleaders who passed me in the hall, whispering, laughing and pointing in my direction several times a day. The Dragon Girl resumed life as usual, keeping to herself. Once I passed her at her locker. I nodded. Her eyes returned the acknowledgement. Even my pseudo-best friend hadn’t given me that much attention.
A week before school ended a misunderstanding arose between me and the Mean Girls’ sorority. I was taking a shortcut to class around the back of the school when suddenly my path was blocked by three members of their organization.
“Think ya can steal my man?” the biggest one said, pushing me backward.
“What?” I asked.
“We saw you flirtin’ with Donnie,” said another.
“I wasn’t flirting,” I insisted.
“Right, bitch,” a voice came from behind me. I swung around to discover I was encircled by the whole alliance. I tried to back up, but there was nowhere to go.
“I wasn’t flirting. I just wanted to tell him about Jesus,” I said.
The sorority burst into laughter. “Bullshit,” one of the girls spewed, her spit spraying onto my face.
“We’re gonna cut ya as a warning,” one of them said, pulling out a switchblade and clicking it open.
“If we catch ya talking to him again, it’ll be a whole lot worse,” said Big Bertha, grabbing hold of me. My schoolbooks tumbled to the ground.
Just then, the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo pushed through the circle. With the grace and speed of a hummingbird she retrieved me from claws of big Bertha.
“Leave her alone,” she said.
“This ain’t none of your business,” said one of the Mean Girls.
“What you defendin’ this bitch for?” said the girl with the knife, advancing closer.
The Dragon Girl let go of me and stepped between me and the knife, “I said leave her alone.”
“This got nothin’ to do with you,” said the girl with the knife, advancing toward us, twirling her knife like a drum majorette’s baton, “Unless you want a little of this.”
“Get your books,” my new ally said calmly.
Knees knocking, I bent down to retrieve my belongings. I saw the girl with the knife as she hit the pavement, her head snapped against the concrete. She didn’t get up. The Dragon girl kicked the switchblade over to me with her boot, “Pick it up,” she said. The metal handle was still hot from the Mean Girl’s grip only seconds before. It felt good in my hands. A sudden rush of confidence swept through me.
“Let’s go,” she instructed.
The circle parted. We stepped through the opening into safety. No one followed.
“Thanks,” I said, handing her the open knife. Clicking it shut without so much as a glance, she slid it into the pocket of her tattered jeans. “Forget it,” she said.
Opening the back door, she stepped into the corridor and was instantly swallowed up by the throngs of students. I moved deeper into the crowd, hoping to protect myself from the Mean Girls who might be following. Rising up on my toes, I scanned the hall ahead of me; I spotted the Dragon Girl’s purple Mohawk just as she rounded the corner.
This is where I’m supposed to tell you The Dragon Girl and I became friends. But that would be a lie. Her code of honor demanded she repay my kindness in the gym earlier that year. In so doing, I had made myself a target of ridicule dished out by self-absorbed cheerleaders and their compadres who had created countless rumors about me, all having to do with boys and sex, laughable really, as I was so homely no one would have had sex with me even if I had paid them.
The Dragon Girl knew I had taken a hit for what I’d done. I didn’t mind. We were a part of the same distant sorority of outcasts. Her defense of me in the schoolyard made headline news in the school cafeteria. No one ever messed with me again, at least not publicly.
That day in the gym, Jesus knew what The Dragon Girl needed. Months later, behind the school, he knew what I needed. And though she may have never known, Jesus sent The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo to help me as surely as he sent me to defend her against the sorority of Cheerleaders. The scales had been evened.
My next attempt at trying to save someone else didn’t go so well. In fact, it went so wrong that my tiny moon of a self was pulled out of orbit through a big black hole into an anti-verse. Caught in an asteroid field, it would be decades before my moon was able to right itself again.
It all began with a birthday card. The best intentions aren’t always the right intentions (lessons too numerous to list). Daniel was a tragic soul, like me, from an alcoholic family, like me. But I didn’t know that the day I dropped by his house to deliver a birthday card. All I knew about him was he was a tough guy with rounded edges. His warmth and laughter greeted me from the window of our high school shop class on my way to the library every day.
Taking him a birthday card seemed like a way of saying thanks for brightening my abyss of a life and not noticing that my nose covered my entire face. Somewhere inside me I thought that maybe he was a member of the outcast society, too, and I wanted him to know that Jesus loved him, something I never got to tell The Dragon Girl.
As I mounted the front porch of his house, I could hear screaming through the door. If I’d had a brain cell working, I would have gotten in my little persimmon Toyota Corona and driven away. Unfortunately my brain was on vacation.
My superhero complex kicked in, deluding me into believing I could stop whatever insanity was happening. The door opened, and I stepped into a vortex of self-destruction that would alter my reality and the lives of every star in my tiny galaxy, whether born or unborn.
I’ve frequently been asked the all-important superpower’s question: If I could have any superpower, what would I pick? Whenever this question is posed, I don’t have to think about my answer. There’s no sorting through my mental Rolodex of superhero abilities, no lusting after invisibility (I was born with that one), or after Profession X’s telepathic gift. No, I’d go straight for the thing Superman did when Lois Lane’s car fell into the crevice and she died. He reversed the earth’s orbit and rewound time so he could save her. If I had that power, I would have gone back and saved myself right then and there on those steps outside that small red-brick house.
At the top of the foyer stairs stood his intoxicated father, dressed appropriately in his wife-beater t-shirt and a pair of faded blue work pants, beating his mother with the long metal extension rod from their canister vacuum cleaner. Obscenities ricocheted back and forth as a tigress of a woman defended herself with vengeance and ferocity equal to his. My friend rushed from the front door and up the steps. Wedging himself in between them, he fought desperately to extricate his mother, father and the Hoover. He got pushed and shoved in the mix but managed to untangle the trio. Clearly practiced in the art of domestic violence resolution, he ordered his father and mother to their respective caves.
Afterward, Daniel and I sat on the front steps, and I listened to him as he wept. Like me, he had never known any other life but addiction. His parents had been locked in battle like two rams fighting over a prize, and the prize was his love. Their destructive dance had been born out of an affair that happened right after he was born. The other woman had pulled his father into alcoholism, and she had died at its hands. Hardened from battle, his parents’ defenses were impenetrable fortresses behind which each of them hid, only emerging as an act of destruction toward the other. Their war had raged so long their barely sixteen-year-old son was shell shocked and battle weary.
Having been raised with a code of silence, Daniel was the first person outside of my direct family that I knew would keep my secret safe. As kindred spirits in dysfunction, we pushed off from shore in a tiny rowboat, hoping to find a new land out of harm’s way; two broken people, rowing for our lives. One of us would drown. The other would barely make it out alive.