The devil she knows

The remarkable thing about my decade-long friendship with my good pal Janet is that it has endured in spite of her apparently sincere and long-held belief that I am the Devil.

Janet was and is the best friend of a girl I dated in university. At the time, I was the owner of a luxuriant head of hair, which radiated outward from two points on the back of my head, rather than the usual one. This is known as a double crown, and according to Janet, who was horrified when she noticed it, it is also the Devil's Mark. (I didn't have the heart to show her my third nipple.)

Based on this, she leapt to the reasonable conclusion that I also had a two-pronged phallus, an attribute the Devil also purportedly possesses in order to commit both fornication and sodomy simultaneously. She once demanded in front of a long line of people waiting to get into a local bar that I disprove her accusation by taking out my genitalia for all to see. I didn't take the bait, though. I knew that if I only had one prong to show, she would simply accuse me of using my infernal powers to change my form.

Another time, my girlfriend called me and invited me to their house. When I came through the front door, Janet leapt out of the shadows. She was clad all in black and wearing a beret, and she was aiming a squirt gun at me. It was filled with holy water filched from the cathedral a block away. She squirted me in the face a few times.

"Agh! Stop that!" I said.

"Why? Is it burning, Devil?"

"No," I said. "It's annoying!"

Eventually I asked why we got along so well if she thought I was the Prince of Darkness. She just shrugged. "The Devil is a charming man."