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just kind of dispersed and went back towhat they had been doing. The excitement was over; the man in the dirt was gone.
    I went to the bathroom, put my head over the toilet, and pushed every last toxic butterfly out of my stomach.

Jesus will propose to your sister, and not you. Dick.
    My sister got to marry Jesus and I didn’t.
    Just like all the other boys in Smurf Village, he liked her and not me. And I have to say, given his alleged noble qualities, I was a little surprised that he turned out to be just another guy who ignored the smart, awkward girl and went straight for the beautiful one. (Also, I would end up having a very brief period in my early twenties, right after my freckles faded, and just before I gained a lot of weight, in which I was considered quite attractive. So suck on that, Jesus.)
    Rhiannon’s proposal came about rather quickly, as far as rushed romances go. I’m not sure if you could call it an arranged marriage, but my mum certainly facilitated the proceedings. Basically, one day she decided that we were Mormons. I’m not sure exactly how it happened, but I like to think Mum looked at the eager, sensibly dressed young men holding their Bibles who had just knocked on our door, shrugged her shoulders and said, ‘Yeah. Alright.’
    A few months later Rhiannon was put in a white dress, shoved down the aisle and dunked under water, thus cementing her love connection with the big man himself.
    As usual, I watched from the sidelines, not surprised that yet another man had chosen her over me. I was probably about seven, which would have put her at about ten, and even then I knew there was a huge disparity in our looks. She had gorgeous olive skin and those wide-set alien eyes that were becoming popular in the early ’90s thanks to the likes of Kate Moss. I inherited my dad’s Irish skin, was covered in dark freckles and my eyes were small, grey and unremarkable. I wasn’t unfortunate-looking by any means – in fact, I was quite pretty – but nobody was stopping me in the street asking me to do Kmart commercials.
    Rhiannon was constantly stopped in the street and asked to do Kmart commercials.
    But despite the fact Rhiannon’s looks were something everybody around us constantly felt the need to point out (‘She’s just so beautiful! She’s going places! She’s going to be famous! She and Rosie look nothing alike!’), I don’t think I realised just how significant the difference was between us until the contest. The child-modelling contest I entered, which Rhiannon proceeded to win.
    That was the exact moment I realised I was the Doug Pitt to my sister’s Brad.
    Nothing can quite prepare you for the trauma that comes with entering a modelling contest, only to have your sister win it. That was the day I figured out that no amount of smarts would ever matter as much as a pretty face. And considering I had been born with the smarts and the average face, I was pissed.
    It happened at the ‘Some Kids Are Beautiful and Some Kids Are Not’ modelling competition at Macquarie Shopping Centre. (Okay, so I can’t actually remember what it was called but that title pretty much captures the essence of it.)
    I desperately wanted to enter. There was a temporary studio set up in the middle of the mall, and you got to bring two outfits and pretend to be famous for half an hour while a teenage ‘casting agent’ pretended to know how to use a camera. Then they forced your mum to pay exorbitant amounts of money for photos with a faux-cloud background.
    Since I had always assumed I would win an Oscar by the time I was ten (obviously for playing the lead role in one of my many works-in-progress, or Atreyu’s girlfriend in the sequel to The NeverEnding Story), the kind of star treatment offered by this totally legitimate modelling operation seemed right up my alley.
    Naturally, I would be discovered at ‘the studio’ (literally