Are you God?

Christy C. said God talked to her.

She told me this after we'd dipped Barbie's plastic hair under the running faucet and before we got around to the blow drying.

Christy was, according to my best friend at the time, a snob, a stuck up bitch and ugly. Then again, my best friend at the time regarded most girls who weren't her -- and in many cases, those who tried too much to be like her -- stuck up bitches.

I have a feeling my parents sent me to Christy's house so I'd be in the company of someone other than my best friend at the time.

Christy, who wasn't religious and never went to church, told me about God after I complained that I hated my parents for being so strict and grouchy and for always yelling at me.

Christy said she felt the same way about her parents. Only at night, when she was crying, God would talk to her. He would tell her to stop crying, that her parents weren't evil like she thought, but just strict because they loved her.

"That's not God," I told her. "I get that voice too. It's just a voice you make up in your head."

But Christy insisted it was God and we got into an argument about it (undoubtedly one of the many insignificant arguments about God, not to be confused with the great crusades and intifadas fought in His name) and I stomped home in a huff thinking Christy was a stuck-up snob, and stupid too.

It wasn't until years later, years and years later, that I became enlightened enough to wonder if that voice in her head was God, if that's all God really is, something you make up in your head.