When You’re in Kindergarten, a Crush Can Be a Kick in the Teeth

He glides into the kindergarten classroom the way famous actors enter a crowded room--eyes sparking, arms waving, his perfect teeth flashing a perfect smile.

“Hi guys,” he says in his perfect voice.

The little girls in the class will not acknowledge his existence, except to try to corner him and tackle him and make him their own.

“Ouch,” he says when one of them steps on his toe.

“I love you,” says the little red-haired girl.

Well, she doesn’t really say, “I love you.” What she really says is, “You look stupid,” which is code for “I love you”--at least from kindergarten through 12th grade.

“Yeah, you look stupid,” says her friend, the other little red-haired girl.

The kindergarten heartthrob just smiles. He’s a swell kid, as pleasant and bright as a little boy can be. The girls don’t care. They like him anyway.

His biggest mistake, apparently, is that unlike the other boys in class, he will occasionally speak to the girls.

“Get out of my way,” he says to them. Or sometimes, “Hey, I was here first.”

They swoon when he says these things. He might as well be reading them sonnets under an elm tree.

At 6, he is a marked man. The little girls talk about his dimples during craft time. They whisper wedding plans at recess. On weekends, they look at houses.

“Dad,” the little red-haired girl says to me one night before bed. “Did you know Mommy in kindergarten?”

“No.”

“First grade?”

“No.”

“When?”

“We met in prison.”

“Really?”

“She was the prisoner and I was the guard. It was pure magic.”

“Really?”

“Now she’s the guard and I’m the prisoner,” I say. “Love’s like that.”

One morning, I watch as the little red-haired girl and her friend, the other little red-haired girl, try desperately to grab the little boy’s attention. They are standing at the classroom door, shamelessly wiggling their loose front teeth with their tongues.

The first little red-haired girl pushes her tooth up and around, till it points up at her nose. This is known as a backward one-and-a-half.

She holds the tooth like this for maybe five seconds, so no one can miss it. It is a killer move, perfectly executed. The other kids gasp in amazement. The parents cringe. One nearly faints. That’s how good this move is.

What does the kindergarten heartthrob do? He does the worst possible thing.

He yawns.

Fortunately, the little red-haired girl doesn’t take the yawn personally. It just breaks her heart, that’s all. No big deal. In 10 or 20 years, her heart will have mended. In 30 years, she will have forgotten the entire episode.

In the meantime, the little red-haired girl looks at me. She doesn’t say anything. She doesn’t need to say anything. Her eyes say it all. Her eyes say, “Pound him, Daddy. Please pound him.”

But I don’t pound him. In kindergarten, there are rules against pounding. “NO POUNDING,” it says in big letters, right above the door. “Don’t even think of pounding,” it says right underneath.

Besides, I know something the little red-haired girl doesn’t. I know that someday it’ll be the girls who do the yawning. I know that one day it’ll be payback time. Love’s like that.

There is a nice line in the movie “One Fine Day.” George Clooney, probably a former kindergarten heartthrob himself, has just been verbally destroyed by Michelle Pfeiffer.

He turns to his young daughter and says, “Promise me this one thing. As you grow up to be this incredibly intelligent and beautiful young woman, and you’re like this distant promise to the worthy and the brave, promise me you will not beat to a pulp every poor guy who comes along, just because you can.”

A few hours after the tooth incident, I find the little girl in the corner of her room. Something is bothering her. I can tell because she is sitting in the corner of her room, cutting the eyelashes off a doll. A boy doll.

“Honey, why are you cutting the eyelashes off your doll?”

“Dad, when I grow up, I want to be rich,” she says. “Because when you’re rich, people love you no matter what.”

Good answer. It doesn’t have anything to do with what I asked her, which is the secret to answering difficult questions. Someday, when she’s done maiming dolls, she’ll run a company.

“I love Mommy,” she says. “But I don’t like boys.”

“Not even me?”

She snips the last eyelash off the doll.

“Dad, you look stupid,” she says.

“Thanks honey,” I say. “I love you too.”