Never Meet Your Heroes

It happened one morning during a gray and misty recess. After months of teasing, the preschool playground finally erupted into bloody violence. I watched with horror from the swings as the ruffians heightened their quotidian verbal abuse to a vicious assault. Tiny feet and fists flung at Jordan with brutal, wild abandon.

Jordan was an obvious, inevitable target. His name was vaguely effeminate, and anyone could tell that he was dangerously prissy. In all the preschool, there was not a single hand that would compare to Jordan’s fastidious manicure, delicate half-moons peeking coyly over the smooth horizon of his cuticles, serene white ridges capping his fingertips like distant mountain peaks. Even the teacher’s nails were cluttered with grit by the end of a day spent clawing through the sandbox for lost toys.

As for the rest of us, we were what you’d expect from a normal nursery school class – snotty, scabby, frayed, and tousled, dressed as haphazardly as our parents dare allow, gloriously unselfconscious in our filth. But Jordan was always meticulously, perfectly assembled, an oasis of calm and clean amidst the messiness of common toddlerhood.

Over the course of the year, while my classmates developed their aversion Jordan’s compulsive sense of hygiene into open animosity, I cultivated an obsession. I gazed adoringly at his blond hair slicked neatly into place, at the crease ironed so precisely into his miniature khakis, at the candy-colored polo shirts that lay flat on his back.

As the school year drew to a close, the class’s long-brewing resentment and suspicion were finally transmuted into action. They grabbed Jordan’s shirt and tugged at his hair, willing him to join the fray, to sink their proletarian muddiness. When the bell rang, they scattered, and Jordan hobbled back to class, his nose trickling blood, his pale blue shirt torn to shreds. The teacher gasped at his appearance, but he slipped into his seat, pulled out a file, and went about cleaning his fingernails.

After school, I ran up to Jordan in the parking lot and threw my arm around his neck. I was so moved by his display of pint-sized bravery that I pressed my lips to his cheek, hoping desperately for some of his glory to rub off on me.

Jordan only grasped his mother’s hand and pushed me aside.