Prom queen

Since it was an infant prom and Lyla is a big toddler now, she made a fashionably late appearance and then left. The little boys were impressed and started drooling as soon as they saw her. Or rather, continued drooling.

The toddler room is full of big kids, and to be honest, I'm a little intimidated. I don't have any idea how to act around a person who is three years old. There's this one precocious young woman, for instance, with hair like Shirley Temple and a name that you might give a Cabbage Patch doll; seriously, it's like Presley Cassandra Xavier or something.

I was pulling a pink scribble-painting out of Lyla's cubby when Presley Cassandra Xavier started singing her ABC's with perfect pitch. "Wow," I said, and turned to Lyla and started singing them and doing the hand signals. I made it all the way to P with signals, a personal record. I glanced over to Presley Cassandra Xavier, and she had this "Oh. My. God." look on her face, for she, like Lyla in her car seat that one day, thought that I had forgotten the alphabet.

"Look sweetheart, I'm an English teacher. High school."

I really wish I would've said that. Instead I held up Lyla's schizo-painting and said, "Do you know what color this is?"

"Pink," she said with pity in her eyes, as though I was retarded.

Then her dad came and we all walked out together. They climbed into their shiny new white Lexus SUV, and we squeezed into our 2002 gray Corolla with one working headlight.

It was awkward, and I felt a little bad. You look at them, and then you look at Lyla and me, and there's no comparison. It's not our fault, though. It's not like we set out to be that much better looking than them. That's just how it is.