Show and tell was the pinnacle of any preschooler’s day. It happened to be the only time when a kid could bring something from home and show it to the other kids during class time. I was keen to impress my classmates, but luck had it that the most exciting object I stumbled across in my house happened to be a whistle, a party favor from one of my classmates, no less.
The giver-of-the-whistle’s name was Katie. She was a flouncing, ticking time bomb made of sparkles and various hues of pink and red, ready to blow up into tears when any hostility was directed towards her.
That morning when show and tell rolled around, I grimly trudged up to the front of the classroom and donned my, ahem, Katie’s, whistle for the class to see. Katie wasted no time at all.
“Hey guys, Alex brought in a whistle that was a party present from me!” she taunted.  Our teacher bolted up to silence her and minimize the damage, but she had already finished her assault. The class was whispering and giggling and my face burned redder than one of Katie’s bracelets. The only thing restraining me from punching her in the face was the fact that snack time was coming up next.
Snack time was a time of the day in which the teacher went into the break room and left the two assistants to look after 15 children in possession of inordinate amounts of sugar. For that particular snack time my obsessively healthy “no junk food at school” mother had allowed me to bring salty, fatty, high-in-cholesterol potato chips. It was the equivalent of winning an edible lottery.
As snack time progressed, another classmate held up a Ziploc bag with a few mushy M&Ms melted to the bottom and hollered, “Up for grabs!” A group of my peers scurried up to him and he began to show them the almost-liquified candy.
My simple five year old mind concluded that ‘up for grabs’ was something called out when a person wanted to show something off. I was absolutely desperate to redeem myself from that morning’s mini-catastrophe and quickly dangled my bag of chips above my head, excitedly repeating the same three words.
Katie was the first to show up, and while I was blinded by her atrociously neon pink shirt, she quickly snatched the bag of chips from my grasp. The brief conversation that ensued went something like this:
“Hey!”
“What? You said up for grabs. Up for grabs means that anyone can take it.”
“No it doesn’t. Just. Just. Give it back!,” I angrily stuttered.
At that fateful turning point in our little tiff she carefully extracted a precious heaping handful of chips from the bag and licked them. I began bawling. Whilst I cried and complained to the assistants, they did nothing but usher me out to recess.
By the time recess was over, my shame had transformed into pure, unfiltered rage, bottled up inside of me and ready to be unleashed on Katie. I sat there at my desk for the better half of the afternoon brooding over my feelings while the rest of the class decorated Pillsbury sugar cookies. Katie, quite naturally, suffocated her pastry in whatever pink decorations were within her arm’s reach.
By the time the dessert was ready to eat I was an unstable flaming ball of rage. As soon as the tray was set down, I lunged for Katie’s cookie. It wasn’t hard to spot. I carefully lifted it up, absolutely beaming that I was moments away from exacting my revenge. Then, with the whole class staring in disbelief, I held up her cookie and took a massive, crumbly pink bite out of it.
The teachers dragged me and my smug little face out of the classroom. Inside, Katie was letting loose two waterfalls from her eyes and showed no sign of letting up. All the other kids gaped in awe at the chaos that had unfolded so suddenly around them; the shock was written all over their chubby panicked faces.
There were no terribly harsh punishments. After all, it was preschool. I probably had to scribble down some forced apology letter and hastily decorate a new cookie to appease Katie’s insatiable appetite for revenge.
Everything quickly settled back to the mundane everyday boringness of five year old life and the incident was eventually forgotten: one of the perks of being so young. Afterwards, though, any platter of consumables was heavily guarded by looming teachers and no one ever dared to bring a ‘party present’ to show and tell again.