So the alphabet is difficult to learn.

There's so many letters and they all curve different ways and their sticks go in different directions and it's hard to remember what they sound like, let alone what they look like. And no matter how many times your mother pulls out those bright green flashcards with the S that looks like a worm and the O that looks like an eye, the lines and curves still scramble themselves up in your brain until you are drawing letters that don't exist in any alphabet. And Sally Gardener, who sits on the little blue chair beside you, can draw perfect Ms and Ns whose lines run exactly parallel to each other and she tries to help you out by grabbing your pencil as you write and reminding you yet again how to do it. But it only makes you mad to have your pencil stolen from your hand, so you push Sally Gardener off of her little blue chair and get put in the naughty corner for the rest of the afternoon.

And while you are in the naughty corner, you try to recite the alphabet to yourself so that you can go home and impress your mother. You've heard her crying to your father about how she is worried that you might have a learning disability. She thinks you fell on your head once too many when you were younger. So you spit out your ABCs with all the determination you can summon in the naughty corner. Things are going pretty well until you forget what comes after G and then you start to cry because all the letters sound the same, pretty much.

Your teacher comes and tells you that it was very wrong to push Sally Gardener but that she will let you out if you go over and apologize to her. So you stumble over to the girl in the frilly pink and white dress with the tear marks on her face and are stung by the injustice of apologizing to someone who has been pushing you around for the entire school year.

By the time the spelling bee rolls around, you are barely holding in the tears. And when the teacher looks at you over her glasses with a small smile on her face and asks you to spell FROG, you are too upset to even try to unscramble the squiggles dancing around in your head so you scream once, really loudly, and run away to the cubby room.

When you are there you curl up in the corner and place your chin on your knees, wrapping your arms around yourself so that you can keep all of your anger inside. When the teacher comes you want to explain to her that maybe the alphabet is difficult because kindergarten shakes you up so much that it is only natural, really, that the letters get knocked around a little too.

But she only grabs you by the wrist, hauls you to your feet, exclaims that you will be the death of her and drags you back into the classroom.

A week later you close yourself up in your room where it is nice and quiet and you recite the alphabet perfectly to yourself. It is not so hard to unscramble the letters when you are by yourself with nobody pressuring you to get them right. You go back to class and recite how to spell the word FROG perfectly.

It was last week's spelling word, but it doesn't matter.