I love irony: it’s a lot like the little Chinese girl from second grade who used to embarrass me by chasing me around the playground, puckering her lips, and telling me that I’m handsome and that I love her. Back then, girls had cooties and boys were always smarter, but a part of me enjoyed being chased around the playground, always trailed by her shouts and her charms. Her name was Bernadette and I think she latched on to me because we had the same jet-black hair and similar Cherokee backpacks: mine was black and hers was pink. Yet it wasn’t until third grade—the year Ms. Rockette read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 to the class—that I finally learned the truth of Bernadette’s perception, the beauty of irony, and the rather long memories of the opposite sex.

“Brandon, you had the biggest crush on me last year. You were stupid enough to kiss me.”

And therein lies the beauty of it all: I don’t recall ever kissing Bernadette and she was most certainly being sarcastic, but like the best kind of irony, she’d exposed an embarrassing truth I hadn’t wanted to confront. I’ll never know if she liked me in return, and hindsight doesn’t always guarantee clarity of vision, but the cynicism I’ve nursed all these years tells me that she probably thought I had cooties and that girls were indeed smarter than boys.