Teeth People

My dentist fired me and now I go to the one in the strip mall next to the Li’l Cricket where Shawn got arrested that time for eating a Slim Jim before he paid for it. He did pay for it. He was going to pay for it. The cashier didn’t care. She’d already called the cops and was leaning on the counter like she’d been waiting her whole life for this.

The new dentist is Dr. Kho and she has small, cold hands and a poster on the ceiling above the chair that says TEETH PEOPLE ARE HAPPY PEOPLE with a cartoon molar giving a thumbs up, which is disturbing because molars don’t have thumbs and also I don’t think that’s true.

The reason Dr. Renner fired me is that I bit him. Not on purpose. He was doing the thing where they stick the mirror in the back of your mouth and push your tongue down with it and my body just did what it did. He bled on my bib. I apologized seven times but by then his receptionist had already called to say they felt it was best if I sought care elsewhere. She used the word elsewhere like it was a place you get sent. When I was nine I got sent to my aunt’s house in Greer because my mom needed a break, which is what adults say when they mean something else but haven’t figured out the right word yet. My aunt had an above-ground pool that was always a little too green and a Rottweiler named Chauncey who would sit on your feet if he liked you. Chauncey sat on my feet every single day. I’ve been chasing that feeling ever since, someone choosing your feet specifically.

Dr. Kho doesn’t talk to me like I’m a problem, which is new. She talks to me like I’m a mouth, which is actually fine. She says things to her assistant like “buccal” and “distal” and “we’ve got some recession on fourteen” and I just lie there and let them discuss my gums in the third person like I’m not even here. Honestly it’s relaxing. I spend most of my life trying to be present and here’s this woman telling me I don’t even have to be a person, just a set of teeth that need attention, and something in my chest loosens up like a knot I didn’t know was there.

She finds three cavities. She doesn’t say it like it’s my fault. She says it like weather: “You’ve got three cavities, two on the upper left, one lower right.”

Shawn drives me to all three filling appointments because I chose the gas option and you can’t drive after the gas. He waits in the Li’l Cricket parking lot playing a game on his phone where you build a medieval village and occasionally get raided by barbarians. He’s been working on his grain stores for weeks. I told him once that I admired his commitment to something fake and he said “everything’s fake, Neen, your teeth aren’t even your real teeth anymore” which is the most philosophical thing he’s ever said.

On the second appointment Dr. Kho is filling the lower right and she tells me to raise my left hand if I feel pain. The gas is doing its thing, which is making the ceiling tiles pulse gently like they’re breathing, and the TEETH PEOPLE poster is rippling, and the cartoon molar’s thumbs-up looks suddenly sincere, like he really means it, like he’s rooting for me specifically. I feel the drill somewhere far away. When it stops I feel the filling go in, smooth and foreign, and something in me sinks a little. Like I wanted her to keep going. Past the cavity into the good part. I don’t know how to explain it except that there was more in there I wanted taken out and now it’s sealed over.

I don’t raise my hand.

Not because I’m brave. Because there’s something about being in the chair, mouth open, unable to speak, that feels honest. All the things I can’t say finally have a reason not to be said. Dr. Kho’s hands move inside my mouth with a certainty I’ve never felt about anything.

When it’s done she tilts me upright and hands me a cup of water and says “You did great,” and I know she says it to everyone but my eyes sting anyway because no one has said that to me in a while, not since before the thing with my mom, which I’m not going to get into because it’s a Tuesday and I have a policy about crying on Tuesdays which is: don’t.

I spit pink water into the little suction sink. Dr. Kho peels off her gloves.

“See you next week for the last one,” she says.

In the parking lot Shawn’s village has been raided. He’s hunched over his phone, thumbing through the wreckage. “They got my granary,” he says, not looking up. “I had so much wheat.”

I sit in the passenger seat and press my tongue against the new filling.

“How’s your mouth?” he asks.

“Fixed,” I say, though that’s not exactly it.

“Cool,” Shawn says, and starts the car, and we pull out of the strip mall past the Li’l Cricket cashier who’s outside smoking and watches us go with the same flat expression she had when she called the cops on Shawn.

But I’m pressing my tongue against the filling again, and I’m thinking about Chauncey sitting on my feet in Greer, and Dr. Kho saying you did great, and the cartoon molar rooting for me.

Shawn merges onto the highway. His wheat is gone. My teeth are mostly fixed.

“You hungry?” he says.

“Starving.”

“Waffle House?”

“Obviously.”

He signals left. I lean my head against the window. The glass is warm.