1 RUNAWAY TEETH
“I don’t get why I have to go with you to Max’s bucky beaver appointment.”
My little sister sulks from the back seat of the car. I’m up front with Mom, who just picked us up from school because I have an orthodontist appointment. Alexis always whines when she has to come along, even though it means she gets out of school early.
“Why don’t you shut up, carcass breath?” I bite back. Alexis is one year younger than me and she acts like a total baby when she doesn’t get her way.
“What did I tell the both of you about name-calling?” Mom snaps. We’re at a red light around the corner from the doctor’s office. And it’s exactly like Mom to ignore the fact that Alexis started the whole thing.
“You’re right, Mommy,” Alexis says, batting her eyes at Mom in the rearview mirror. “I’m sorry. I’ll never do it again.” Mom’s face softens, and it reminds me of how Alexis always gets off the hook, no matter how badly she treats me.
It wasn’t always this way with my sister. Not that long ago, we could be in the car together without fighting. We’d sing along to whatever song was on the radio and even make each other laugh. During longer rides we’d invent games to make the time go by and it was fun. We were never best friends, but we weren’t enemies, either.
I stare out the window and clench my fists. It’s bad enough that I have these appointments to begin with. About once a month I have to see Dr. Watson to get my braces tightened, which is about as much fun as it sounds. This means that my teeth and gums are gonna feel like they’re on fire for almost one whole week. Then, just when the pain starts easing up, I’ll have to go and do it all over again. And Mom usually makes Alexis come with us, which used to not be so bad. If the wait to see the doctor was long, we’d joke around or do our homework together while Mom looked at her phone. But lately, Alexis has been acting like coming to my doctor’s appointments is the Worst Thing Ever.
I roll down the window just a bit, to get some air. It’s the last day of January, and the icy wind seeps into the car as Alexis kicks the back of my seat.
“What’s your problem?” I bark.
“Your train wreck of a face, that’s what. It’s cold. Shut the window.”
“Enough!” Mom snaps again. “If I have to pull over, you’ll both be sorry.”
Even though a lot of kids at school wear braces, I still feel like a freak. I have something called a maxillofacial deformity. It sounds scarier than it is, and it looks scarier than it sounds. Basically, my parents call it a severe overbite, my orthodontist calls it an extreme overjet, and the kids at school call me Bucky Beaver (among other awesome and totally creative insults). My jaws fit together like mismatched puzzle pieces and my top teeth are spaced and overlap my bottom lip.
When I was eight or nine, my teeth pretty much started to do whatever they wanted, and now they look like they’re running a race against my face. The doctor says that braces should Fix My Deformity, but I’ve been wearing them for a whole year and I still feel like my face is a hot mess.
Ever since the doctor glued these stupid brackets to my teeth I live on Advil and soft foods, and I can’t do anything fun like bite into pizza (instead, I eat it with a fork—blah) or apples because it hurts too much and food gets stuck and I can do real damage to The Apparatus if I eat the wrong thing. I’m also not allowed to chew gum or eat hard candy, and I have to brush my teeth way more than normal to keep everything clean.
Oh, and thanks to the way my teeth jut out, my lips wouldn’t close before I had braces. Now that there are chunks of metal glued to them, my mouth hangs open even more and I’m on constant drool patrol.
Whoever invented braces must have seriously hated kids. Sometimes I wonder if my orthodontist hates kids, too. She acts like plastering a bunch of metal to my teeth is No Big Deal.
“Ew, Mom, she’s drooling again!” Alexis shouts from behind me. I glance in the side-view mirror—I didn’t realize she’d been giving me the evil eye from the back seat. “You slobber like a Saint Bernard!” Her face twists with disgust.
I wipe the drool away with my sleeve and glare back at her.
“The two of you better knock it off if you don’t want to spend this weekend in your bedroom,” Mom warns.
This whole thing with Alexis being such a jerk really only just started when she joined me at junior high school last fall, which was right around the time that I got braces. Alexis is in the sixth grade, and I’m in the seventh. And my parents say that she’ll need braces, too, in another year or two, so I really don’t get why she makes fun of mine.
Again, Alexis kicks the back of my seat like a baby. “Ugly loser,” she growls under her breath. I know Mom heard her because I heard her, but Mom doesn’t do anything about it, and fifteen minutes later I’m sitting in the Chair of Doom.
2 THE CHAIR OF DOOM
I’m pretty sure Dr. Watson is the worst thing to ever happen to me.
Me and Mom walk into the doctor’s office. I’m wearing my favorite T-shirt. It’s white with black letters and says There, Their, and They’re in large capital letters. Mom got it for me because she knows I get a kick out of grammar. Dr. Watson completely ignores it, which I expected, but I still find it annoying.
Most people comment on my T-shirts because of how out-there they are. I have a collection of sarcastic shirts that Mom is helping me build. If she sees one she knows I’ll like, she picks it up for me if it’s cheap enough—and only if it’s school appropriate. My second-favorite T-shirt is a black one with white letters that say Don’t even.
I set myself up in the patient’s chair and Mom sits on the other side of the room just as Dr. Watson breezes in.
“Great to see you, Ms. Plink.” Dr. Watson smiles at Mom. Her teeth are white and pearly against her brown skin, and her black curly hair is pulled back in a tight ponytail. “And you, Max. Any complications this time around? Unusual pain or discomfort?”
“No, but—”
“Open, please.” Dr. Watson begins to poke around my mouth before I can get the words out. “Okay, close,” she orders as she shoves the mirror up against the inside of my cheek. “I’m just looking at how your teeth and jaws are fitting together at this point. I think of them like puzzle pieces. There’s a very specific way that your top teeth should sit over your bottom teeth.”
She pauses and looks at Mom. “Today we’ll start practicing with the headgear. We might need a maxillofacial surgeon down the road, to fully correct the malocclusion.” Dr. Watson turns to me. “This is a surgery that would change the position of the maxilla, which is your upper jaw, and the mandible, which is your lower jaw. So, double jaw surgery in your case. But we’ll have to wait and see. It might be a few years before we know exactly what needs to be done.” Turning back to Mom, she says, “She has to be almost finished growing before we can make any final decisions.”
My stomach churns and my mouth goes dry.
“You think I need surgery?” My eyes dart between Dr. Watson and Mom. This is the first time Dr. Watson has said anything to me about surgery. And I’m only twelve. Won’t it be years before I stop growing? Like, don’t people stop growing when they’re twenty-five or thirty or something?
“Are my jaws that messed up?”
Dr. Watson throws Mom a curious glance, as if to say, Have you all not had this conversation yet?
She stands up from her rolling chair. “That’s a good question, Max. A maxillofacial surgeon is a doctor who specializes in jaw restructuring. Um.” She clears her throat. “Realignment. Remember, like a puzzle. Making sure your top and bottom jaws are even with each other, but also making sure that your top and bottom teeth align and fit together. This helps with chewing, swallowing, and sometimes even breathing. I know we’ve talked about this before.”
Then she asks me to open and close my mouth a couple of times. “Some deformities correct without maxillofacial intervention, especially when you get in the game early enough,” she says. I hate when she says deformities. Like, isn’t there a better word? “That’s why we’re going to start using the headgear, like I mentioned the last time I saw you. We talked at length about that, remember?” Dr. Watson sounds a little irritated, like she doesn’t want to be caught up in the drama of Mom not telling me things that she’s supposed to tell me. I remembered that Dr. Watson said something about headgear about a month ago, and when I went home and googled it I was seriously hoping she’d forget. But this is the first time I’m hearing anything about surgery.
“This really sucks,” I say under my breath, and before the words are even out of my mouth, I know I’m walking on thin ice.
“Max,” Mom warns. “Watch your mouth.” Her hands are clutched around her purse, like a gremlin or something is about to pop up from around a corner to steal it. She’s young—the youngest mom of anyone in my whole grade, I bet—but her brown hair is graying, and her skin is super pale. When she’s really tired, you can see some of the veins under the skin around her eyes.
The doctor sighs, like I’m the first kid ever to hate having braces. She bends forward, leaning over me. “Open, please.”
I do as she says, and she pulls my lips back far away from my mouth. It doesn’t hurt or anything. “Sometimes, Max, a person’s lower jaw might overshoot their top jaw, and that’s when this happens.” Dr. Watson juts her bottom jaw out so that her bottom teeth overlap her top teeth. “In your case, your top jaw shoots way out over your bottom jaw.”
I mean, I knew my mouth was messed up, but I didn’t know it was, like, surgery bad. I squeeze my eyes shut because I can feel the tears and you’re not supposed to cry in front of your enemies.
“So they basically have to smash up my face if things don’t get better? Sounds like a great solution.” I open my eyes and see Mom glaring at me from her chair, in a you just wait until we get in the car kind of way. She always has a real problem with me asking questions, especially of Authority Figures, but this time, I don’t hold back.
Dr. Watson shrugs. “Kids get orthognathic surgery all the time. You certainly wouldn’t be the first. The surgeons reposition your jaws and wire them shut for a few weeks, so that everything can fuse in the correct place, much like broken bones. You can ask me whatever questions you might have. I’ll make sure you get a pamphlet on the way out, if that’ll help.”
They reposition your jaws and wire them shut for a few weeks … like broken bones … the doctor’s words knock around my head like Ping-Pong balls and I taste bile.
“What do you—” I squeak, but Mom interrupts me.
“Will it help my wallet?” Mom smirks like she’s trying to be funny, but in a way I can tell isn’t a joke.
Dr. Watson’s eyes are nervous now, like she really doesn’t want to be a part of family drama. I don’t blame her. My family is nothing but drama, at least lately.
“Max, look here.” She pulls her lower lip down and taps on her bottom teeth. Some of them are crowded together, like dominoes that started to fall over. “Sometimes, braces can’t correct everything. See? This can still happen, many years after braces. As we get older, our teeth tend to do what they want to do, and we have to accept our imperfections. In your case, we’ll just have to see how you do here. You’re not finished growing, which makes things hard to predict. Bite down, please.”
Dr. Watson examines one side of my mouth, and then the other. She looks at Mom. “As I’ve said from day one, Max is a complicated case. We’ll just have to see how things develop. In the meantime”—she turns her attention to me—“we need to try the headgear we talked about last month.”
I swallow hard. Having a skeletal deformity is a real blast.
“She mostly gets it from her father’s side of the family,” Mom says. “The women had horrible teeth. All of them.”
I know that Mom wore braces, too. But I don’t bring it up.
Dr. Watson glances at Mom and says, “Indeed, these things are often hereditary, for better or for worse. But we’ll do everything we can to take care of Max, get this fixed, and avoid surgery.” She opens a drawer and pulls out a contraption that looks a bit like a thin metal tube folded into the shape of a half-moon with two slim stems on each end. It has a strap running from side to side, like a slingshot.
Dr. Watson unhooks the strap. “This is the headgear, Max. Some of my patients call it a jawbreaker.” She chuckles.
“Why?” I yelp.
Dr. Watson clears her throat. “It’s not actually going to break your jaw. You’ll feel a little sore when you wear it because it’s designed to gently reposition your top jaw. That’s all that means. I used to have to wear one, when I was around your age.”
Text copyright © 2023 by Christina Wyman
Illustrations copyright © 2023 by James Lancett
