For a moment, she was speechless. “You must be joking.”
“After three years? I don’t think so.” I stood up, poking my finger at the calendar on the wall. “I’m getting my braces off today.”
“You are not going to Rob Reece’s office,” my mother said.
Okay, that’s the detail I left out: the only orthodontist in Bankton-the one I’d been seeing all this time-happened to be married to the woman she was suing. Granted, due to all the drama, I’d missed a couple of appointments since September, but I had no intention of skipping this one. “Just because you’re on some crusade to ruin Piper’s life, I have to leave my braces on till I’m forty?”
My mother held her hand up to her head. “Not till you’re forty. Just until I find you another orthodontist. For God’s sake, Amelia, it slipped my mind. I’ve obviously had a lot going on lately.”
“Yeah, you and every other human on this planet, Mom,” I yelled. “Guess what? It’s not all about you and what you want and what makes everyone feel sorry for your miserable life with some miserable-”
She slapped me across the face.
My mother had never, ever hit me. Not even when I ran into traffic when I was two, not even when I poured nail polish remover on the dining room table and destroyed the finish. My cheek hurt, but not as much as my chest. My heart had turned into a ball of rubber bands, and they were snapping, one by one.
I wanted her to hurt as much as she’d hurt me, so I spat out the words that burned like acid in my throat. “Bet you wish I’d never been born, too,” I said, and I took off running.
By the time I got to Rob’s office (I’d never called him Dr. Reece), I was sweaty and red-faced. I don’t think I’d ever run five whole miles in my life, but that’s what I had just done. Guilt is a better fuel than you can imagine. I was practically the Energizer Bunny, and it had a lot less to do with getting closer to the orthodontist than it did with getting away from my mother. Panting, I walked up to the receptionist’s desk, where there was a nifty computer kiosk to sign in. But I had only just settled my fingers on the keyboard when I noticed the receptionist staring at me. And the dental hygienist. And in fact, every single person in the office.
“Amelia,” the receptionist says. “What are you doing here?”
“I have an appointment.”
“I think we all just assumed-”
“Assumed what?” I interrupted. “That just because my mother’s a jerk, I’m one, too?”
Suddenly Rob stepped into the reception area, snapping a pair of rubber gloves off his hands. He used to blow them up for Emma and me, and draw little faces on them. The fingers looked like the comb of a rooster and felt as soft as a baby’s skin.
“Amelia,” he said quietly. He wasn’t smiling, not one iota. “I guess you’re here about your braces.”
It felt like I had been walking in a forest for the past few months, a place where even the trees might reach out to grab you and nobody spoke English-and Rob had said the first rational, normal sentence I’d heard in a long time. He knew what I wanted. If it was so easy for him, why did nobody else seem to get it?
I followed him into the examination room, past the snarky receptionist and the dental hygienist whose eyes went so wide I thought they might pop out of her head. Ha, I thought, walking beside him proudly. Take that.
I expected Rob to say something like Look, let’s just get this over with and keep it strictly business, but instead, as he settled the paper bib over my shoulders, he said, “Are things okay for you, Amelia?”
God, why couldn’t Rob have been my father? Why couldn’t I have lived in the Reece household, and Emma could have been in mine, so I could hate her instead of the other way around?
“Compared to what? Armageddon?”
He was wearing a mask, but I pretended that, behind it, he cracked a smile. I’d always liked Rob. He was geeky and small, not at all like my father. At sleepovers Emma would tell me my father was movie-star handsome and I’d tell her it was gross that she even thought about him like that; and she’d say if her dad was ever in a movie, it would be Revenge of the Nerds. And maybe that was true, but he also didn’t mind taking us to movies that starred Amanda Bynes or Hilary Duff, and he let us play with brace wax and fashion it into little bears and ponies when we were bored.
“I’d forgotten how funny you can be,” Rob said. “Okay, open up…You may feel a little pressure.” He picked up a pair of pliers and began to break the bonds between the brackets and my teeth. It felt weird, like I was bionic. “Does that hurt?”
I shook my head.
“Emma doesn’t talk much about you these days.”
I couldn’t speak, because his hands were in my wide-open mouth. But here’s what I would have said: That’s because she’s become an überbitch, and she hates my guts.
“It’s obviously a very uncomfortable situation,” Rob said. “I have to admit I never thought your mother would let you come back to me for orthodontic care.”
She didn’t.
“You know, orthodontics is really just physics,” Rob said. “If you had brackets or bands on crooked teeth alone, it wouldn’t do anything. But when you apply force in different ways, things change.” He looked down at me, and I knew that he wasn’t talking about my teeth anymore. “Every action has an equal and opposite reaction.”
Rob was cleaning the composite and cement off my teeth. I lifted my hand and put it to his wrist, so that he’d remove the electric toothbrush. My spit tasted tinny. “She’s ruined my life, too,” I said, and because of the saliva, it sounded like I was drowning.
Rob looked away. “You’ll have to wear a retainer, or else there could be some shifting. Let’s get some X-rays and impressions, so that we can make one up for you-” Then he frowned, touching a tool to the backs of my two front teeth. “The enamel’s worn down a lot here.”
Well, of course it was; I was making myself puke three times a day, not that you’d know it. I was just as fat as ever, because when I wasn’t puking, I was stuffing my disgusting face. I held my breath, wondering if this would be the moment someone realized what I’d been doing. I wondered if I’d actually been waiting for that all along.
“Have you been drinking a lot of soda?”
The excuse made me feel weak. I nodded quickly.
“Don’t,” Rob said. “They use Coke to clean up blood spills on highways, you know. Do you really want that in your body?”
It sounded like something you would have told me, from one of your trivia books. And that made my eyes fill with tears.
“Sorry,” Rob said, lifting his hands. “I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Me neither, I thought.
He finished polishing my teeth with the toothpaste that felt like sand and let me rinse. “That is one gorgeous occlusion,” he said, and he held up a mirror. “Smile, Amelia.”
I ran my tongue over my teeth, something I hadn’t been able to do in nearly three years. The teeth felt huge, slick, like they belonged in someone else’s mouth. I bared them-not a smile but more of a wolf’s grimace. The girl in the mirror had neat rows of teeth, like the string of pearls in my mother’s jewelry box that I’d stolen and hidden in one of my shoe boxes. I never wore them, but I liked the way they felt, so smooth and uniform, like a little army marching around your neck. The girl in the mirror could almost be pretty.
Which meant she couldn’t be me.
“Here’s something we give out to kids who’ve completed treatment,” Rob said, handing me a little plastic bag with his name printed on it. “Thanks,” I muttered, and I leapt out of the chair, yanking the bib off.