by Kathleen Walker

Creative Nonfiction Contest Winner

When I’m sad, I brush my teeth with my back to the mirror. My apartment’s sink sits low enough to rest my lower back against the rim, so that’s what I do. And when I have to turn around to spit, I try very hard not to think about what exactly it is that I’m doing. See, I don’t like teeth. I particularly dislike mine. When I was a toddler, my upper incisors grew through my gums all black and rotted. Two dentists later and my parents had them removed in the pediatric ward of the local hospital. The nurses gave me a teddy bear for being brave, although I very much doubt that I was. My dentist fit the new gap with a partial denture which I cluelessly and unashamedly referred to as my partial. 

At some point in elementary school, I snapped one of the false teeth clean off the metal bracket while eating a leftover cookie from Books-A-Million. After that, they pulled the denture free and waited for my adult teeth to grow in. For the next few months I walked around with a big gummy gap in the center of my smile. This should’ve been the worst part. But when my adult teeth grew down, my lateral incisors came in too high and too crooked. I hated them. I smiled with my mouth closed. And before school and before bed, when my parents sent me to the bathroom to brush my teeth, I learned to do it with my back to the mirror.

I got braces when I was in high school. This is where the girl comes in. Between you and me, I think this next bit is just a right of queer passage—the high school friend, the homoerotic subtext, the nights drinking gas station Coke bottles in Walmart parking lots where neither of you quite seem to understand why the space between the driver’s seat and the passenger’s seat feels too far. Mine was blonde. She was pretty in an off-putting, Hot Topic sort of way. Long legs, boxy torso. She wore chunky smudged eyeliner that she never wiped off—just layered a fresh coat over the previous day’s remnants each morning. I used to write her essays and slip her answers in algebra. She was abrasive and sharp-tongued with everyone who wasn’t me. And I adored being her under-bellied exception.

It was a couple weeks after I got my braces on that we sat in the McDonald’s drive thru waiting on our 20 chicken nuggets. I smiled wide so she could see my incisors around their metal brackets and said, look how far down they’ve come, and instead of brightening she just replied, I’m going to miss your little vampire teeth, with an odd sort of pout, and when I think about that now, I wonder if I should've run away with her right then. I saw her Snapchat location the other day—she’s in Columbia, with the boyfriend she used to tell me she’d leave all at once if I asked her to. Should I have asked her to? I type out texts to her that I don’t send. They’re all variations of, what if we went back in time?

She dragged me to nearly every sex store in the upstate—although in South Carolina, that's hardly an exhaustive list. But this was our mythological quest, concise as it was. Once, on the way back from a store two hours clear of our hometown, we got stuck in an unusual bay of traffic. We shared some chips her brother had forgotten in her backseat and stuck her new vibrator into the empty bag to hear the crumbs rattle. The next day, the news said that police had found a dead body along the roadside and had closed the highway to move it. I don’t know what narrative that sequence of events spells out, but I know that I still think about it more than I should, with more warmth than I ought to.

I’m ready to offer my confession. You see, I was hungry for the way she needed me. The kind of hunger that makes you loose and cruel. And when I think about her now, I think too much of the way she would take my words off my tongue and twist them upside down. I think about the day she shouted on the docks and left me crying on my parents’ front porch. And on all the days, I think about her when I brush my teeth. On the sad ones, I’ll turn around and think of the ways we, she, I all got it wrong. But on the happy days, I’ll think about the cream of her SUV's interior, the tear in the driver’s seat leather, $1 large Cokes, fingers brushing over knuckles in a bag of greasy fries, and the sincerity in her expression when she prodded her face close to mine and said, I liked your teeth, I liked them a lot.