“What are ‘summer teeth’?” 38°53 N, 77°05 W
“Sum ’er going this way and sum ’er going that way,” Dr. Gupta said, chuckling. He wondered if perhaps a career in standup comedy had been his true calling. Jackson, however, was not amused, and when Gupta spotted his scowl, the orthodontist got back to business. “Sorry. What I’m trying to say is your teeth are all over the place. A few of them are sideways. There’s one that’s upside-down! Don’t worry. It’s nothing a set of braces won’t fix.” Jackson felt his heart stop. “Braces!” Nerds had braces. Dr. Gupta smiled reassuringly. “A lot of patients worry that braces are going to ruin their lives, but I assure you that nothing will change, Jackson. Your friends are still going to like you. I doubt that anyone will notice at all.” When Jackson looked back on that moment, he realized that was when a terrible truth was revealed to him: Adults are liars, horrible, soulless, black-hearted liars. The braces didn’t just ruin his life, they demolished it, then salted the land so nothing would ever grow there again! When Dr. Gupta was finished, Jackson was thirty-two teeth lighter but fourteen pounds of metal heavier. Each of his teeth was encased in a jagged steel cage that ripped at his gums. Worse, a metal halo that Gupta called “headgear” was attached to Jackson’s bicuspids, and protruded out of his mouth and encircled his head like Saturn’s rings.
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