Jodi Picoult - Handle with Care

“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.

“Amelia-wait. Your retainer-” Rob said, but by then, I had already fled into the reception area and out the front door. Instead of heading downstairs and out of the building, though, I ran upstairs, where they wouldn’t think to come after me (Not that they would. I wasn’t really that important, was I?), and locked myself in the bathroom. I opened the goody bag. There were Twizzlers and gummy bears and popcorn, all foods I hadn’t eaten in so long I couldn’t even remember how they tasted. There was a T-shirt that read SHIFT HAPPENS, SO WEAR YOUR RETAINER.

The toilet bowl had a black seat. With one hand I held my hair back, with the other, I stuck my index finger down my throat. Here’s what Rob hadn’t noticed: the little scab on that finger, which came from digging into my front teeth every time I did this.

Afterward, my teeth felt fuzzy and dirty and familiar again. I rinsed my mouth out with water from the sink and then looked in the mirror. My cheeks were flushed, my eyes bright.

I did not look like someone whose life was falling apart. I did not look like a girl who had to make herself vomit to feel like she could do something right. I did not look like the kind of daughter who was hated by her mother, ignored by her father.

To be honest, I didn’t know who the hell I was anymore at all.

In four months, I had been reborn. Once, I’d used a paper tape ruler to determine fundal height, now I knew how to figure out a rough opening for windows using a measuring tape. Once, I had used a Doppler stethoscope to hear fetal heart tones; now I used a stud finder to locate the sweet spots behind a plaster wall. Once, I’d done quadruple screens, now I installed screen porches. I had applied myself to the task of learning as much about remodeling as I had about medicine, and as a result, I could have been board-certified as a contractor by now.

I had first remodeled the bathroom, then the dining room. I pulled up the carpets in the upstairs bedrooms to install parquet floors instead. I was planning to start faux-painting the kitchen this week. After a room was finished, it went back on my list to be renovated again, eventually.

There was, of course, a method to my madness. Part of it was feeling proficient at something again-something I hadn’t known how to do before so I couldn’t possibly mess up. And part of it was thinking that, if I changed every bit of my surroundings, I might be able to find a spot where I felt comfortable again.