“Very good,” said the doctor. He took a wooden tongue depressor from a jar and held it up to Nathan’s mouth. “Say ahhh.”
“Ahhh.”
“Actually, I wasn’t interested in hearing the noise itself. It was really just a ruse to get you to open your mouth. So let’s try it again.”
“Ahhh,” said Nathan, opening his mouth and sticking out his tongue.
The doctor held the tongue depressor in mid-air. “Is this some kind of joke?”
“Do we look like the kind of people who would play such a joke?” asked Mary, believing it to be a suitably evasive answer.
The doctor looked wistful. “My entire life, I’ve been ashamed of the normalcy of my teeth. Each night as I brushed I thought about how wonderful it would be to be a shark or a barracuda, swimming around in the ocean with a mouth full of jagged teeth.”
“Wouldn’t the other kids have made fun of you?” Nathan asked.
“They did! In a moment of poor judgment, I told one of my classmates about this fantasy, and he thought it was ever-so-amusing. ‘Hey, everyone, let’s ridicule the warped boy who wishes he had razor-sharp teeth!’ Those were dark times for me. But I had the final laugh, because now I am a rich and successful physician, with a huge house and a thin wife, while he has a small house and a huge wife. Did you want another shot?”
“No, sir.”
“Good. You passed another test.”
“See, now that wasn’t so bad, was it?” asked Penny, as they drove away. “Doesn’t it feel good to be healthy again?”
“It does,” said Nathan. “It really does.”
If one were to draw up a comparison chart between any two months of the year that Nathan spent in the forest, and the two remaining months of his first summer with the sisters, the line for the months in the forest would be drawn near the bottom of the page, indicating sadness, while the line for the months with the sisters would be drawn near the top of the page, indicating happiness. The bottom line would be drawn in an unhappy color, perhaps dark blue, while the top line would be a bright yellow or purple.
Nathan’s bedroom was small (they’d converted a room in the back where Penny used to like to sit and read) but comfortable. He stayed at home while the sisters went to work each day, since they supposed that a boy who’d lived by himself in the forest could stay by himself in a locked house during the daytime. He was given a list of chores to do each day, and almost always did them.
Each night they played games. Mary would usually win, and Penny would pretend to be furious and storm off, and everybody would laugh. Sometimes Penny would win, in which case Mary would also be furious and storm off, except that she wasn’t pretending. When Nathan won, he would do a dance, which would be adjusted in scope and intensity depending on whether he’d won by a little or a lot.
The sisters would scold him when he did something wrong, and even punish him when necessary, but he always felt loved.
Was he happier with them than with his real mother and father? That is an unfair question. Given the opportunity to change history, he certainly would have saved the lives of his parents and gone back to excitedly anticipating his candy store visit. Yet he also enjoyed being able to go grocery shopping, to eat in inexpensive restaurants, and live beyond his front and back yard.
He would have changed the past if he could, but since he couldn’t (to the best of his knowledge), he would simply live the life he’d been given and enjoy being happier than he’d ever been.
The happiness was impacted by a sense of dread, though, as the date for his first day of school approached. He liked social interaction such as ordering hamburgers, but to be stuck in a classroom all day? With other children? Who might chant “Fangboy” at him? And who might draw mean-spirited pictures of him depicting his teeth as even larger and sharper than they were? This seemed like it could go terribly wrong.
“Can’t you just teach me at home?” Nathan asked Penny and Mary.
Penny, who sat on the couch, patted the cushion next to her. “Come here, Nathan, and let me tell you a story.”
Nathan sat down next to her.
“Once upon a time there was a little boy, a boy who looked much like yourself as a matter of fact. This little boy did not want to go to school. But we made him. And he went. The end.”
“That wasn’t a very good story,” said Nathan.
“That’s because it’s based on reality. Would you really have us devote as much time as a teacher to your education? Shall I quit my job and let Mary support us? Would
“I’m sorry,” said Nathan. “I’ll go to school.”
“Yes, you will. And you’ll bring home good grades. Your handwriting is so atrocious that you’d think you had sharp pointed fingers instead of teeth. What is six times seven?”
“I don’t know, but six times five is thirty.”
“The fives are easy. You have many things to learn, Nathan Pepper, and you
Nathan nodded, and felt ashamed that he’d ever protested. This was his chance to have a normal life. He couldn’t expect anybody to quit their job to keep him from feeling awkward. When had he become such a selfish boy? He was going to go to school and study hard and learn his multiplication tables and be able to point out every country on a map and become smart and invent things and get rich and move himself and the sisters into a mansion with a butler and a gardener and a special room filled with butterflies.
He would change the world!
NINE
Two weeks before school started, Nathan lay in bed, nearly overcome by sleep, when he discovered that one of his teeth was loose.
It was one of the corner ones that could legitimately be called a fang. The upper left. If he poked at it with his tongue, it jiggled. He lay there for a moment, jiggling his tooth, then got out of bed and hurried into Penny’s room. She sat up in her bed, reading.
“Look!” he said, proudly opening his mouth and making the tooth move. “It’s my first loose one!”
Penny leaned forward. “I believe you’re right!” She called Mary into the room, and they both admired his loose tooth, the way it could wobble forward and backward.
They’d discussed this before. Mary had told him that before too long his teeth would start to fall out, one by one, and that it was nothing to be afraid of, it was part of the natural course of things, and that new teeth would grow back in their place.
“Will they be normal teeth?” Nathan had asked.
“We won’t know until we see them. Perhaps they might. Perhaps when it’s all over, you’ll have a mouth full of teeth just like anybody else.”
Penny had shushed her and told her she was being cruel, that it was wrong to raise his hopes likes that. Mary had argued that it was a perfectly feasible outcome, and that there was no reason the boy shouldn’t look forward to the possibility. Nathan had been told to leave the room, and the subject was no longer discussed.
“Should I get a pair of pliers and rip it right out?” asked Mary, her eyes gleaming with mischief. She said it with a smile to let Nathan know that she was teasing, that she wasn’t really going to rip his tooth out with pliers.
“No, no,” said Penny. “We need to tie a string around his tooth, and then we need to tie the other end around the tail of a bull, and then we need to anger the bull so that it runs off.”
“But what if the tooth isn’t loose enough? Our poor Nathan could find himself being dragged behind an angry bull!”
“You’re right! And what if we were careless about the location of the bull and sent it rushing toward a
