Free A Song for Mary by Dennis Smith Page A

easy.”
    I am yelling bloody murder now, trying to figure out why they would let such a young guy do this in a clinic, and the guy keeps saying, “Take it easy, don’t make it hard on me.”
    In all of this time, he has one hand pressed down hard on my nose, and I don’t know now if my nose hurts more than my mouth.
    “It’s coming,” the guy says. “Don’t make it hard on me.”
    I don’t know how he could be thinking that it is hard on him when I am being picked apart like this.
    When the jackass of a tooth finally does come out, it comes out suddenly, and the pliers jerk from my mouth and slam into my lower lip. The lip begins to bleed, and the nurse is getting upset. She doesn’t have any gauze, and she runs to get some.
    The young guy throws this tooth into the garbage can, too.
    When the nurse returns, she has a big wad of cotton that looks like it has been soaked in monkey grease. She puts it into my mouth and tells me to bite down hard. It feels funny in there, like the whole side of my mouth is missing. She then presses gauze on my lower lip until it stops bleeding. After a while, the nose-hair man comes in again and looks into my mouth. He takes the cotton out and throws it into the garbage can with my teeth.
    “Good, good,” the man says. “All right.”
    When he leaves, the nurse smiles at me and then fills my mouth again with the cotton. She is close to me, and I can see how the material of her uniform is being stretched at her breasts. I wonder if Sue Flanagan has ever been in this clinic with her nurse’s uniform, and if she leans in close to people like this. I can smell the nurse’s hair, she is so close, and it smells like applesauce. I think it is so funny that they have tortured me here and left the Grand Canyon in my mouth, and still I am thinking about Sue Flanagan and applesauce.
    In the bus, going back to school, I sit next to Ann Kovak, a tall blond girl who could be the prettiest girl in school if she wasn’t so quiet and shy. She sees I have my hand pressing against my mouth, and she leans over and pats my other hand.
    She says, “It will be okay tomorrow, Dennis.”
    Most of the rest on the bus are quiet, except for Dante Vescovi, who is bragging that he doesn’t have any cavities.
    “How about the cavity on top of your shoulders?” Raymond Rabbitscabbage says.
    “Maybe they missed a cavity,” I say. It is hard to talk with all the cotton in my mouth, and it hurts as I move my jaw up and down. “They can miss things at the clinic, you know.”
    The bus hits a bump, and the bump goes right to the empty space in my mouth. I don’t want to yell because no one else on the bus is yelling. Sister Stella is knitting something in the front seat. She doesn’t look at the knitting as she does it. She is looking out the window, watching the buildings go by.
    “That’s no clinic,” Dante says to me. “That’s a school for jerk-offs.”
    A school for jerk-offs. It’s no wonder Dr. Schmidt wouldn’t let Greta go.
    I think about this all the way back to school.
    The next day at school, Sister Stella gives each of us a pamphlet about a girl named Maria Goretti who died a long time ago, even before my mother was born.
    I like it when they give things out at school, like scapulars and holy pictures and miraculous medals. Usually, we just take these things home, but today Sister gives us the pamphlet and then makes us read it out loud. I like to read out loud, but today is not the day to do it. Ann Kovak was wrong, because my mouth is still so sore from the dentist that I can’t really talk.
    The class is reading like they are singing a song or saying the pledge of allegiance, and Sister sees that I am not doing it with them. She quietly comes down the aisle and knuckles me under the chin a few times. She does this to everyone, and no one ever seems to mind, but now my mouth is hurting like she poured boiling water inside of it.
    “Oww,” I say, and the class shuts up like there was