Free Dreidels on the Brain by Joel ben Izzy Page B

the first thing people see is a mouth full of metal. Sometimes bits of food get stuck in them, unless you’re really careful and brush after every single thing you eat. That’s what Howard does. And he tells us about it. We’ll be driving in the car somewhere, or even talking to other people, and he’ll suddenly announce that it’s time for him to brush his teeth.
    Dr. Snitkopff wants me to do that too. He’s my orthodontist, and he’s evil. But we go to him because he lets us pay on credit. That’s because he doesn’t care about the money—he’s in it for the pain. In addition to all the metal he glues in my mouth, with sharp edges and wires sticking out, he gives me little rubber bands I’m supposed to put on every single day, just so. If I forget to do it, even once between visits, he knows. The moment I sit in the chair he opens my mouth, and says, “So, have you been wearing your rubber bands?”
    Have you ever noticed that dentists always wait until your mouth is wide open to ask you questions? That’s what Dr. Snitkopff does.
    I try to nod and say, “Uh-huh.”
    â€œWe’ll see,” he says, and out come the needle-nosed pliers, twisting and tightening until I confess (which is also hard when you can’t talk). I manage to utter, “Weh, ho uh ha hi,” which is supposed to mean “Well, most of the time.” He doesn’t care. The pliers twist.
    So I’m short, with braces, and I also wear these really ugly glasses. Both Kenny and Howard had to get glasses when they got to fifth grade, so I could see the writing on the wall. Actually, I
couldn’t
see the writing on the wall, and that’s why I had to get glasses. I held out as long as I could, pretending I could see the board, but finally, last summer, the doctor did an eye test, said my vision was terrible, and gave me a prescription.
    I wanted contact lenses. Those are round pieces of glass that are shaped exactly like your eyeball, so you put them in and they just stay. I know it sounds impossible, but they make you see perfectly. No one even knows you’re wearing them—unless you lose one.
    That’s what happened to Larry Arbuckle. We were all in the schoolyard playing football, when suddenly he called out “Stop! Nobody move!” Everyone froze, and he explainedthat his left contact lens had popped out. We all got down on our hands and knees to look for it, very slowly so that no one would accidentally crush it. Contact lenses are really, really expensive—one hundred dollars each! That’s two hundred dollars if you have two eyes, which is a lot of money to pay to look like you don’t wear glasses. We crawled around for a long time, not finding it, until I heard Eddy Mazurki say, “Uh-oh.” He said it in a bad way—not that there’s a good way to say “Uh-oh.” And we all knew what happened to
that
hundred-dollar contact lens.
    I knew my parents wouldn’t go for contact lenses, so I had a Plan B. Wire frames. Silver. That’s what hippies wear, like John Lennon, who’s a Beatle. It’s possible to wear wire-framed glasses and look cool, so when I was at Kaiser with my dad, looking at all the frames, I pointed to a pair on the top shelf that would have been totally boss. They were mostly flat on the top and rounded on the bottom, called aviator, like a pilot might wear. They were groovy enough to look like you were wearing them just because you wanted to. But the tag said eighty-nine dollars. My dad shook his head.
    â€œNo, wire won’t be sturdy enough.”
    Then he looked over the rack and picked out a pair on the very bottom. Not solid black, not horn-rimmed, not even tortoiseshell. They were brown at the top and gray at the bottom with a wire running through them, ugly as could be.
    â€œTry these,” he said. I did. They looked like something
he
would wear. In fact, they were. Exactly