Bad Teeth Bradley's Arc

Chapter 5 of 5

The back room was brighter than Bradley expected. He sat down in the exam chair and the paper crinkled under him. Dr. Stevens rolled his stool over, snapped on gloves, and set a tray of small metal tools beside the lamp. "Open when you're ready," he said. "We'll go slow." Bradley opened his mouth. Dr. Stevens leaned in with the mirror. He worked in silence for a minute, tapping, scraping, moving from one tooth to the next. Then he stopped on the back molar and held still. "This one," he said, quiet. "The one you told me about." Bradley felt it start in his hands first. A small tremor along his fingers, then his wrists, then his knees under the paper drape. The candies in his pocket pressed against his hip like they were waiting to be noticed. He hadn't eaten one since the trash can. That was maybe twenty minutes ago. His whole body seemed to remember at once. "Sir," Dr. Stevens said. He set the mirror on the tray. "You're shaking." "I know." "Do you want a break?" Bradley stared up at the ceiling light. He could ask for the break. Sit up, walk out to the waiting room, put a candy in his mouth, come back when his hands were still. He had done a version of that a hundred times. Dr. Stevens would let him. That was the problem. "No," Bradley said. His voice came out thin. "Don't stop." Dr. Stevens waited. "It's worse than I told you." Bradley kept his eyes on the light. "The back one isn't the only one. I can feel two others moving when I chew. And I eat candy every hour. Not sometimes. Every hour. When I try to stop, I shake like this, and then I eat more, and it goes away." He swallowed. "I've got a pocket full right now." Dr. Stevens didn't move for a moment. Then he pulled his stool a little closer, not further away. "Thank you for telling me," he said. "That changes what we do today." "You can still clean them?" "I can clean what's here. I won't pretend the rest isn't coming." He paused. "I'd like the candy in the pocket, before we finish. Not to punish you. So the hour after this appointment isn't the hardest hour of your week." Bradley reached into his coat. He pulled out the handful — reds, blues, a striped one, a lemon square — and held them out over the tray. His hand shook the whole way. Dr. Stevens took them and set them aside without ceremony. "Open again," he said. Bradley opened. The scraping started up, steady and small. His hands kept shaking against the armrests. But the pocket was empty now, and the cleaning didn't stop, and for the first time someone knew the real number.