The Loose Tooth

Loose

Nell had been wiggling that tooth for eleven days.

She wiggled it at breakfast. She wiggled it during math. She wiggled it while her mom read stories before bed. She wiggled it with her tongue, with her finger, and once — just once — with the eraser end of a pencil, which she did NOT recommend.

The tooth was her bottom front one, just a little to the left. It had started as a tiny wobble, like a fence post in soft ground. But now it leaned. It tilted. It swung back and forth like a little door on a little hinge, and every time Nell touched it, she felt a strange, tugging feeling that wasn't quite pain but wasn't quite not pain either.

"Just pull it!" said her best friend Marco at recess. He said this every single day. Marco had already lost four teeth. He pulled them out himself like it was nothing, like he was picking berries off a bush. "You just grab it and yank. Done. Easy."

"I don't want to just yank it," Nell said.

"Why not?"

Nell didn't have a good answer for that. She just knew she wasn't ready.

On the twelfth day, which was a Tuesday, the cafeteria was serving chicken nuggets and apple slices and those little bags of carrots that nobody ever opened. Nell sat down across from Marco and next to her other friend Priya, who was carefully taking apart an Oreo.

"Still got the tooth?" Priya asked, not looking up.

"Still got it," Nell said.

She picked up a chicken nugget. It was warm and golden and perfectly ordinary. She bit into it — not even a big bite, just a regular, normal, everyday bite — and felt something shift.

Not a wobble. Not a tilt.

A pop.

Like a snap pea breaking open. Like a Lego piece clicking free.

And then something small and hard was just… sitting on her tongue.

Nell froze.

She put her hand over her mouth. She looked at Marco. She looked at Priya. Her eyes went wide.

"Wha—" Marco started.

Nell spit the tooth into her palm.

It was so small. That was the first thing she thought. It was so small, this tiny white pebble with a rough little edge at the bottom, and it had been inside her mouth this whole time, part of her actual body, and now it was just sitting in her hand next to a chicken nugget crumb.

"IT CAME OUT!" Marco yelled, like he was announcing a touchdown. "NELL'S TOOTH CAME OUT!"

Three tables turned to look. A lunch monitor raised an eyebrow.

"Let me see, let me see," Priya said, leaning over.

Nell opened her mouth. She could feel the gap with her tongue — a soft, slippery little window where the tooth used to be. The spot felt warm and tasted like pennies.

"Cool," Priya said, very seriously.

"That's awesome!" Marco said. "Now you can put it under your pillow and get money. I got two dollars for my last one."

"Three dollars," Priya corrected. "I got three."

"No way. The tooth fairy doesn't give three dollars."

"She gave me three dollars."

While they argued, Nell sat very still, holding the tooth in her palm.

She thought she would feel happy. She'd been waiting for this. She'd wiggled and wiggled, and now it was done, and she should feel happy. Everyone was smiling at her. Marco was basically throwing a parade.

But Nell felt… she didn't know what she felt.

She looked at the tooth. She touched the gap with her tongue.

Something about it made her chest feel tight and fluttery at the same time, like a bird was trapped behind her ribs and couldn't decide which direction to fly.

"You okay?" Priya asked.

"Yeah," Nell said. "It's just…"

"Just what?"

"It's just weird," Nell said quietly. "I had it my whole life. And now I don't."

Priya thought about this. "Huh," she said.

After lunch, Nell went to the bathroom and looked in the mirror. She pulled her lip down. The gap was right there — pink and empty and strange. She smiled. She looked different. She looked like one of those kids in the picture frames at the dentist's office, grinning with spaces in their teeth.

She didn't look bad. She just didn't look like the Nell she was used to.

She ran her tongue over the gap again. Smooth. Slippery. Gone.

Her eyes got hot, which surprised her, because she was NOT going to cry about a tooth. That was silly. She blinked hard, once, twice, and the hot feeling went away. Mostly.

When she got back to class, Mrs. Kwan noticed.

"Nell! You lost a tooth!" Mrs. Kwan said it the way grown-ups always said it — bright and excited, like it was the best news in the world.

"Yeah," Nell said. "At lunch. In a chicken nugget."

Everyone laughed, and Nell smiled, and when she smiled, she could feel the air move through the gap, cool and tickly, and that was actually a little bit funny.

Mrs. Kwan gave her a tiny plastic treasure chest to keep the tooth in. It was shaped like a heart and it was purple and it snapped shut with a click. Nell put the tooth inside and shook it. It rattled like a tiny maraca.

She kept it on her desk all afternoon. Every few minutes, she opened it and peeked inside.

Still there.

At pickup, Nell's mom was waiting by the fence. Nell walked up slowly, holding the purple treasure chest in both hands.

"Hey, bug," her mom said. "How was—"

Nell opened her mouth.

Her mom gasped — the big, dramatic kind of gasp, the kind that meant she actually, truly cared. "Your TOOTH! It came out!"

"In a chicken nugget," Nell said.

"In a CHICKEN NUGGET!" her mom repeated, as if this was the most extraordinary detail in the history of teeth.

They got in the car. Nell clicked the treasure chest open and shut. Open and shut.

"Mom?" she said, as they pulled out of the parking lot.

"Yeah, bug?"

"Is it weird that I feel kind of… sad?"

Her mom didn't answer right away. She didn't say "Don't be sad!" or "That's silly!" She just drove for a moment, and then she said, "Tell me about the sad."

Nell thought. "It was mine. And it was part of my mouth. And now there's just a hole. And a new one's going to grow in, but it won't be the same tooth. It'll be a different one."

"That's true," her mom said.

"And I wanted it to come out. I wiggled it every day. But now that it's gone, I kind of… miss it?"

"You can want something to happen," her mom said, "and still feel a little bit sad when it does."

Nell looked out the window. The trees were moving past, green and gold, and the sun flickered between the branches like a strobe light.

"Two things at once," Nell said.

"Two things at once," her mom agreed.

Nell ran her tongue over the gap. It felt a little less strange now. A little more like it belonged to her.

That night, she put the tooth under her pillow in its purple treasure chest. She lay in bed and smiled in the dark and felt the air move through the space where something used to be and something new was already, slowly, beginning to grow.

She felt proud. She felt a little bit sad. She felt excited about the money. She felt weird about her face. She felt brave, even though she wasn't exactly sure why.

She felt all of it, everything, all at the same time.

And that, she decided, was okay.