"Okay, Mr. Mathews, right in here," the hygienist said, guiding me into a room that was so orange I had to squint my eyes against it. Orange wallpaper, orange countertops, and an unbelievably orange vinyl dentist's chair into which she skillfully maneuvered me, at the same time attaching some bib-like item around my neck. Clearly these people wasted no time on pleasantries. There was no "How's the family, how are you enjoying school;" none of that. Just "sit down, shut up, and open wide," pretty much. So that's exactly what I did, all the while continuing to marvel at the sheer orangeness of the place. Between this and the wallpaper in the waiting room, the office's interior designer must have been heavy into some LSD or something, no joking. This is what it looks like growing up when you're an orange seed, I thought, and wanted to laugh, but my mouth was already pried permanently open.
Course that's when they start in with the questions, once they've got your jaw locked in the fully open position and held that way by a full-fledged goddamned erector set. The dentist appeared out of nowhere, introduced himself as Dr. Browning, and began the interrogation.
"How long has this been bothering you, Keith?" he asked. He was coming at me with an intimidating looking sharp metal object as I offered up my best attempt at "a week or so."
He nodded, and offered absolutely no indication of whether or not he had understood my response, or whether he even cared about what it might have been.
"First root canal, I see," he commented. I wasn't sure whether that necessitated a response or not, so I offered up a grunt of some sort, which seemed to satisfy him. "This tooth looks pretty damaged... we might end up having to extract it."
I grunted again.
"You allergic to any medications, Keith?" It seemed to me that a question of that nature might best be asked when a patient was able to fully utilize their mouth for a response, but hell, this guy went to dental school, and I didn't, so who was I to judge? There is no possible way anyone would have been able to distinguish what I actually said, which was "Not that I know of," from what I might have said, which could easily have been "every drug on Earth," but, again, he simply nodded and poked around a bit more, taking a nice stab right at the most painful part of my gum with his shiny little implement of torture. I guess in this office they operated on the theory of "we'll find out whether he's allergic to anything by seeing if he dies in the chair after we drug him up." I summoned up my best resolve not to die in any chair so ungodly orange as the one in which I sat.
Alright, then, Keith, we're gonna put you out for a while so we can work on Mr. Molar back here. You just breathe regular and let the gas do its work, okay? We'll wake you up as soon as we're done." A mask descended on my nose just as I saw a rather long needle heading in the general direction of my mouth. I closed my eyes and breathed in and, thankfully, all of the orange quickly faded to black.
.....................................
"Keith, wake up. You're all done." The hygienist was shaking me awake. I woulda sworn I had just closed my eyes, but the clock on the wall said it was an hour and a half later than when I had sat in the waiting room staring at that clock. The room came into focus and it was, unfortunately, even more orange than I had remembered. It made me feel a little sick, actually, waking up woozy from the gas and being faced head on with such a violent explosion of color. I never was a big fan of orange to begin with, but this experience was really helping me to turn the corner into a full-fledged hatred of it.
I sat there for a minute while they removed my bib and wiped the drool from the corner of my mouth. Half of my face was numb and I'm sure I looked real tough.
"How you feeling, Mr. Mathews?" one of them asked, lifting the arm on the chair so I could slide my feet over the side.
"Just fine and dandy," I answered, though that isn't exactly what came out. My tongue and lips were not cooperating with my brain.
I stood up and shook off the last effects of the gas. The dentist patted me on the back.
"We ended up doing an extraction, Keith. The tooth was a little too far gone to salvage." I moved my numb tongue to what was now a blank space in my mouth. At least it was in the back, I thought, thankfully. I wasn't gonna have to look like one of those Brumley guys with no front teeth.
"Okay," I said. What else could I say, really… I mean, it's not like I could demand they put it back or something.
"Alright, well, here's a prescription for an antibiotic, and you give us a call if that extraction site gives you any trouble." He handed me a piece of paper which contained writing completely unintelligible to any human being who was not either a doctor or a pharmacist. I shoved it into my pocket.
This time I just nodded. Speaking seemed hardly worth the effort. He half-pushed, half-escorted me around the corner and back down the hall to the reception area. As the dentist bade me farewell and I heard the door shut behind me, I was surprised to see Marcia sitting in one of the aforementioned torturously uncomfortable chairs, looking at me.
"How'd it go?" she asked.
"Okay, I guess," I shrugged. "I got one less tooth now," I added, trying to make my speech somewhat intelligible.
"Well, you still got a nice smile, anyway," she said. "Did they give it to you?"
"Huh?"
"The tooth. Did you get to keep it?"
"What? Why?"
"Oh, come on, Two-Bit! Are you trying to tell me the Tooth Fairy doesn't come over to the East side of town?"
"Baby, believe me, the Tooth Fairy wouldn't hardly last more'n a second in my neighborhood. She'd be robbed of her teeth, her virtue, and her magic wand, to boot, 'fore she even crossed over to the East side o' Sutton!"
She laughed and stood up, disappearing into the back while I checked out.
"Don't go anywhere," she called over her shoulder. "I'll be right back."
I couldn't believe my ears. This cute Soc girl was telling me not to get lost? This was certainly unexpected, and… different… though not unappreciated. I suddenly had no future plans to move, at least not until directed by the little lady to do so. I filled out the paperwork and handed it back to the receptionist, who, again, giving me far more respect than I probably deserved, referred to me a second time as "sir." I was starting to wonder if this office might not be a secret passageway into a new dimension, one where greasers were referred to by fancy titles, and Socs, rather than telling us to get lost, demanded we stick around. I wondered if this happened in all dentist's offices or if I had just hit the greaser jackpot with this one.
She finally reappeared through the door, a small vial in her hand. I assumed it was some sort of additional drug her father had sent my way, so I was surprised when she handed it to me and announced that it was my tooth. Nice, I thought, my now demoralized and useless molar. It was demoralized, and I was demolarized. I laughed out loud at my joke, and she seemed to assume that it was due to having been given the tooth, rather than a result of my my very narrowly concealed insanity.
"Uh... thanks?" I suggested, raising an eyebrow. Girls always seemed to like that.
It worked, because she smiled.
"You got any little brothers or sisters?" she asked.
"Kid sister, why?"
"Give it to her and let her tell your parents she lost a tooth." She grinned a surprisingly devilish grin at me, and continued, "Hey, somebody should benefit from all your pain and suffering, right?" God, this girl was getting cuter by the second.
"I s'pose you're right about that," I said. I still hadn't moved. Hell, she told me not to, and I was starting to feel like I just might do anything this girl told me to, what with a smile - and a body - like she had. My eyes had begun wandering south, and my head snapped back up to attention as she spoke.
"So… I know you just got a tooth extracted and everything," she started, twirling her hair around her finger in a way that turned me on more than I would have thought possible for such an innocent act, "but… would you like to go get a soda, or something? No big deal, just at Rusty's or something?"
She had to be kidding. She really wanted me to go somewhere with her? To be seen, with me, in public?
"Yeah, I guess I can fit that in." I sounded like a drunk, what with my mouth half paralyzed, but she didn't seem all that turned off by it. Come to think of it, a good deal of the time, I was a drunk, and I certainly had been that night at the movies when we met, so I probably didn't sound all that different than usual - to her, anyway. "I, uh… don't have my car here, though. I took the bus." Soda had borrowed the car to go see Ponyboy's track meet. I was supposed to meet him there, but hell, there was no way I was turning down a drink with a cute girl to go watch the kid run around in circles wearing skimpy shorts. No siree, bub.
"That's okay… I have my car here. You probably shouldn't be driving, anyway… you still seem a little…out of it." I wasn't out of anything, least so far as I could tell, but I was getting more in to her with each passing moment. And the next second, when she reached out and grabbed my hand – the one not holding my bloody tooth in a vial – and pulled me out the door, I was more than happy to oblige.
"C'mon, let's go… all the good seats at the counter get taken after five." She pulled me outside into the parking lot where her shiny little corvette sat, the sun glinting off the hood and nearly blinding me. I found I actually preferred the blinding sunlight to the orange hell I had just emerged from.
I wonder how many poor molars it took to pay for this? I thought, as I climbed in and admired the leather seats. Something about this situation was considerably less than tough, me getting driven somewhere in a girly car by a real looker like her, but for some reason I was willing to go with it. I actually was kinda glad I didn't have my car; it woulda bothered me, sticking a classy girl like Marcia in my dirty old heap of tin. Kinda like putting caviar in a sardine can. Or somethin' like that.
She drove us over to Rusty's, neither of us saying much on the way, though she did catch me staring at her once and smiled a smile that made me wonder just exactly what was really going on in that upper-class mind of hers. I never would have thought that it could have been the same thing I had been thinking about, when I was looking at her, but something about that smile…
I must be still high from the laughing gas, I decided, snapping back into reality. Seriously, was I kidding? There was no way this girl could be interested in me. She was just being nice, probably pitying me for everything that went down after that night we met, with Johnny and Pony... I was Jerry Lewis to her Grace Kelly, for Christ's sake. And I made that tragically clear as I tripped getting out of the car in my hurry to try to get around to her door and open it for her. She stepped out and laughed at me sprawled out on the ground.
"You're really funny, Two-Bit."
Yeah, real funny, I thought, wondering how many of her upper-crust friends had witnessed that stellar example of chivalry gone awry. I stood up and she took my hand again, leading me into the diner as I dusted myself off. I recognized a few of the kids in there from school, but this place was definitely out of my element and quite a few people shot glances my way to make sure I knew it. I was more than happy to return the look with a cheesy grin and a wink, which made them all look away pretty quick.
We sat at the counter and she ordered a Cherry Coke while I opted for a root beer, though one without the "root" was sounding pretty damned good right about then. Damn, but this girl was good. So good I felt kinda nervous being around her. Yeah, a Bud would have taken the edge off quite nicely... At first, our conversation seemed a bit awkward, but eventually we settled into a pretty comfortable groove. We chatted about nothing too serious, but she had quite a sense of humor on her and that, in my book, is just about the sexiest thing a girl can have, well, besides the obvious…uh…physical attributes. And she had those, too; don't get me wrong. She had a whole lot going for her, in a whole lot of ways.
It was dark by the time we got up to leave, and as we walked outside she shivered. I took off my jacket and went to put it around her shoulders, leaning her up against the wall of the diner as I pulled it over her shoulders. In that second she looked up and it was pretty obvious as to what was gonna happen next. I leaned down and in, the sweetness of her Cherry Coke still evident as I pressed my lips up against hers, and closed my eyes.
"Mr. Mathews…. Mr. Mathews!" I was being shaken.
What the…? I opened my eyes and immediately closed them again at the onslaught of orange. Who the hell thought that color was a good idea? And the taste in my mouth wasn't Cherry coke, it was disgusting gritty toothpaste.
A dream? That was a fucking dream? Are you kidding me? I couldn't remember having been so annoyed in quite a long time.
The dentist and hygienists were talking to me, telling me they took the tooth out… I guess that part wasn't a dream… but I wasn't listening. Eventually, they stood me up and walked me out to the waiting room, where I was not surprised to see…
Nobody.
Just the receptionist, smiling at me as I walked over to fill out the forms. I filled in all the information, signed at the bottom, and then asked the date so I could fill that in.
"It's the first, hon. April Fool's Day. You better watch your back out there tonight," she joked. I noticed that, in the real world, I was no longer "sir."
Now that was rich, I had to admit. April Fools Day, and nobody makes a bigger fool of ol' Two-Bit than ol' Two-Bit himself. I had to laugh as I handed her the papers and turned to walk out the door. Hell, least the only one who knew what a fool I'd been was me. Thinkin' a girl like that'd want to kiss me… I just shook my head, and wished the receptionist a good night.
"Oh, Mr. Mathews, wait," she called. I turned back around. "I almost forgot. Dr. Browning's daughter wanted me to give this to you." She walked around from behind her desk and handed me a folded paper. I unfolded it and read it. On top was a phone number.
Two-Bit,
Here's my number. Don't lose it this time! I heard they took your tooth out… I hope the Tooth Fairy is good to you. Call me!
Marcia
I stood against the outside wall of the office, waiting for the bus, reading the note again. Any other day, any other girl, and I would have been at the first pay phone I could find, setting up a date for that very night, if not sooner.
But this time, I decided, I would wait. For another day, at least.
