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When I was younger, my wisdom teeth grew in just fine. It seemed to me like the lucky other kids at school were absent left and right, in their beds with swollen cheeks stuffed full of cotton, and I kept hoping that my teeth would need to be pulled, too. Give me an excuse to stay home for a few days, to make Marian giggle with whatever featherbrained things I said under the effects of the laughing gas, to be hand-fed warm soup by my mother even while I whined for her to leave me alone. But no: the teeth came in straight and even, sprouting from my gums as perfect as the headstones in Wind Gap’s Confederate cemetery, and although my mouth itched with the change I did not get to stay home from school. I was fifteen then.
Now, I can call out from The Daily Post whenever I want, and Curry will tell me to get some rest. Now, my mother is in prison back in Missouri for the murders of Marian Crellin, Natalie Keene, and Ann Nash. Now, I only hear Marian’s giggling voice in the dreams that make me toss and turn and wake in sweat-damp sheets, and it sounds nothing like Amma’s. (Amma, who lives with me in my apartment in Chicago and just started her sophomore year at the local high school. Amma, who makes friends just as readily as she did in Wind Gap, and whose friends I never speak to anymore, not since Lily Burke, just in case. Amma, who smiles at me like we’re sharing a secret, even though I wish I didn’t know the thing I think I know about Natalie Keene and Ann Nash ever since Lily Burke turned up dead, too.)
Now, I am thirty-three, and the crowding of my teeth in my jaw is giving me headaches.
“That can happen, sometimes,” the dentist tells me. “Even if they initially grew in well, they can start to cause problems later in life. Not to mention that being so far back in the jaw, they’re nearly impossible to brush well by yourself, which leads to cavities. Best to just get them extracted, since they’re bothering you. You can schedule the procedure at the front desk.”
I’m twitchy in the days leading up to the surgery. I keep thinking of when I saw Natalie Keene’s body wedged in between buildings, her mouth hollow and empty gums dull red. The bloodstained pliers the police had found in my mother’s room with the dead little girls’ DNA all over them from when their killer had yanked out their teeth. I feel shivery and sick with anticipation, and I tell Amma that Curry’s going to be the one who drives me home after the procedure, even when she begs and pleads and reminds me of how much progress her driving instructor says she’s making towards replacing her permit with a license.
“You love Curry more than you love me,” she pouts, with a cold glint in her eye that makes me glad that Curry is a grown man, a lot stronger than Amma. We’re sitting on the sofa together, takeout spread on the coffee table in front of us; she flops back against the cushions to fold her arms over her chest.
“I need a licensed driver to be responsible for getting me home,” I tell her.
She keeps pouting for a while, then she gets all wiggly and excited and asks me, “Can I keep your teeth when they’re out?”
“You… want my teeth?”
She nods, smiling close-lipped, and I try to push away the surfacing thoughts of dead little girls with holes in their mouths.
“You know, I… I don’t think it’s a good idea for you to have those.”
“How come?”
“Well… What would you even do with them, anyway?”
She sticks her bottom lip out at me. “Please, Camille?”
“I don’t think the dentist will even let me keep them, Amma,” I lie.
“Will, too. You just have to call and ask ahead of time. I looked it up. C’mon, Camille, do it for me.” She gives me big round eyes and a coquettish tilt of her head, fluttering her lashes.
“I dunno,” I mumble, looking down and picking at my sleeves.
My reticence to give into her sours her mood again. She storms off to her room in a huff, slamming the door, and leaves me to finish my chow mein alone.
“Cubby, why did I get handed a little box of your teeth?” Curry asks me as he drives me home.
“My sister wants them,” I say, muffled around a mouthful of foul-tasting storm clouds, harsher consonants disappearing into the edges of the softer ones. Telling him is a slip of the tongue caused by the faraway haziness of the world and things like consequences. At least I have enough awareness to know that I can’t talk too much about my little sister, or I might say something more incriminating, like how much less pleasant it is to be high right now than it was when she kissed a pill past my lips at that party a couple years ago. Can’t say that.
I’m thinking about it now, though. Curry’s car jostles over a bump in the road, and my head swims like I’m back there, in that too-warm room with her, her hot little tongue soft and lithe in my mouth. Her chapstick had tasted like strawberries, or maybe she’d been sucking on a Blow Pop before the party. I spend the whole drive home remembering it. Maybe Curry tries to talk to me during the journey, but if he does, I’m not paying attention.
When we get home, Amma’s there, and she tells Curry, “Eileen called. She said she wants you to come home right away. I can take care of my sister,” and gives him a big, winning smile.
There’s a frown on Curry’s face, and I try to decipher what that means, but it’s gone before I can figure it out and he says, “Alright. We’re just a phone call away if you need us. You hear me, Cubby? You can call.”
“I’ll be fine,” I try to tell him, and the words come out mostly intelligible in spite of all the fluff in my jaw. He hands Amma my bag, helps me onto the couch, and then goes.
Belatedly, I realize it wouldn’t make sense for Eileen to have called Amma. Maybe that’s why Curry was frowning. Maybe he’s worried about leaving me in Amma’s care, but he’s too polite to say.
She stands over me where I lie, eyes sparkling and mouth curving upward.
“You look like a dope,” she says, and then kneels, folding her arms on the couch cushions and resting her chin on them, our faces not very far apart at all. “Your eyes are all unfocused. Like you’re high.”
“I am high,” I remind her.
“You remember the last time we were high together?” she whispers, and I glance at the front door on instinct, as if to make sure Curry’s really gone.
“I remember,” I admit, and her grin broadens like she’s somehow read into what I’ve said, like she knows I was thinking about it on the drive over. I try to puzzle out whether or not those two little words could really have been that telling, but I can’t figure it out.
“That was real fun,” she says. “Wasn’t it fun, Camille?”
“I hurt myself that night,” I recall, remembering my impact with the ground, blood and gravel on my skin. Amma’s eyes dip to my wrists and travel up my arms to skate along my torso, and I realize belatedly what I’ve accidentally reminded her of, even if the scars are covered by my clothes. “No,” I say. “Not like that. On accident.”
“Didn’t you have fun that night?” she presses, shuffling closer on her knees.
Cautiously, I nod.
Amma reaches out and gently brushes a strand of my hair out of my face. She says, “I’m gonna take care of you while you’re sick.”
“I’m not sick,” I remind her. “I’m just healing.”
“Isn’t that the same thing?” She cups my jaw in her hand, but my face is too numb to feel it. “You’re drooling.”
I don’t say anything when she runs a thumb over my bottom lip and coaxes my mouth open. She reaches in with careful slender fingers and plucks the pillows of cotton out; as they come loose, there’s a release of pressure in my gums, and I narrowly avoid coughing.
“There’s still a little blood,” she says, staring wide-eyed into my open mouth like she’s looking in the windows of a candy store, “but I don’t think you need more cotton. It’s mostly stopped.” She keeps peering in until I shut my mouth, saliva- and blood-soaked cotton wadded up in her hands. “Do you want a pill?”
“I’m fine for now,” I tell her, and wonder if she’ll step away.
She doesn’t. She stays kneeling there, in front of the couch, face right by mine. Her eyes are bright and eager as she watches me. She takes deep breaths in. Is the smell of blood wafting from my mouth?
“Are you gonna go to sleep?” Amma asks.
“Dunno.”
I don’t really want to sleep. I want to lie there on the couch while she kneels in front of me. While she runs her hands through my hair, maybe. Brushes a finger down the bridge of my nose like I used to do for Marian, like our mother used to do for all of us, until she stopped doing it for me because I would shake her off and complain.
“You look sleepy,” says Amma.
I nod, the motion sluggish.
“I’ll get you a blanket and some water.” She stands and walks away.
I’m asleep before she gets back.
I wake to a dull throbbing in my gums and jaw. The anesthetic is wearing off, but some effects still linger: the ache is muted, the lower half of my face slightly numb but not entirely. Draped over my body is the promised blanket. Amma is standing in the doorway to the kitchen, leaning against the jamb and watching me.
“I thought you might be waking up soon,” she says. “It’s time for you to take a painkiller.”
I sit up, mumbling an agreement and disoriented from being unconscious a second time in one day. Amma fishes one of the capsules out of the paper script bag and brings it to me. It’s blue in color, a deep, glass bottle-blue like that of the poison we were once spoonfed by Adora.
I wait for Amma to hand me the pill. Instead, she tugs the blanket off of me and climbs into my lap, straddling me. Her pleated miniskirt rides up her thighs, knees turning red where they’re pressed into the couch cushions, and she leans in close enough that our chests brush.
“Open wide,” she tells me, voice low, and I obey slowly. Now I’m waiting for her to place the pill on my tongue, but she doesn’t do that, either.
She puts it on the tip of her own tongue and leans in, her sweet breath filling my mouth just like it had back in Wind Gap. She’s warm and soft against me, her lips plush, her tongue pressing the pill past my teeth. I tremble underneath her and realize that somehow my hands have found their way to her hips. I can taste the lingering remnants of mint gum.
Her tongue pushes and pushes, crowding mine back into my mouth, and the capsule tumbles to the back of my throat. I nearly choke, pulling back from her and sucking in enough air that I manage to dry-swallow it, and then her mouth is back on mine. And I know I should probably stop her, but… nobody can ever say no to Amma. Me, least of all.
Her hands come up to cup my jaw, fingers prodding at the half-numb flesh and making starbursts of a deep ache radiate outward from the back of my mouth. My lips don’t feel entirely my own as I kiss her back.
“Amma,” I breathe, “we shouldn’t,” and then gasp a little as her teeth sink into my bottom lip. It’s a terribly strange sensation, the muted pain of her incisors and the knowledge that it should hurt more.
“Shh,” she tells me. “It’s just like last time. That’s all. But this time it’s ‘cause I’m taking care of you.”
I want to protest, to remind her that I’m the older one, I’m supposed to take care of her, but I’m too exhausted, too wrung-out and sluggish, and instead I just let her reach up and hook fingers against my lower teeth to pry my mouth open wide.
“It looks so cool,” she whispers, squirming in my lap, all pink-cheeked while she peers at the wounds in my gums. “It’s like being naked.” Amma giggles, and I imagine what she’s looking at: the swollen, wet, red flesh behind my molars, the weeping pulsing openings left by the extractions. I’m reminded of when I caught her watching the suckling pigs, how she’d squirmed just the same then, flushed and excited at the sight of the bleeding mother sow.
My mouth tingles as she continues to hold it open, her thumb skating along my bottom row of front teeth, her fingernail pressing into the gums there. For a second I worry she’s going to prod at the healing extraction wounds, but her fingers steer clear of the back of my mouth. After a moment, she parts her lips and leans in, and I think she’s going to kiss me again, but she’s still holding my jaw open, saliva pooling under my tongue.
Her tongue finds its way to the back of my mouth and I realize what she’s going for just a fraction of a second before she makes the contact, tip of her tongue gently brushing my back molar and then beyond. Her tongue is so far into my mouth that I nearly gag around it, saliva trickling in the back of my throat and I’m not sure if it’s hers or mine; she licks with great tenderness the first of my wounds. There’s an electric zing of sharp pain and then a dull throbbing that beats in time with my pulse. I make a creaking noise of weak protest like an old door.
Her tongue is hot; I taste metal when she runs it carefully, slick and soft, against the tender open flesh. It’s like being naked, her voice repeats in my head, over and over, and my whole body shudders. Am I bleeding? It feels like maybe I’m bleeding again.
My hands cling to Amma’s hips; her knees shuffle restlessly where they’re spread over my thighs, and she pushes her tongue even impossibly further into my mouth to caress the wet red holes where my teeth used to be. Her humid breath in my face is making it hard to breathe. My eyelids flutter. She tilts her head and switches to the other side, licking, licking, licking at the stinging wounds. I envision pink flesh against angry crimson, dripping. There’s a puddle of our mingled saliva in my jaw and some of it is starting to spill from my open mouth, dribbling across Amma’s fingers where she’s still holding me open.
I hurt. But I let her do it anyway, because I can’t fucking help myself when it comes to her. I know I’m more than a bleeding animal to her, even if it might not look that way from the outside, and that’s why I can’t help myself. Weaned on the same poison, so she knows me better than anyone, and she relishes it. She can’t get close enough to satisfy herself, but I want her to keep trying, want the love that she showers me with so readily, want her to lick up the blood in my mouth because nobody else ever would.
I imagine what it would be like to get my hand under her skirt. To run my fingers along something as soft and warm and slippery-wet as what she’s running her tongue over now. My hands tremble where they rest on her hips, but don’t move.
She finally pulls back, a strand of spit clinging to both our bottom lips until she gets far enough away that it can’t thin any further and finally snaps. She sits in my lap, one hand on my shoulder, the other trailing from my mouth down my chin and neck, smearing saliva there. I can finally close my mouth.
“I wish I could’ve been the one to do it,” Amma whispers. “I would’ve taken such good care of you, Camille.”
My mind is fuzzy and distant, bright white spots dancing in my vision. My chin is wet. I ask, “Do what?”
“I could’ve pulled them.” Her voice is low. She squirms in my lap again, her thighs trying to pull together and prevented from doing so by my legs between them. I imagine that she can feel her heartbeat in her cunt and feel my own heart skip a beat. She continues, “If they woulda let me in there, I coulda done it so well. All they’d need to do is shoot you full of lidocaine and give me the tools. I would’ve liked to see.” Her hips twitch toward me, briefly rutting against the air before she stops the motion.
“It wouldn’t have looked pretty,” I tell her breathlessly.
“Would, too. The way they’d slide out of your gums all shiny-white. Blood vessels clinging ‘til they broke. Gush of red.” She grins. “You could’ve been awake for it. Drugged up so you wouldn’t feel anything but a little pinch.”
I swallow hard. “That sounds like a nightmare, Amma.”
She pouts at me. “Not if you get to look at my face while I do it. Don’t you feel safe with me, Camille?”
My breath feels hot and misty when I give a shivery exhale.
No, I think. Not really.
But before I can answer, she’s leaning back in.
I open my mouth.