The only solution to this condition was to install a janky contraption the doctors called an “expander,” conceived by the same sadists who designed mattresses in the nineties or the wooden benches at Starbucks or any number of other bullshit things created solely to bring nothing but torment and pain to everyone, particularly narrow-mouthed children like myself. Here’s how it worked: The expander was a metal apparatus that the dentist literally installed in the top of my mouth with actual cement, which I’m pretty sure he was not even legally allowed to use, because he was a dentist and not a fucking construction worker, but that’s not the point here. He cemented that thing to my mouth, and then gave my mother a tiny key, and whispered in her ear instructions for how to use it. Every night, just before bed, she was to insert the key into my gaping mouth, slide it into a teeny hole on the bottom of the device, and turn it three times, and with every turn, the spacer would crank wider, like those torture devices they used in the Middle Ages to rip people apart, except instead of ripping someone apart, it would slowly lurch the roof of my mouth wider and wider. My mother claimed it was just as painful for her to crank the key, because she knew how much it hurt and a mother feels the pain of her children or some shit like that, but that’s bull, because it felt like a very tiny person with a very tiny chainsaw had climbed inside of my head and started to chop off my face from within, and I’m pretty sure she didn’t fucking feel that. In fact, I would go so far as to say that she even enjoyed it some nights, because I was a smart-ass, and my narrow mouth and I deserved every bit of pain we had coming to us.

In addition to the physical pain, though, the device was a general pain in the ass to live with. It was a giant hunk of steel cemented to the top of my mouth, which you’d think would be a perfectly discreet place to keep a hunk of steel, but turns out, not so much. For one, metal of the medical variety is always somehow sharper and more jagged than the metal they use for, say, barbed wire or hacksaws. So I spent most of the four months I wore this device hoping that I wouldn’t wake up one morning to find half of my tongue lying next to me in bed. It also turns out that your tongue generally needs the full space of your mouth in order to speak in a language that other humans understand, so I sounded like I was constantly trying to get an oversized bite of peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich unstuck from the back of my teeth.