“The invisible ones. Obviously,” I say.

“Just so you know, they’re a lot more expensive than traditional stainless brackets.”

I sigh, then agree to the more fiscally responsible choice. It doesn’t really matter. I’m not a teenager. No one’s looking at me anyway.

The final step is taking impressions of my teeth, top and bottom. Michael leaves to see another patient while his assistant looks for the right size metal arch trays for my mouth and prepares the gloppy mixture that goes in them. I settle in, play with my bib, and think of Charlotte.

“I left my dog at home,” I chatter nervously to her as she spreads the amalgam into the two trays. “She’s kind of a therapy dog but not really. She’s an unofficial therapy dog. She doesn’t wear a stupid vest and I don’t walk her—I wear her, in a sling.”

The assistant looks at me. There’s a giant bird on my head. I’m just another weird person her mother’s age babbling about something totally gross and embarrassing, but I’m too distracted by sling-withdrawal—I should have brought the dog. Why didn’t I bring the dog? Isn’t this exactly the sort of stressful event when I should have the dog with me?—to really care. We’re both clearly relieved when Michael finally returns.

“So,” he says, rolling toward me on his wheely-stool, clasping his gloved hands together. “Have you decided? Are you going to stop the entropy and control the chaos of tooth regression?” I don’t know if he’s trying to sound like a dental brochure on purpose or not, but it’s time to commit to a yes or no.

I think of Glenn’s body, her chaos, cells dividing everywhere. Suddenly my physiologic mesial drift and malocclusion don’t seem so bad. In fact, I’m lucky to have my chaos, the relapse of shifting teeth, so minor and harmless by comparison. I reach for Michael’s arm. I tell him I’ll do it, but only if he can squeeze me in now. “Before I change my mind.”

* * *

I wait, reclined, with all the comforts of modern dentistry—fancy headphones blasting Enya into my ears, which I’m too lazy to change and too embarrassed to admit, even to myself, that I actually like—the little remote that controls the wall-mounted flat-screen television where any number of movies are available for distraction—it’s all too complicated, just like the one at home that I always have to beg Teddy to show me how to use.

But who needs a flat-screen when the flashbacks are coming, fast and furious, inside my head: I’m eleven, twelve, thirteen; the metal brackets are fitted around each tooth, not just affixed to the front of the teeth the way they are today: the tiny dental pliers thread the wires from tooth to tooth, on uppers and lowers, the gums bleeding. All while my mother sits in the waiting room, distracted behind a copy of Better Homes and Gardens, in which she’s folded down pages of rooms with wallpaper she liked and recipes for easy weeknight chicken, even though she will always leave the magazine behind the minute I come out and even though she never cooked from recipes anyway.