#157 Wiggle Tooth

It started at lunch, when I bit into a carrot and my milk carton fell over.

At the time I didn’t think that biting into a carrot could possibly make my milk fall over. I just thought maybe I’d bumped the table. It could have happened. I wasn’t paying much attention because when I bit that carrot, my tooth came lose, and that hurts!

“What happened?” Joe asked.

“You okay?” Kelly watched my milk puddle all over my tray.

“My tooth is loose,” I said, holding my hand up over my mouth to hide the chewed bits of carrot.

“Awesome,” said Andy. “Does the tooth fairy bring you a dollar?”

“A dollar? I get five dollars when my teeth come out,” said Kelly.

I grabbed some napkins and started mopping the spilled milk, then gave up and just went to throw out the rest of my tray.

It happened again during class. Mrs. Reed was talking about prepositions or something, and I was staring at my pencil lying on top of my language arts worksheet. My loose tooth still hurt a little from the carrot during lunch, so I pushed at it with my tongue.

The tooth wiggled. So did my pencil.

I made a kind of sniffle-snort of surprise. Was there an earthquake going on. I looked all around the room, but nothing else was shaking.

I pushed at my tooth again, staring at the pencil. Wiggle tooth. Wiggle pencil.

Awesome.

I tried it with some other stuff in the room. I made the American flag over the front board wiggle, but no one seemed to notice. I guess they thought it was just the air conditioning. I tried to make the second hand on the clock go around a little faster, but I couldn’t quite get the timing right, and just kept making it go back and forth. I even made Mrs. Reed’s glasses wiggle, so she wrinkled up her nose, then took them off and set them on her desk.

On the way home from school, I was so busy looking for stuff to wiggle I didn’t notice my brothers arguing at first.

“You have to give it back to me!” my little brother Tyse said.

“No, you traded it to me. It’s mine now,” my big brother Tim was being a jerk again.

“I’ll give you back your guy.”

“I don’t want him back. You traded and that’s it.”

My little brother shoved past me and ran out into the crosswalk. He turned to scowl back at my big brother. That’s probably why he didn’t see the car coming around the corner.

“Tyse!” my big brother shouted.

I stared at my little brother as the car braked and swerved, trying to miss him. There was no way to reach him in time.

I grabbed my tooth and pulled as hard as I could.

My brother jerked out of the way of the car, as if someone had pulled him on a puppet string. He landed on his backside in the road just as the car squealed to a stop. An old lady got out and started yelling at us for running in the street.

My little brother Tyse, his eyes big and scared, stared up at me, and at the bloody tooth I was holding in my fingers.