Handle With Care by Picoult Jodi

Author:Picoult, Jodi [Picoult, Jodi]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, pdf
Publisher: Hodder
Published: 2009-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

I had braces, too, but not the kind that kept my legs from bowing. Mine were the ordinary kind, the ones that had changed the whole shape of my head during the progression from palate expander to bands to wires. This much I had in common with you: the very second I got my braces, I began counting the days until they would be taken off. For those who’ve never had the displeasure, this is what braces feel like: you know those fake white vampire teeth you stick in your mouth at Halloween? Well, imagine that, and then imagine that they stay there for the next three years, with you drooling and cutting your gums on the uneven plastic bits, and that would be braces.

Which is why, one particular Monday in late January, I had the biggest, soppiest smile on my face. I didn’t care when Emma and her posse wrote the word WHORE on the blackboard behind me in math class, with an arrow that pointed down at my head. I didn’t care when you ate all the Cocoa Puffs so that I had to have Frosted Mini-Wheats as a snack after school. All that mattered was that at 4:30 p.m. I was getting my braces off, after thirty-four months, two weeks, and six days.

My mother was playing it incredibly cool – apparently she didn’t realize what a big deal this was. I’d checked; it was right on her calendar, like it had been for the past five months. I started to panic, though, when it was four o’clock and she set a cheesecake into the oven. I mean, how could she drive me into town to the orthodontist and not have to worry if her knife slipped out clean in an hour when she tested it?

My father, that had to be the answer. He hadn’t been around much, but then again, that wasn’t radical. Cops worked when they had to, not when they wanted to – or so he used to tell me. The difference was that, when he was home, you could cut the air between him and my mother with that same knife she was using to test her cheesecake.

Maybe this was all part of a calculated plan to throw me off. My father was going to show up in time to take me to the orthodontist; my mother would finish baking the cheesecake (which was my favorite anyway) and it would be part of a big ol’ dinner that included things like corn on the cob, caramel apples, and bubble gum – all forbidden foods that were written on the reminder magnet on our fridge with a fat X across it, and for once, I’d be the one everybody could not take their eyes off.

I sat at the kitchen table, scuffing my sneaker on the floor. ‘Amelia,’ my mother sighed.

Squeak.

‘Amelia. For God’s sake. You’re giving me a headache.’

It was 4:04. ‘Aren’t you forgetting something?’

She wiped her hands on a dish towel. ‘Not that I know of .

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