Show Me Your Teeth
Celeste’s teeth were horrible. I don’t know if it was due to depression, some kind of phobia, or pure laziness, but she never brushed them. I’d gone to school with her since kindergarten, but her teeth were at their worst in fifth grade. They had taken over her mouth and grown in every possible direction, like untamed patches of kudzu. Most were baby teeth— some so tiny that they barely peeked out from her crimson gums. The whole set was the same shade of yellow as those illustrated manuscripts of poetry from the Middle Ages, or maybe what vomit would look like if you ate too much corn. There were bits of red and black ingrained into her teeth; maybe if connected, they’d form a hitherto-undiscovered constellation. I never discovered what these pockets of unusual colors resulted from. I’ve theorized about them being pepper flakes or magical polka dots that wormed their way into the intricate series of canals that comprised her enamel.
My affinity for the gruesome sides of the human condition didn’t start with Celeste. A few years prior, I asked my dad if I could see the black circles on his teeth— cavities he had filled as a child. At first, he entertained these abnormal requests, I guess he recognized my need to understand the myriad ways in which the human body collapses in on itself. Still, it didn’t take long for him to grow tired of my incessant prodding. He quickly stopped opening his mouth wide enough for me to peek in, but he couldn’t stop my mind from fixating on the way those dark spots stood out against the yellow-white of his molars. I was incapable of steering my gaze in any other direction. I needed to bear witness to the gore and the decay.
Celeste and I had Ms. Gallagher in fifth grade, the worst human being we’d ever encountered in our short little lives. Ms. Gallagher was a devout plainclothes Catholic with a tight blonde bob, a permanent scowl on her twenty four year old face, and a stick up her ass. Sometimes, when helping our classmates with their fractions worksheets, she’d bend way over to take a closer look and her pants would sag just enough so you could see her underwear, and we’d all look at each other and giggle under our breath. There were rumors she had a boyfriend, and sometimes kids would say they saw the two of them together at Mass on the weekends, but I never believed it. I couldn’t comprehend the idea that another person could enjoy her company.
As a child, Celeste was far from my closest friend, and yet, she populates many of my memories of these formative years. There are dozens of pictures of the two of us together, taken on field trips and first days of school, on Halloween in kindergarten, when I went as a racecar driver and Celeste dressed as a witch. With the gift of hindsight and a sliver of wisdom obtained in young adulthood, I have deduced that our kinship partially arose from forced proximity, but there had to have been something deeper there. Perhaps we sensed a recognition of ourselves in one another; maybe my brown eyes peered into her hazel ones and saw a piece of myself reflected back.
The other half of our grade had Ms. McLiney, who had curly auburn hair and matching freckles that made her look kissed by Irish angels. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, we switched classes in the afternoon and got to have Science and Social Studies with Ms. McLiney. I imagine that the euphoria I got from being in her classroom was similar to how prisoners feel when they let them out into the yard. Ms. Gallagher would yell at you at 8 A.M if you looked at her the wrong way, which, in turn, made Ms. McLiney a bastion of kindness in our eyes. To be clear, she knew when to lay down the law, but she still had the decency to let you enjoy the last gasp of childhood that fifth grade offered.
By the final year of elementary school, Celeste had become a crucial part of my life. Our kinship flourished under Ms. Gallagher, with us growing closer in our shared commiseration. During one of these countless moments, I must have had the realization that she could provide the same service that my dad once did. Now that I’d found someone else with poor dental hygiene, I fixed my desires towards her. Celeste was fine with me asking to see her teeth on a daily basis. Her incisors all seemed on the verge of spilling out of their sockets and into the sandbox. Looking into her mouth, my heart raced and goosebumps poked through the peach fuzz that had just begun to coat my arms. I don’t know why it was so critical to me that I got to see her teeth. In a perverse way, it seemed to me that I could not live without them. I needed her in a manner that went beyond the basic responsibilities of friendship. Perhaps it made me feel better about myself; it gave me a leg up on her in the late-elementary-school rat race we found ourselves in. Celeste’s teeth were simultaneously the most grotesque and the most marvelous things I had ever seen.
Our school had monthly Friday pep rallies; I couldn’t say what purpose they served, because god knows we weren’t good at sports. While the rest of our grade came up with victory chants; Celeste and I sat on the dirty gray gymnasium floor and made up games to pass the time. During one of these pep rallies, I asked to see her teeth. Not the first time I’d asked, but this time within earshot of Ms. McLiney, who thought I was making fun of Celeste. I didn’t get why Ms. McLiney couldn’t just comprehend my reasoning; she didn’t get how necessary Celeste was to me. At eleven years old, I didn’t understand how to put my deepest, most bizarre desires into words. That was the last time I got to peek into her mouth. A month later, Celeste had every unsalvageable tooth ripped out by the orthodontist. Since so many of those were baby teeth, they began to grow in normally. By the time we got to eighth grade, she had a healthy, full set of teeth.
Ms. Gallagher had been chased out of our school by then, but Celeste and I now had to join forces against our Religion teacher, Mr. Gomez, who was short, fiery, and balding. We argued with him each week about whether or not our existences were bathed in sin. Somewhere between fifth and eighth grade, Celeste had grown pensive and distant, and not in the usual way that a middle schooler does. I could tell that she was fighting to define herself with a fervor that not many other kids needed to have. She and I were both only children with older parents, leading us to be infinitely sheltered— even by Catholic school standards. Everyone knew we were both gay before we did, and— at least in my case— before I knew what the word entailed.
Celeste and I developed our first crushes around eighth grade— and for the first time we realized that our schoolyard attachments to other boys and girls were something much more complex, and, due to where we went to school, dangerous. There were only 30 kids in our grade, so it made sense that we’d both fall for close friends. Thanks to a pernicious combination of fear and denial, I kept my feelings close to my chest. Celeste did not.
All of the other gays and emos in our grade found each other and constructed a makeshift social circle, which functioned less as a friend group and more as the LGBTQ student organization we never could have formed at Catholic school. We brought umbrellas and picnic blankets to eat our lunches on the sidewalk, much to the endless chagrin of Mr. Gomez, who also functioned as the lunch monitor. The girl that Celeste had her heart set on was a mutual friend, so Celeste usually joined us for lunch, though I don’t think she enjoyed our company much. Eventually, the group grew tired of her oddities and clinginess, and Celeste was banished. All of us were queer, or some other form of outsider, but the majority of us recognized that we had to stifle fundamental aspects of ourselves in order to survive in this space. Celeste seemed uninhibited by this informal rule and dared to be markedly different. I still cared for her, but never had the courage to stand up for her or even talk to her individually. I stared at Celeste across the blacktop, trying to telepathically communicate to her that she still had a place in my heart. When I would find myself trapped in the confines of a similar situation, and had no one left to turn to, I reached for her in my memories. Celeste left middle school with no friends and her first attempt at expressing her sexuality had been met with cold shoulders and averted eyes. Nobody ever heard from her again.
Sometimes, I dream that the onyx-colored spots in Celeste’s mouth swallow me up like a black hole and I disappear into her forever. We become one body, one flesh. I don’t believe that I was in love with her, but perhaps we could’ve escaped the dangers of our young lives together. That we would pack our sleeping bags, climb out of our bedroom windows, hop on our bikes and ride down the yellow brick road, away from Mr. Gomez and Ms. Gallagher and the false Jesus that they sold to us. That we would set ourselves free.
About the author
Elijah Ritch is a queer creative nonfiction writer from Austin, Texas. He currently lives in Albuquerque, New Mexico, having attended the University of New Mexico, where he earned a BA in Film History & Criticism with a minor in English. During his time at UNM, he wrote for the Daily Lobo and was a reader for Blue Mesa Review, where he helped to put together the magazine's biannual issues. His exploration of queerness, his Texan upbringing, and where the two meet is informed by the work of Elif Batuman, Richard Siken, and Edmund White. In his free time, he loves to think about the all-powerful entity that is pop culture.
