Other People’s Mouths by Leah Sipher-Mann

It was yesterday we infected everything. It was pretty late at night, like one or two in the morning, maybe even later, and Manny stole the keys from the top of her dresser. He looked all proud of himself when he did it, even though she doesn’t even try to hide the keys at all, just throws them on top of her dresser when she gets home from work. That’s how we know she’s home: we hear the keys hit wood and then we rush to turn off the downstairs TV since we don’t have a remote and we’re not supposed to watch TV before dinner but that’s all we really do before dinner anyway.

“Lucilaaaaaaaa,” she’ll moan from her bedroom, “I am so tired and is that the television I’m hearing because if it is the television then I am even more tired, because I am tired of hearing the television before dinner.”

Our mother is always moaning about something we’re doing, always waving around and moaning about how she’s tired and especially about how she’s tired of us and our big, lazy butts. She says this so much I got scared and went to look in the full-length mirror in her room to make sure my butt wasn’t too big. And it’s not, really, it’s small and round and I like looking at it and I think Manny’s friends like looking at it, too.

Me and Manny were sick of it, all of her whining and her not letting us watch TV or have friends over, so we wanted to get her in trouble. Manny thought he was so smart for taking the keys from her dresser, but it’s not that big of a deal because she’s half deaf and like I said, she just leaves her keys sitting there.

The only hard part was figuring out how to get to her office, and it wasn’t even that hard because she’s practically deaf and also, she goes to bed by eight almost every single night. We usually stay up and watch TV with the volume up to a million anyway, so when we stomped around clanging the keys all over the place, she didn’t even wake up. She probably didn’t even turn over, or do one of the noises she always does in her sleep, when we started the car outside. She was probably so tired she didn’t even change out of her work clothes before she went to bed.

Manny has his permit and everything, so technically he knows how to drive but he’s not supposed to do it without an adult in the car, but I thought I could probably pass for our mother anyway because of my big lips. Everybody’s always talking about my big, fat, lips, even Grandpa Joe, who said they’re “womanly,” and I didn’t think that was gross until Manny told me it was. So I try to have something in my mouth, or near my mouth, as much as I can to make people look at it. Manny’s friends call me “Pop” because I almost always am sucking on a Blow Pop, but only the red kinds like Strawberry and Cherry because I don’t like when my lips turn weird colors.

While we were driving to our mother’s office, I thought I saw a cop and I told Manny, and he told me I was probably just making it up to scare him. But I wasn’t, and just to be safe I plumped my lips out as far as I could to look like our mother in case it was a cop and he was looking for an adult in the car. The whole rest of the drive was okay, though, because I made Manny go the speed limit.

Once we got to our mother’s office, we had no problem getting in. The key didn’t get stuck or anything and they don’t even have any kind of alarm, which we didn’t know beforehand but I guess we decided to risk it. Our mother’s office is kind of in a residential neighborhood, in this brick building that used to be a dance studio, and when we drove by the building we always saw girls in fancy outfits going in and out. Maybe the people in the neighborhood decided they needed dentists more than people to teach spoiled girls how to dance, but our mother isn’t even a dentist, she’s a dental hygienist, and Manny’s friends always think it’s hysterical when anyone ever says that word, “hygienist.”

Anyway, we walked right into her office and found the room with her name on the door and the words “Dental Hygienist” and right away started looking in the drawers with the toothbrushes and floss and basically just taking everything out. Then, all of a sudden, Manny’s friends Peter Vosway and Ernesto Muñoz were there, I think they took the bus or something, and even though we just wanted to make a little bit of a mess, they started taking the toothbrushes and floss and putting them in their pockets like they were going to steal them.

Peter is a fat, blonde boy who doesn’t pronounce words right and gets red in the face when anyone ever corrects him but not because he’s embarrassed, just because he’s so mad. Peter wouldn’t look so fat if all of his clothes weren’t hand-me-downs from his older brother, Johnny Vosway, who isn’t so fat. It’s just that Peter Vosway’s stomach always looks like it’s kind of dripping out of his shirt and down his pants.

Ernesto Muñoz isn’t fat, but he uses too much hair gel and he even got Manny to start using it even though I told him it looked like crap. While we were in our mother’s room, Ernesto kept trying to get me to sit in the dentist chair and when I would do it, he would try to get in on top of me but I would always push him off.

“Manny! Tell your stupid sister to get in the damn chair and stay there!” Ernesto kept saying, and Manny kept shushing him and telling him he was going to wake all the rich neighbors.

I kept thinking about the girls in their sequin dance costumes and how I could probably look real good in one of those tight little outfits, especially one of the kinds with fringe that dangles down and lands right on your butt. It probably looks amazing when they do their moves in the dance shows and everybody probably watches their butts the whole time, maybe even the gross grandfathers.

Anyway, while Ernesto is trying to get me in the dentist chair, Peter Vosway takes the little tool our mother uses for other people’s teeth, the one with the mirror on the end, and starts putting it in his mouth. I don’t even know where Peter got the tool but even Manny knows it’s kind of a big deal that he’s putting it in his mouth. That’s all our mother talked about when she was taking Clinical Dental Hygiene Three at Community College. I know because she always made me quiz her and all her study sheets said that keeping the tools sterilized at all times was the most important part of everything because if the tools aren’t sterilized, it’s not okay for them to come in contact with other people’s mouths.

That’s when our mother got big into cleanliness and hygiene around the house and she’d watch us brush our teeth at night to make sure we were doing it right. She got real picky about the kitchen, too, and she’d microwave the sponges every night because she said it got rid of all the germs that build up during the day.

So it was a big deal that Peter Vosway was doing unsanitary stuff to the dental tools and Manny started screaming, “Shit, Pete, stop putting those things in your mouth! That’s sick, man, that’s freaking disgusting! Do you know who has to put those things in their mouth tomorrow?”

Peter Vosway didn’t stop, he just started pretending he was brushing his teeth with the Dental Carver our mother uses to pick out the plaque in other people’s teeth. I knew it was the Dental Carver because I used to help our mother go over her flashcards when she was at Community College.

Then Ernesto started doing it too, and he grabbed a whole handful of tools and started rubbing them all over himself, including putting some down his pants, and the more pissed my brother got, the more tools he started grabbing until all the tools in the drawer were out, and I knew that even them touching the tools a little meant they weren’t safe to use on other people’s mouths. But they weren’t just touching the tools, they were licking them and putting them in their pants, which I thought was really gross.

“Okay, that’s the freaking end,” Manny said, probably because Ernesto and Peter were making so much noise that he was scared someone would call the cops and tell them about a disruption at the dentist’s office. And since Manny lifts weights he borrowed from our across the street neighbor in the basement sometimes, he’s pretty strong and he just pushed Peter Vosway and Ernesto out of our mother’s room and out of her office. The whole time, his mouth looked like a big, black hole and that’s how I knew he was real mad because usually when his mouth does that I try to throw things in it and that makes him even more mad. Anyway, I had to follow them out the door, but the room looked like a wreck and I knew our mother was going to get in trouble if she went into work and her room looked like that for the patients, with nothing sterilized and everything unsafe and infected.

We all got in the car and just started driving, because Peter Vosway and Ernesto took the bus over to our mother’s office, so obviously they had no way of getting anywhere and Manny just kept saying shit, shit, shit, because maybe he thought like I thought, that our mother might get fired and then she wouldn’t be able to pay the loans from Community College, and we both knew the loans were a big deal because she talked about them practically every other second.

“Relaaaaaax, dude,” said Ernesto when we were in the car, “They won’t even blame your mother, they’ll think it was just some stupid vandals.”

He had the window in the backseat rolled down and was practically hanging all the way out of it and I thought he looked like a dumb dog with his tongue flapping all around like it was. I had to sit next to him and he kept on poking me in the arm and making my arm fat hurt, and then he took off his seatbelt and started to climb over to me, his fat tongue sticking out of his mouth. I kept pushing him away and all I could smell was his stupid hair gel, the cheap blue or green sticky kind you get at drug stores, and I wanted to barf.

But I was also thinking that if just our mother’s room was a mess and no other hygienist’s room was a mess, they were probably going to blame our mother.

“Look, Lucy,” said Manny, “I’m going over to Ernesto’s for the night, until this thing clears up. Where do you want me to take you? Do you want to go home? She might wake up and then who knows what.”

“Your sister should come to my house, too. Then we could really have fun,” Ernesto said, and then he stuck his face close to mine and waved his gross tongue at me again and I could smell his sticky hair gel.

I didn’t know what to say because even though I wanted to go home, I didn’t want our mother to wake up and know that we were out all night, and I also didn’t know what I’d do if our mother came home from work after being fired on account of all her tools were left unsterilized and in a big, infected mess.

“Take me back to the office, Manny. Take me back right now.”

“What? No way in hell are you going back there. We gotta stay away from there. No way in hell are you going back there.” He just kept saying “No way in hell, no way in hell.”

“Manny, if you don’t turn this car around, I’ll get out when it’s moving,” I said, and I really meant it. I really wanted to go back.

“I’m not turning around,” said Manny. Peter Vosway laughed a little.

So just I did it, even though I was scared as anything and I thought I might die just from being so scared. But I did it, I just got out when he stopped for he next light. I thought it would be hard and I’d have to jump out and roll away like they do in the movies, but I just opened the door and walked right out. I could hear Manny yelling out the window and honking the horn I knew he would turn the car around and come after me, but I just started walking toward the office.

Lucy is sitting on the end of her mother’s long, red dentist’s chair, and thinking the tools scattered all over the floor look like long needles when she squints her eyes.

She has to look all over the room before she finds the alcohol she is looking for. She isn’t sure if this is the way her mother sterilizes the tools, but she doesn’t know another way to do it. She picks out two rubber gloves from the box on the counter and snaps each one on. Looking at her hands, she thinks this is how her mother’s hands must look every day. She thinks how her mother must look forward to the second she can peel off the gloves and feel the new air on her hands.

Lucy picks up the first tool from the floor and dips into the little dish of alcohol she poured, careful to cover the whole pick with the alcohol, careful not to touch it to any of her exposed skin or her clothing, and then sets it on the bed of blue paper towels in the top drawer below the counter.

As she is placing the tools in the drawer, she lines each one up exactly parallel to the one before it. After she pushes the last tool into line, she stands up and looks at the row of them, early sun angling white spots onto her face. The tools look like clean gray slits on the blue paper towel.

As she is placing the tools in the drawer, she lines each one up exactly parallel to the one before it. After she pushes the last tool into line, she stands up and looks at the row of them, early sun angling white spots onto her face. The tools look like clean gray slits on the blue paper towel.