Teething, by Kimberly Rooney
The morning after the first nightmare, Hannah assured me it was a good sign. “Teeth falling out in dreams means you’re on a path of rebirth.”
It was two days after my twenty-third birthday, and my feet were resting on a cardboard box I had yet to unpack despite moving in almost six months prior. She was finishing the last of her toast as she checked the transit app for the next 61. When I asked her what I was rebirthing from, she looked up from her phone and wiped flakes of yeast from her lip. “Latent stress from graduation,” she determined after several seconds. “You’re finally actualizing and accepting the non-student version of yourself.” I nodded, careful to avoid the slanted ceiling. Agreeing lent a weight of correctness to her answer, but more importantly, it warded off my understanding of the dream: a premonition.
After the second dream, I began checking my teeth in the mirror in the morning and before I went to sleep. I pulled back my upper and lower lips and turned my head to each side to inspect as far back as I could. Nothing seemed to have changed, but I took a picture each evening and created a folder on my phone for comparison. After a few days Hannah suggested that if I was going to spend more time in the bathroom in the morning, maybe she should use the bathroom first.
“Can’t we keep the routine, at least until I get a job?” I asked, but the next week, she missed the 61 and had to run to make the 87 several blocks away. That night, she stood over the kitchen sink and scrubbed baking soda paste into the sweat stains around the collar and armpits of her blouse. I sat with my laptop at the table under the slanted ceiling even though her seat was empty. As I scrolled through LinkedIn, she sighed.
“I really think it’d be easier if I used the bathroom first.”
I looked down at the half-filled application on my screen. I’d applied to a different job at the same company in April, but despite seeing them post about their new hire on social media, I had never heard back. Hannah held the shirt up to the light to see if she’d missed any spots, shifting the fabric so the water-weighted sections danced like a polyester ghost. The stiff cotton of my T-shirt scratched at my neckline, and I pulled it away from my skin. It wasn’t like I was going anywhere in the mornings. “O.K.,” I said. She turned the cold water on and rinsed the baking soda out. On her way out of the kitchen, she kissed my cheek. “Thanks, babe.”
The next morning, I slept in. Hannah had already left, but her blouse was still hanging on a mostly empty drying rack in the living room, squeezed between the coffee table and the couch. As the toaster heated up my bagel, I checked my job hunting spreadsheet. I added a row for November 10 and scrolled through the job listings I had yet to apply to. Leaning over the table, I rested my elbow on the surface and my forehead on my palm. By the time I updated the status of several unanswered August applications from pending to ghosted, just to feel a sense of doing something, my bagel had gone cold.
As I ate, the hardened crusts grated against my teeth. During a particularly forceful bite, my top right molar shifted, and I dropped the remaining bagel onto the plate. I touched the tooth, first with my tongue, then with a probing index finger. No movement. I withdrew my finger, now covered in saliva and bread gummy from chewing. With a damp finger, I opened a new tab and began scrolling through Indeed postings until I found one I hadn’t seen before.
After the third dream, the roots of my teeth began to ache.
“Maybe it’s not a self-actualization thing,” Hannah conceded as she watched me examine my teeth the night before Thanksgiving. We were staying in her parents’ guest bedroom upstairs but were crammed into the hall bathroom. Before we went to bed, I took 400 milligrams of ibuprofen to soothe the dull pain that radiated from my upper jaw up into my forehead. Two days later, as Hannah drove us back to our apartment, she apologized that her parents kept asking me about job hunting. A drum-heavy pop song played on the radio, and I could feel each beat in my gums.
“It’s fine,” I said, checking my phone’s clock. Two hours until I could take more ibuprofen.
“It’s really not. I asked them not to be so pushy about it.”
“You talk to them about my job hunt?” I tugged at my sleeve, glancing up to see her lips press together.
“Yeah.” The syllable came out clipped and resistant to further questions. The song ended, and Hannah flipped the radio station to a different preset.
On the second day of December, it snowed overnight, and my entire mouth ached. I alternated ibuprofen and acetaminophen throughout the day, but neither did much to stem the pain. After dinner, Hannah and I sat on the couch, watching a movie one of her coworkers had recommended. Months ago, we had pushed the couch and table forward to make room for my boxes of books and a suitcase of formal and professional clothes, still unpacked. She’d said in May that we could save ourselves the time packing them later by storing them there until we moved. When I didn’t find a job by August, we decided to stay in her one-bedroom apartment. We hadn’t talked about the boxes since then.
Pain flared in my left molar, and my cheeks tensed. I stood, and she pulled her knees to her chest so I could shuffle out, careful not to kick over the mugs of hot chocolate Hannah had made for us. In the bathroom, I picked up Hannah’s makeup mirror and tilted my head back, adjusting the mirror’s position and angle until I caught the reflection. The tip of my tongue rolled over the errant tooth. I felt it budge under the pressure, but I couldn’t see any change. I put the mirror down on the sink vanity and stretched the corners of my mouth until they felt like they would crack, opening my mouth taller and leaning towards the mirror with my right shoulder forward. The molar sat between another molar and a bicuspid, shining with saliva. I hooked my finger around the inside of my cheek and pulled to let more light in.
From the living room, I heard Hannah’s laugh and the sound of a text notification.
“Should I pause it?” she called. The muffling of the distance made it feel even more like an afterthought. I thought of her coworker, whom I’d never met yet had intruded into our apartment—Hannah’s apartment—with their recommendation.
“No, keep watching!” I called back. I tried to remember the last time I had recommended a movie to Hannah. My fingernail bit into my cheek, and I let go, wiping the spit on my leg. When I returned to my spot on the couch, Hannah didn’t look up.
The next week, while we sat in the kitchen over dinner, our moms texted about Christmas. Hannah’s winter jacket was draped over the back of her chair. We lived in an old building designed to keep the windows open during the winter, but the landlord had since painted them shut, so I wore a sports bra and shorts.
“So, what are you thinking?” Hannah asked, shedding her sweater and tossing it on top of her jacket. The carved wood on the back of the chair pressed into my shoulder blades, and I brought my feet up to the edge of the cardboard box.
“We just did Thanksgiving with your family. Let’s do Christmas at my parents’,” I suggested. She frowned, and the edge of the box began pressing into the arches of my feet.
“We’d have to fly…are you good to buy a ticket?” she asked. I looked down, letting the pain in my feet intensify to take my mind off the persistent pounding in my gums. My parents had told me after graduation that they expected me to pay for my own needs, and I’d burned through most of my graduation gifts on rent. In September, Hannah had agreed to pay two-thirds of the rent until I could find a job, but I could now count on my hands the months of rent I could afford. Hannah stood and walked over to me, straddling my lap and sitting down. She rested her arms on my shoulders and smiled to soften her suggestion: “Why don’t we go to my parents’ house? We can drive. It’ll be easy.”
“O.K.” I glanced away, but she tilted my face back towards her and kissed me. She had told me the week before that her therapist thought it would be a good idea if we made an effort to be sexually intimate at least once a week. I ran my hands up her thighs, and she kissed down to my neck. Her nose pressed against my jaw, and I winced, pulling back.
The corner of her lip tugged sideways in a half-hearted reassurance that we could try again another time. She stood up, kissing just below my hairline with a murmured, “I love you,” then walked into the living room.
Christmas creeped closer. Most mornings, I woke with certainty that my teeth had chipped, cracked, loosened, or fallen out. I would run to the bathroom to check my teeth, navigating the obstacle course of the living room with speed earned by repetition. I had started sleeping on the couch so I didn’t wake Hannah in my race to the only well-lit mirror in the apartment.
Taking acetaminophen and ibuprofen had become rituals to mark how far into the day I was. If I reached the second round of ibuprofen and hadn’t sent out two applications, my anxiety would rise in my abdomen and chest, meeting the toothache in my throat. Most days, all I could manage was changing the status of jobs I’d applied to in early August from pending to ghosted. Hannah told me it was the holiday season, so jobs would be slower to respond, and even fewer would be hiring.
“Everyone’s pretty much checked out until the new year,” Hannah told me during dinner when I mentioned the lack of responses. Her voice was breezy, as though she’d checked out too. I pushed around the pasta Hannah had made after a coworker had shared the recipe with her. Despite my unbounded time, I couldn’t remember the last time I had tried making a new recipe for us.
A pang in my back left molar made me run my tongue underneath, pushing up to keep the tooth from falling. The pulsing ache only became stronger, like a heartbeat spreading into each tooth and reverberating through my jaw. I checked my phone. Almost time for the third round of ibuprofen. I tried not to think of the holes I was likely burning into my stomach lining.
“Good, isn’t it?” Hannah grinned from across the table, and I mustered a brief, “Yeah.”
Her face fell, and she set her fork down in her bowl. “Everything O.K.?”
“Everything’s fine.” My voice sharpened at the end, turning accusatory that she felt the need to ask. She drummed her fingers against the table.
“How’s Maggie?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t really talked since graduation.” Maggie had gotten a job in June as a marketing assistant at a publishing house. She’d been saying we should call ever since she moved to New York, but my first two attempts to set a time were met with apologies that she was still getting settled, New York is just like that, you know? I didn’t have it in me to tell her I didn’t, and I hadn’t messaged her since. I pushed the pasta around some more, metal scraping against ceramic. “It’s just hard keeping up with everyone.”
“You should!” Hannah’s voice turned encouraging. “Especially since your time is so flexible now.” My teeth pulsed again, and my expression soured. “El. I didn’t mean it like that.”
“It’s fine,” I said, and she sighed, rubbing her forehead with the knuckle of her index finger as though she could neutralize any wrinkles I was causing.
“I just think…maybe you would feel better if you talked to your friends.”
“I’m trying,” I insisted. “You make it sound so easy, but—”
“El, I don’t want to fight about this.” She stabbed at her pasta, layering several pieces of fusilli on the prongs of her fork. “It’s been a really long week. Let’s just…forget it, O.K.?”
That night, after Hannah went to sleep, I scrolled through LinkedIn for jobs to apply to in the morning. Hannah had insisted that I stop looking through job boards during and after dinner, so I made up for it in one last scroll before I went to sleep. The screen washed my face and shoulders in soft blue-tinted light, making the oil and dirt sit more heavily on my skin. My hair clung together, and I pushed a matted clump behind my ears. “Skincare is self-care,” Hannah used to say with an exaggerated affect to mimic her coworkers, but she had stopped in July when she started buying skincare products on their recommendations. Now, three tiny bottles and two jars sat in a neat line on the sink counter in the bathroom. I wondered if there would be more if she didn’t have to pay part of my rent. She had used student loans to cover rent in undergrad, and while her salary was just enough to cover two-thirds of the rent, loan payments, and all the utilities on a careful grocery budget, there was little left over. I picked up my phone, navigating to the banking app, but I didn’t open it. I knew what it would say—the same as it had when I’d checked in a post-nightmare haze the night before. Four months of rent left. I considered asking Hannah to cover three-fourths of the rent, just until I could find a job.
Instead, I returned to the LinkedIn homepage and scrolled past several job announcements from friends and tenuous acquaintances. A high school classmate had posted about a new side business for her pottery. I typed out a quick, “congrats!!,” then unfollowed her. I shut the laptop and stared at the ceiling as the darkness adjusted into distinct tones of shadow. When I fell asleep, I dreamt of smashing clay vases until the shards drew together into a wave that smothered me.
On Christmas morning, I took 600 milligrams of ibuprofen and moved four applications from early September from pending to ghosted. As Hannah showered, I checked my email for any rejections. When she emerged in a green knit sweater and black pants, I was still hunched over my laptop. My cheeks and teeth throbbed, spilling down into my chest.
“We really need to get going. Traffic’s going to be rough.”
“Sorry. I was just seeing if there were any new listings.”
“El, it’s Christmas. No one’s posting listings.” She sat down next to me and closed my laptop. “Just think of this as a holiday from job hunting. You’ve earned it.”
I recoiled, shifting away from her and pulling my knees to my chest. “I haven’t earned anything. I’m sorry I can’t relax and enjoy things like you can.” Her cheeks tensed, so I added, “I don’t get paid to take a day off from job hunting.”
“Look, I know this sucks, but I’m not the one—” She closed her eyes, then began again. “Let’s just go to my parents’, O.K.?”
“You’re not the one who what?”
Her eyes opened. She leaned away from me, and I felt myself shrinking in proportion to her movement. “I’m not the one who sits around all day deciding what to apply for, then decides most of the jobs aren’t good enough or that I don’t fit the qualifications, so there’s no point in applying anyway.”
“So it’s my fault I haven’t found a job yet?”
“No, but—”
“I’m so sorry I’m not the perfect job candidate, and I never spend enough time networking, and I can barely get out of bed most mornings.”
“You don’t even sleep in our bed anymore!” The force of her scream shrunk me further. She sank back against the cushion and pressed the palms of her hands against her eye sockets. She ran her hands up her forehead and through her hair. Her eyes closed, she said, softer, “You never ask me how my work is going. I’ve tried not bringing it up because I know it’s hard for you to talk about, but you never even ask.” She opened her eyes but fixed her gaze at the boxes stacked behind the couch. Her hands fell to her lap. “All of your friends—we’ve been trying to talk to you, but you just…it’s like we have to be miserable just because you are.”
“You’re making me feel like I can’t talk to you at all.”
“You know that’s not what I meant.”
“You keep saying I need to talk to my friends, but none of my friends have messaged me in months.”
“Because you don’t message them back! And we’re so tired of putting all the effort in when we have actual jobs and—” She rubbed her fingernails into the palm of her other hand. “I’m not blaming you.”
“Really. I couldn’t tell.”
She stood, stepping over the coffee table and clipping the edge with her foot. A growl caught in her throat, and she kicked the table. It scraped half an inch closer to me, and the contact echoed in the roots of my teeth. I relaxed my jaw but ran my tongue under my teeth, trying to secure them.
“I think it would be better if I went to my parents’ alone.”
“Hannah—”
“We can talk when I get back.”
Without her, the apartment filled with the clanking of the heater. I sat in the same spot on the couch, and the radiator echoed as though from a distance. Time passed in the magnifying pain from gritting my teeth until I reached for the bottle of acetaminophen under the coffee table. I stopped when I felt a crack.
My body contracted with fear, making the next molar fracture. I ran to the bathroom as the bicuspid next to them split, and I held my palm over my mouth and leaned my head forward to catch any enamel or pulp. I curled over the bathroom sink and spat. Clear saliva caught on the grime that I’d promised Hannah I would clean two weeks ago. I wiped my mouth with the back of my hand and opened the photo album on my phone, searching through the last two weeks of photos for a sign that this had been coming. A molar on the left side of my mouth cleaved open, and my body shook. I spat again and ran my finger over my teeth, but there was nothing but smooth, unbroken enamel.
Another crack, this time on a lower incisor. A text notification from Hannah dinged: “Just got to my parents. I’ll bring you back some food. Mom made ham and roasted potatoes.”
I opened the message and typed back, “thanks. i love you.” A front tooth splintered, and I added, “i’m sorry. text me when you’re on your way back.” I waited for a reply, but it didn’t come. Instead, a text notification from Maggie slid down. I tried to swipe it away, but the teardrops on the screen disrupted the motion, and my phone opened the message. Above her “Merry Christmas!!! Hope the job hunt is going well!” text sat her last one from October. “Just give me another week and then we should def call!! I miss you so much!!!!”
I set my phone down and looked up at my reflection, opening my mouth and stretching until the corners tore. Tears rolled down my face, searing the raw lines cut into my cheeks. I covered my lower face with my hands, pressing inward with my fingertips and working the intact skin like clay.
Kimberly Rooney 高小荣 is a queer Chinese-American adoptee currently based in Pittsburgh, PA. Their writing has appeared in The Offing, Longleaf Review, Chestnut Review, Waxwing, and others, and when they aren’t writing, they enjoy calligraphy, singing, and crocheting. You can find them at kimrooneywrites.com or on Twitter @kimlypso