I sit on the plaid couch. I shift my weight and it creaks. Everyone knows what a dentist’s office looks like, but this one is worse. My eyes dart around the room, to the light fixture, to my mom, to the table with the magazines, to the front desk. The white door to the outside world of people with perfect teeth is so near and the one that leads to the room of no turning back is so far.

I sit, close my eyes, and concentrate, hoping I might disappear. Instead a picture enters my head as if my eyelids were movie screens. I am standing in a white room with no doors, no windows, nothing - except a mirror in the middle of the wall. I walk toward it and smile, and, to my horror, my teeth are green and yellow and purple and red. All are twisted and crooked; some are even upside down.

I open my eyes. I am back in the waiting room with my mom sitting next to me. “Alexandra Whisenhunt,” someone calls. I turn my head. “Time to get your braces,” a rosy-cheeked woman says. I get up and slowly walk to the room of no turning back.