Turn 5 of 26

Let the answer come out and hear what your voice sounds like now. It sounds like Megan’s, With a lisp and braces messing up speech as braces form on your teeth. You sit down and feel the metal on your teeth. Dr. Prewitt says good and continues calling on the others who speak just like you, with a lisp and braces messing up their speech. The class ends and you see the same routine for leaving.

The answer comes out of you before you can shape it, and you hear your own voice the way you'd hear a stranger's through a wall.

"Firtht you factor the quadratic, then you thet the denominators equal," you say, and the lisp is there — thick, whistling, Megan's voice wearing your words. Your tongue feels the metal as you speak it: brackets cold against your teeth, wire tight, rubber bands snapping faintly with every S. They formed sometime in the last minute. They are simply there, and your mouth already knows how to work around them.

"Correct," Dr. Prewitt says, and writes something beside your weight on the board — a check mark, tall and unhurried.

"Well done, Emma. Sit down, dear."

You sit. Your tongue runs along the braces without your permission, mapping every tooth, and where the metal presses there's a dull ache like the teeth themselves are moving, being arranged into something tidier. You try to feel horrified and what you actually feel, underneath the horror, is a small warm glow — correct, well done — and the glow frightens you more than the wire does.

Dr. Prewitt calls the rest of the problems, girl after girl after girl, each one standing and lisping through the same consonant graveyard, and you understand that you are listening to your own future in thirty variations. Then the clock at the back of the room reaches the hour and Dr. Prewitt caps her chalk.

"Notebooks away. Same seats Thursday."

Twenty-nine girls rise in unison, chairs folding, pencils capped, notebooks squared to desk edges. Your hands do it too. You gather your things and stand in the aisle, and the last thing you see before the doorway is the board — your weight, underlined, check-marked — and then you are walking up the stairwell with Ruth beside you, sunlight ahead, and you cannot remember leaving the room. There's a gap where the door should be, a smooth white nothing, and your feet already know the way home.