Prom

Presents

The nurse slipped the blood pressure cuff around Amy's arm and pumped it up. Air hissed out and she looked at the dial, wrote on a clipboard.

"Ninety six over sixty six. Good. Let's take a look at your ears." With white-gloved hands she snapped a cover over her otoscope. She lifted up the top of Amy's right ear and stuck the plastic head inside. "Great." She checked the other ear. "Great."

She reached into the clear jar on the counter and pulled out a popsicle stick. "Stick out your tongue and say, 'aah.'" Amy did, and the nurse shined the light into her mouth. "You have beautiful teeth, sweetheart."

"Ankh ou," said Amy. Then the nurse pushed her tongue down with the popsicle stick. Amy felt a searing, slicing pain on the left underside of her tongue. "Oww!"

The nurse pulled back the stick. "What happened?"

"I think I cut my tongue,” said Amy. But the nurse hadn't even pressed down that hard. Amy got off the bed and walked over to the rectangular mirror on the wall and touched her upper lip with her tongue to look at the underside. Sure enough, there was a welling red line there. As she watched, a small drop of blood slid down towards the bottom of her mouth.

She glanced at her lower left canine and then her eyes locked on it. There was still a streak of red from the top down the side. And something was different about it. It was long. Much longer than she remembered it being. She looked at her upper left canine. It, too, was longer. And it had gained a silky bit of curve. Her right canines were the same. She curled her tongue under, probed the cut as she stared. Her teeth looked very sharp.

She looked at the rest of her face. Dark, intense eyebrows. Pale gray eyes flecked with patches of shadow. Prominent cheekbones, straight nose, wideish mouth. Nothing else had changed. Just the teeth.

"I'm so sorry," said the nurse. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah," said Amy. "Do my teeth look strange to you?"

"Wish I had a set just like them."

"I think they grew."

The nurse pursed her lips. "Let's take your temperature," she said. She patted the bed. Its white paper covering crackled. Amy sat back down and the nurse stuck the thermometer under her tongue, much more carefully this time.

Its firm fullness and subtle taste of rubber were reassuring, and Amy stared off at the wall. Suddenly the thermometer beeped three times and the screen flashed.

The nurse peered down at it. "You can't move your tongue, sweetheart," she said. "It interrupts the reading."

Amy realized she had been running her tongue around the bottom of her mouth. There was a sweetness there, like she had just been eating ice cream. She had been trying to get at every bit of it. She placed the taste the second she thought about it. It was blood. Coppery, tangy, like always. But there was also a richness she couldn't remember from the previous times she'd bit the inside of her mouth, or licked a cut on her arm.

The nurse pressed a button on the thermometer and it beeped again. Amy came back to the present and stuck out her tongue. This time she got all the way through her temperature reading.

Everything normal. The nurse finished filling out Amy's chart and clicked her pen shut. "Just sit tight, the doctor will be right with you."

The door closed behind her and Amy looked at herself in the mirror. She pulled her lips back from her teeth. Even from this far away, her canines looked big. She prodded the upper left one lightly with her tongue and immediately felt a little sting. She felt it with the pad of her thumb. Razor sharp. It was a little gross, like the tooth had broken and she was feeling the jagged edge where it had shattered. But it was solid, and smooth, and strong.

She started to feel nervous, so she closed her eyes and pricked her tongue again. Just hard enough to draw blood. There was a little pain, but it calmed her too. It really did taste pretty good. She scraped her tongue against the bottom of her flat middle teeth, spreading the blood around. There was barely any of it but she could feel it spreading. She could taste it with every taste bud. It was like biting her nails, but better. She couldn't believe she didn't do it all the time.

The clock ticked and Amy started to think about Beatrice. The first time she had seen Beatrice’s face on TV, she had had this feeling of recognition. Not like they had been friends at summer camp years ago, or anything. Amy didn't think that they had ever actually met. More like she was a long-lost sister, separated at birth. Thinking back to their meeting, remembering her laugh and her slightly husky soprano voice, Amy had that same feeling. Knowing her, but not knowing her. Like déjà vu. It was weird.

And Beatrice had been murdered. Amy knew that. Everybody knew that. But she had been right there, in Amy's room. They had talked. So what use was there in saying something like, “I don’t believe in ghosts?” She had been terrified at first, but most of that had been shock. Beatrice wasn’t trying to hurt her. She wasn’t even trying to scare her. But why had she chosen to show up in Amy's room, of all the rooms she could have chosen? Beatrice had had plenty of friends. Everyone knew a girl who knew a girl who had been hit hard, hit personally, by the news. Why wasn’t she hanging out with them?

Amy mulled it over, pricking her tongue again and swishing it slowly through her mouth. She’d have to ask Beatrice about it again next time she came over. Maybe she just wanted to spend some time with someone who wasn’t always crying about her death. That kind of thing could get depressing, after a while.

The one thing that still bothered her was Beatrice’s parting advice. Just tell the doctor you didn’t get any sleep last night, it worked for me. Had she seen someone nobody else could see in her room, too? How soon before she died? What did that mean for Amy? 

But her thoughts were interrupted when the doctor came in the door. He glanced over her chart, furrowed his brow.

"You saw someone in your room, yes? Who was it?"

“It wasn’t anything,” said Amy. “I just freaked out. I didn’t really get any sleep last night.”

He fixed her with a sharp look for a moment, over his clipboard, over his silver glasses. “Hmm,” he said.

By the time Amy got back home, Beatrice was gone. But she had left a present on Amy’s pillow, decorated with a little bow of burgundy yarn from her sweater. A brand new toothbrush.