When I was in sixth grade I found out I'd have to get Medicaid braces. I was indifferent; so many people were getting them that it was almost cool, plus I'd one day have straight teeth. But there was still a stigma about braces, that they made it hard to eat, impossible to chew gum, and especially difficult to kiss.
It wasn't until I had had them for over a year that I began to worry about that last bit. Many of my friends had already kissed girls and a couple of them didn't have braces. But my mother put the fear into my head that if I kissed another girl with braces we could possibly be stuck together, and unable to separate and in severe amounts of pain and embarrassment we'd have to call an ambulance to take us to the hospital to detach us. And there was the possibility of cutting a girl's mouth with my braces even if she didn't have braces. So I was in no rush to kiss any girls any time soon.
But there was one girl named Emma who "liked" me. Her friends approached me at recess with notes delivering this secret, further scaring me from publicly shaming myself. She had braces but she wasn't bad looking, she was kind of cute, in a mousey way. But I didn't "like" her, and plus, there was always the chance my mother would see us in the emergency room stuck together if I gave her that long-desired kiss…
This went on for a few weeks until one day after school when there was a dance, a winter ball. I went with my friends and we huddled on one side of the gym, occasionally boldly asking a member of the opposite sex to slow dance. Towards the end of the dance, Emma came up to me and asked me to dance. This was unheard of. Very rarely did girls ask boys to dance, only when they really liked them and wanted everyone to know it. So I put my arms around her waist and we started bobbing in circles. She looked at me coyly and smiled, exposing her shiny metal teeth. I smiled back, embarrassed, always embarrassed. By the end of the song, I realized that maybe this wasn't so bad; she was soft and slender and we were dancing closer and then, she leaned up and I leaned down and kissed her on the mouth. It was fast, but it was my first kiss. And we weren't stuck together. It actually felt good.
And it was that kiss that gave me the confidence to kiss Emma again with my Medicaid braces. And again. And again. And we never got stuck together.
Author Resource:-
HansonPlaceOrtho.com, Hanson Place Orthodontics is a Brooklyn NY orthodontist run by Dr Yakov Eisenberger dedicated to improving the smiles of patients using the latest treatment technologies.
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