After school, Mom picks us up to take me to the orthodontist. Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do with It” plays on the radio and Mom sings along. The same boy who blew Mom a kiss last week does so again. His friends laugh at him, which makes me feel like he’s laughing at me and my mom. I see Peter walking home, and he thankfully doesn’t look in our direction. Good. I don’t want him to know that my mom is an exercise freak/karaoke singer. Yeah, she sings karaoke like it’s nobody’s business during parties.

I’m also not in the mood to hear love songs since my heart’s all torn up and gouged out. It’s so hard trying to get Peter to look at me as girlfriend material. Lisa and Shakira are totally in my way. Lisa is hanging all over him shamelessly, and I’m attempting to be bolder than her without stepping on her toes as her best friend. I also want a relationship to happen naturally, yet I feel like I’m going out of my way with Peter by trying to get noticed. I don’t know if I can take the chance of looking like a fool and being rejected with all the extras I’m doing (like pretending to be interested in sketching). Then there’s Shakira, who is beautiful and more of an artist than I am. I did take a peek at her sketchpad today and she isn’t as good an artist as Peter, but she’s good enough to draw people who look like people, without outrageous features or any other oddities. Still, I feel like I’m able to compete with Lisa and Shakira. With or without braces, with or without glasses, with or without an extra ten pounds, I know that I’m girlfriend material.

Mother starts yowling like a cat in pain (or heat) when Tina Turner hits a high note.

“Mother!” I snap.

She keeps singing. The woman is tone deaf. I sigh. The sight of the road pleases me, because now we’re far less likely to be spotted by my classmates as she sings off-key, dances in her seat, shakes her shoulders, and puffs out her chest. I want to walk home, but I have to go to this appointment with the orthodontist. Lisa slicks on some more Fierce Pout. Mom asks her what it is and they start to talk about makeup. I look out of the window, wanting to be somewhere else—in Peter’s arms, in a size-four dress, on the beach. My stomach growls loud enough for me to hear it, but nobody turns my way. Tina Turner is drowning out my hunger pangs, but I want people to know about my pangs. I want everyone to know that I’m hungry and starving during Ramadan, I’m afraid of Grandpa’s driving, I don’t want braces, and I’m madly in love with Peter. I want to be heard.

“Do I look like Angelina with this?” Lisa asks my mom.

“More than you used to,” Mom says. “But Angelina has big lips and I don’t think you can buy anything from the store to get that pout.”

Everything is about what Angelina would do. Since Lisa wants to be just like her, it means being slinky and seductive. She’s going to take Peter from right under my nose. I’m going to be like Jennifer Aniston, spurned and lonely, and with braces. Dad always tells me that life isn’t fair, and at this point I know what he means.

Dr. Abdelwahab and Dad work in the same building. The building is three stories high and is packed with doctors. There’s a gastroenterologist (someone who fixes gastric stuff), urologist (a urine doctor, I guess), endocrinologist (a doctor for the endocrine), and hematologist (someone who studies hemas, whatever those are). On the top floor is Dad and Dr. Abdelwahab. Mom and Lisa stay with me for extra support, even though I don’t need it. I’m not dying or anything like that, unless braces are going to look so disgusting on me that I want to die.

The doctor is tall and skinny, with a handlebar moustache. “How are you?” he says, loud and happy.

“Okay,” I say.

“Fantastic!”

I frown. He reminds me of Borat, who is funny on screen but probably obnoxious to the extreme in person. There is no need for him to be so peppy when he’s going to uglify me and ruin my life. I open my mouth. He pokes, he prods, and then he sticks this contraption in my mouth to take an X-ray. After a few minutes Dad comes in, taking a break from his own work to see what’s going on.

“Her bottom teeth are crowded,” Dr. Abdelwahab says, a large smile plastered on his face. “And they will get even more crowded because her wisdom teeth are coming in.”

“What?” I say. “I’m too young for wisdom teeth.”

“They usually appear after sixteen years of age, but sometimes they come in earlier,” he says.

“I’ll pull them,” Dad says. “Then she can get braces.”

Pull them. Out of my mouth? “Um, Dad, how are you going to take my wisdom teeth out?” I sputter.

“You’ll need surgery.”

Oh my God, I’ve never had surgery before.

“It’s just Novocaine. You’ll be awake.”

I don’t want to hear this! If I’m going to have surgery, I don’t want to be awake during it. I want to be knocked out cold so that I won’t feel an ounce of pain.

“I can do it tomorrow—my four o’clock cancelled, so I have an opening,” Dad tells Dr. Abdelwahab. He turns to me. “After you heal, you’ll get braces.”

“Dad!”

“Don’t whine, Almira,” Dad admonishes with the shake of his head. “We’re the professionals.”

That doesn’t mean anything. Professionals can cause a lot of pain. They have the needles and knives. I shouldn’t have smiled and laughed in front of Dad last week, because then he wouldn’t have noticed my funky teeth and I wouldn’t be going through this agony. I should learn to keep my mouth shut.

“You’re going to look beautiful!” Dr. Abdelwahab brays. “Very nice!”

“It’ll be okay,” Mom says.

“Yeah,” Lisa says. “I had my tonsils taken out when I was little. We all get surgery some time in our life.”

“But I don’t want to have this surgery before Parent Night.” So that I can arrive there with a swollen, ugly face when I want to eat dinner with Peter afterwards? Nooooooooooo.

Whatever. There’s nothing I can do. I’ll be grown up and suffer through it. It’s bad enough that I wear glasses, but now I’ll wear braces to boot, with wisdom teeth extraction as a prerequisite. Mom stops by Starbucks to get us iced lattes, as if that can make me feel better. The sun has an hour more to go, so I put the latte, which makes me salivate, in the fridge until then. Everything seems like a test of patience: to wait for the sun to go down, to wait for my braces to come on, to wait for my braces to come off, to wait for Parent Night, to wait for my first kiss, to wait for my first boyfriend …