No matter how much Wren stomped her feet and flailed her arms and told her parents it was illegal and she’d have them arrested as soon as she found an officer who didn’t laugh at her, they grabbed her elbows at the first of every month and dragged her to the red brick building with the cartoon toothbrush with braces and gleaming white teeth. Her parents refused to believe that the orthodontist was anything other than the short balding man who politely answered all their questions about straight molars and pink gums. They always left the room before he transformed into an eighteen-foot-high monster. Then he’d get sick thrills by shoving his hands into the mouths of young kids and yanking on the metal he cruelly wrapped around their teeth. He had great big hairy arms and a voice like an eagle. He smelled like wet, soggy salt.

“This is cruel and unusual,” said Wren, dragging the heels of her black and white shoes. She’d learned that phrase in school and used it on everything from vegetables to teeth to homework. “You can’t make me go in there again.”

Her parents made her go inside and sit in the plastic chairs in the waiting room. They held her arms down as Wren squirmed and tried to bite them.

“Wren,” said her mother, her smile stretching her lips thin. “Not in public.”

“Not at all,” said her father. He turned pages of a magazine with one hand and rested the other heavily on Wren’s shoulder.

A woman in matching blue pants and shirt came out of the monster’s lair and called Wren’s name. The woman looked at Wren and her face firmed up.

“Oh,” she said. “Hi, again.”

“You’re one of his,” said Wren.

Wren decided, if she was to face this monster time and time again, she wouldn’t let him see her cry. Even Gizmo, the blackbird with the pink beak who lived on her sill, explained that monsters can’t hurt you if they don’t know you’re afraid of them. He was always saying, “Wren, you have to be brave. Be as brave as you can be.”

So Wren held her head up high and stiffly as she walked into the small room with the huge chair and the metal tray that held thin torture instruments: pokers and pinchers and slicers and mincers.

The monster man came in with his arms covered in the plastic he had taken to wearing ever since the time Wren drew blood.

He asked, “How have you been, Wren? Teeth okay?”

“I’ll eat your fingers,” said Wren.

He jammed his fingers in her mouth and felt all around her teeth and gums. He tightened the tiny screw on her braces. The metal pulled on her teeth and scrunched them together until her entire mouth vibrated in sharp pain. Wren tried to bite his hands but he moved too quick for her, and the woman in blue would pinch her gently on the upper arm whenever Wren caught his pinkie between her incisors.

Her parents never believed her about the monster man, no matter how much she sobbed and said it hurt, hurt, hurt even long after they had left the lair. This visit was proving to be no different than any of the others, so Wren covered her eyes with her hands the whole way home so that they couldn’t see the water.

Her parents were tough to be around sometimes. They always smiled at her, and while Wren liked to smile, she also knew that she didn’t like smiling all the time. Sometimes she liked frowning, or laughing, or crying. Often, she wanted to do all of these things at once. But her parents, they only had smiles. Warm smiles, cold smiles, stretched to their ears smiles, and smiles that were so small it was almost like they weren’t smiling at all. The only difference between them was that when her father smiled he always opened his mouth so she could see his tongue and the dangly bit at the back of his throat. But when her mother smiled she never opened her mouth and, if by chance something inside her made her so happy she couldn’t help but show all those teeth and tongue and gums, she’d put her hand over her lips and look at her feet.

Gizmo couldn’t smile, what with his beak and all, so when he was happy he raised his wings above his head, pushed his feathery butt out as far as he could and pooped a white and black turd.

“You’re gross,” Wren always said whenever he was happy, but secretly she was jealous that she couldn’t poop every time she was happy, too.

But Gizmo wasn’t ever happy when Wren was crying, so when she came home and ran into her room Gizmo shuffled his feathers into a tight ball, balanced on Wren’s thigh and held his smooth, cool beak under her chin. Because she could not fall asleep with her teeth thrumming, Gizmo stayed up with her the whole night.

Wren avoided her parents for as long as she could, which was only until morning when they knocked on her door and asked her down to breakfast.

“Waffles,” they said cheerfully. “With blueberries. Your favorite.”

Wren grudgingly followed them downstairs and sat at their table and ate the creamy,gooey waffles with the sugared blueberries they had made, but she refused to look at them or talk to them, even when she could feel their smiles looking at one another and struggling to stay in place.

Later, Wren was sitting in her room running her hands over Gizmo’s soft feathers when she heard her mother say her name. Curious, she crawled on her hands and knees to the edge of the stairs and listened.

“Angry,” her mother was saying. “All the time.”

As carefully as she could, Wren tiptoed her way down. Gizmo spread his wings at the top of the stairs and beckoned her to come back.

“You’re spying,” accused Gizmo. “You wouldn’t like it if someone did that to you.”

“Shhhhhhh,” said Wren. “It’s about me.”

But Gizmo dropped his beak to his chest and headed back into Wren’s room. He stopped at the doorway and said, “It’ll make you sad, and then I’ll be sad with you.”

“Oh shush,” said Wren.

“Why must you look for an excuse to break our hearts,” said Gizmo, then ruffled his feathers and hopped up onto his sill.

Wren rolled her eyes and turned back to her mother.

“Don’t know what to do,” her mother said and lapsed into silence. Then she said, “twenty or so more visits. She fights us every time.”

And then, “doesn’t know what’s good for her.”

Wren ran back into her room and slammed the door, not caring who heard.

“Did you hear, Gizmo?” she asked. “They’re going to make me keep going back to that horrible monster!”

“Well yes,” said Gizmo. “That’s how braces work. It’s to bind your teeth together so they don’t fall out. Everyone gets it done these days.”

“Everyone,” grumbled Wren.

Gizmo was right. The next day at school Wren looked closely at the mouths of the kids in her class and everywhere she saw the familiar gleam on their teeth.

Monsters have gotten all of us, thought Wren, and felt a heaviness in her chest for her classmates. She gathered them around her at recess on the hot blacktop and told them she understood their pain, their monthly agony that kept them up in the nights and how parents refused to understand.

“Let’s go,” she told them, “to Africa. We can discover the baby of a lion and a giraffe. A Liraffe, or a Girion. We’ll be famous and can do whatever we want, then.”

But her peers only stared at her dumbly or laughed, then they wandered off and ran around in circles, something they loved to do but which Wren never really saw the point of.

When she told her teachers about Africa, they said animals can’t mate like that.

“But it’s far away,” Wren said. “You don’t know everything that happens there.”

“Yes, we do,” said her teachers, and handed her several books on the subject.

Wren read each line and grew heavy because it sure seemed like the books did know everything about Africa.

“I’ve got to get away from here on my own,” Wren told Gizmo later that day as they sat on top of the stairs and listened to her parents bang out a dinner in the kitchen. She said, “I have to go somewhere that’s new and nobody knows anything about.”

“No place like that left,” said Gizmo. “Everything on Earth is all found out.”

Wren pushed her forehead against the railing on top of the stairs and rubbed her cheek where the braces nicked the soft skin. She heard her parents smiling downstairs and felt her stomach bunch up like dirty laundry.

“Then I’ll have to move,” she told Gizmo. “I’ll move up, up, up.”

She told Gizmo her plan to escape and live on the moon, the one place her smiling parents could not follow and where nobody she knew had braces. And, more importantly, she knew monsters could not breathe in space.

Though he poo-pooed the idea up and down her room, Gizmo brought her all kinds of thingamabobs he found on his daily flights to help her build a Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket. She didn’t know where he found these things, but he brought all sorts of gewgaws and thingys and even managed to find a long, thin doodad with wires coming out of both ends.

She had to ask her father if she could borrow his screwdriver and hammer and wrench.

“I’m building a rocket,” said Wren and lowered her eyes to her socks.

“That’s wonderful,” said her father, beaming. “I always wanted to be an astronaut, myself.”

The next day he gave her his tools and a stack of books from the library with pictures of long white shuttles with their butts exploding in fire as they zoomed straight up to the lining of the sky. She showed Gizmo the pictures and said she needed parts that looked just like that: white and smooth and able to pierce the atmosphere.

She furiously worked at shaping the things Gizmo gave her into something that looked like it was from the book.

The doohickey was delicate because the thin, copper tubes that made up its long body were super bendy, and the red and green and blue and purple wires that burst out of its head like fireworks gave off little shocks if they touched other metals. It needed to be slowly bent around the whatchamacallit which was so big it was taking up almost all of her bedroom. The whatchamacallit was a block of metal so large that when Gizmo brought it to her he had been so impressed with his own birdy strength he shat all over her bedroom in glee. The whatchamacallit held the fuel and once the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket started firing up the fuel would roll around and spurt into the doohickey, and that would send all that energy and spurty-power into the rocket and take her up, up, up.

Gizmo was the one who told her the doohickey couldn’t be tightened all at once. It was the same excuse her parents gave her when she said that if the braces were tightened really hard just the one time Wren would already have the stupid perfect teeth they wanted her to have. And, she wouldn’t have to be in pain at the beginning of every month. Even though they explained that that isn’t how teeth worked she knew they were silly. They were in real estate and that had, as far as Wren was concerned, nothing to do with teeth. But Gizmo was a bird and he had no teeth. No teeth meant he was trustworthy.

With her father’s wrench and hammer and the screwdriver with the flat head she furiously formed all the contraptions into something that looked like it was from the book. She had to hide it under her bed every morning so that her parents wouldn’t find it and spoil her plans.

But her parents were nosy and always liked being in her business. They knocked on her bedroom door and she could hear them smiling at her. “Wren,” they said, “don’t you want breakfast? Even astronauts get hungry.”

“I’m very, very busy,” Wren said.

“Wren, darling, it’s time for a shower. We can smell you through the door. You’re one little greaseball monkey.”

“I’m busy!”

“Wren, darling. You have to go to school.”

“No, I don’t.”

“You do. It’s the law,” they said, and she could hear their smiles tremble.

“That’s silly,” said Wren.

Her parents started to push their way into Wren’s room, and even though Wren and Gizmo barricaded themselves against the door and pushed back with all their might, Wren’s parents were much stronger. It was her father that overcame Wren and Gizmo’s strength, and he pushed the door so hard that Gizmo rolled all the way under the bed, and Wren fell to her stomach.

“You can’t shut us out Wren,” her father said, wrapping his large arms around her small frame and resting his smile on her shoulder. He added, “We are always going to be here for you.”

“Bah,” said Wren.

It took several days for Wren to properly bend the doohickey around the whatchamacallit without breaking it. She sent Gizmo out to look for Elmer’s glue but even though he showed how his wings were falling out from flapping so hard he couldn’t find any. So Wren put him to work making sure the veeblefetzer had enough dirt and water in it (that was the fuel to make the whole thing boom, boom, boom upwards and away) and that the thingamabobber was able to withstand all kinds of temperature, because that was what would heat up the veeblefetzer and make it all fly.

She was very confident in the science of her rocket.

Sneaking downstairs, she ran behind potted plants and dived into closets whenever her parents walked into her line of sight. She waited for them to go into another room before she scavenged in cabinets and threw pencils and pens and notebooks and calculators and brooms and the mop and even several coats onto the floor.

“Honey,” said her mother, making Wren jump. “Can I help you find something?”

Mother was wearing her I’m worried about you smile, the kind that was all wobbly on one side.

“I need Elmer’s glue,” said Wren.

“Why didn’t you just ask?” Her mother went and got a blue glue stick from a desk drawer in the kitchen and handed it to Wren.

“There’s no cow on the label.”

“It’s just as good as any other,” said her mother.

“Cow glue is the best,” said Wren.

“It’s all the same.”

“Ughhhh,” said Wren, and ran back upstairs.

“Wren!” shouted her mother. “You need to clean up the mess you made.”

“I’m working on a top-secret rare assignment!” Wren shouted back and locked her door.

Over the next couple of days Wren concentrated on nothing else except getting herself into the air even though she was nervous that when she was up there it might get lonely, because one of the books said there was no sound in space. Still, she didn’t want Gizmo to think that she didn’t appreciate all the work he had done, and anyway, the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket was rather fun to make with him.

“We need to get it done before the first of the month,” said Wren. “Else they’ll send me back to the monster.” She rubbed her jaw and winced.

Wren managed not to get her parents to come into her room by showering early and being by the door when she had to go to school. The Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket was way too big to hide from them now. Her father bought it right away and smiled and ruffled her hair and said she was growing up, but her mother smiled tightly and narrowed her eyes. When Wren used the bathroom during breaks on the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket she would catch her mother dusting the table in the hallway, the table her mother never dusted, and was very close to Wren’s bedroom door.

When it only needed the final finishing touches, Wren and Gizmo smeared generic glue all over the gewgaws and spent the night sitting on them so that they would be firmly fixed in the morning. Then it would be ready for flight.

“I made a spot for you,” said Wren. She pointed at the perch she glued next to the pilot seat, which was really just a stick Gizmo had brought in by accident one day.

“I can’t go with you,” said Gizmo. “I can’t breathe all the way up there.”

“But Giz,” said Wren. “You have to go where I go. We’re a team.”

“But I can’t,” said Gizmo. “You want to go somewhere where no one else can follow.”

He turned away from her and jumped on the sill.

Wren didn’t know if she wanted to go to the moon all alone, even though she had to escape her aching teeth. Gizmo was the only one she knew who was not like any other of his kind, or her kind, and it was not only the pink beak that made him stand out, or that he could carry way more than he weighed, or even that he once tried to train her to poop when she was happy just like him. She wasn’t even sure why she liked him so much, except that he seemed a part of her, if blackbirds with pink beaks could be a part of a little girl.

There was a soft knock at her door. “Wren,” said her mother’s watery smile. “I think you slept in. It’s time for school.”

“Uh,” said Wren. “I’m very sick. Over 150-degree temperature. Cough. I better stay in bed. And you shouldn’t come in or you’ll get just as sick as I am.”

“Wren,” sighed her mother, “I know you hate the orthodontist, but that’s no reason to miss school. In a few years you’ll thank us for making you go, trust me.”

“Doubt it,” said Wren.

The knob of Wren’s bedroom door caught on the lock. “Wren,” said her mother, “you have to let me in.”

“No, I don’t.”

Wren’s mother called for her husband, and Wren ran to her window to get Gizmo to help her with the door, but Gizmo was gone. Not even a bit of his poop remained on the sill.

Wren’s braces hurt more than they had ever hurt her before.

“Wren!” cried her father. “Please open the door.”

“No!” said Wren. “You can’t make me go to school and you can’t make me go to the monster! I’m going to the moon!”

Wren hopped into her Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket and pushed the button that heated up the fuel in the veeblefetzer. She set her straight-o-meter to aim her at the moon and hurried it along because she could hear her father hitting his body against the door.

“Wren!” they said. “Wren, what do you mean?”

The gauge-o-meter that told her everything was filled up and ready to go began to beep and glow, so Wren pushed the button that started the explosion out of the butt and held on to her seat.

Just as the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket began to lift off the ground, her father broke into her room and stumbled when he saw Wren in her machine. It was the first time Wren saw her parents without their smiles, and she realized how grown up they were.

Her parents grabbed onto each side of the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket and held it down. It shook and whined in their grasp, but together they dug their heels into the plush carpet and whitened their knuckles over the wings. They said, “stop, Wren! You haven’t done your homework! You haven’t eaten dinner! You’ve got an appointment at the orthodontist!”

Wren looked at the straight-o-meter and it said if she didn’t get off the ground right-at-this-moment-now she wasn’t going to go straight to the moon, so she cried to her parents that they had to let go, or she wouldn’t make it.

Her mother openly cried great big watery tears, and she cried with her mouth open. Wren saw that her mother’s teeth were big and gapped. The spaces between the molars and incisors and front two were so large whole pieces or carrot or celery could fit in-between. Her mother had teeth just like Wren’s own, except that her mother’s weren’t covered up with metal and wires. Wren wanted to say just how cool her mother’s teeth were, and probably would be even beautiful if she ever showed them in a smile, but her mother saw Wren looking and slapped her hands over her mouth.

Alone, Wren’s father couldn’t hold down the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket, and it burst out of his hands like a rabbit hops, jittery and with its legs kicking furiously at the air. Wren was pushed to the back of her seat when she blasted off from her room, breaking into and past the ceiling, and into the great big blue sky. She wanted to turn and say goodbye to her parents but she couldn’t turn her head. So she opened her mouth to scream her farewells but the pressure was so great she couldn’t form a single sound. The air was so thick and hot that when she pushed her head forward against it she felt the braces on her teeth begin to come undone.

First the small bits of metal bent and twisted against her teeth, but her teeth were slimy from her spit so they screeched and slid off the white part like they were rolling down a slide. Then they formed into a small scratchy ball on her tongue, all that metal torture, and Wren could taste the gritty cement-glue. She rolled it to the front of her teeth with her tongue and spit it out. It landed against the front of the cockpit. Wren ran her tongue across her teeth and her gums, and though she could feel the bumps of the glue at the edges where the tooth met gum, for the first time in a long time her mouth didn’t hurt at all, and she smiled wider than her parents ever did.

She looked down below her and saw that the world was really truly blue and big. She couldn’t even see her house, it was all a blur. She strained her eyes hard at the world and thought, maybe, that tiny little speck of pink there was Gizmo flying around looking for parts for something else they would have made, or maybe he was looking for her, or maybe he was saying toodle-hoo.

The pink speck faded into the big blue, and Wren felt, in her stomach, the pressure drop away from all sides of the Rocket-To-The-Moon-Rocket. But when the pressure dropped away so did everything around her. It started as a small vibration, then went into full out shakes. Outside she could see the gewgaws begin to tear away from one another. She cursed that she had not insisted on the Elmer’s Glue, because the cow on the front of the package was reliable. Once the gewgaws fell away the doodads went next, because they were made out of wire and black feathers. Then the whatchamacallit simply dropped out the bottom back to earth, and then everything else fell away except for Wren, who kept on floating and floating towards the moon.

This is better than Africa, supposed Wren, who looked out into space and thought what a grand adventure it was going to be, especially when she discovered all those girions and laraffes who, if they didn’t live on earth, probably lived on the moon.

It was interesting, thought Wren, and new, to not hear a thing at all in space. It was vast and quiet, and she didn’t feel anything except for a little tinge in her mouth. She stuck her fingers in, cringed, and out came a little bit of blood from where the braces had scratched the side of her tongue.