The Everlasting Story of Nory

6. Be Careful About Fluoride

Besides History, there was I.T., which were the initials of Information Technology, where they were learning the middle row of letters on the keys of the Acorn computers. And there was French, and Geography, and Music, and Netball, and Hockey, and other classes, too. There were a surprising amount of teachers at Threll School all together. Even the headmaster of the Junior School was the teacher of a class called Classics. He started off one class by reading in a deep, roly-poling voice about the trickles of blood of the Trojans mixing with the muddy water that collected in pools at the base of the walls of the ruined city. It turned out to be the story of Hercules. Or, not Hercules precisely, but someone with a name quite a bit like Hercules, although it wasn’t Hector either. Anyway, whoever he was, he was dipped in magical waters when he was a baby except for where he was held by his ankle.

A few days after that, the headmaster spoke to the whole Junior School in Hendall Hall, which was the place the whole school got together, except when they went to Cathedral once a week. He told them about a painter who had not believed in himself and had been so hungry that he had squeezed tubes of oil paint into his mouth. The paint had lead in it, and it affected his brain in a negative way, and soon enough he gruesomely shot himself in the chest. Now his paintings were worth millions of dollars, which would probably be billions of yen.

Kids want to eat lead because it tastes sweet, Nory knew, which is also why they want to eat toothpaste. You’re only supposed to put a pea-sized amount of toothpaste on your toothbrush but many kids put more. Nory thought that what they should make is a tube of toothpaste that squirts out green until you’ve squirted out just the right amount, and if you try to squeeze more out after that, the color turns red, meaning stop: Green light, red light. If you eat too much toothpaste, the fluoride in it will turn your teeth gray, but there was a kid at the Junior School who had a bad cavity or some sort of medical thing gone wrong in one of his pointy side teeth, one of the bicuspids maybe, that made it completely gray ‘from smokebox to buffer,’ as Littleguy would say. You only saw it when his mouth made a malicious laugh, as in ‘Hah-hah-hah, hah-hah-hah, I’m going to revenge myself on you for that!’ If that boy, who was really a fairly nice boy, had had a sweet tooth and eaten tube after tube of toothpaste, that same tooth would be just as gray as it was now, but he wouldn’t have the cavity to worry about, and the rest of his teeth would match the color exactly so it would blend in and wouldn’t be so noticeable. Nory’s own teeth were sometimes a little yellow, she thought, but then she went on a rampage brushing them individually one by one and got them to look pretty white. They looked white in photographs, anyway, which made her happy.

The moral of the story about the child who was dipped in magical water was: nobody is one hundred percent immortal. Except God, for those who believed in God. The moral of the story about the painter was: you never know who will be famous and talented, so try not to get discouraged, and don’t allow handguns. The moral of the story about gray teeth was: sometimes by trying to do a good thing, you do a bad thing instead.