Jackson heard the honking of someone blowing his nose and he knew the enemy had arrived. He peeked out from his hiding spot and saw them stumbling up the sidewalk toward the school. It was time for action.

“Attack!”

His signal sent the nerds scattering like frightened cattle. They bayed and bellowed and rushed about, knocking into one another.

“First wave!” Jackson cried, and his team removed drinking straws from their pockets. They loaded the straws with sticky-wet spitballs and aimed them at the panicked nerds. “Fire at will!”

A wave of spitwads blasted through the air, raining down on the geeks. One kid with exceptionally large buck teeth was „blinded when a dozen sloppy wads hit him in the face. He ran headfirst into a flagpole and knocked himself unconscious.

“Leave us alone!” a girl shouted in a wheezy voice as she was peppered with sticky ammunition.

Before the nerds could peel the gooey missiles off their faces and clothes, Jackson called for the second wave of attacks. The straws were tossed aside, and his team pounced on the misfits; administering purple nurples, blistering pink bellies, cruel charley horses, and nasty noogies. Ears were flicked. Wet willies were delivered. KICK ME signs were applied to unsuspecting backs.

Everything was going according to plan, but Jackson was determined not to get lazy. He called for the third and final wave, the part of the plan they called “the hammer.” They spun the geeks around, grabbed the backs of their underpants, and yanked toward the heavens. The elastic waistbands were then pulled over the victims’ heads. Atomic wedgies. The final, crushing blow.

The nerds flopped around on the ground like fish, trying unsuccessfully to stuff their underwear back into their pants. Jackson, Brett, and the others celebrated their success.

Now, to the casual observer, Jackson would appear to be a jerk, but in fact he was very popular. Very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very popular. His teachers described him as charming. He was captain of his PeeWee football team, and his coach said Jackson had the best passing arm, best kicking leg, and best touchdown dance he had seen in twenty-five years. Kids copied Jackson’s every move, hung on his every word. Even some of the teachers started to dress like him.

Yes, Jackson Jones was blessed, but little did he know that the cruel hand of fate was about to smack him in the face, and it would all start with a single word.

“Interesting.”

“Whaghh?” Jackson asked. He would have been clearer but he was sitting in his orthodontist’s office with a suction tube in his mouth. Dr. Gupta, who had said the word, was looking at his teeth.

Jackson knew it was never a good sign when a medical professional used the word “interesting.” It was one of those words you never wanted to hear a doctor say, like “rare,” “inoperable,” and “flesh-eating.”

“Very interesting,” the orthodontist chirped as he continued his examination.

“Whaghh?” Jackson cried.

Dr. Gupta was too excited to speak. In his twenty years as an orthodontist, he had heard many medical-phenomenon stories. The podiatrist in suite 4A had a patient with eight toes on each foot. His brother-in-law, an emergency-room doctor, claimed to have had a patient with a third eye. Even his dog’s veterinarian, Dr. Hanger, had a two-headed turtle under his care. Now Gupta had his own medical oddity. He crossed the room to a telephone, picked it up, and punched in a number. “Donna, can you bring the camera in here?”

A moment later a pale, sleepy woman entered the room. Dr. Gupta directed her to look into Jackson’s open mouth. Her drowsy eyelids popped open.

Dr. Gupta clapped his hands like a happy baby. “I know, right? No one will believe it if we don’t take some pictures.”

“Whhhaaaaaaggggghhhh?” Jackson cried, but again he was ignored.

Donna snapped pictures from various angles. The camera’s flash blinded Jackson, and by the time the blue and red spots disappeared from his vision, his patience was gone. He yanked the suction tube from his mouth. “What’s going on?”

Dr. Gupta smiled as he rubbed his hands together. “Well, Jackson, how do I explain this? It’s just … well, a normal person has twenty-eight teeth. Some have several more if they still have their wisdom teeth. You, however, have a lot more.”

“How many?”

Dr. Gupta smiled. “You have sixty-four teeth! In fact, you have four rows of them, two on the top and two on the bottom.”

“Is that unusual?” Jackson asked.

“Not if you’re a great white shark,” the doctor replied, handing Jackson a mirror so that he could take a look for himself.

Jackson studied his mouth closely. Besides remembering to brush, he had never given much thought to his teeth. He assumed everyone had as many as he did, though he recalled his father complaining just last week that the family was spending a fortune on dental floss. “So, what are you going to do about it? I can’t walk around with this many teeth.”

“Well, we’ll have to extract those extra choppers.”

“Extract?”

“Yeah. You know, yank them out. But there is good news. The tooth fairy is going to owe you a bundle.”

Gupta slapped his knee and burst into a giggling fit. After a while he wiped the happy tears from his cheeks. “Sorry, that’s an old orthodontist joke.”

“Is it going to hurt?” Jackson asked.

“Absolutely. But that’s not even your biggest problem. You’ve got summer teeth.”

“What are ‘summer teeth’?”

“Sum ’er going this way and sum ’er going that way,” Dr. Gupta said, chuckling. He wondered if perhaps a career in stand-up comedy had been his true calling.

Jackson, however, was not amused, and when Gupta spotted his scowl, the orthodontist got back to business. “Sorry. What I’m trying to say is your teeth are all over the place. A few of them are sideways. There’s one that’s upside-down! Don’t worry. It’s nothing a set of braces won’t fix.”

Jackson felt his heart stop. “Braces!” Nerds had braces.

Dr. Gupta smiled reassuringly. “A lot of patients worry that braces are going to ruin their lives, but I assure you that nothing will change, Jackson. Your friends are still going to like you. I doubt that anyone will notice at all.”

When Jackson looked back on that moment, he realized that was when a terrible truth was revealed to him: Adults are liars, horrible, soulless, black-hearted liars. The braces didn’t just ruin his life, they demolished it, then salted the land so nothing would ever grow there again! When Dr. Gupta was finished, Jackson was thirty-two teeth lighter but fourteen pounds of metal heavier. Each of his teeth was encased in a jagged steel cage that ripped at his gums. Worse, a metal halo that Gupta called “headgear” was attached to Jackson’s bicuspids, and protruded out of his mouth and encircled his head like Saturn’s rings.

It also turned out to be highly magnetic.

Jackson found that by the end of an average school day, his headgear had collected cuff links, belt buckles, hairpins, cafeteria trays, cell phones, and umbrellas. He once stepped too close to a school bus and became locked onto its bumper. He was helplessly dragged through a rainstorm as children were dropped off all over town. He nearly died the night his father decided to treat the family to dinner at the local hibachi restaurant.

But the most horrible side effect he suffered wasn’t the pain or the humiliation—it was the sudden end to his reign as king of Nathan Hale Elementary. His popularity vanished overnight. Friends turned their backs when he walked by. Teachers cowered in the lounge, hoping to avoid eye contact. The classroom hamster buried itself under a mound of sawdust and pretended he wasn’t there. Even his best friend turned on him.

“Nice braces, goober,” Brett said when Jackson tried to sit at their usual lunch table. “You look like you’ve been munching on a bicycle chain.” Their other friends laughed and refused to let Jackson sit down. They banished him to a table in the far corner of the cafeteria where even the custodian with the lazy eye wouldn’t go.