A couple of times a year, one of my veneers falls out. It’s happened so often at this point that it's become a recurring joke among my friends: How will Edgar’s fake teeth fall out next? Will it be from eating corn on the cob? Biting my nails? Recently, the evil culprit was a stale pan dulce at a friend’s birthday party in New York. The party was country and western-themed, and my tooth that fell out was the exact one that, in a movie, an actor playing the role of "Hillbilly" or "Bumpkin" would have blacked by production out to signal the character should be seen as poor and dumb. I tried to laugh it off, though on the inside I was mortified: Those were the stereotypes I was trying to counter when I first got my veneers installed in 2009, when I was still in high school.
Back then, the only people getting veneers were celebrities like Tom Cruise and Hillary Duff, who could afford the 5-figure price tag for a quality set. My family, like most Americans, didn’t have that kind of money to spare. In Orlando, my mom worked as a barista at Starbucks, making a little over $20,000 a year. We both had the same teeth: jagged and growing inward, with dark cavernous gaps between them. I brushed mine obsessively as if to wash off the word DIRTY I felt was written on my forehead. Unlike me, however, my mom owned a cheap pair of flippers: those perfect, creepy-looking fake teeth toddlers wear in beauty pageants. When she put them on every morning, her face lit up, and she was free to go out into the world with her head held high.
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I’d begged my mom for braces for years, but there was no way she could afford both the initial installing fee, plus the return to the dentist every couple months to tighten them. It was a miracle if we went once a year at all. Veneers, on the other hand, were a one-stop solution, though at three times the price. In the end, she paid for them with credit cards, and even then, she didn’t have enough credit for a whole set and could only purchase me enough to cover the top row of my teeth, which the orthodontist assured were “the only ones people see anyway.” They were $8,000—almost half her annual salary. A few months later, she would declare bankruptcy.
As shortsighted as my veneers might seem to some, to my mom they must have been an investment in my future. Before I got........