The seventh grade is an important year for preteens. By this time, I was sure I’d remain the super shy loner girl. After
all, I was already in the habit of covering the radiator burn mark on my face with my right hand and holding my left arm
against my body to conceal the burn on my forearm. I even invented the perfect pose for when I sat at my desk. It was a
casual pose wherein I rested my face in my hand. I had these burns my whole life, and I had been conscientious of them for almost as long. I was burned on a radiator twice: once, at six months old, and again at one year old. Imagine my shock when a traumatic experience reset my social status.
After school one day, a friend and I began our walk home.
She was chattering about something that happened at lunch.
In the middle of her excited story, I heard someone shouting,
“Veda? Hey, Veda?”
“Hold up,” I told my friend. I looked around.
“Veda,” Dad shouted from across the street, waving
me over.
“Bye,” I said to my friend. “Glad my dad came to pick me up. It was a long walk home.”
I stepped from the curb in between two parked cars, looked both ways, and, seeing the coast was clear from my vantage point, ran out into the street. Tires screeched just before I took a hard blow from a van that hadn’t been there a moment ago. It knocked me off my feet and into the air, and then plunged my body to the ground. The sudden blow knocked me out altogether.
Blue sky and puffy clouds were the first things I noticed when I opened my eyes. Then, the ambulance lights came
into focus.
“It’s gonna be alright.” Dad knelt at my side and rubbed my hand. “It’s gonna be alright, baby,” he assured me. “Stay still.”
“Who’s hurt?” I asked.
“It’s alright. Everything’s alright.” He continued rubbing my hand.
My tongue brushed against my front teeth. Three of my front teeth were chipped and jagged. Pain rushed over me.
“Oh no,” I cried out, “I’m hurt. I’m hurt!” My voice grew anxious. “My teeth, Daddy, they’re cracked.”
“Don’t worry, baby. Daddy’s gonna get you some more teeth.”
The accident also knocked me out of school for the next few weeks, due to my list of injuries. My leg was pretty messed up. I couldn’t walk on it at all for a few days. My face was scarred and bruised. But my teeth were the biggest disappointment. I missed my teeth and knew I could never get them back. Dad
kept his promise, though. He took me to a dentist who had such compassion for my condition.
My first trip to the dental office, the dentist prepped and set three temporary crowns. They weren’t the best-looking
teeth, but I was relieved not to see those snaggle teeth glaring back at me from the mirror. All I thought about, though, was how the heck was I going to keep kids at school from noticing my fake teeth? The burns, the teeth… I didn’t have enough
hands to cover all my insecurities. The permanent crowns were an improvement to the temporary ones and, thankfully,
lasted me twenty years.
For now, I just needed to survive my return to school.
There had to be a way to blend into the background. This was all I thought about while recovering. I hardly slept the night before my return to school. What if I was the school’s new laughingstock?
“Hey, Veda. How you doin’?” was the chorus I heard when I walked back into school. “Aren’t you the girl who got hit in front of school?” kids in the hall asked. “Yes,” I’d say, nodding my head. By lunch, my head buzzed with an unfamiliar feeling:
being noticed wasn’t so bad. When I sat down, kids I didn’t know crowded my table and tried to get to know me. One kid, on my first day back, said, “You’re my hero.” Wow.
Just like that, I was popular. I wasn’t used to such attention.
If anything good came from this accident, it was my new social
status, making junior high a memorable success.
© Daveda Buckman-Reed