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The space between my teeth and my cheeks is dry. I pull up saliva from under my tongue. It shoots back down the channels on either side of my jaw.

My braces ache dully.

The flaps on the inside of my cheeks are still dry. I suck up more saliva to wet them. It’s as sluggish as a putty shake.

I am getting angry now. I sit up. The walls are too close around me. Somewhere there is a cool, wet, open expanse and I want to be there. I am irate at my saliva.

I stand up. I walk over to my window and slide it open. I breathe in the night air.

Hopeless. Thin as nothing.

I want to pound on something and make it bleed for me. I want to tear into something. I want to tear away these walls.

I need to go to the bathroom. There’s water there.

The pain from my braces shoots through the bone of my jaw. My teeth are moving.

I reach out for my door handle.

Then I hold up my arm, close to my eyes.

My pajama sleeve has been pressed into a slinkie of ringlets at the elbow. My forearm is bare before it.

At the sight of my smooth white skin, fine as cream, I start to salivate. I trace the little blue veins from the wrist up to the plumper muscle.

I lower my mouth. My open lips just nuzzle my forearm.

The points of my canines touch the bare skin. My canines seem larger than usual. My saliva is thick.

Helplessly, I pierce the skin; and helplessly, I start drawing and sucking as ferociously as I can, yanking blood up into my mouth. The pain jolts my elbow up and down, while I feel the blessed blood murmuring over my lips, my chin, down — in the most tantalizing trickle — my throat, a few drops, a spot, more; and I tear at my arm and slash downward with the teeth, rutting up little tracks of meat while the thick, sour tang of my own gore sweetly fills my mouth and cheeks, puffing them out. It hurts like the devil, and I’m moaning, lost in pain and wonder, but now I hack a little more at my arm with the same pleasure I’d peel a scab, so the pain is bigger, harder, cleaner, more burning, more scathing, more cleansing.

Lost in pleasure and pain, I almost howl, slurping, licking, and my arm is red and slick and I chase every, every, every last drop.

A half hour later, I am lying drowsily on the floor.

My braces are just one big loopy tangle. My pajamas are twisted all around me. There are wide swaths of blood scraped across my striped arms and chest. The wounds in my left arm have clotted and started to heal. Very quickly, I notice. Unnaturally quickly. My fangs have slid back into my gums.

I curl up like a kitten.

For the first time in weeks I sleep, satiated.

My teeth ground me for a week. My teeth are fine, but my braces were yanked completely off my canines. I told people it was a night-time skateboarding accident. My orthodontist says this is unlikely. He has taken the braces off entirely. My mother says she is grounding me for a week or until I tell her what really happened. She thinks I got in a fight with a gang.

“Yes, Mom,” I say. “Luckily, I fended them off single-handedly.”

She says, “You have got an attitude problem.”

My orthodontist took her aside and spoke to her. That I know. I do not know what he said. She says it was serious.

They are starting to suspect me, I can tell. Not of the right things — my father keeps leaning close to me to casually smell my breath — but they suspect me none the less.

I want Chet to come back.

I have a feeling he is not coming.

The lawns are starting to smell syrupy sweet. In the next week or so, many of the blossoms on the trees change to leaves, however that works.

The leaves are so fragile, an infant green, they look almost frightened when they first cluster at the joints and elbows of the trees in the yard.

All I seem to see on the news are stories about people killing inhumans. I’ve never noticed it so much before. There are still all the same stories about starvation, and fighting in the Middle East, and senators talking about the national debt — but now I notice more than