We Are Pirates: A Novel by Daniel Handler

butts and duck feet they’d attached to the ceiling to create the disquieting illusion that patients were having their teeth cleaned at the bottom of a pond. She was separated from Room Two by half a wall and a large bubbly aquarium filled with very small fish. The aquarium never covered the sound of the drill or even the patients, and Gwen could hear Amber’s sour replies to Dr. Donner’s muttered questions: “I’m not.” “I’m not .” “I said I’m not .” “No, you are.” “I don’t care.” “I don’t care.” “I don’t care.” Gwen smiled at it. Amber, her name was, but she didn’t know anything else. Now they’d never see each other again.
    Dr. Donner came in, wiping his hands of Amber. “And how are you ?” he said.
    “Fine,” said Gwen.
    “I trust you don’t have any quibbles about what we’ll do today.”
    “What?”
    “I said, I trust you don’t have any quibbles—”
    “No,” said Gwen. Dr. Donner had considerably less hair than last time.
    “I’ll have my associate clean and polish your teeth,” he said, “and then I’ll come in to give you a complete checkup and make sure your smile is the kind that all the boys look at.” He raised his eyebrows and gave her the smile of the world: Please let us have a laugh at your expense. “Is there anything you’d like me to look at?”
    “Just that thing,” Gwen said.
    “What thing?”
    “That thing that’s on my chart; you never remember it.”
    Dr. Donner frowned and opened a folder. From the other side of the tank Gwen was pretty sure she heard Amber snort. “Oh yes, that irregularity,” he said.
    “I always forget what it’s called.”
    “It’s an irregularity,” he said again, mortifyingly. “After my associate does the polish, I’ll come in with the Aquapressure system. You know the drill.”
    Gwen knew the drill, ruthless, relentless, useless. Dr. Donner’s associates were all motherly women who didn’t like kids, so Gwen faced the ceiling and closed her eyes. She imagined that she really was underwater, drifting in a thick layer of duck shit and toddler-tossed bread, while the associate put on gloves and began to tramp around Gwen’s teeth. All those fingers in my mouth , Amber had said, and now it bothered her.
    “Don’t!” It was loud, on the other side of the tank.
    Dr. Donner muttered something.
    “I said don’t !”
    The associate sighed. Gwen kept her eyes closed and tried to join up with Amber’s fiery anger. “I said don’t ! I don’t care. I don’t care who hears me. I don’t like it and I’m not going to put up with it.”
    Gwen grinned, closing her lips around the associate’s fingers.
    “Hey.”
    “Sorry,” Gwen said.
    “I won’t. ”
    Dr. Donner muttered something again, and there was the clink of his poky tools.
    “I won’t. ”
    Mutter-mutter.
    “ You shut up.”
    Amber, mutter-mutter-mutter.
    “ You. ”
    A great, clinky sigh.
    “Then fuck you. Fuck you ! ”
    The music was turned up, and the rest was lost underwater. The exam took longer than usual—Gwen kept smiling—and Two was empty when Gwen left One, the chair tilted and clean but the paper where Amber had rested her head crumpled like an angry brow. The woman behind the window gave Gwen a little card with the details of her next appointment on it. She agreed to keep an eye on her gums and walked out to find Amber leaning against the far wall of the parking lot, mouthing the words to her music. From the other end of the lot she seemed to be in a steady, angry shiver, as if wearing cold clothes. But when Gwen crossed to her, she could see that Amber had one shoe off and was rubbing it vigorously sideways against the concrete. “Hi,” she said to Gwen, too loud.
    “Hi,” Gwen said, but kept walking so she wouldn’t look eager.
    Amber scowled and took her music off her ears. Gwen thought she might recognize the tinny, tiny beat. “Fine, don’t say hi.”
    “I said hi.”
    Amber smiled then. “Maybe,”