"Wow!" Dr. Gomez exclaimed while visiting Logan for his next checkup. "Your upper jaw has been moving back at an unprecedented rate. Good for you!" Logan had been wearing his headgear full time along with his new best friend Ethan, instead of only 16 hours per day as he'd been told to do. And he was going to keep doing so as long as Ethan was in headgear. Logan got his wire tightened, had his ligatures changed to green and yellow, and left as Ethan came in.
Camila welcomed him as her colleague was sanitizing the utensils. "How was your month with 24/7 headgear?"
"Better than I thought it would be. At first I hated Dr. Gomez for what she did, but in the end I just accepted it."
"She loves control, she wants it her way... and there's no way she'll ever stay unless you give it up!"
"Ha, I guess so, but I've learned my lesson and from now on I will comply."
Dr. Gomez appeared through the door as she overheard the conversation. "You sure have learned your lesson, and I will now unwire your headgear!" The dentist started inspecting her patient's mouth. "The jaw is reacting to the headgear--less than I thought, but there's still progress. And I'm glad to see I don't have to give your expanders any more turns, as you completed them! One more month of two turns per week, and you'll be set. As for the headgear, you will have to keep wearing it almost full time for the next few months, otherwise the treatment will take too long."
Ethan sighed and nodded. Dr. Gomez reassured him: "I know people might mock you for your headgear, but you don't have to listen to those people, because they weren't going to stick around in your life anyway. Who says you're not perfect? Who says you're not worth it? Who says you're the only one that's hurting?"
Ethan thanked Dr. Gomez for her inspiring (albeit clichéd) words of encouragement, got his wire and ligatures changed (he opted for black and blue this time), and left the office with Logan.
The next day, while he was getting his books from his locker, Ethan received an unexpected visit. His ex Ariana was standing there, looking at him with her big puppy eyes and holding a tray of chocolate cookies.
"i'm sorryyy for dumpin u like that. ik you're going thru sumn so yuh... i made these cookies for u," she mumbled at her ex. Ariana was such a size queen, and having seen the other guys in the gym locker, Ethan wasn't surprised she'd been... missing him.
"Yeah girl," he replied, "I'm not gonna hold a grudge. It's all good. So thank you," he said, as he grabbed a cookie. As soon as he bit into it, he felt a weird sensation in his mouth, other than the instinct to spit out that burned piece of charcoal. He should've known better, Ariana was pretty much the only Italian in the world who couldn't cook for her life.
Ethan ran to the nearest restroom and inspected his mouth. The baked rock he'd just bitten into had managed to break not one, but two of his brackets! And one month later, during his checkup, it turned out that those were two key brackets, meaning that he'd lost most of the progress his teeth had done thus far. "You're my dilemma, Ethan," Dr. Gomez said with disappointment. "I get it that the mouth wants what it wants, but you should have read the list of foods to avoid with braces that I gave you on your very first visit." And just like that, his 3+ years treatment had just been extended by at least three more months.
The next following months went swimmingly. Ethan and Logan kept getting closer and closer and seeing each other every day as they went through their elaborate orthodontic treatments together. They turned each other's expanders until the last turn, it had become their thing. They wore headgear when they visited colleges together, and got quite a few laughs and stares, but they were used to it by then. They went to prom together, and even there they proudly wore headgear. They didn't even take it off when taking prom pics or for their yearbook photos, in fact! And they still wore it together on graduation day, almost six months after the beginning of their treatments. Other people in school had gotten used to their headgears, and as most found them endearing they ended up being voted the cutest senior couple for the yearbook.
During one of his checkups over the summer, Dr. Gomez noticed there was something off about Logan's upper jaw. He'd never told her that he had been wearing his headgear full time along with Ethan, and he kept wearing it even after one month prior the appliance had been discontinued. "Your jaw's flying on autopilot, it shows no signs of stopping," she said. "Come back tomorrow so I can give you something to fix that."
The next day, Logan was fitted with a new appliance to wear "as much as possible over the next couple of months" in order to bring his upper jaw back forward. It consisted of two metal rods running vertically over his cheeks and connecting a forehead pad and a chin pad. Both pads had straps that went behind his head and neck; the appliance was further kept in place by six elastics connecting a horizontal bar running outside of his mouth in front of lips to special extra hooks, three per side, installed on his upper archwire. Much more visible than the headgear he had before, that's for sure.
As Ethan saw Logan with his new appliance, he smirked. "Damn boy, if kissing you with our facebows in the way was hard, it'll be even harder now with all that metalwork over your head."
