Hi everyone. I'm new here. I wrote two braces stories and I'd like to post one of them.

This is the second (and shorter) story I wrote. And I apologize in advance for some mistakes, English is not my first language so I might have written something that could sound strange because I'm not familiar to idioms, expressions, sth like that.

Here's the first part of the story, I hope you enjoy and let me know if you liked it.

Never Been Kissed

Part 1

Chapter 1

Frank

I remember that when my cousin got his braces I asked

“Mom, can I start my braces already?”

Had I known what I was getting into I’d never had said these words.
My teeth are very misaligned and rotated. Not because of lack of space because all of them are somewhat in the position they were supposed to be but they aren’t side by side, there are ones more in the front, others in the back, others facing the wrong way, and the top canines are in the middle of the gum. Yeah, gum, canine, gum. All this mess leaves a lot of gaps and I saw my cousin’s teeth when he was my age, they were exactly like mine and now my cousin is handsome. Everybody says that I look after him. The acne, the teeth, the height. But I am three years younger which means he is handsome now that he finished his acne treatment and is taking his braces off. I haven’t even started ... Yet.
We are the Montgomery cousins, Montgomery brothers’ sons. Our family has a big company that our fathers run and that’s what Nate and I are supposed to do in the future.
Nate and I are going to the orthodontist together today. People say that this orthodontist is so good that he has offices in two cities so it’s very difficult to get an appointment with him and he selects his clients. The richer the better. Nate is getting his braces off and I’m getting mine on. He said that it’s not so bad, that’s why I want to start as soon as possible. The pressure is higher now that in a year we are going to study together in college. Here's how we are different from each other. Nate is not the kind of person who likes to study but I tend to the geek way of life. I love science, reading, and enjoy when my father takes me to work. While Nate went to a regular school and failed a year I studied in a special school for gifted kids. Nate likes parties, booze, and being laid-back. I like science, technology, studying, computer games, and comic books.
The day my mother brought me to my first appointment with the orthodontist he said he would like to have the opportunity to compare old and new similar treatments. The catch was that my cousin's treatment would be the reference to modern treatment and mine will be like they did in the 70s. He explained that the braces would be very different, mine can be considered uglier and take a little longer.  Nate started when he was 15 and he finished now that he is 18. I am 15 now but my braces will work with outdated technology but it all would be for the sake of science. We started late because our orthodontist thought Nate was too immature to comply with his treatment and my treatment being similar to his we had to be the same age.  I believe that if this study shows where were the biggest improvements in braces technology the faster the future treatments will be. That’s how he got my acceptance. My mother tried to convince me not to start this experiment ("Francis, dear, people will talk, we are an important family, we are always in galas, dinners, exhibits, charity balls. You will be the company's new face so you'd better start and end all this as soon as possible") but everybody knows that if there’s an opportunity to improve science studies who am I to say no.
I needed spacers only on my back teeth, all the back teeth because my teeth being misaligned there are gaps. When I told Nate what I was up to he was worried but said it was up to me and the spacers meant that I would have to wear headgear as he did at night for some time. While the ortho’s assistant takes off Nate’s braces and fits his retainers Dr. Rogers puts on my bands. After two hours or so he is done and I see my teeth in braces for the first time and wow! That’s more extreme than I thought it would be, my mouth has a metallic taste and it might be because every tooth is covered by metal bands and they should look new once I’m starting the treatment now but they look old, they are not silver nor shiny like my cousin’s brackets were, they are opaque leaden bands with big squares that look like a bracket project. Even the archwire looks old. Nate was also shocked but said it’s not too bad and that I can always keep my mouth shut. I started feeling pain and we went home. Wearing full bands affects my speech a little and I make this hissing sound in the Ss. Whatever I eat stuck on the bands and cleaning is a pain but I keep saying it’s for the sake of science. I wanted to start the acne treatment but the dermatologist thinks I’m too young. At school, things didn’t change because people there have more important things to care and I was even praised for offering myself for research matters, like a Guinea pig.

Oooh very good cast as I had definitely dit the bait! Lol
Cant wait to read more of this ?

Chapter 2

Frank

This first week in college sucks. Nate is part of the popular crowd now and I am his shadow. He spent so much time in his life being the poor ‘rich but ugly’ kid and now he wants to enjoy his popularity and drags me because he wants me to be as popular as he is but his friends mock of me all the time. Nate is the only person I know and being 16 in college with the forehead full of acne and wearing braces makes you feel like a fish out of the sea. My speech hasn’t improved so I hiss a lot and whistle in some words. I still feel the metallic taste, especially when I wake up. I made some research and the bands I wear are more similar to the ones in the 50s than in the 70s. This morning I had them tighten which means I’d do anything to quit the pain, it’s Friday and I’m looking forward to the weekend to play my games and read comic books. I’m a little distracted seeing a girl that seems to be lost, maybe I can help. She is cute and I can’t take my eyes off of her chubby beautiful face. I make my move towards her but someone hits her accidentally and the girl’s books fall. I bend on my knees to help her get her books but she does the same and hits her forehead in my mouth and I’ve never felt so much pain. I see blood drops on her book and I know I’m bleeding. The braces dug into my inner lips. I hear Nate talking to me and we run to the toilet where he helps me clean all the blood. My upper lip is so swollen that I can’t close my mouth and everyone can see the mass of metal in it, the lower one is not so swollen. The girl who hit me is very sorry and very beautiful and I mumble that there’s no need to apologize. I feel like I can't be angry at her.
Nate is worried and that’s something I can never complain: Nate’s loyalty. He calls my mother and when she sees me she starts crying and very uneasy, takes me to the orthodontist the second time that day to see if any damage was caused. Dr. Rogers asks me to continue putting ice on my top lip and to prevent the lower one from being scratched by the lower brackets on the bands he puts on something that expands my lip, making it difficult for me to close my mouth. Hiding the lower bands now is impossible, the thing has a black plastic piece held by a big wire and is attached to my lower molars, the ones with the tubes. I hope it is off on Monday. I spend the weekend reading, playing computer games and helping Nate with his studies. The guy is slow but with my help, we can be as good as our parents running the company. It’s Saturday night and my mother reminds me that we have a dance to go and I already know that no one would like to dance with the guy with the disgusting mouth but my mother convinced two girls to dance with me and these are by far the most awkward dances ever. The weekend is over but my mother forgot to take me to the orthodontist to take the lip thing off so I call Nate and he takes me to Dr. Rogers, there I find out that my mother hadn’t forgotten to take me there to remove the lip bumper because it’s now a new acquisition for my mouth, which I was supposed to get installed on my next appointment but as I was already there and installing it then would show my mother that it was worth the trip, he took the chance. As if I needed something else in my mouth. Then Nate and I go to college and I am shier than ever and start keeping my head down almost all the time since then. The girl who hit me looks at me and staring at my creepy mouth, apologizes again and once more I say that’s fine.

Great job, keep it up!

Chapter 5

Frank

So far, all I can think about is how Jenny feels relieved when Nate is with us. She likes me, she is my best friend but she prefers when my cousin is with us and I know that sometimes he goes to her apartment and spend the night. A good thing is that they’ve never told me anything they have done together. I don’t think I’d like to know but I’m sure they are closer. I just wish I had never shown that I have feelings for her. College is almost over, just six more months and we’re done. I’m already working at the company. My father wanted me to be Montgomery’s new face and even got into a fight with Dr. Rogers because he wanted to pay him to remove my braces or at least put on modern ones but Dr. Rogers said isn’t the kind of guy that can be bought so he threatened my father, saying he would go to the press telling he was interfering in scientific research, but to tell you the truth, Dr. Rogers make more money asking me to go there every month and sometimes every two weeks adding or removing something that doesn’t change anything than he would make if my father paid him, because everything he does with my mouth is expensive and for scientific matters. F**k science!!

Yeah... About this fight between my father and Dr. Rogers. Like most of the fights, we have winners and losers. My father and uncle decided to make Nate the new face of the company while I am the brain. Dr. Rogers found reasons to improve his research. The loser is me, who now, in addition to the ton of metal around the teeth and the Interlandi, display more metal with j-hooks and another face bow tied to my lower molars pulled by a cervical dark blue strap. I told him I’m older and I know the importance of wearing everything as directed (because of course I didn’t want to display all those wires and straps around my head) and he said he understood and he knows I’m older now, have a life (what life???) but it’s my father the one not to be trusted so yes, everything is tied to my stained dark bands.
If there was anyone who still wasn’t afraid of me, the time has come. The j-hooks were attached to big leather straps, in a high pull configuration with a big pad where the metal hooks attached to that cover great part of my cheeks. As usual, I had two sets, the other wasn’t caramel leather, it was a regular elastic one but it was red, he only had this color, so, no way wearing the red one in front of people. When Jenny saw she felt a little nervous because I noticed her trying to be nicer to me. Not that she wasn’t nice before but now she has offered help more often.
She is always at our house, even when Nate is not home. Now and then she makes dinner for us and she has a great repertoire of soft foods, that’s all I can eat. I cry every night and I’m extremely hopeless. Jenny saw too much, so much that she will never forget how I look like so even when this nightmare is over, I won’t have a chance.  The crush I had for her was promoted to love. But one day I will have to get over, no way this wonderful woman will end up with me. I am constantly drooling, I can’t close my mouth because of the number of wires coming out of it, I’m forgetting how it feels to hold the lips together because they simply don’t touch keeping my mouth permanently open. Jenny insists on applying moisturizer to my lips but I don’t feel good with her near my mouth with these ugly bands and lots of headgear, when I speak, I spit like a llama and when I eat I have to open my mouth, put the spoon inside, drop the food, bang the metals trying to chew, and swallow. It isn’t beautiful. When I talk all these wires bump into each other and it makes noises and I don’t want to drag attention to myself so I stopped talking to anyone including Jenny but she continued helping me until last month that’s when she began spending more time with Nate. She’s two years older than me, Nate is one year older than her, hot and with those beautiful teeth. I’m 20 years old and have never kissed anyone, not that I can with all these obnoxious braces and tons of headgear that I wonder how long I’m going to wear and lost the love of my life for my cousin, who is like a brother and the person that I love the most. I knew it would happen. After two horrible months wearing double headgear and j-hooks, I noticed that the lower headgear has never hurt therefore isn’t applying any force, the neck strap is loose.
I never learn that I can’t question about the need of the appliances so when I questioned if the lower headgear was really necessary in our next appointment he removed the bottom face bow and I was happy for two minutes. That’s what it took him to go to another room and come with another face bow with some hooks where the inner and outer bows meet, he asked me to open my mouth again and wired this new weird face bow, then he puts elastics from the hooks of the bands in the incisors to the hooks in the face bow. I felt that these elastics, different from everything else I have in my mouth, all the four green elastics are applying force. No, I can’t take them off to eat. Yes, the cervical strap is still loose but it's better to wear it than only have the metal hung in my mouth.

It is interesting to see where your mind is taking us. Please continue adding to this story.

Braceface2015
TheArchive2018

Chapter 6

Jenny

I started college on Friday. The thing is... I didn’t want to go to college wearing any kind of braces. I was done with it. I’ve had a miserable life so far so I wanted to enjoy college but my orthodontist was traveling and I wanted to know if I could finish the treatment and start the retainers. I’ll tell you the story of my life so far.

Let’s begin with my parent’s divorce when I was six years old. My mother decided to have a career and I ended up living with my father who didn’t have any idea of raising a child. I used to walk around like a boy, short hair, sneakers, jeans, and a t-shirt. Then he thought it would be nice if he got married again and this woman married him and started ‘taking care of me’. She began with my clothes and I resumed wearing dresses, which I liked but she used to twitch my hair when my father wasn’t looking and I cried a lot. Then when I was almost eight she took me to an orthodontist and he installed a palate expander. It sucked. Food got stuck on it and I had a lisp in the beginning. I started eating a lot due to anxiety so I started putting the fingers in my mouth all the time to remove the food from the expander and that witch said it wasn’t good manners to keep putting my hand in my mouth so I started wearing a habit breaker appliance that was like a retainer with a grid that didn’t let me reach the expander. Speaking was hard and I started to ‘forget’ where I left the habit breaker, that woman convinced my father that I had to wear something permanent but he refused, then she started to leave me without food, cut my hair that now was more girlish but nothing worked… Three other removable habit breakers mysteriously lost later she told me that my father was so upset that she was wondering if he would continue loving me if I kept losing the annoying appliance. I was afraid of my dad not loving me anymore, just like my mother, so I started wearing it all the time, becoming the joke of the school. I shouldn’t wear it when I was eating which means I stopped eating solids and became addicted to milkshakes.
After months the expander and the habit breaker were out but that woman loved my orthodontic hell, so I started wearing top and bottom retainers, nothing big, just annoying. She kept telling my father that the orthodontist was shocked by my case and it would take a long time to fix my teeth while my father thought I was too young to start such a hard treatment but she convinced him saying that they had to fix my teeth while I was young or else it would take more time. I wore the retainers for one year.
When I was 10 years old I started wearing a Frankel appliance and it was hell since that thing was too big and I couldn't speak because nobody understood and when I opened my mouth people thought I was playing with the brace because it kept falling. I wore it all the time for almost a year. I remember because it was fit on her birthday and she even said it was a gift nobody being able to understand whatever I said. During that time, I started paying attention to things and I heard my stepmother talking to Dr. Gonzalez saying that the braces scheme was great for them and in a few years they would have made lots of money. By that time, I didn’t understand what they were talking about. I was 11 years old and was the ugliest girl in the city, fat and with that huge activator all the time.

Chapter 7

Jenny

One month before her next birthday I stopped wearing the Frankel and it was a happy month but on the afternoon of her birthday party she took me to the orthodontist again and I started wearing a new huge brace. At her party, she said she was soooo happy to have a daughter like me and was sooo sad because I had to wear that huuuge brace, but she would do an-y-thing to help me become a beeeeeeeautiful woman. For the party, she made me wear a beige dress, very plain and beige shoes, everything was almost the color of my skin. My hair was in a bun surrounded by the neon pink straps of the headgear. The brace has a gigantic piece of electric green acrylic with a block between my top and bottom teeth with two rows of thick wires around them, electric green lip bumpers top and bottom didn’t allow me to close my mouth. The whiskers of the headgear came from the top lip bumper and from the block between my top and bottom teeth and these four wires connected to become one thick wire engaged to high pull neon pink straps and another pair of whiskers came from the bottom lip bumper engaged to a cervical pink strap. That green thing was always there for everyone to see, showing my teeth that had a diastema because of the time I wore the expander. Behind my teeth, the acrylic extended to my palate and had spikes that poked my tongue. I couldn’t close my mouth, so my lips were always very dry, different from the sea of saliva behind the plastic wall.  When I was near my stepmother, she proudly told whoever she was talking to that my orthodontist designed this activator specifically for my difficult case. It was as if she wanted to drag all the attention to my braces. Well, after one month without wearing any appliance my mouth wasn’t used to the bulkiness of that brace that had that ugly headgear and I had to make slurp noises to swallow the incredible amount of saliva I was producing. I learned that it was worse than the last brace because I had to speak with my teeth clenched into the bright green block, without the help of my lips and I hadn’t learned how to do it yet so people asked me things about school, for example, I mumbled the answers, they didn’t understand and they stopped talking to me and looked at me with pity eyes while I constantly made the slurp noises. I was feeling a lot of pain and went to my bedroom crying and boy... Crying trapped by that contraption was a very, very ugly and noisy thing. I couldn't swallow nor rest my jaws and I almost choked that first day.
I needed to ask the witch or my baby-sitter to unlock the brace whenever I wanted to drink water or eat, which I did a lot because there was a safety lock and I couldn’t unlock by myself. While my classmates were having their first kisses hidden somewhere at school I was hidden asking a teacher to unlock my braces so that I could eat alone with that big green alien on the table. Once I ‘forgot’ to put it on again and right when I was going to talk to the most popular girls at school I heard the voice of the principal on the speakers telling me to put the brace on or else he would call my stepmother and that’s what he would do if I didn’t wear it all the time and everybody laughed because I needed to ask the teacher to lock it. I asked dad to be homeschooled, but she said I needed social interaction and my father agreed but at school what I had was far from social interaction; stares, jokes, and even a guy said that he had to spend time with me, holding hands, to win a bet and I was so happy because someone would spend time with me that I let him do it but at lunch break, I asked a teacher to unlock it and when I met him wondering what would we talk about he took the braces from me and ran and suddenly my stepmother arrived and said that I should put myself in the insignificant place I belonged because it was time for me to know that nobody cared about me and locked the brace again in the middle of the cafeteria, gave the boy a 20 dollars bill and left. I wanted to tell my father what she had done but what he heard was something like “Eh, eh ath a oh at thoo oo ac y athe oo ueea e” and he asked her to unlock for me to remove the thing so that he could understand what I was saying but while she did she whispered that if I said anything she would ask Dr. Gonzalez some more spikes because my tongue was too big so I just told my father that I was happy because he came earlier to have dinner with me. My father was glad for her ‘taking care of me’ since my mother was busy with her own life, but he was sad because of that huge brace his daughter was condemned to wear.