I am fourteen. Newly so. It's my birthday and I want to celebrate even though I look like this. Yesterday at school I slid a flattened straw between my two front teeth to feel the plastic on my gums, but I pulled it out too quickly and felt it catch, felt the tug and then the little corner of tooth floating around in my saliva, spit into my hand. It happened between fifth and sixth period, so I just wiped it into the pocket of my jeans, pressed my lips together and made it through the rest of the day in silence. Now I can't stop running my tongue over my tooth's chipped ridge. It is a pleasant sensation, this altered mouth-scape. It's sharp but not too sharp. Familiar little groove.

The tooth has been chipped for years, really. It was the veneer I disturbed with the straw—the fake part. The actual chip happened in a roller-blading accident way back in fifth grade, so I know the drill by now: a trip to the dentist Monday morning, a finger wag for being careless, and then I'll get to look at a lot of cool tools and gadgets, flavored pastes and putties that become teeth and hot blue lights and a straw that sucks on me and I'll have a new fake tooth corner in a half-hour or so. Isn't dentistry surreal? I'll get back to school in time for drama class.

I still want to celebrate my damn birthday.

My family has moved, recently, from a split-level rental on a cookie-cutter suburban cul-de-sac to a big fairytale cottage in an enchanted wood on the other side of town. My little brother has already joined the pack of boys that march around in line like elves, organizing enchanted soccer games. I am way more popular at my new school than I ever was at the old one. It really sucks that I can't have a big party. So many kids would come.

Let me tell you about Cathy Tupper, my best friend from my old school. I still want to celebrate my damn birthday and I know she'll be nice about my tooth because Cathy and I got hot together. That means we were ugly and invisible together first, so it would be very uncool for either of us to judge. When we met, in band class, sitting side by side with clarinets in our mouths, we were both the kind of girl you might call mousey, our hotness all hidden somewhere behind the oversized tee-shirts and thick glasses. The ponytails with messy bangs. The lack of mascara. Near the end of seventh grade, though, we both got contacts and started shopping in the Juniors department and suddenly we weren't invisible anymore. Boys started to make jokes about what those clarinets could be.

We didn't realize that becoming visible would mean that boys—men, too—would start saying things like that to us. We didn't know we would have to start "dodging dicks," as Cathy calls it, and we don't know how we're supposed to feel about it. But we sure do like feeling pretty. We are glad that we became hot girls together. We talk about these things, Cathy and me.

Let me tell you about Grant Stillman, my best friend at my new school. He will walk over from his parent's fairytale cottage pretty soon. He, too, lives in the enchanted wood, and he will, as usual, bring along some enchanted substance or another that will make us giggle in the backseat of my mom's car all the way to the mall. We are going to see Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet. Grant is one boy whose dick I know I will never have to dodge because he hopes to do some dick dodging of his own someday. We talk about these things, Grant and me. We talk about dicks and vaginas and we showed ours to each other once, like children playing doctor, I guess, except it was just a month ago. When he touched me Grant immediately recoiled, saying "men are like weapons and women are open wounds" and I guess he's right about that. He spent the rest of the night talking to the ceiling about the inequity of heterosexuality while I tried to draw him in my journal.

I'm weeping in the theater on my fourteenth birthday, tonguing my chipped tooth and letting the tears slide down my face in silence, feeling safe in the dark. Romeonardo peers through a bright blue tropical fish tank at My-So-Called-Juliet and I am thinking about my first boyfriend, Aaron Butler, and how Cathy Tupper introduced us over the phone, on a conference call from Justin Dwyer's dad's home office. Justin was Cathy's boyfriend at the time and Aaron Butler, Justin's best friend, was about to start going to my new school. Over the course of several more conference calls, we, the four of us, built it up into some kind of new-kids-in-love story and a few days later, via call waiting, in Cathy's voice, translated from the Justin translation of the original, Aaron Butler asked me to be his girlfriend. We didn't see each other face to face until a week later, on his first day at school, when he found me in the cafeteria at lunchtime. Our relationship mostly just consisted of us sitting together at lunch and walking together in the hallways, but now I'm sitting here weeping in the theater on my fourteenth birthday and Desiree is singing about kissing and I am thinking about that one, soft kiss that day before I got on the bus. My first kiss. My only kiss. When will I ever kiss again?

And now Mercutio-in-drag is dancing and I am thinking about the time I refused to hold Aaron's hand in the hallway because I just didn't feel like it at that moment and why did we have to hold hands all the time anyway? And now neon crosses, and now swimming pools and now bloody street fights and Romeo slew Tybalt and Romeo must not live and I am thinking about how Sandy Black stormed into French class that morning with a smirk on her face, like she had just eaten something delicious and she couldn't wait to give me a taste, how she used Spice Girls lyrics to say it at first, something like, "I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want my lover to get with my friends," how I later learned that this alluded to the fact that she had witnessed my very first boyfriend, Aaron Butler, making out with Jenny Konopka on the bus that morning.

My-So-Called-Juliet is ugly-crying, poison-eyeing, and I am digging my tongue into the sharpest point of my chipped tooth, hoping to taste blood, and all that I am thinking is that Jenny Konopka is not my friend.

We have to kill some time before my mom comes to pick us up. Grant suggests pizza, but Cathy wants to buy me a present. I smile without parting my lips. I am thinking about how when I asked Cathy that night to ask Justin to ask Aaron Butler why he did it, he said, in Cathy's voice, another call-waiting translation of a translation, "Well, which girl would you want? The one who makes out with you on the bus or the one who won't even hold your hand?" My heart lurches a little.

We loiter around Tower Records for a while and Cathy buys me the CD I have been coveting since the summertime, with the one song that is sure to cheer me up, anytime, always, and presents it to me with a flourish. We listen to it in the car on the way home and my spirits pick themselves up off the dirty floor of my soul. The intro builds up in my gut and the outro assures me, "Awwww, it's all goood." I believe that decrescendo.

Jenny Konopka is my friend, sort of? She sidled up to me on the running track during mandatory exercise last week and told me she liked my iridescent nail polish and she kind of hasn't left my side since then? And I kind of don't mind, I guess? We are YMCA counselors-in-training, Jenny and I, and there aren't a lot of us. I guess Jenny decided I was the best fit for the empty slot labeled "Jenny's Summer Camp Friend," because I guess she maybe actually thinks I'm kind of cool, maybe? On Friday she introduced me to my new boyfriend, Brandon Moody, who is best friends with her boyfriend, Tommy Galloway.

Being a counselor-in-training kind of blows. It's just because none of our parents trust us to stay home all summer and we aren't old enough for real jobs yet. I'm pretty sure Grant and all of the other teenagers in the enchanted forest are ordering pizzas and playing Super Nintendo without me every day. But I do really like the things Jenny and I do with our boyfriends just feet away from each other in the little storage room above the racquetball court.

Jenny Konopka has seen me with Brandon Moody's tongue in my mouth and she has seen what I look like when I am thinking about doing it and she probably knows, like Brandon and I both know, that I love being felt-up but I don't want to do any feeling up of my own. Jenny knows all of that about me and she likes my nail polish so I think we must be actual friends, now.

Let me tell you about Brandon Moody's dick. I touched it, finally. I tried to avoid it almost all summer, but one day I guess I just gave in and I reached into his pants and I wrapped my hand around it. It felt kind of like a big worm at first and then it changed and I was holding this, like, flesh-rod and it was so weird I pulled my hand right back out. I think it might have been a mistake to touch it because Brandon won't stop talking about doing it now. He keeps trying to get me to sneak off into the woods with him, and he keeps reminding me that Tommy and Jenny did it last week and no one caught them. I said I was on my period for a while, but Jenny called me out after a week of that lie. "Mine only last like five days," she said, "so you should be able to do it now." She said that in front of Brandon Moody, too. Jenny Konopka is not my friend.

Brandon Moody and I are sitting at a picnic table playing footsie and he tells me to reach out under the table for his hand and when I do he presses something squishy into my palm. Looking down, I see that it is a condom with a sheep on the wrapper. The ones Grant keeps in his sock drawer don't have sheep on the wrappers and I wonder if Brandon's sheep-condoms are better than Grant's condoms, which come in clear wrappers so you can see which color you're getting. I turn the sheep-condom over in my hand, squeeze it and feel it squish again. I try not to react.

"I'm going to use that with you next Friday," is what Brandon says about it, and I know he means at the amusement park. There is a field trip next Friday. He is trying to be romantic, he says, so that our first time can be special. The amusement park is a special place, he says. Plus it will be easy to sneak off there, to slip the real counselors and then slip it in, he says, and he chuckles. I just keep nodding, not knowing what to do or say back to him. I like Brandon Moody. I really like him. I want him to keep being my boyfriend, so I just keep nodding.

Last night I freaked out. I didn't know what to do so I called Cathy Tupper and I told her everything. And Cathy Tupper told me I don't have to go to the amusement park and I don't have to ride any rides I don't want to ride. She said it seemed like a good night for a sleepover. And now it's amusement park day and I am sitting on her couch watching Seinfeld instead, because I want to remain master of my domain. I want my life to be a show about nothing.

When I return to the Y on Monday, Brandon Moody is no longer my boyfriend. I learn this first from Lauren Flayme, a pudgy, funny, gossipy girl a year younger than the rest of us. When I see him—sitting alone at a picnic table with his hands folded in his lap, as if he's been expecting me—Brandon explains that Jenny introduced him to her friend Candace at the amusement park and, in my absence, what choice did he have? He wants to still be friends, he says, but at lunchtime he and Jenny and Tommy all sit far away from me. I sit with Lauren Flayme.

As I walk the running track alone at mandatory exercise, I run my tongue over my smooth front teeth and I feel sort of dissatisfied and I realize my stupid heart isn't even broken. I watch Brandon, Jenny, and Tommy, so far ahead of me on the running track that I can see their smiling faces, not their backs. I kick a rock and squint at the sun and I find myself thinking about the night of my fourteenth birthday, back at the enchanted forest, Cathy, Grant and I lying across my bed, full of enchanted substances, listening to Beck and giggling at the ceiling, chanting, "Oh! Delay! Oh! Delay! Oh! Delay!"

—Claire Boswell