Quote:
A new candy store is giving free promotional candy to try and attract new customers. At first, it’s delicious; it’s easily one of the best candies you’ve ever had. Only, within twenty four hours of eating your first piece, you begin to have extreme tooth pain that can last for up to a whole day. It feels like a cavity, but a trip to the dentist reveals nothing strange. It just hurts. While the pain eventually fades, you’ll remember how much it hurt. Is your drive for Halloween Candy dented or are you still gearing up for more?
Clementine had not, initially, felt anything out of the ordinary; she might have been thirteen-going-on-fourteen and getting to the point where her mother asked her (well-meaning, but still a little insultingly) that was she sure she wanted to go trick-or-treating, wasn't she a little old for Halloween? She wasn't - but that was because it was a silly question. Halloween was the only good holiday in the latter half of the year, and it was all due to the candy; and you were never too old for candy, in Clementine's esteemed and clearly informed opinion.
It was hard to be as smart as her, she had thought, and had promptly thrown another caramel into her mouth without further thought. Or it would have been without further thought, in most cases, but about three hours later her mouth started to hurt. It was a small pain, at first, like biting down on something that wasn't designed to break and doing it too hard; maybe she had gotten a bit of one of the hard candies stuck in her gum? Clementine poked around in her mouth with a toothpick for a bit, then, to see if anything was found - she found nothing wrong with her mouth besides caramel between her teeth, and resolved to ignore it. That was a pledge that lasted all of about thirty minutes, over which the pain intensified and intensified until she shoved a washcloth between her teeth and bit down and started to cry, in pain she couldn't really recognize as a toothache due to lack of experience -- Clementine was one of the lucky sort who rarely ever even had cavities, after all, and even though those could occasionally hurt she'd never had a proper toothache.
Localized food poisoning, she thought, maybe? But it was too much pain to unclench her jaw, so through a mixture of frustrated, in-pain wailing and whimpering, Clem managed to bring her mother over to her room; her mother, who patted her hair and held her hand and brought her an icepack for her cheek. That helped, a little, but not as much as she might have liked, because every time she took the ice away from her cheek on virtue of 'too damn cold and her nerves were crying' the pain came back, and she bit down harder on the cloth and cried and cried and cried, too miserable to really manage anything else. At some point she slipped into restless, unhappy sleep, fabric still clenched tight between her teeth; and her dreams were a hazy blur of candy candy candy and fantastical dentists.
(She woke up five hours later, still in pain, and wandered out to the kitchen long enough to swallow some generic-brand ibuprofen and ambien -- her sleep was actually mostly dreamless, then, and all hazy blurs of colors. When Clem woke up again eight hours later, nine hours later, the pain was starting to fade; she sat and played video games with an icepack taped to her face, and resolved to learn absolutely nothing from this because she would be damned if she would let one toothache ruin Halloween forever. Even if it had been both her first toothache and a particularly bad one.)
[wc: 535]
