In 7th grade, my brother and I were given air soft guns as our Christmas gifts. My gun was much larger and much more powerful. I took great pride in my huge Desert Eagle that could have probably passed for a real gun excluding the bright orange tip. We were both ecstatic about getting them because now we would be able to follow the trend that most of all our friends were doing. We could join in on the air-soft wars. It didn’t hurt as much as a paintball, but still created quite a rush.

It was Christmas night and we finally were able to take our guns outside and see what damage we could inflict on one another. We had no idea. It started out fun, and but then go kind of boring because we were the only ones playing and we grow old of each other pretty quickly. I turned towards the house and figured we had both agreed on stopping. I regret not saying that I was done for the night and just wanted to go inside because Reece didn’t get that impression just by me walking away. I heard him come up from behind.

“Don’t you dare,” I urged him. The second I opened my mouth to complete my sentence of urgency, he had already fired his stupid little P-22 gun. It paled in comparison to my gun. This gun was tiny and didn’t even hurt when getting shot with it, but somehow was able to do severe damage to my body after all. I felt two hard pieces of an unknown substance in my mouth. It was two pieces of my two front teeth sitting in my mouth. Reece had chosen to shoot me in the vicinity of my face no more than five feet away. His judgment was clearly clouded.

When I realized this had happened, I started to scream. Not from the pain, but from the possibility of my disfigurement. I couldn’t have imagined what I would look like with a large piece of tooth missing from both of my front teeth. Christmas break was almost over and I would eventually have to go school to face my peers. Would I be able to get to a dentist in time? Even the thought of a dentist was agonizing for me because of the possibility that I would have to get a shot in my mouth, which I had never experienced before.

As I ran inside screaming, my dad instantly reacted and acted like he predicted this would happen. He did not approve of the gifts in the first place. My mother had bought us the guns. I remember that the Christmas gift system was one of the only good things about a divorce. For a young kid, double the gifts was amazing.

Luckily for me, Reece had only chipped my teeth and didn’t expose, which have cause a root canal on each tooth. That would have involved a shot in the mouth and I’m sure other painful and torturous techniques used at the dentist’s office. They were able to fill the gaps with some sort of plastic and it didn’t hurt at all. So now my teeth are in tact, but I’m not allowed to eat corn on the cob. I don’t even like corn.