The Tooth Will Finally Come Out

This story is my dad’s from when he was about twelve years old. He and his three siblings were home alone on a winter day while their parents were running errands. The four kids decided to have a snowball fight, with a few twists: it was a three-on-one fight, with the three older siblings taking on the youngest brother. To “make it more fair,” the three older siblings would stick to throwing snowballs, while the youngest brother got to shoot at them with an old BB gun. The gun was not powerful at all — according to my dad, you could almost see the BB coming toward you because the gun was so weak — so they thought they would be okay with their heavy winter coats and snow pants, as long as their brother didn’t aim at their heads.

About ten minutes into the snowball vs BB gun fight, my dad popped out from behind a tree and threw a snowball at his younger brother. His brother shot at him, aiming at my dad’s chest to avoid breaking the rule against headshots. The only problem was that my dad ducked.

According to my dad, when the BB hit one of his teeth, it made a sound kind of like a loud bell echoing inside his head. My dad’s tooth broke in half, and the kids naturally called the fight off and went inside to take care of it. When their parents got home and saw my dad’s broken tooth, all the kids lied and said my dad had slipped on the icy driveway and broke his tooth when he fell. Somehow, the parents believed their kids, and rushed my dad to the dentist with no further questions asked.

My grandparents didn’t find out the truth about what happened until almost thirty years later, when my mom casually mentioned the story to my dad’s parents, not knowing that his parents had never heard the true story about my dad’s broken tooth.