Pointer Tooth

I had a pointer tooth when I was a child.

I called it a pointer tooth because it jutted out of my mouth and, wherever I looked, it pointed in the same direction. Aside from being just an annoying looking tooth, it also proved to be very dangerous.

One summer while I was at a summer camp in Tyler, I found out how dangerous my pointer tooth could be. The whole camp was playing a giant game of freeze tag (or some other game that required a bunch of hyper middle-school students to run around in circles) and I wasn’t exactly doing a good job of looking where I was going. At one point I looked behind me to see if I was being chased and when I turned back around, it happened.

I slammed into another camper’s head. I grabbed my mouth and he grabbed his head. Almost instantly I knew what had happened. I had stabbed his head with my pointer tooth. He started to look up at me and I bolted. I didn’t want to be known as the kid who ran around biting people in the head.

Oh how wrong I was.

The next day I was standing in line at the concession stand when I heard, “What happened to your head?” I slowly turned around to see a familiar face with a giant bandage on his head. In answer to the inquiry about his head the boy just shrugged but one of his friends answered the question for him.

“Some guy was running around during the game yesterday and bit him in the head.”

Suddenly I wasn’t in the mood for the concession stand anymore. I had gone from a fun-loving middle school student to the “Anonymous Head Biter,” scourge to all camp games. Needless to say it didn’t feel good at all and it mostly didn’t feel good because I was hiding from what I had done, even though it was an accident.

The guilt wrecked me for the entire week and I could just picture in my mind the boy who I bit growing up to become a shut-in because he didn’t want to leave his house only to be attacked and have his head chewed on once again.

So, the last night of camp, I went looking for the boy with the bandage. I found him with the girl who had told the concession stand line that someone had “bitten him in the head,” and just pointed at his bandage and said, “Hey man, that was me. I’m really sorry about that.”

He looked at me with a shocked expression and his friend looked at me like I was a monster. Then the guy said, “That’s cool man. I’m sure you didn’t mean to do it.” Suddenly a weight was lifted off my shoulders. I could live life knowing that I had not caused someone to become a recluse.