“Fake,” An Excerpt from Alligator Tears by Edgar Gomez
Junior year of high school, my mom took me to the dentist to have my teeth filed down into sharp, flat daggers, then covered with perfect, shinier teeth, like press-on nails. They were called veneers. All the Hollywood It Girls like Hilary Duff were getting them at the time, whereas my broke-ass classmates could barely afford fake vampire teeth for their Halloween costumes.
Technically, Mom couldn’t afford to buy me veneers either. Once as a kid, I asked her if she could take me to the library, and she told me we couldn’t go because gas was too expensive. It wasn’t the first time I realized we were poor, but it was the first time our poverty seemed cartoonishly inescapable: we couldn’t even afford to drive five blocks for free shit.
I’d been obsessed with my teeth since the fifth grade, when being gap-toothed stopped being cute, and the kids with naturally straight teeth started pairing off to preserve their superior evolutionary lines. My teeth weren’t endearingly bad. I’m not talking about a tiny gap I could rebrand as quirky. Some of them were missing, the rest looked like rotting toenails. There was one stubborn baby tooth at the very front of my mouth that refused to fall off no matter how hard I tugged at it. I watched in horror well into my teenage years as all my other teeth began to crowd around it, strangling each other, fighting for air. I brushed them as soon as I woke up, after every meal, plus two or three times in between, to be safe. I thought making them whiter would distract from how awful they were, but after almost a decade of fanatical brushing, all that happened was my gumline receded. Google said I might even need gum surgery. Surgery!
I’d been bugging my mom for years about braces. During a trip we took to Nicaragua to visit relatives, I practically dragged her to a dentist, who said he could put some on me for cheap, but there was no way to get around having to fly back every few months to get them adjusted. I promised I would figure out a way to pay for the plane tickets myself, that the second we were back in Orlando, I would get a job and save every penny.
Still: “I’m sorry,” she said. “Maybe next year.”
But a year might as well have been an eternity, and I understood perfectly what she meant by “maybe.” I told her not to worry about it and stayed quiet the rest of the afternoon, brooding out of the car window on the drive home.
By the time I made it to high school, I’d added my teeth to the growing list of things I hoped would simply resolve themselves in the future: being gay, my acne, whatever mental illness I had that compelled me to stay up all night watching rom-coms and biting my nails until they bled. It was easier to tell myself that adult me would find solutions to these problems than to fixate on what I couldn’t change in the moment. For a while, this strategy worked.
Then I was expelled on drug charges from the criminal justice program Boone, after a classmate lied to the campus police that I was a drug dealer, and suddenly the future became just as unreliable as the present. I spent the summer between getting kicked out of Boone and starting at my new school, Oak Ridge, pacing my bedroom, spiraling. What if the expulsion stopped me from getting into college? Would adult me still be able to get a good job, or at least one with dental insurance? What if my smile always made people cringe? Who could love someone like that? Broke, with fucked-up teeth. What now? I used to think I was smart. Used to think that was something. But I was wrong. What was I supposed to do now?
My mom was the first person to teach me the importance of being beautiful. Ever since I was a child, she kept our fridge stocked with homemade creams she’d concocted by blending aloe and avocados from our yard. She’d lock herself in the bathroom once a month and emerge with her hair tinted a slightly different shade of red: Radiant Ruby, Cinnamon Sensation, whatever was on sale at Sally Beauty Supply. She wouldn’t leave the house without applying lipstick, mascara, blush, and her signature smoky purple eye shadow, or without high heels on, which she swore she was more comfortable in than flats. She lived for press-on nails and leopard print, for people to smell her perfume before she entered a room. At home, she walked around with her breasts hanging out and peed with the door wide open. Mom was proud of her body.
Some of them were missing, the rest looked like rotting toenails.
But she also had a pair of flippers, those creepy, removable fake teeth they make little girls wear in beauty pageants to look like dolls. She’d bought them for a hundred or so dollars in Nica and only took them off at night, keeping them in a Starbucks mug by her bed, ready for her the second she woke up. I know a part of her remembered what it was like to have bad teeth, because it was still evident in all the small mannerisms we shared. The way we pressed our lips tight in pictures. How we instinctively covered our mouths with the back of our hands when we laughed. Mom knew how it felt being afraid to smile, and the impact that had on everything else.
That isn’t what changed her mind about fixing my teeth, though. What was different, the year she finally took me to a dentist in Orlando, was that she was declaring bankruptcy. In the early 2000s, it seemed everyone was. The country was scrambling to get back on its feet after the recession. For years, banks moved in the shadow of the crumbling economy, offering predatory loans like the one Mom received to buy our house, trapping her in an endless payment cycle during which she could hardly cover the interest. Desperate for help, she’d called the number of a lawyer she saw on a billboard who said a bankruptcy would give her a fresh start and wipe out the mountain of credit card debt that had been accumulating since she divorced Papi.
What he didn’t say, but she must have inferred, was that it was also her chance to make one last big purchase.
I was only vaguely aware of the bankruptcy the day Mom drove me to the dentist. Part of me was convinced she was taking me just so I’d get off her back, and once we arrived at the clinic, she’d tell me no again, like in Nicaragua. I was sixteen by then—skeptical of anything trying to pass itself off as good news. This clinic was too nice for people like us, I thought, taking a seat in the waiting room. Portraits of happy blond families hung on the walls, their cruel white smiles beaming down at me as elevator jazz piped in from hidden speakers.
When the dentist, Dr. Franklin, emerged through a door and called out my name, I slid lower in my seat. He was younger than I’d expected, dressed like a former jock in a button-up shirt rolled up to his muscular biceps, and we were about to waste an hour of his time discussing my biggest insecurity. Mom forced me up by the arm. We followed Dr. Franklin to a screened-off room, where he instructed me to lie down and open my mouth wide so he could inspect inside with little silver tools. Just in case I’d ever deluded myself into thinking my teeth weren’t that bad, he began to list their various flaws: crooked, not enough room, growing inward.
“No cavities, though,” he said, sounding surprised. “Good for you.”
I lay there, trying not to choke on my own saliva.
In the end, Dr. Franklin gave Mom the same monologue I’d already heard from the last dentist. Braces weren’t a one-and-done thing. In my case, they required a minimum two-year commitment. He rattled off prices I didn’t bother paying attention to. I would have preferred he slapped me on the face; it would’ve been less humiliating than pretending to take him seriously.
I was preparing for us to go when, out of nowhere, Mom asked about alternatives to braces. My ears perked up. What was this about? So did Dr. Franklin’s, because he reappraised us, as if trying to fit a newly discovered piece into an already complete puzzle. My dirty sneakers. Mom’s bamboo earrings. He shifted in his chair, then mentioned that a popular new option was veneers, but it was a more extreme route that most clients found too expensive for—
“That’s fine,” Mom cut him off sharply.
I looked at her sideways from the bed. That’s fine? Fine for who? Where was the lady who bought underwear by the Ziploc bag at the flea market?
Dr. Franklin nodded apologetically and went on to say that I was an excellent candidate. Because my baby tooth had never fallen off, after removing it there would be a large space in my smile that would take years for the braces to correct, but veneers could cover that problem area up instantly. In fact, he said, he could do some X-rays, order the veneers, and give me a brand-new smile all within a month. The veneers were $900 per tooth, plus installment fees. About $16,000 in total.
It was Mom who shifted in her chair now. She lowered her eyes and bit her lip, trying to calculate how much credit she had between her cards.
“What if we do just the top half of his teeth?” she asked after a while, lifting her eyes to Dr. Franklin again. “Those are the only ones people can see anyway, right?”
He cleared his throat. “Yes,” he said. “That’s . . . possible.”
The total would come out closer to $8,000, but I wouldn’t need to return for readjustments, as with braces.
“Okay,” Mom said. “What do we have to do?”
I pointed at the best tooth, at the end of the slab, imagining it in my mouth and the doors it would open.
When Dr. Franklin’s assistant marched over in a pair of Minnie Mouse Crocs to hand Mom the paperwork, I felt dizzy with disbelief, as if I’d stepped into the most incredible movie and none of the actors had realized I had locked the actual star, a spoiled little rich boy who casually did rich people shit like get veneers, into his trailer and taken his place. I didn’t dare speak or move, worried the wrong action on my part would alert the cast and bring the film to a screeching halt.
Mom, swiping several credit cards before signing on the dotted line.
Dr. Franklin, shaking my flabby hand, kindly ignoring the sweat gathered there.
His assistant, guiding me to a blank wall, an explosion of light as she took the Polaroid she explained would be used as my Before picture.
A few minutes later I found myself in a cozy, dimly lit office, where she placed in front of me a ruler-sized slab of wood with a dozen teeth glued to it, side by side, in shades ranging from Beige to Pastor at Megachurch. It looked like something she’d fished out of a radioactive swamp.
“Which color you want for your veneers, hun?” she asked.
I was so close to getting away with it. I hesitated, wondering whether this was one last test. It didn’t make sense—what idiot would pick a shade other than the whitest? Surely no one would be so tragic as to settle for mediocrity when they could be great? But even if it was a test, Mom had a receipt in her bag and a date set. There was nothing stopping us now. I pointed at the best tooth, at the end of the slab, imagining it in my mouth and the doors it would open. With a full set like that, I could get any job, date anyone I wanted. Images of myself as a doctor or a lawyer flashed behind my eyes, clinking wineglasses with my husband in our tasteful brownstone in Manhattan, the two of us cracking up about the time I got kicked out of school and thought I’d ruined my future. I felt an awkward pull in my cheeks, the muscles contracting in a way I wasn’t used to. I couldn’t help it. I was smiling.
“This one!” I practically cackled.
“No.” The assistant frowned. “You don’t want that one. It’s too white for you. Trust me. Choose one with a little yellow, or no one is going to believe they’re real.”
Since starting at Oak Ridge, I’d mostly minded my business, trying to focus on my grades and prove to Mom I wasn’t a complete mess. The memory of the afternoon I came home from Boone and told her I’d gotten expelled still haunted me. I’d anticipated tears, a fight. She was not one of those chill American parents who let stuff slide. Energy drinks were drugs to her. Walking around the house barefoot: a war crime. But she’d listened to me tell her about my failure in silence, didn’t even flinch when I mentioned marijuana charges. That crushed me more than the expulsion itself. It was like she expected me to disappoint her. I was Papi’s kid, right?
After the initial shock started wearing off, I felt relieved to be free of Boone and my majority white classmates who were probably glad I was gone. As the new kid at Oak Ridge, I was a novelty. In the early days, the predominantly Puerto Rican and Haitian students in my classes all climbed over each other to be my friend. Did I play sports? they asked. Have a girlfriend? Could I sit next to them? The kindness they welcomed me with confirmed that Oak Ridge was where I’d always belonged.
A few months in, riding on the wave of my popularity, I told a boy I was gay. We were at the bus stop waiting to be picked up. Something about the way Angel sat, with one leg tucked under his butt, made me feel like he wouldn’t be weirded out. And he was in drama club, so there was that.
The gold cross around his neck glinted in the sunlight. “I think I am too,” Angel said.
Everything happened quickly, like we’d both been starving before we showed up in each other’s lives. By the next day, we were boyfriends. Making out behind the theater at the far end of campus, me on my tiptoes to get on his level. Switching hoodies between periods while our teachers shook their heads. I was so smitten that I had a boo I could touch and kiss and text good morning and goodnight to that it didn’t bother me that my reputation around school was changing.
Being out wasn’t the automatic death sentence it’d been in the past, but it wasn’t anything to be celebrated either. These were the days of Mean Girls, of Christina Aguilera wailing You are beautifullll on the radio, and yet a common argument on every morning talk show was that if gays were given the right to marry, next people would start marrying their dogs. My straight classmates didn’t know what to do with me. Initially they followed the script their parents must have in the ’80s, their questions turning from curious to accusatory. How did I know I didn’t like pussy if I hadn’t tried it? What did I do about all the shit when I had sex? Did one of my uncles touch me? Nothing I hadn’t heard in some corny after-school special. But it was like they also understood how tired those jokes were, and gradually their disgust faded into ambivalence.
Caught up in the excitement of being in love, I shrugged at the warning signs: how Angel and I only kissed in hiding, the worn Bible he carried around in his backpack. When we broke up—he made a mistake, Angel said, a phase, he told people— I was suddenly aware of how compromised I’d become. I was okay with him by my side, but now I was out on my own, my loneliness multiplied by my classmates’ avoidance of me.
One boy who I’d been eating lunch with found out I’d tried to “turn” Angel gay and said we couldn’t be seen together. He said he’d made real friends he’d be having lunch with.
The Gay Kid was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things, after all, not real friend material, not worthy of sharing meals with and too pathetic to even enjoy bullying anymore. The same classmates who’d wanted to know me when I was new had long ago backed away. Their offer of community, just as I began to believe I deserved one, withdrawn. I took their rejection as another expulsion, except worse: I never expected anything from kids at Boone. But at Oak Ridge, I’d started to think I could be someone. At lunch, I went to the library, laid my head down at an empty table, and pretended to sleep as the cheerful din of students eating outside echoed in my ears. I did that for a year.
The day of the procedure, Mom picked me up from school right after she got off work. We arrived at the dentist’s office twenty minutes early and parked under a shady tree. While we waited, Mom pulled a thin cardigan out of her purse, buttoned it over the green Starbucks mermaid sewn onto her uniform, then lowered the driver’s seat mirror to dab concealer under her eyes and apply a fresh coat of mascara. She must have been exhausted.
“Ready?” she asked.
I leaped over the divider and wrapped my arms tight around her chest.
“Thank you,” I whispered.
She kissed the top of my head. “You’re welcome. Now you can’t say I don’t love you.”
Before he began, Dr. Franklin gave Mom and me a lecture on upkeep. There were hard foods I’d need to avoid for the rest of my life: no apples, no candy. And I shouldn’t try opening bottles with my veneers, he winked. I nodded politely, as if any of those things mattered to me. I would have given him my soul. He said the veneers were made to last about ten years, though with proper care they could last up to fifteen, and then I’d have to replace them.
That, actually, gave me pause. It meant there’d come a day when I’d need to come up with $8,000, an impossible sum of money, nearly half what Mom made in an entire year. Yet I also knew that once I had veneers, money would never be a problem again. They’d cover all my ugly parts. My drug record. My brokeness and broken-ness. I brushed my uneasiness away.
After asking Mom to wait in the lobby, Dr. Franklin had me lie back on the operating bed and open my mouth. I stared up at the strip of bright white lights on the ceiling as he wrenched out my baby tooth with a pair of pliers, turned on what sounded like a power drill, and proceeded to slowly sand down my teeth, bone particles filling the air. When he was finished, he brought out the tray of off-white veneers his assistant had recommended and cemented them one by one over my newly flattened teeth. The whole process took about two hours. It was heaven.
Finally, he had me sit back up and placed a mirror in my hand. My heart pounded as I brought it up and pried my lips open. It took a second for what I was looking at to sink in. The veneers didn’t merely close the gaps in my teeth, they also made my face fuller, my jaw rounder instead of tense and jammed tight, like I usually kept it. I scrutinized my reflection, turning from side to side. I looked like myself.
I looked like the real me, not that other, shame-filled version of me I’d been living as before. A startled giggle shot out of my mouth. Instinctively, I reached up to cover it with the back of my hand, but I stopped and lowered it halfway. I didn’t need to hide ever again.
Dr. Franklin summoned Mom from the waiting room, and within minutes, she and half of the office were hovering over me, oohing and aahing.
“Amazing work!” they patted his back. “It’s incredible!”
“You’re a genius, Doctor!”
“Precioso,” Mom said, kissing my cheek. “Mi niño lindo.”
A flash went off. I was back against the blank wall for my After picture with Dr. Franklin’s assistant. She snatched the Polaroid from the camera and waved it in the air, then fit it into a plastic sleeve inside a binder next to dozens of other clients’ Before and After photos. It reminded me of a yearbook, all our smiles vulnerable and self-conscious. As I stared at my Before photo, a strange pang of grief shot across my chest. I’d been that person my whole life. Whatever I’d felt about myself over the years, they’d kept me alive through everything.
Sitting in Mom’s truck as we drove home that day, the world beyond the passenger seat window seemed to glow with possibility. Wildflowers bloomed along the edges of retention ponds, flocks of egrets swam across the tangerine sky. That week I laughed the loudest at everyone’s jokes at school, savoring the new sensation of my jaw growing sore. I was the first to volunteer to work out problems on the board so my classmates could get a better view of my smile. Some offered compliments, most didn’t notice a difference. I’d thought their opinions would matter to me more, but they didn’t. At least, they didn’t like before, when I measured my self-worth by their approval. I had $8,000 teeth now. There was no denying my worth.
I had $8,000 teeth now. There was no denying my worth.
On a sunny afternoon not long after the procedure, while I was still floating on the high of my transformation, Mom and I went to Saks Fifth Avenue to use a coupon they’d sent her in the mail. Ordinarily, I didn’t even like walking through Saks to get to the other stores inside the mall. The prices intimidated me, the bored rich ladies sighing miserably as they rifled through racks of European designers. But those things also made Saks a safe space in a way. Nobody made a scene there. You had to be on your best behavior. As Mom and I stood at the Clinique counter waiting for someone to help us, a voice in the pit of my stomach told me it was time.
Do it, the voice said. You’re going to have to eventually. Come on. She’s not going to freak out around all these rich white bitches. Get it over with now.
“Mamá?” I heard myself say. “I have to tell you something.” “Yeah?” she answered while looking around for a salesclerk.
My legs started shaking, preparing to make a run for it. But the voice was right. I couldn’t keep postponing the conversation forever. I laid my head on my mother’s shoulder and held it there for a few more seconds, breathing in her sweet perfume, just in case she’d never let me do that again.
“I think I like boys,” I told her. “I think I’m gay.”
Right then a salesclerk appeared in front of us. Mom’s posture stiffened. I lifted my head to try to read her face. “Okay,” she said, then dug through her purse for her sunglasses and put them on, I understood, to cry. The salesclerk didn’t seem to notice. Behind her sunglasses, Mom acted totally fine, cheerful even. She accepted the samples the woman offered like nothing had happened, and in the end, we left the store with a three-month supply of face wash and several bags of free makeup that came as a gift with purchase. All paid for with credit.
Afterward we walked through the mall holding hands, not speaking. I assumed she was processing what I’d said, but the fact that she hadn’t pulled me to the car yet buoyed me. She didn’t disown me or kick me out. Just a few tears, but maybe those were normal. Wasn’t coming out supposed to be sad? The moment we entered the next store, I grabbed a random pair of jeans from a stack and fled to the dressing room. Inside, I sat with them folded on my lap, laughing. I did it, the thing I was most afraid of, and she’d said it was okay.
It wasn’t, though. That night I heard her sobbing on the phone with an aunt in Nicaragua. Over the next few months, she’d begin to avoid me at home, leaving food for me in the microwave after work and disappearing into her room, locking the door behind her. My mother was born in a country where it was illegal to be gay. When she immigrated to Miami in the ’80s, the queer community was in the throes of the AIDS crisis. Like my classmates, I could see her struggling to bridge the gap between then and now. In her mind, being gay would lead to a lifetime of discrimination, if I was lucky, and death by a disease or a hate crime if I was not.
Things would get worse between us before they’d get better. There’d be long, painful screaming matches, kicked-down doors. Nights when I’d fall asleep hugging my pillow tight, remembering how close we used to be. She was my best friend, my co-conspirator. When I was younger, the mere thought of her being upset with me would have destroyed me.
And yet I wasn’t destroyed. In the morning, I’d wake up, take a shower, make an effort to keep going. It’s a parent’s job to raise their child to the best of their abilities and prepare them for the real world. Looking back, that’s what she did. What Mom had been doing, since long before I’d come out, all those years she’d modeled for me how to be clever and resourceful, to never allow anyone to make you a victim. Every time she’d told me I was beautiful, even when I didn’t believe that myself. She’d given me what I needed to survive. I just hadn’t thought I’d have to do it without her.
From one month to the next, something shifted inside me. It was as if I’d used up my lifetime’s supply of sadness in one short, aggressive period of time and now I had to find another emotion to run on. A coldness spread around my heart, not unpleasantly so, like ice on a bruise.
All right then, I decided. If all I could ever be was the Gay Kid to my classmates, then fine, I would be exactly like the bitchy gay sidekicks on TV. So what if I couldn’t win over some miserable, no-taste-having-ass losers? Obviously they were just jealous I was perfect and they were what? Peaking! At seventeen! How tragic! They’d probably end up selling fridges at Sears or some shit—of course they were mad! It wasn’t my fault I was gorgeous, that they simply couldn’t take me. They’d made a mistake, showing me kindness when I was the new kid. I could have kept on hating myself. Ha! If it weren’t for them, I might have never known I was special.
Throughout the rest of high school, I tried to pass off my silence as haughtiness, a look I thought made me seem grown. Orlando bored me. Oak Ridge was embarrassing. When I was older, I’d move to New York where people had style and sense and were really living.
Until then, I made friends with the kids who, like me, were also desperate for an escape. The ones who lived in the trailer parks by the airport, who filled dollar composition books with angry poetry. Queer girls. They taught me how to skip class in the bathroom, squished into the handicap stall, that no one would stop us if we walked off campus at lunch and drove to the beach, blending in with tourists. Soon I only showed up at school enough to avoid the truancy cops and maintain my 4.0 GPA—less a reflection of my intelligence than of how little our jaded, under-resourced teachers expected of us. When I did go, I sat at a desk far in the back, feigning indifference and drinking coffee out of the travel mugs Mom stole from Starbucks to give to relatives, acting as if I were sipping on an expensive latte. In case anyone mistook my being quiet as weakness and dared say something slick to me, I maintained a running catalog of insults to shoot back with: Whose gold chain left a green ring around their neck and thought no one noticed. Which jock was rumored to have a tiny dick.
In the afternoon, I rode the bus to my new job at Auntie Anne’s Pretzels at the Florida Mall, treating myself to a few staples with the money I made: checkerboard Vans, Levi’s 511s, clothes that radiated a casual, generational wealth, the final touch I needed to complete my Over It costume. I kept secret how I got my veneers and pretended to love working at Auntie Anne’s, my smelly, baggy uniform, customers barking orders and throwing their cash onto the counter instead of placing it in my hand. I wouldn’t give anyone anything to hold against me.
Making my way through the hallways at Oak Ridge, I strutted to my locker in my tightest jeans, bouncing my freshly grown-out head of curls. I was sickening, honey! That bitch! Happy as a moth, crashing my body over and over against a lamp. You could not tell me I wasn’t going anywhere, that my future wasn’t bright. I put one foot in front of the other, stuck my chin up, and smiled with all my fake teeth.
From the book Alligator Tears: A Memoir in Essays by Edgar Gomez. Copyright © 2025 by Edgar Gomez. Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.