Bethany Bruno
Admission=1 Tooth
It means empty lots, orange flags, and a billboard with a white family smiling in front of a lake that isn’t a lake yet. It means bulldozers where palmettos used to grab your ankles. It means somebody got paid to name a subdivision Heron Pointe Preserve after chasing off every heron.
Our park was behind the model homes, where the retention pond sagged green in the heat and smelled like hot pennies and lawn chemicals.
We called it Mosquito Kingdom State Park.
Admission was one tooth. Baby teeth counted. Shark teeth counted. A secret counted if it had blood in it. Kayla paid with a molar she’d saved in a film canister. Tiff paid with a chicken bone because her father had gone back to Georgia. I paid with the truth that my mother cleaned the model homes at night and let me eat the sales office mints if I didn’t touch the staged towels.
“That’s not a secret,” Kayla said.
“It is if I don’t want you to know it.”
She stamped my wrist with mud.
We made ranger badges from Publix receipts, drew trail maps on pizza boxes, and named everything before the developers could. The ditch was Alligator Alley. The shopping cart was Fort Winn-Dixie. The dead pine was the Hanging Tree until Tiff said her grandma had people in Georgia, so we called it the Tree of Poor Decisions.
The sales office had a sign that said WELCOME HOME. We stole the HOME part and nailed it to a cabbage palm.
Our rules went on survey flags.
NO FATHERS PAST THE CULVERT.
DO NOT FEED THE TADPOLES UNLESS YOU’RE READY TO BE REMEMBERED.
IF A MAN SAYS THIS LAND IS SOLD, BITE HIM.
Kayla wrote that one because Kayla bit people at school and said it was cultural. She had a gap between her front teeth and a stare that made grown men check their pockets.
The summer got mean. The pond shrank. The mud cracked at the edges, and the fish came up gasping, silver mouths opening and closing like they were trying to tell on somebody. Men in polos walked buyers through the model homes and pointed at nothing.
“Future walking trails,” one said.
We crouched in the sawgrass.
“That’s our trail,” Tiff whispered.
“Future lake views,” he said.
“That’s a drainage hole,” Kayla said, too loud.
The buyers pretended not to hear, which adults do when money is talking.
My mother told me to stay away from that pond while she wrung a rag into the sink, her hands smelling like lemon cleaner and other people’s countertops.
“It’s not safe,” she said.
“That’s why it’s a park.”
The next day, the pond gave us a tooth. It wasn’t one of ours, not with that big yellow root and the way it sat in the mud beside a turtle shell and a broken bottle embossed with the word SUNNY.
“Animal?” Tiff asked.
Kayla crouched until her knees sank into the mud. “Maybe.”
“You don’t know teeth.”
“I know enough.”
The tooth became our ranger captain. We set it on a bottle cap altar inside Fort Winn-Dixie and gave it offerings: a melted gummy worm, two pennies, a wasp nest, and one page torn from the subdivision brochure where the white family smiled with every tooth still in.
The park changed after that. The mud held our footprints longer. The mosquitoes stopped biting us and started following. At dusk, the pond made sucking sounds. Kayla said it was breathing. Tiff said shut up, but she stopped turning her back to it.
Then the tadpoles began spelling things, not words at first, only loops around our ankles when we stood too close. One afternoon they gathered near the culvert in a dark wriggling line that looked like a mouth.
Kayla said, “It’s hungry.”
Tiff said, “Everything is.”
Then the developers put up the grand opening banner: HERON POINTE PRESERVE: LIVE WHERE NATURE LIVES. They brought balloons, water bottles, and a bounce house shaped like a castle.
That night, we met at the culvert. Kayla had pliers. Tiff had her brother’s pocketknife. I had the coffee can where I’d kept my last baby tooth, the one my mother forgot to trade for a dollar because she had three houses to clean and a headache that wouldn’t quit.
“What’s the plan?” Tiff asked.
Kayla grinned. “We open the park.”
We moved every survey flag into a circle around the pond, tied the grand opening ribbon between two cabbage palms, and buried our teeth beneath the WELCOME HOME sign. Mine went last. The mud closed over it warm, almost grateful.
In the morning, the men in polos arrived with clipboards and coffee breath. Buyers stepped from clean cars into wet heat. Children ran toward the bounce house, playing on top of something that wanted its name back.
We stood at the ribbon with safety scissors from my backpack.
“Admission is one tooth,” Kayla announced.
A realtor laughed. “Isn’t that cute?”
Her heel sank into the mud.
The pond burped, not a bubble but a warning, and one survey flag disappeared, pulled straight down, orange plastic and all. Behind her, the bounce house sagged while children screamed because children know a collapse can still be fun if it isn’t your house yet.
Tiff cut the ribbon.
“Mosquito Kingdom State Park is open,” I said.
The pond took another flag, then another. Men in polos shouted about liability, and my mother came running. When she saw me, her face changed, fear first, then something else.
Not pride. Not yet. But close enough to hurt.
The mud climbed over the realtor’s shoe. Behind her heel, the tadpoles gathered until they spelled a word clear enough for everyone to read.
PAY.
I held out my palm. “That’ll be one tooth.”
