<blockquote>When I was sixteen, I sold my teeth each Thursday, and that is how I first met the doctor. This was before his celebrated school, his fame, his dogged pursuit of bodies for his collection, back when he was very young and took his income as a dentist. While the ladies of society ate cakes until their smiles were the same gappy gray cobblestone as our London streets, my own hungry mouth was full of pearls, and I let the doctor harvest them. He paid four cents an incisor, five for the fronts. After my first visit, he asked me to stay back for a word. Not ten minutes earlier, he’d pulled my right front tooth and planted it firmly root-first in the rotted mouth of a nobleman’s daughter, and already I could feel the edge of a new one poking through my ragged gum. I kept my lip down to hide it.
He said, “Am I wrong to suspect you won’t miss that tooth for long?”</blockquote>
