The Tooth Was Lost Twice, So the Teacher Wrote a Reference

Claim one. Burchfield Elementary, Pennsylvania, June 2019. A seven-year-old first grader loses a tooth at school. The school nurse puts it in a novelty tooth necklace. The necklace is then accidentally thrown out with the lunch trash. That is a tooth lost twice in one day, the second time by a professional.

The girl was sobbing, her teacher, Laura Roth, told Good Morning America. Roth did not go through the bins. She told the girl that she and the tooth fairy went back twenty-five years, and wrote the fairy a letter vouching for the tooth. A reference, from a colleague. The girl hung the note on her bed and woke the next morning, her birthday, to two dollars and a reply.

A reply. I would have left the two dollars and a granola bar.

Claim two is the paperwork children file themselves. In 2018 London's Wellcome Collection published tooth fairy letters shared during its Teeth exhibition and noted that the most urgent question in them is whether the fairy still pays when the tooth has gone missing. The children have found the loophole. One letter asks whether a nine-year-old should get double for losing a molar on her birthday. Strong case. Terrible precedent. Pay double once and by Thanksgiving you're negotiating a Tuesday rate.

Claim three. Gillett Elementary, Wisconsin, October 2019. A student's tooth apparently goes missing at recess, and the principal, Curt Angeli, writes to the fairy as a "trained principal and hobby dentist." He certifies a gap that was not there that morning and requests the usual rate. Then he adds a claim of his own: compensation for the wisdom teeth he lost in 1987.

That's the move. You wait until the claims office is in a good mood, then you slip in the old ones.

I have six baby teeth in a film canister in my mother's attic, unpaid since 1984. The letter's drafted. I just need someone at a school to vouch.