The tooth-fairy's evil twin sister is my best friend.

The tooth-fairy's evil twin sister is my best friend. Her name is Cynthia and she cares very little for dental health or world peace.

There's a strange contrast between the twins— one of them is light and airy and she smells of spring and every single word that comes out of her mouth feels warm and sparkly. Whereas the other started spelling her name Sin-thia in middle school and recently got banned from international travel until a court case wraps up next fall. She wears only dark shades of blue and purple and the blackest black.

From birth it was known that her sister would be the Tooth-Fairy; decided on by some sort of higher power. It was pre-ordained, the whole ordeal with the ancient text and prophecies, yada yada. Want to know what wasn't in the ancient text or prophecies? Cynthia.

Her mother didn't even know she was pregnant with twins until the day of - a big surprise for everyone involved.

There was panic after the birth(s), a meeting of the council of Magical Beings, rioting in the streets, talk of an uprising against the current leadership. The big question was "What the heck is going on and what are we going to do about this baby?"

The Counsels' official recommendation was that they drown this surprise bonus baby in the river - "we're just really not sure about this one" they said, looking down into the bassinet where one baby was blonde and seemed to glow from within and the other was pale and had thick black hair and didn't give off fairy princess vibes in the slightest.

Poor baby Cynthia. Drown her, they tried...three times... unsuccessfully. You can imagine what three attempts at being murdered can do to a child. Naturally everyone starting to think the baby was a witch being that she was only three days old and able to withstand death. The town's biggest thinkers all came together to come up with something else to try. It was an all-hands-on deck affair.

A few weeks later there was a plan B attempt to leave her in the woods to succumb to the elements. They even sought out a location with a particularly large wolf pack in hopes of them treating her as an appetizer, but the wolves just kept bringing her back to her parents' house. Howling up at the front door until someone would come and retrieve the infant. They only tried that a few times before the town's people asked them to stop - the wolves kept picking off everyone's pets on their way out of town, all the children were distraught; as you might imagine.

Plan C (my personal favorite) was to give her to a passing group of gypsies - they figured if there was no way to truly un-alive this child then at least it would be better to have her as far away from them as possible. Legend has it that the gypsies only got a few miles out of town before turning the whole caravan around. They left her at the towns edge in the tall tall grass all the while yelling strange, ancient, evil curses to the towns people who met them there.

A translator from the town, who later denied this claim, said someone from the caravan had told him of all the visions the gypsies had been plagued with since the child was in their care. Horrible signs of end times and war -

The gypsies never came back to  town and Cynthia was returned to her parents yet again.

"Maybe it'll be nice to have her in the house." Her father was overheard saying "She could end up being like a small guard dog," Oddly enough she was. No one wanted to mess with the family when their strange feral, emo daughter was around. Which came in handy when your other daughter is a prevalent magical and political figure.

Cynthia was especially beneficial for the years when no one wanted to have a Tooth-fairy anymore - all those progressive college students and their radical anti-childhood magic ideas.  When they came to protest outside the family estate it was comically short lived once Cynthia caught wind of it. She has a way with people and plagues, you know how it is.

All in all, her childhood years were spent between being grounded in the attic and in the detention hall. Her teenage years were spent in the woods with the witches and in juvie. And her young adult years have, so far, been in the deans office and debate room.

At this current moment, however, she is in none of those places. Instead, she is standing in her dorm room practicing a speech in her mirror.

"...In conclusion, I propose to you a vote of who should be the Tooth-fairy. Let the people decide who should hold the title."

Some people truly want to watch the world burn - Cynthia is one of those people. She also happens to be the type to want to set it on fire herself.

In some regards this is what she is doing with this speech. A long toss of the match - these ending lines will set ablaze both personal and professional relationships. In simpler terms, her family and the Counsel are going to be completely pissed when they hear it - oh, in about  15 minutes.

It's a yearly ordeal, the meeting of all the Counsel, the Magical Beings and all the powers that be.  Held in one of the great halls of the very university that Cynthia cheated, swindled and threatened her way into. She flashes her signature smile into the mirror (much debate in the last few years of whose smile is straighter and whiter between the twins. Truly sometimes it's hard to tell.) She straightens her black turtleneck, adjusting the campaign button pinned to it and runs a lint roller over her slacks.

I stack the flyers, pamphlets and box of buttons on the campaign cart. The banner tacked on the side reading "Sin-thia, wants YOU to bite back." the illustration being Cynthia in a dark hooded robe, sporting vampire fangs and pointing directly at the reader.

"Do you know where my fangs are ?" She asks, I slip them out of my pocket and into her hands.

This moment was years in the making, after taking classes in the art of voodoo doll making, black magic consultations, full moon conjuring in the mountains, tracking and manipulation of the stars and a brief stint of meetings with the pop closet demon in southern MN, we came to the conclusion that the only way to win this war against her sister would be behind a podium.

As Cynthia puts in the faux fangs, I also bare my teeth and look at my smile. Running my polished red nail over the row of teeth - the clicking sound it makes sounding fake and hollow.

My burning anger against the Tooth-fairy goes beyond prophecy and sibling rivalry. Rather, she ruined my teeth six years back during a procedure she personally assured (and used as promo for her franchise) would be so simple and easy she could do it blindfolded. The new procedure was part of her New Years "Reso-TOOTH-ion" (gag), bringing dental work into lower income areas. So badly executed was the procedure that the executive decision was made to pull all of my teeth, give me dentures and sweep the whole thing under the rug. Swiftly and cleanly.

Cynthia and I connected a few years later on an 'I hate the tooth-fairy’ Facebook page. It was friendship at first cruel, de-humanizing post against her sister. “she could have at least given you veneers” she had commented under my lengthy post describing the suffering I'd endured under the Tooth-fairy’s drill.

Friendship bloomed from there, evolving from our anonymous online presence to best friends quickly. The idea of over-throwing her sister’s reign didn't come to us until years later. One drunken night out and about the pubs in London, Cynthia came to a screeching halt, putting both hands on my shoulders, her face inches from mine- she whispered "I'm going to run for Tooth-fairy," In the obnoxiously fake British accent she pulled out every time we got to this country.

This idea was ridiculous. There was no 'running' for Tooth-fairy. All magical positions are appointed by The Beings and Fate- there is no deciding against it. Sure, every summer her sister would come out with a new 'campaign' but it was never for an election, rather to promote whatever she was pushing out to consumers next.

I brushed off the idea as a drunken rant, except for the next morning Cynthia woke me up at the break of dawn to confirm I would be her campaign manager.

Our deadline to get this show up and running was today’s date, when all of council would be together.

It did end up making sense, all the occult dabbling we’d done to try and end it all for Miss Tooth-fairy was for nothing- this was our last resort. Our roles from friendship into Campaign manager and Runnie transitioned seamlessly, since really, the bases of both relationships were the same: our mutual distain and personal need for the eventual downfall of her sister.

We chose not to take any sort of high road in our strategy for success. 

We began by spending months carefully orcistrating rumors and posting articles against her. Some of my favorites:

"What is the Tooth-fairy REALLY doing with all your children's teeth?"

"Why isn't the Tooth-fairy leaving more money under your child's pillow? Aren't their teeth worth more?"

"Ex-Best friend spills all - the rotting secrets about the woman in charge of your teeth,"

“Does she even have a first name? Who is the ‘Tooth-fairy’?”

“How She Makes Her Money: The Tooth-fairy profits on your dental decay,”

It worked almost too well. People, for the first time, were questioning exactly what they knew about this woman who visited their homes in the night, left money for their children and took their baby teeth. Who was the ‘professional’ clad in sparkly pink dresses who spoke to us about future dental care procedures?? Who begged Europe to let her come visit?? Who bled red, white and fluoride ?? What exactly were her credentials?! Why was she always in pink!?

There was also a timely leak of particularly questionable adolescent diary entries, which we mailed to Teeth & Jaw, Dentists Weekly, and Braced Faced. They published them almost immediately.

Who doesn’t wanna see the popular girl go down?

We paid the arts department at the college to make our buttons and flyers - threatening anyone who tried to question production or seemed like they would leak information. A campaign site was created and now sits ready to be publish - all sent into work once this meeting was over, which we were quickly approaching.

It was all a fever dream. I clicked my jaw together - we were gunna create quite the stir.

I pin a campaign button onto my own blazer and took a deep breath.

"We’ve done good work,” Cynthia says - her eyes are ablaze, and she practically vibrates across the room to grab two shooters of Tito’s from her backpack, handing one to me, “To root-canals, and world domination!” 

(World domination being our next goal once the position of Tooth-fairy is secured. Cheers.)