"HAPPY GROWING UP!"

Letters from the tooth fairy set kids on the right path

- Eliza Shapiro

THE MESSAGE LOOKED like a ransom note, with each jagged letter traced over and over for emphasis.

The author got straight to the point: “I KNOW IT’S YOU MOM.”

A fourth grader named Caden had begun to harbor suspicions about the supposedly magical being who left cash under his pillow after each baby tooth fell out. There had been inconsistencies in the tooth fairy’s behavior: After Caden lost his first tooth, he woke up to a crisp $100 bill.

For each subsequent tooth, Caden received less. The variations in bills raised questions in his mind, so he wrote the accusatory letter to his mother, Ashley Lee, a chiropractor in California.

Now Lee wanted to keep her son a believer. So she took a shot in the dark and dashed off a note to what she figured was a made-up “toothfairy” email address, not knowing whether anyone would receive it.

“Caden thinks it is me giving him money for exchanging the tooth,” she wrote, and asked the tooth fairy to reply and prove him wrong.

Her hope—silly, sweet and a little desperate—was that an “official” email from the tooth fairy might somehow persuade Caden.

Dr. Purva Merchant was sitting in her office at a pediatric dental practice in Seattle when Lee’s email arrived. It was roughly the 6,000th such email she’d received in the past 20 years, so she knew exactly what to do:

Dr. Merchant became the email tooth fairy by accident. In 2004, her boyfriend—now husband—made her a new email address that included her nickname, The Tooth Fairy, to help organize her dental school applications and keep in touch with family abroad.

About three years of mundane emails later, Dr. Merchant got an unusual message. The subject line was “Calum’s tooth,” and the message was urgent.