IF MISS HAD been watching Bogdan, the pale boy by the door, when the words short and long had come from her mouth, she would have seen him tense. And after, if she had looked up from her marking, she would have seen him sitting there staring straight ahead, paralytic, while the rest of the class lifted the lids on their desks and went rustling around inside for work.
But Miss didn't notice Bogdan, the thin one with the dark, sunken eyes and hair cut short on top and left long in the back, the one who huddled with that tiny first grader, Farid, in quiet corners of the playground, the one Trish had run by one day pointing and screamed, "Short-Long!" And Miss didn't know that "Short-Long" was what they all called Bogdan now. What she did know was that the week before during lunch hour she had discovered Farid lashed to the baseball backstop with his own belt, Bogdan commanding him, "Talk, you filthy cur!" and smacking him in the face with a catcher's mitt. Miss freed Farid, who went bounding so happily off across the playground that she didn't feel the need to punish Bogdan. Besides, he had such a cute accent and sang so sweetly.
But yes. A short-long haircut and Bogdan lived in The Coop and wore Zips, brought his lunch of weird leftovers to school in an A&P bag, had sported high blue socks since coming to London at six years old. Suddenly in the fourth grade high blue socks were not okay — but that was all he had, seven pairs! So then sneaking his mother's tennis socks from her dresser and with the pink bobbles popping up over the tops of his Zips during phys. ed. volleyball it was worse, even worse than before. Trish had bumped Bogdan's serve into the ceiling, and when he grinned at her through the net she pointed at his feet: "Short-Long's got girl socks!" Bogdan's next serve rocketed by so close to Trish's little blonde head that it ruffled a few curls. All the other kids went, "Ooo-ooo," and Bogdan had been asked to sit out the rest of the class.
What Miss could not have known was that in that quick empty moment after she said, "Short-long" and before the class lost it, something electric zipped up Bogdan's arms and exploded burning in his face: the music teacher he liked was with them too. And their laughter had risen like a wave and crashed down over him, leaving Bogdan wilted and lonely and lost.
MISS WAS A NOMAD in the school; she didn't have a classroom of her own. At the end of each period she transferred herself down the hall for another forty-five minutes of autoharp and scales. She was teaching her students the music of different cultures — Indian, Japanese, Australian Aboriginal, Dutch — and wanted to show them how, while the melodies and song structures were different, the rhythms were often the same. "Syn-co, pa, ta, ta," she could have said to illustrate this, or "Tiri-tiri ta" or "Ta-ah-ah-ah." But she chose "Ta, tee-tee, ta" because it was easy and she was tired. Miss didn't know what it meant.
She didn't know that in Morse code, "Ta, tee-tee, ta" (long, short-short, long) is noted like this: — . — Or that in Morse code, — . — signifies the letter X. Miss didn't know this, but Bogdan did. When Bogdan's father had still been alive he had taught his son Morse code — for emergencies, if the house were raided — tapped out on the floorboards or flashed in the dark from a lantern. Sitting there Bogdan realized that the rhythm "ta, tee-tee, ta" was — .. - or X. And X represented an unexplained variable, a mystery, an unknown.
These were the things that Bogdan thought, staring up at the front of the room at Miss marking behind her desk. He tried to understand what she had done. It had been like torture, like punishment, like how Bogdan would track The Arab down at recess, pin him to the ground, and spit at him through clenched teeth, "I am going to break your glutinous maximums, you filthy Muslim dog," bending the small boy's arm behind his back.
One time Bogdan had pushed his arm too far; The Arab began to cry, the quivering lip and then the whimpering. Bogdan felt a sudden emptiness in his stomach and pulled away. "What kind of friend are you?" The Arab asked, rubbing his arm, tears streaming down flushed cheeks. "We are not friends," Bogdan said. "You are the enemy."
The Arab stiffened, looked at Bogdan's face as though searching for something, then turned and sprinted across the playground. He spent the rest of lunch watching kids play King's Court from the portable steps while Bogdan dug a trench around the climbers with a stick in the mud. But the next day, as always, The Arab returned.
Thinking this, Bogdan stared at Miss. Back and to his left was Trish, who he didn't want to look at. When he did she would mouth "Short-Long," lips pursing as if for a kiss on the SHOR, teeth bared on the T, tongue lolling for the L, the open mouth of ON, the final sneer of G. Trish always did that to him in class, the stealth of it exasperating. And Bogdan would spin around in a sweat. Even thinking of it, his palms grew damp.
A SHORT-LONG was how his mother cut his hair. And hairdresser was her job!
She cut her son's hair in the shop she had set up in their duplex, before the mirror with the combs and scissors in blue jars of antiseptic juice. On the turntable in the corner of the room she would play the only album she had brought with her on the move to London, Canada: the Sticky Fingers LP with the actual zippered trousers on the cover, which Bogdan occasionally fingered but never dared unzip.
Every two weeks when the haircut was done Bogdan's mother stepped back and told him, "There, you look like Mick Taylor," which meant that Bogdan looked like his father, who had looked like the Rolling Stone Mick Taylor. And the wistful smile on his mother's face in the mirror made him feel nice, sad but nice, closer to something in a country that no longer existed and every day he felt sliding even farther away.
MISS WASN'T REALLY marking. Sort of, but more she was waiting to look up sharply and order some loud kid: "Out!" She hoped it was Trish. Trish in those stirrup pants like an acrobat, prissy, too eager with her head of perfect blonde curls and private voice training and hand shooting up fluttering to correct Miss on something Trish had learned at the Conserva-tree (like the Queen, she said it). "Miss, Miss!" and then, "Actually. ." Doing harmonies when the class sung "Happy Birthday" even.
When Miss told her friend Lindsay back home in Newmarket about Trish late nights on the cordless phone under the covers in her basement bachelor, her futon in the den, the den in the kitchen, she resorted to the second person. "You little bitch!" she screamed into the receiver at Lindsay, who became a proxy for Trish, such were the intensity of Miss's feelings.
Bogdan wiped a dribble of sweat from the front of his shortlong and stared at Miss. She was so small and pretty and nice — why did the kids torment her so? While the rest of the class murmured to one another in an effort to make her yell, Bogdan sat demurely. Not working, but at least silent. He stared at Miss and a thought began forming somewhere faint in the back of his mind, way out back where short became long.
THE SHORT-LONG took Bogdan's mother exactly three minutes and fifty-two seconds to style. Bogdan knew this because she timed it to the first song on the second side of Sticky Fingers. It was a game — the rush of scissors and both of them laughing as the music began to fade and there was still more snipping to be done. On this song Mick Jagger's singing was garbled. The only words that Bogdan could make out were, "When you call my name," which were then followed by something like, "I sell a bite like a padlocked hog." This he imagined: a pig in a cage, grudgingly hawking bacon from its own hide.
BOGDAN ONCE CALLED Miss "Mother." He said it in line at the pencil sharpener, and even before Trish, behind him, announced it to the class and the class screamed, his face blazed. Why had he called his teacher that, he wondered now. She did not look like his mother. She was too young, too thin and nervous. He liked Miss plenty but still it made him feel weird — and especially weird around his own mother that night at home, as though he'd betrayed her.