Thinking about this really got Bogdan sweating. Temples, armpits, hands — feet, even, squelching around sockless inside his Zips. He watched Miss. He knew she was waiting for the whispers of the class to rise above a trickle, to burble up into a running stream, and he knew the class knew this and were flirting with that line, testing her like swells against a levee.
Bogdan felt that he should hate Miss, or something. How could she be so dumb? But his anger dissolved into pity. Look how she floundered about at the front of the classroom, how easily she gave up. And so tense! Whenever he got his own work back from Miss, Bogdan could feel the bulge of curlicues on the back of the page, so hard she pressed with her red pen a loopy sort of Braille pushed through to the other side.
Around the classroom the other kids whispered. Part of him felt glad they had for the moment forgotten about him, felt Miss deserved it for provoking them, and another part of him felt like screaming, "Shut up, shut up, shut up!" But that would be impossible. Still, in his brain something was beginning to take shape, the particles of it collecting into a thought, an idea.
ON THE OTHER side of Sticky Fingers was a song Bogdan knew the words to better. Mick Jagger sang clearly and sometimes his mother would sing along and so would Bogdan. But this song opened with something Bogdan didn't think was true: "Childhood living is easy to do." What? Sorry? For people like Trish, maybe. For people with thermally regulated lunch bags and Nike Airs and ankle socks; people who got good, curly, cute haircuts at proper salons, not one owned by their mothers with all middle-aged women for clients except one kid, her son.
WHAT MUSIC DID Miss listen to, at home alone in the basement where she lived? Not the music of many cultures: whatever was playing from the radio-alarm clock beside her futon (U2, The Eagles, Cher). On nights her calls to Lindsay went unanswered Miss poured herself a glass of pink wine and cranked the volume and the music came out tinny and faraway from the clock radio's speaker while around her one-room apartment she twirled and sipped and spun.
At the front of the classroom Miss sat with her pen hovering over a test on the various dances of the Spanish-speaking world and suddenly missed very much playing her trumpet in the free-jazz band she and some other students had formed — was it already five years ago now? But then she had been robbed of her trumpet (as well as all her CDs, her stereo, her VCR, and a very expensive knife) by a roommate with a coke problem. Something inside her left with that trumpet. It had never come back.
She should buy a proper stereo. By the monophonic rattle of a clock radio, that was no way to live. Miss marked the test B = iBueno! the pen carving down through the paper and into the enamel of the desk below. Bogdan watched, imagined the tip of the pen etching some sort of secret message on the other side.
The students kept up their whispering. Miss flipped to another test, Trish's, always a struggle not to give an A+. She stared at the test, but instead of marking it laid her head o1 the desk, forehead first. And then, seeing this, it came: Bogdan had an answer, a crazy answer. Miss had been giving him a signal. She had been using a code. She had been sending him a message. He knew now what it was. Long, short-short, long: Mission X.
IF SHE GOT HER haircut done in time, Bogdan's mother whisked off the apron and pulled her son down from the chair and danced with him in waltz-time to the next song on the record. They swung each other around, one-two-three, one-twothree, and though it was fast and fun, Bogdan couldn't help but think slow thoughts of his father and mother doing the very same dance to the very same song in the kitchen of their old apartment. "Ta, tee-tee, ta," "Long, short-short, long,"-.. - these were all waltz-time too: one-two-three, one-two-three. Bogdan and his mother laughed and waltzed while the guitar jangled and the drums drummed and Mick Jagger sang, "I'm gonna tear my hair out just for you."
HIS FIRST GRADE four math test Bogdan had (a) got back, (b) seen his result (14/45), and(c) eaten. It was on fractions. The other students were eyeing one another's papers, commenting on the marks — "Trish got perfect!" — and out of fear that someone would see his, in a panic Bogdan tore into little pieces which he popped in his mouth, chewed to mush, and swallowed down. The test was one page, double-sided, not too much to eat, but Trish noticed what he was doing and started screaming.
"Why?" Admin asked when Bogdan was sent down with the ragged page as evidence. After three years in Canada Bogdan's English was good, but on occasions when he needed it most, it failed him. So he sat there in silence. Admin sent him back to class, but instead he went home. And at home he sat with his mother and cried and cried and cried.
The next day he came to school and kneeled on The Arab's chest and spat in his face. Miss again found him doing it and this time took him down the hill and watched him cry, and although spitting on someone was a horrible thing she said nothing, just sat there. After a while The Arab came over and sat with them too. The Arab put his hand on Bogdan's back and said, "It's okay." When the bell rang the three of them waited a long time, well after everyone else had disappeared into the school, to go back inside.
Sitting in the classroom surrounded by whispers, watching Miss with her head down on her desk, Bogdan knew it was time. He accepted his mission, Mission X. He knew what he had to do.
He opened his desk. The contents were ordered neatly into piles: textbooks on the right, workbooks on the left, a nifty row of ruler, pens, pencils, and a math-set in between. And the scissors. He slid his thumb and forefinger into the two loops and removed them slowly, opening and closing the blades as he did, and the sound of metal sliding against metal sent a shiver through him. They came together with an icy snick. And he opened them again so he could see how, yes, they formed a cross. Or the letter X.
THE LAST SONG ON Sticky Fingers was Bogdan's favourite. Sometimes his mother had another client coming in for a haircut and they couldn't make it to the end; other times her afternoon was free and they would get there. She took Bogdan in her arms, held him close, and he laid his head against her chest and closed his eyes. They swayed gently in place like that as the song rose up slowly from the turntable: pretty guitar and piano and singing from somewhere faraway. Bogdan nuzzled into his mother, the two of them wobbling there amid clumps of hair strewn all over the floor, and for a minute that was all there was in the universe: the two of them, and the song.
BOGDAN STOOD. The whispers continued. If any of his classmates noticed him it was in passing. They were mostly watching Miss, her face buried in her marking. Bogdan looked around, back at Trish. She regarded him at first with disdain, as usual, and seemed to be readying herself to mouth his nickname, but then noticing the scissors in his hand Trish's face changed. It took a moment for Bogdan to realize what that look was, her mouth parting slightly, the eyes widening: fear. For once, Trish had nothing to say. Bogdan slid out from behind his desk.
The scissors in his hand felt light; his body seemed distant. It was as though part of him were there in the classroom and part of him were moving through his life leading to that moment: now tapping out Morse code back home with his father, now lying down with his mother on a mattress on the floor of their new duplex in The Co-op in London, now dancing, now eating a math test, now from across the playground watching The Arab sitting alone on the portable steps, now here. And through it all he heard that song, the last one before the needle would lift and leave them in silence: the cymbals crashed like waves and the drums came rumbling — and, oh, the violins! They were saddest of all.
Bogdan stepped toward Trish. The class went quiet, snapped off like a radio. Bogdan raised the scissors, now at Trish's desk. Miss looked up blearily. It took a moment for her eyes to focus. What she saw was a shaggy-haired boy standing there in the middle of the classroom with a pair of scissors in his hand, and the girl at her desk beneath him staring wideeyed at the blades, and every face in the classroom turned toward them in wonder.