The Withdrawal Method by Pasha Malla

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.

    Thinking about this really got Bogdan sweating. Temples,