The Withdrawal Method Read online

  I pick up the egg. The foil around the chocolate is starting to peel so I smooth it down and put it in the pocket of my pajamas. I look at my dad Greg's bedroom door which is closed with only black showing from the crack underneath, and then I start to tiptoe down the stairs, slow.

  Guess what? There are eggs lined up in the corners of each stair JUST LIKE I WROTE ON MY SECRET LIST. The eggs go into my pockets and it's like I'm doing a weird kind of front crawl or something, down one step and reaching, then the next, eggs into my pockets, but feeling I'm maybe sinking, maybe drowning, and the house is dark and still with only the hum of the fridge from the kitchen to prove the world is even alive.

  I move around the house, silent, leaving the lights off, looking in all the spots I wrote down, taking the eggs and loading up. Between the cereal boxes: check. On top of the vcR: check. All of them. He's put them in other places too, stupid places like lined up on the kitchen counter. Way too easy. But even finding eggs in places I didn't have on my list makes me feel weird - my hands go prickly for a second, I feel my face hot. Once the egg disappears into my pocket the feeling goes away.

  Around 4:50 my pockets start to get heavy - they're sagging and bulging with eggs. I look around one more time but I'm pretty sure I've got all of them. So I go to the back door and put on my shoes.

  Outside it's still dark. The sky is navy blue, almost purple, all clouds left over from yesterday's rain. There's no stars. Only the moon glowing in a little white fingernail behind the night. I shiver a bit in my pajamas, and it's hard to walk with my pockets full of eggs, the way they swing heavy at my sides. I have to hold my pants up by the waist to keep them from falling. I close the back door quietly and drop a single egg there. The porch light shines off the silver wrapper. It twinkles.

  I go out across the lawn all wet from a day of rain, soaking the bottoms of my pants and cold on my ankles, and then onto the street where my footsteps echo a bit, tap tap tap in my runners on the pavement. Every twenty steps exactly I drop an egg. I count twenty and duck and put one down, then twenty and duck and put one down, again and again all along the curb of the street. I put one right in front of Jared Wein's house and think about knocking on his window, getting him to help, but I decide no, this is something I have to do on my own. Then at the end where there's the path I look back and there they are, all in a line lit up by the streetlights.

  Down the hill at the end of our street, along the path, into the woods. Eggs dropped all the way. It's dark because tonight the moon's not enough but I know the way by heart: where to step, where to duck. When I come to the entrance to the tunnel that leads to The Inner Sanctum, I stop. I've only got two eggs left, but I made it. From way up above, Mom the moon is looking down. She's faint and out of focus, just the corner of her face like she's turning away and every now and then little wisps of darker cloud go past like smoke. All around her the night sky is a big murky sea but she shines out of it far away and watching, up there.

  I haven't brought anything to dig with, nothing to make the hole for my Parent Trap. There's a broken beer bottle behind the log so I use that, holding it by the neck and using the jagged edge to carve into the mud. I use my feet too and my hands - dirt gets up underneath my fingernails and sticks there. I go down on my knees and can feel the earth cool and wet through my pajamas. But I keep digging, I dig and dig and I'm sweating even though it's cold out and I'm shivering and digging and covered in muck.

  As the hole gets deeper and deeper the earth gets wetter and once I'm a ways down there's water at the bottom collecting in a little pool. I stop for a second and think maybe it's from the ocean, that this is water that flows in a river all the way from the coast underneath the surface of the world and I've tapped into it. An underground seaway, linking all the water on the planet.

  In The Human Body we learned a little about all the tubes you've got inside you - Fallopian tubes and whatever, all those tubes like canals and rivers carrying stuff back and forth around your vagina, or wang - depending on what you've got. And right then, right when I'm thinking that - I swear - the clouds break up a bit and even though she's gone so tiny Mom the moon comes smiling down into the water at the bottom of the hole, lighting the puddle up silver.

  From my pocket I take the two last eggs and open my fingers to plop them one at a time into the water at the bottom of my Parent Trap. But I don't. I look down and the water's gone black again. The hole's not big enough for a parent. It's barely big enough to trap a cat. I'd need like a digger and a crew of a thousand Jared Weins to make a Parent Trap big enough for my dad Greg, to trap him there and keep him for a while and teach him a lesson.

  So I put the eggs back in my pocket and I squat there beside the stupid useless hole in my pajamas in the mud, kind of cold and it's five in the morning and for other people tomorrow will be Easter but not us. This year there won't be any Easter. There's nothing that makes my dad Greg sadder than seeing Brian sad, and if there's no chocolate for Easter Brian'll be the saddest he's ever been ever, and my dad Greg will be even sadder. But I'll have saved two eggs. Later I'll give my brother one in secret and I'll have one too and no one will ever know.

  Right then I hear a voice go, Hey, and nearly fall over. I have to put my hands down in the mud to stop myself.

  It's my dad Greg. He's standing at the entrance to The Inner Sanctum. The branches are low so he has to duck and it's still dark so he's like a black hunched-up shadow but it's definitely him. Hey, he says again. But he doesn't come in.

  My heart's going crazy. I wait for it to slow squatting there in the mud, seeing what my dad Greg's going to do. He doesn't move and I don't either. We both just wait for something to happen. It's like in Trouble when you've got one guy left and Brian's got one guy left but they're both in their homes and you're just popping the popper and popping, trying to get out.

  We wait for a long time, me and my dad Greg. Both our breath comes in clouds. He sits down after a while in the mud but still doesn't say anything. I don't either. My hands are covered in mud, and I can feel mud stuck up under my nails and drying in streaks up my arms but I don't really care. I'm tired.

  After a while the sky starts to lighten a little, going greyish up through the branches of the trees. The moon's fading. Soon it'll be morning and the moon will be gone for the day, and then the next night she probably won't be there at all.

  I start thinking maybe if the world is like a person and underground seaways are the tubes, making the world go on, then when the tides go in and out it's like the world having its period. Like the blood of the world rushing in and out and making everything grow. It's a big thought like the kind you have to say out loud when you think them and it kind of makes me go whoa a little bit. But I can't tell my dad Greg about it, about periods and stuff. Not him. Even though he's over there just waiting for something, I'm not sure what.

  So then he goes, Hey, in a weird sad tired voice.

  By now the light is morning light. It came so quick, it's pale and thin but it's washing over the night, erasing the night.

  And my dad Greg goes, Hey, again, and that's when I realize he's showing me something. He's holding out his hands, cupped together. I can't see so I have to get up and take a step closer. It's the eggs. They're all there in his big hands, like twenty of them, maybe thirty. I found them, he tells me, like he's proud.

  And I say, Yeah. I look at his hands, my trail of chocolate eggs collected in there together like grapes. I put my hand in my pocket to make sure I've still got the two extras.

  You found them, I tell my dad Greg. You found them all, I say.

  LONG SHORT

  SHORT LONG

  IN A SCHOOL in London, Canada, there was a classroom. In it: a teacher, Miss, weary in her skirt but standing, and twentyeight fourth graders silent as the sky in rows at their desks. Miss clapped her hands four times and said, "Ta, tee-tee, ta," one clap to each syllable. Then a translation: "Long, shortshort, long." And the students all died.

  With laughter,
like a cloudburst.

  Why so funny? Miss didn't understand, fresh from Althouse and already of waning hope, B.A. History with a minor in Music also. She held up her hand in a gesture that meant: silence. It took a while; the laughs were a downpour, a drizzle, the occasional drip from a drainpipe. "Shhh," the one named Trish encouraged them, though Miss was sure she had been the first to laugh. Then, okay, quiet enough.

  Miss tried again. Clap, clap-clap, clap. "Long, short-short, long."

  Boom. Down rained hilarity.

  Miss threw up her hands and retreated behind her desk. When her students had settled she decreed, "Work period," and from her book bag got out some marking, set to it, trying not to think about the basement bachelor apartment she rented with the towels for drapes, her life.

  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.

  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.