Long Division(15)

That felt like love to me.

The phone kept ringing the next morning and Mama told me not to answer it. I wanted to ask her why it was ringing so much and why I couldn’t answer it but I’d made it this far without a back beating and I didn’t want to chance it.

Forty minutes later, we were headed to the bus station. Mama didn’t say a word to me the whole trip. She bought my ticket when we got to the bus station and waited in her car until I got on the bus.

Then, just like that, Mama left.

No “I love you.” No “See you later.” No “Behave yourself.” I was headed to Melahatchie, Mississippi, for four days to stay with Grandma.

I walked all the way to the back of the bus and person after person, no matter whether they were old, young, black, brown, clean, or dusty, was messing with their cell phones and bootleg iPods. Some folks were talking. Some folks were listening. But most were texting. I walked to the back of the bus hating all the sentences I imagined those folks writing, hearing, and reading, and I pulled out Long Division.


Five minutes after the bus took off, I got a tap on my right shoulder. I turned around and one of the girls who had been two seats in front of me was now sitting right next to me, and her friend was sitting in the seat in front of me. Both were looking me dead in my face. They were cute up close, but cute in two different ways.

The cuter one was slightly sleepy-eyed. I liked that. She looked at the cover of Long Division and said, “Who wrote that book?”

“I’m not sure,” I told her.

“We going to Waveland,” she said. “Where you going?”

“Melahatchie, to stay with my grandma.”

“You heard of that girl they call Baize Shephard?” she asked me.

“That’s her real name,” I told her. “They don’t just ‘call’ her that. She lives next to my grandma.”

“You the boy from the game last night, right? The one with the brush who was cutting up on them white folks?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Sleepy Eyes looked at her friend in front of us. “Told you that he was the one with the brush,” she said. “The one from that private school.”

I almost forgot the new brush was in my hand. I started brushing to help me with my nerves. “Fannie Lou Hamer ain’t no private school,” I told her.

“This girl right here,” she pointed to her friend, whose eyes weren’t sleepy at all. Truth be told, her eyeballs were so large and round that when you looked at her you wondered how she could ever sleep. She was wearing this muscle shirt that would’ve fit just right except her pregnant-looking belly made it cut off too soon. The girl had plenty of stretch marks on her stomach, too. As someone who had plenty of stretch marks himself on his biceps and waist, I always liked stretch marks on girls, even if it was on the front of their bellies.

“She told me that she wants you to holler at her,” Sleepy Eyes said. “She tweeted on her phone this morning that she think you was smart and fine, even if you heavy.”

“No, I don’t,” Stretch Marks said laughing. “I’ont think you fine. I don’t even know him. Stop lying, V!”

Sleepy Eyes just looked at Stretch Marks for a full eight seconds without saying a word. Then she looked back at me. “She told me that she wishes she could take a video with you for her Facebook with you saying one of your sentences.”

“Okay,” I told her and got next to Stretch Marks while Sleepy Eyes taped us. “My name is City,” I said into the camera phone, “and meeting these two cute girls right here on the way to Melahatchie made a day that started off sour as warm buttermilk into a day destined to taste something like a banana Slurpee.” I looked at Stretch Marks’s face and she was giggling her ass off.

“Can we touch your brush?” Sleepy Eyes said to me and put her phone in her pocket.

I handed it to her. “That’s a different brush than the one I threw at the contest.” She smelled the brush and she handed it right back.

“I get why you said what you said to that Mexican girl,” she told me. “It was funny. I just don’t think she had nothing to do with it, though. I don’t mean to drop no shade. I’m just wondering how come you didn’t go off on her brother like you went off on her.”

“I don’t even know,” I said. “That’s a good question. I said what I said because she was there, in my row, and I wanted her to feel worse than us. But…”

“But you don’t know what that girl was feeling. You just didn’t even care.”

“That’s true,” I told her. “And after I left, she put in that work.”

“I would never be in one of those games but if they did me like they did you, I would have done the same thing you did,” she told me. “I would have gone off on the brother though. That would be wrong, too, but that’s what I would do. I woulda called him a li’l Mexican bitch.”

“I don’t know about all that,” I told her.

“Why you don’t know. That’s pretty much what you did. You just snapped. I saw it. Would you do anything different if you could do the game over?”

That was one of the best questions anyone ever asked me. “I guess I would have been more prepared for what they were gonna throw at me. And no matter what, I shouldn’t have never left my boy, LaVander Peeler, up there by himself.”