Long Division(17)

Shalaya Crump looked so happy to see me and I tried hard not to look as happy as I was to see her. I started pulling my dingy Izod up over my mouth and fake yawning. She offered me a saltine and a sip of cold drank. Then she gave me the kind of full body hug that made me taste melted Jell-O Pudding Pops.

I don’t know how to say this without making you hate me, but Shalaya Crump smelled like she’d just come back from about six recesses right on top of one another. And at every recess, she must have been swimming naked in a sea of cube steak gravy. I didn’t mind her gravy funk, though, for three reasons: #1 — I hated the smell of deodorant. #2 — Shalaya Crump’s funk smelled better than most girls’ best stale perfume. #3 — I loved me some cube steak.

“How you been?” she asked me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“You really want to know?”

“I do, my queen. Tell me what’s on your mind.”

Shalaya Crump shook her head and said, “Oh God,” before grabbing both of my hands and walking toward the Night Time Woods. The Night Time Woods separated Old Ryle Road from Belhaven Street, where most of the white folks lived in their trailers. Grown folks always told us that no good could come from getting caught in those woods after dark because of this crazy family called the Shephards. I had heard that the Shephard house got burned down a number of times in the 1960s by the Klan. All the Shephards were dead now except for this one old woman people called the Shephard Witch. I had never really seen the Shephard Witch, but I heard she lived in what was left of the nasty church right in the middle of the woods.

“I’m worried about the future, City.”

“Oh. That again.” I tried to say it like I was so surprised she was bringing it up. “I ain’t thought about it that much, but you think it’ll be fresh? Like, I wonder if it’s gonna be like moving sidewalks and flying cars. That would make it easier for me to get to my queen so I ain’t trippin’.”

“No, boy. Please just stop. Like what if there’s this huge flood that kills people? Or if the water in the Gulf turn black? Or if we have a black president and…”

“A black president?” I asked her. She threw me off with that one. “And black water? And you say I’m crazy?”

“Just listen, okay? I mean if something you couldn’t believe happened, like we got a black president or a flood swallowed the whole town, you would wanna know how that changed your life, wouldn’t you? Do you even see what I’m saying?”

Shalaya Crump was really asking me a question, and you know what I was really doing? I was really half listening and half looking at her lips, wondering if they ever got chappy. She had the kind of lips, especially the bottom one, that always looked full of air and shiny, but not too shiny, from all that gloss.

“Well, do you?” she said again.

“Yeah, I think so,” I told her. “You wonder what the future has to do with you if all these new things are happening. Like, everybody knows you’re extremely super bad right now in 1985, right? But if you saw yourself in 1999, would you be like, ‘Oh my goodness. Who is that homely ass girl right there, cleaning the mess out her toes, looking greasy?’ Or maybe things happening in the future would make other people so mad that they would want to make you be invisible.”

“Yeah, yeah, City!” she grabbed my forearm and looked me in the eyes. “That’s exactly what I mean. Kinda. What happens if we disappear in the future?”

It was like the smartest thing I’ve ever said, and it was the first time I’d used the word “extremely” in a sentence, but the sad part was that I didn’t really know what I meant. I just knew it sounded like something Shalaya Crump would want to hear. It was some GAME I’d been practicing for two months in my mama’s bedroom mirror. “Hold up, Shalaya Crump. Remember when you said that you would love me? Wait, first—did you mean it?”

“If I said it, I meant it.”

“For real? That’s good. Well, ever since you told me all I needed to do was be special and say something cool about the future, I kinda…”

Shalaya Crump interrupted me. “City, speed that up. Why you gotta be so long division? For real, you don’t have to tell me all the background. The story doesn’t have to go on and on and on.”

“It doesn’t?”

“No,” Shalaya Crump said. “Everything with you is long division. You busy trying to show your all your work. Just get in and get out.”

“But my favorite part of long division was the work,” I told her. Shalaya Crump had thrown my GAME completely off. “I hate the answer. I do. We had this conversation already. You said you hated the answer, too.”

“That’s different. I hate the answer because I don’t believe in mastering the smaller steps,” she told me. “They never teach you to like, you know, linger in the smaller steps.”

“Linger? What’s that mean?”

“They just tell you that you gotta master the small steps if you wanna get to the big answer,” she told me. “But I wish we could really pause at each step in long division and talk about it.”

“Pause and do what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just get on with it, City. Please!”