Long Division(21)

“Wait—that’s a computer?” I asked her.

“Yeah, what else would it be?”

“I thought it was a silver briefcase. Whatever it is, that thing is cold as a mug.”

“A briefcase?”

“Yeah, for children.”

She laughed loud and hard. “You trying to spit game?” she asked me. “What does that even mean? Show me a child who uses briefcases. I know you’ve heard of a laptop computer.”

“A lab top computer?”

“Lap. Lap, mayne. See,” she picked the computer up, held it in the air for a moment, and then placed it back on her lap. “This is a computer and this, see this? This is my lap. Stop fronting. Why you playing stupid? You go to school around here, don’t you?”

“Um, yeah.”

“Then you must’ve gotten one a few years ago with the last of that Katrina money they sent us after all them tornadoes hit us again. Don’t tell me your mama and them sold it on eBay? I was watching this web series, Confessions of a PTSD. You heard of it?”

I looked at the book where she’d moved it. I could really see its cover for the first time. On the cover was a husky black boy’s body standing in the middle of a stage. The picture cut off right above his shoulder blades so we couldn’t see his face. His left hand was in his pocket and his right hand was clutching a wave brush. Behind the boy was another, lankier boy with his head down and both of his balled-up fists dangling between his legs. Near the bottom of the cover were the words “YouTube,” “views,” and the number “47,197,508.” At the top of the cover in bold letters were the words “Long Division.”

I was thinking of what to ask her about the book when I heard a man’s voice in conversation behind me. I turned to the road as a taller man with a big brown T-shirt was walking down the street talking to himself.

“How come everyone around here likes to talk to themselves?”

“He’s on the phone,” the girl said. “Why you trippin’?”

“I ain’t slow. I can see he’s talking to himself.”

“Look, you ain’t gonna get loud with me on my own porch. You know that’s Bluetooth. I know it’s played out. They think they styling with the little headsets, just like you think you think you styling with that outfit,” she paused, “and that curly shag. Where you from?”

I looked across Old Ryle Road at Shalaya Crump and motioned for her to come on over. “My friend is over in those woods and I want her to see all this. Is it okay if she comes over and sees Katrina’s computer?”

“No,” she said. “Why didn’t she come with you?”

“No?”

“Your ‘friend,’” she made these quotations marks in the air, “is a girl, right?”

“Unh huh!”

“She’s your girl, right?” “Um, she halfway my girl.”

“Oh, okay,” she said. “Yeah, well, no! I been seein’ that girl sneaking around here for a while. She looks shade tree to me. I went after her the last time I saw her peeking out of those woods.”

“You did?”

“Yep. But she disappeared. I found this, though, after she left,” she said and grabbed the book. “You ever heard of this book?”

I ignored her question and walked over beside her and saw that the computer really wasn’t a tiny briefcase at all. There was a keyboard and a flat TV screen, and on the flat TV screen were all these colorful dizzy images and boxes and words.

I couldn’t blink.

Or breathe.

Or move.

“Don’t think I’m hating on your girlfriend over there, ’cause I’m not. I just saw this strange white boy over in those woods yesterday, too, and I let him use my computer. He was dressed like one of those white children who be getting home-schooled up north. You know, the kind whose parents don’t let them watch TV or eat sweet cereal? Anyway, I gave him some of my daddy’s old clothes.”

“Wait, what?” I asked. I heard her but I didn’t really hear her. All I could do was watch and listen to my heartbeat as the girl moved her fingers across the letters.

“Yeah, he told me he was looking for more clothes that matched the time.”

“Matched the time?”

“I told him to go downtown to the Salvation Army.” While she was talking, she pushed something below the little square thing on the computer and in a second, the screen flipped on to what looked like the front page of a newspaper. The headline on the newspaper was “The Obamas Get Another Family Dog Just in Time for the Election Cycle.”

“Who is that?”

“Who is who? The dog? I don’t think they named it yet.”

“Not the dog. The man and the woman and those girls. Who are they? And how come you can watch TV on your computer?”

“Stop playing. You think the oldest one cute? All the boys in my class stay falling out over that girl.”

I looked at the bigger girl. “I mean, yeah, she’s kinda cute but who are these folks?”

“Dumbness, we cared about funky dogs when the president was white. Why we can’t make a big deal about dogs when the president is black?”

“That’s the president?”