Long Division(23)

When I got in the house, I flipped open the computer and moved the little arrow thing around the screen like I’d watched Baize do. In the corner was this little picture with the word “Unfinished” on it. I moved the arrow to the picture and pushed on it. A half-drawn blue, white, and plum-red picture opened up on the screen. At the bottom of the picture was this water with palm trees and a few little boats, but right above the water was a huge face and a cool-looking Klansman with a stick over his shoulder floating in the sky. The face looked like Baize’s in a way, but it kinda looked like my face, too, if my hair would have been lined up right. I ran the arrow over all the images in the picture and pushed on them but nothing happened. It was like playing video games except I didn’t know how you were supposed to win.

After a while I pushed on something called “Word” and a blank screen opened up. After you pushed “Word” there was the word “File,” and at the bottom of “File” were all these sections that said “Storm Rhyme” and the numbers 1 through 10. When I pushed on “Storm Rhyme #4,” writing appeared right in the center of the screen:

…Not your everyday rapper

but every day’s a gray haze.

Who took the moons outta

June?

Come take the

pain outta Baize.

My big fat beautiful mouth

was born right here in the South

where Ma and Daddy, they went swimming,

tryin to find a way out.

But Katrina was hummin

and my folks got to runnin.

Ears open for God but she

ain’t telling them nothin.

Now Melahatchie ain’t

exactly what

We thought it was.

Blues for days, dark mayonnaise

and kinda country…

Uhh…

You wanna

touch us?

Oooh…

You really fucked us!

Booo…

I had a hunch that you’d try to

crush us

so I grabbed

my tool.

And now you’re scared of a dike?

This ain’t a brick, it’s a mic.

You went for yours, growled a little

and I was scared of you.

Sike…

Matter fact you suck,

and quite wack, you ducked.

Now quack, or cluck,

cuz Baize don’t give a…


Sometimes you read the stuff people write and have a hard time thinking the person would write the stuff you read. That’s because most people try to write like they’re writing for a bad Honors English teacher or a librarian even when there’s no Honors English teachers or librarians around. The only honors class I was ever in was English, and Ms. Shivers said everything you wrote had to be believable. It’s more important that it’s believable than that it’s smart, she told us. English teachers like Ms. Shivers were always talking about “the reader.” Whoever “the reader” was, it never seemed like she could be like me. How could you make someone you didn’t know do things they didn’t want to do?

Anyway, even though I couldn’t figure out how the words were supposed to sound when Baize rapped them, I could still hear Baize saying the words to “Storm Rhyme #4” in my head. I was Baize’s reader, and I believed everything she said. By the end, I hated that Katrina girl just as much as she did.

But I knew no Honors English teacher or librarian was “the reader” for “Storm Rhyme #4.” And it wasn’t just because of the cussing or rhymes. It was mainly because of those dots she used. She used dot-dot-dot to start the rhyme, and she used dot-dot-dot in the middle of the rhyme, and she used dot-dot-dot at the end of the rhyme. And it just seemed kinda perfect to me. I’d seen those dot-dot-dots and I’d heard Shalaya Crump say dot-dot-dot before, but I never really knew what they meant or how folks were supposed to use them. I used them once on a test when I didn’t know the answer and Ms. Arnold wrote, “Citoyen you better be ashamed before God for trying to trick your teacher.” I thought Ms. Arnold should’ve been ashamed before God for not using a comma after she wrote my name.

Anyway, I had never really even been allowed to spend much time on a typewriter or a big computer either, but typing on a laptop computer was even better. Whatever you typed showed up on the screen, and if you didn’t like what you wrote, you could erase it and rewrite it. After you rewrote it enough, it was like your words were famous. Even if you had the best pencil-writing style in the world like Shalaya Crump, no matter how good the writing looked, it never looked famous. And if you erased too much and the paper was all smudged, you just looked dumb, poor, and messy. But the words on Baize’s computer screen looked famous, like words in a book, even if you wrote something that you would never see in a book, like “Storm Rhyme #4.”

I started typing a lot and erasing a lot. It took me about ten minutes to come up with: My name is City. Shalaya Crump says I’m like long division.

Then, out of the blue, I realized something. Shalaya Crump was jealous of me liking that girl, Baize. I guess I should have known it earlier, but I never thought I could do anything to make Shalaya Crump jealous. Just thinking about her being jealous made me feel so good about myself. If she was jealous, I knew it would only be a matter of time before she was kissing me. My new GAME was to keep her jealous for a little bit, then prove to her that I liked her way more than Baize. A few minutes after that, I knew we’d be kissing. Once I got kissing Shalaya Crump back in my mind, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was always like that. So I typed and erased about her for hours. At the end of the night, all I had was one good sentence, and I used italics and the dot-dot-dots in it too. It felt like the right thing to do: