Long Division(28)

I didn’t hug her, though. I just said, “MyMy, did you see me on TV?”

She nodded up and down.

“What did you think?” I asked her. “You can be honest.” MyMy shrugged her shoulders. “What would you have done?”

She pulled out her Magic Slate and wrote, “You and Baize are Fameus.”

“Girl, I know you know how to spell famous,” I told her. “Did you even know Baize?”

MyMy just looked at me and didn’t say a word. Even before Baize Shephard went missing, everyone in Melahatchie talked about her like she was their best friend. Baize was one of those girls who had thousands of friends on Twitter and Facebook, but she wasn’t that close with anyone in Melahatchie except my friend Shay.

MyMy and I were headed to the Magic Woods when we saw these two big green trucks with confederate flags in their back windows. They were parked in the middle of the trailer park.

“Mean white men drive them trucks,” MyMy said.

“That ‘not talk’ thing you do, I’m just letting you know it ain’t cute. And how are you gonna call somebody white when you are white as a bleach stain?”

MyMy just laughed and said, “Bleach stain.”

We walked in the opening of the woods and I was rereading the beginning of Long Division to get a sense of where this hole in the ground was. MyMy snatched the book from me and opened it to the first page.

“Your name is in this book,” she said.

“I know,” I told her. “Keep reading. Baize is in there, too. You see the name of the second chapter?”

“I don’t want to,” she said and threw the book down. “I don’t like that book.”

“Why? You should read it. It’s not a hard book to read.” She just looked me in the eyes and didn’t say a word. “All the time you been in these woods, MyMy, have you ever seen a rusty handle that leads to a hole in the ground in these woods?”

“Why?”

“Have you seen one or not?

“I think so,” she said. “I think it’s over here.”

I followed her and sure enough, hidden by some pine needles, was a rusty brown handle coming out of ground. “Oh shit. You ever pull that handle before?”

MyMy started walking away from me. “I don’t think we should open that.”

“Why?”

“We don’t want to know.”

“Girl, please. Who are you supposed to be? We don’t want to know what?

“You hear something?” she asked me. I listened harder. We heard some cracked bass and a synthesizer blasting from some tinny speakers.

MyMy snatched my arm and we took off out of the woods and ran back onto Old Morton Road. Coach Stroud was driving the ice cream and watermelon truck our way. No matter where you saw Coach Stroud, he always wore a Titans hat turned to the back.

Coach stopped his truck in front of us.

“Hey, Coach!” I said.

“Hey Wide Load,” Coach said while stretching his neck. “How you making it these days? I heard how you lost your mind on TV but I ain’t been able to watch it on DVR.”

Coach had this lisp that was deep and ringing, more like Biggie’s lisp than Mike Tyson’s. When I was ten, Mama gave me this slightly illiterate book about how all humans come from Africa. The book had pictures in there of the first man and first woman. The first woman didn’t look like anyone I’d ever seen except maybe Michael Jackson, but the first man had a mouth just like Coach Stroud. I’m not saying that I didn’t look lightweight ape around the mouth area, but Coach looked pretty much full ape. That was really one of the best things about him.

“That’s the little white gal you been running ’round with since you got on TV?” Coach asked and stared at MyMy. MyMy walked up looking all hungry and crazy at the pictures of ice cream on the truck.

“I ain’t running around with no white girl. I just got here. People spreading rumors about me running around with white girls?”

“You know how y’all do,” Coach said.

I had no idea what he was talking about. “You still suing the city, Coach?”

“Well, we working on it,” Coach said. He was one of those dudes who always talked about suing somebody and taking the money he won to the casino to play blackjack. “Always doing something to keep a hardworking black man down. So I gotta handle my business.”

Coach Stroud smiled as he scratched the sack part of his tight red coach pants. Everyone in Melahatchie said that Coach Stroud was busting booties with my friend Gunn, and when you hear that a grown coach and one of your friends are busting booties, it makes you want to run your big ass back into the woods when you see him scratch his sack.

I figured that one of the worst things in the world was to have folks think you bust teenagers’ booties. Nobody would ever look at you the same after that. Even when you’re just doing stuff that everybody else does, like scratching your sack, no one would look at you the same. Coach was a walking “Kindly pause,” and that was fine with me. I just hated that I ever even thought I loved LaVander Peeler. No part of me really wanted to touch his sack, but I knew you couldn’t tell people that you loved another boy, because as soon as folks heard the word “love” they would look at me the same way I looked at Coach when he had that sack itch. I wondered, for the first time, what busting booties had to do with love. Once I thought I loved Toni Whitaker and Octavia Whittington, but that was because those girls were the only two real people I thought about when I got nice. They were the people who made my privacy the hardest. As much as I thought I loved LaVander Peeler, I can’t even say that anything about him made my privacy hard. So if it wasn’t love, I just wondered what it really was, and why I felt so much of it when I saw him up on that stage.