Long Division(3)

Without even looking at me, LaVander Peeler just said, “Roaches can’t spell so that sentence doesn’t make any sense.”

Everyone around us was laughing and trying to give me some love. And I should have stopped there, but I kept going and kept brushing and looked directly at the crowd. “Hell, Lavender Peeler can be the first African American to win the title all he wants, y’all,” I told them. “But me, I’m striving for legendary, you feel me?”

Even the seventh-grade Mexicans were dying laughing at LaVander Peeler, who was closest to me. He was flipping through one of those pocket thesauruses, acting like he was in deep conversation with himself.

“Shoot,” I said to the crowd. “I’m ’bout to be the first one of us with a head full of waves to win nationals in anything that ain’t related to sports or cheerleading, you feel me?”

Toni Whitaker, Octavia Whittington, and Jerome Wallace stopped laughing and stared at each other. Then they looked at both of us. “He ain’t lying about that,” Toni said. Octavia Whittington just nodded her head up and down and kept smiling.

The bell rang.

As we walked back to class, LaVander Peeler tapped me on the back of the neck and looked me directly in my eye. He flicked his nose with his thumb, opened his cheap flip phone, and started recording himself talking to me.

“I’m not going to stomp you into the ground for talking about my mother, my brother, and my pops because I don’t want to be suspended today, but this right here will be on YouTube in the morning just in case your fat homosexual ass forgets,” LaVander Peeler told me. “I do feel you, City. I also do feel that all your sentences rely on fakeness and magic. All things considered, I feel like there’s nothing real in your sentences because you aren’t real. But do you feel that a certain fat homosexual is supposed to be riding to nationals tonight in my ‘halitosis-having daddy’s’ van? I do. All things considered, I guess his mama don’t even care enough to come see him lose, does she?”

LaVander Peeler got even closer to me. The boy smelled like fried tomatoes, buttered cornbread, and peppermint. I held my arms tight to my body and counted these twelve shiny black hairs looking like burnt curly fries curling their way out of his chin. I scratched my chin and kept my hand there as he tilted his fade don’t fade down and whispered in my ear, “You know the real difference between me and you, City?”

“What?”

“Sweat and piss,” he told me. “I’m sweat. All things considered, sweat and piss ain’t the same thing at all. Even your mama knows that, and she might know enough to teach at a community college in Mississippi, but she ain’t even smart enough to keep a man, not even a homeless one who just got off of probation for touching three little retarded girls over in Pearl.”

LaVander Peeler closed his flip phone, said, “One sentence,” and just walked off.





ALL CLEAN.


Turns out LaVander Peeler commenced to tell our principal, old loose-skin Ms. Lara Reeves, that I called him a “nigger”—not “nigga,” “negroid,” “Negro,” “African American,” or “colored.” I figured it was just LaVander Peeler’s retaliation for someone turning him in two months ago for calling me a “faggot.” I know who snitched on LaVander Peeler, and it wasn’t me, but after he got in trouble for calling me a “faggot” he started calling me a “homosexual,” because he knew Principal Reeves couldn’t punish him for using that word without seeming like she thought there was something wrong with being a homosexual in the first place.

I guess you should also know that no one else at Hamer or in the world ever called me a “faggot” or “homosexual” except for LaVander Peeler. I’m not trying to make you think I’ve gotten nice with lots of girls or anything because I haven’t. I felt on Toni’s bra in a dark closet in Art and she twerked on my sack a few times after school. And I guess I talked nasty with a few people who claimed they were girls on this website called WhatYouGotOn-MyFreak.com, but really that was it. Truth is my sack stayed dry as hell, but I don’t think you’re supposed to feel like a case about sex unless you make it through tenth grade with a dry sack. The point is that even if LaVander Peeler caught you watching him piss once, I don’t think that should really qualify you as a homosexual.

Anyway, I sat in Principal Reeves’s office waiting to tell her that I didn’t call him a “nigger,” but that I did bring my wave brush out after lunch by mistake.

In Principal Reeves’s office, next to her huge bookshelf, was a big poster with a quote from Maya Angelou. The backdrop of the poster was the sun and in bolded red letters were the sentences, “Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean. Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.”

I hated sentences that told me that my emotions were like something that wasn’t emotional, but I loved how those red words looked like they were coming right out of the sun, red hot.

Ms. Lara Reeves had been a teacher since way back in the ’80s and she became the principal at Hamer about four years ago. The worst part of her being the principal was that she was also my mama’s friend. My mama was known for having friends you wouldn’t think she’d have. Mama had me when she was a sophomore at Jackson State fourteen years ago. She’s old now, in her early thirties, so you would expect her to have only black friends in her thirties, but she had black friends, white friends, African friends, and super-old friends like Principal Reeves.