Long Division(36)

“Yeah, I can do that, Grandma, but you might want to ease up talking to me like this is fifth-grade special ed.”

Grandma’s eyes got to twitching. I looked at the ground, trying my hardest not to get whupped again. “Can you do what I asked you, City?”

“Yeah, Grandma.” I had no choice. “I can do what you asked me.”

“Okay,” Grandma said, and got out of the bathtub. She dried off while I looked at the floor. While she was looking at herself in the mirror, she said, “They always expecting us to forget. I’m tired of forgetting. You and that baby didn’t do nothing to nobody.”

I couldn’t completely understand how Grandma could go from telling me that grown folks forget what they need, to saying she was tired of forgetting. I knew not to ask any more questions but, in a way, it was all starting to make a little more sense.





TENDER TESTICLES.


After all that weirdness with Grandma earlier, I just wanted to run down Old Morton Road and never stop until I was back in our garage in Jackson. Since I didn’t have either the wind or the guts to do that, I called my friend Shay and asked her to come over.

Shay was the junior queen of Melahatchie and raiser of way more hell than a little bit. She walked in Grandma’s yard wearing a pea-green muscle shirt and some Memphis Grizzlies shorts. Usually her Afro puffs were the same size but today the left one was way bigger than the right.

“I don’t know what you was thinking,” she said, with a voice that came directly from her nose. “Nasal” actually isn’t the word for Shay’s voice. Shay’s nose was damn near wider than her lips, and it stayed clogged up so she only breathed through her mouth. Shay spoke fast, too, but it wasn’t like she said certain words fast. It was more that she moved from word to word fast. “I knew you was crazy,” she said, “but I ain’t know you was that crazy.”

“What you mean?”

“Wow!” she said. “On national TV, too? In front of all them dubs?” Shay called white folks “dubs,” which was short for “W’s.”

“Listen,” I tried to change subjects. “Have you ever heard of this book called Long Division? It’s about Melahatchie.”

“Quit changing subjects, boy,” she said. “If there was a book about Melahatchie, don’t you think I would have heard of it? Is it a book for dubs or a book for us?”

“Us mostly,” I told her. “But it’s complicated. It’s a book for us and a few dubs, I guess. There’s this one boy and he’s in love with this girl named Shalaya Crump, and they travel through time and find this girl who lives in Melahatchie. The girl’s name is Baize.” Shay looked up at me. “Baize Shephard. You heard of it?”

Shay rolled her eyes at me and told me to shut my lying ass up without even opening her mouth. Every time I saw Shay, it was like seeing someone you haven’t seen in forever, and it was like seeing a star of a good show and it was like seeing someone you wanted to see every day. Shay never acted too excited to see me ever since I told her this secret when we were playing The Secret Game. The first time I had a wet dream, she was there—in the dream, I mean—and I told her that, and I also told her what we were doing with our hands and mouths.

We jumped the creek and went into this little path leading into the Magic Woods. After stomping through the woods and trying to dodge sticker bushes, we ended up in this dusty opening between pine trees and tree stumps. We were about 50 feet from the Melahatchie Community Center.

Shay walked deeper in the woods. “Keep talking,” she said. “I’m listening.” She wasn’t really listening. I heard all kinds of sticks and leaves breaking before she came out with this huge stick. Right in the same spot where Shay found hers, I found the perfect stick. Not really perfect, but perfect if I was gonna be fighting her with the stick she had.

I was always scared to hit Shay’s stick hard unless she hit my hand or my stomach with her stick. Sometimes you could hold your stick out and the person you were playing against would swing wildly at yours and theirs would get stuck in the dusty-ass ground, or the soft mud if it had been raining. It would be stuck just long enough so you had the perfect angle to smash that joker. If you did that technique to Shay, she got so mad that she’d quit or catch fade with her praying-mantis technique.

“I didn’t know what else to do,” I told her.

“When?”

“At that contest,” I told her. “I swear I wanted to win it for all these people. Like you and Gunn and fat boys with waves like me, too.” She started laughing. “You laughing, but I’m serious. I wanted to win it for all of us.”

“You messed up before beginning, then,” she said. “You should’ve been trying to win it for you. We wanted you to win, but if you ain’t win, we would’ve been happy just ’cause you were in it. You didn’t have to shout out Melahatchie like that either. You made us look like losers.” She paused and looked like she was thinking of what to say. “I just feel as though you should’ve just sat down when you got it wrong. But whatever. That’s you. Come on and play, City,” she said. Shay hated if you held your stick away from hers. “Play, boy!”

“I am a playboy, ain’t I?”

“More like a gay boy,” she said and started laughing.