Long Division(37)

“Why you call me a gay boy? I ain’t gay.”

I swung my stick and tagged the mess out of hers, but it didn’t break.

My hand bones were vibrating. “Dang, I hit that mug hard, too.”

We were both happy as hell to see a stick that hard. It’s hard to explain. The stick was a monument in itself and we just stood there smiling in the stick’s direction for about fourteen seconds. Then, guess what I started thinking about? I started thinking about my mother. I wondered if she was in our garage missing me and if she had any clue what was happening in Melahatchie.

“Does this feel like déjà vu to you?”

Shay sucked on her teeth. “Boy,” she said, “Quit trying to switch subjects, talking about déjà vu. Naw, this don’t feel like déjà vu.”

Shay started laughing and walked deeper behind some baby sticker bushes. “Come over here.”

“For what?”

Time slowed down, I swear it did. When Shay walked her Afro-puffed self over in front of me, the sun coming through the woods hit her face perfectly. She had the color and the shine of a brand new genuine leather football. Shay rarely sweated so the Vaseline all over her face and shoulders never dripped. It just stuck to her and made whatever was surrounding her look pretty dull and blurry.

Shay took the pointing finger of her left hand, and joined it with her thumb, making the symbol that white folks on dumb television commercials used to say that everything is okay. Then she took her middle finger and her index finger of her right hand and pushed them in and out of the hole made by her left-hand fingers.

I wasn’t as scared as you probably think I was. I just didn’t know what to do. Shay walked over to me and grabbed my hips. “Stand right there and just put your back against the tree.”

“I can’t,” I told her. “My grandma ain’t in the mood for me to come back smelling like outside. I ain’t lying.” Shay just stood in front of me with her hands on her hips.

“Alright, City. Stop talking. Just put your arms behind your back and hold your body off from the tree. Okay?”

It was weird. My fatness wouldn’t let me hold myself up like I wanted to. Plus, my lower back and arms started aching, too. All I was thinking about was if Shay was gonna think my belly button was deformed. I had a regular innie-style belly button that she’d never seen, but from what I’d seen, all the kids in Melahatchie had walnut-size belly buttons.

Shay told me to take my pants off but leave my underwear on. I did it and let my pants hang around my ankles.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her as she was looking at my stuff.

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. Close your eyes.”

Sounded like a weird thing to say to someone, but I did it anyway.

“They closed?” she asked. “Don’t be peeking, boy. You a virgin?”

“I ain’t no virgin,” I told her with my eyes closed and my penis getting harder and harder. “I did it once with this girl named Octavia. We recorded it on her stepdaddy’s iPad. But look, I think we should probably get a condom from my Uncle Relle if we really trying to get nice. You feel me? You don’t want to be pregnant in high school and I don’t even know how child support works if I have a baby mama before I’m technically even allowed to work. Maybe we should think about this.”

“I can pay my own bills,” I heard Shay say before I heard the sound of a camera phone and…

Swinncrhuunch.

The pain in my testicles moved through my lower body and into my chest and head. I couldn’t talk. I was on my hands and knees, just fiending for air. I looked up to see what happened. A blurry Shay had grabbed her broken-off piece of tree and recorded herself hitting me in my naked testicles.

I just crouched over the leaves damn near choking as Shay took pictures of me. She was dying laughing, too.

I got off my knees, grabbed Shay’s shoulders, threw her to the pine-needled ground, and jumped on her. Her phone fell out of her hands. I felt crazy being on top of her like that. I mean, I thought about how no one had probably ever had the nerve or the skills to push Shay down like that.

“What the hell is wrong with you?” I asked her. “You can’t just go around hitting people in the sack whenever you get ready.” I was still all in her eyes. “You know how tender the testicles are? That stuff hurt.” I felt goofy saying “testicles” and “tender” to her.

“It’s called ‘skin-sacks,’” Shay told me. “And it’s all one word, with a hyphen.”

“Wait.” I started laughing. “What? That’s the dumbest thing I have heard in a long time. ‘Skin-sacks’? Who said it’s called ‘skin-sacks’ with a hyphen?”

“My brother, Alcee. He said it’s two sacks and it’s covered in skin so it’s skin-sacks.”

“But the skin is the sack,” I told her. “And there ain’t two sacks. There’s two nuts in one sack.”

“My brother said it’s called ‘skin-sacks’ so it’s called ‘skin-sacks.’”

“Well, first of all,” I told her, “Alcee Mayes is my Uncle Relle’s weed man and my uncle said he’s steady overcharging him for an ounce, so I don’t believe nothing Alcee Mayes says.”