Long Division(38)

While I had her down on the ground and was yelling at her, that was the first time I noticed that people have hair under their eyes, you know? Plus, Shay had on that little pea-green muscle shirt, so I could see the little hairs under her arms. I had negative hair under my arms, not even minor hair bumps. I was looking in her big eyes and squeezing on her shoulders softly, and I’ll be damned if my penis didn’t start getting harder and harder. It made me too embarrassed, so I gave her one more good push in the shoulders and I got off of her.

“My bad, City.”

“What?” I asked.

“My bad. I wasn’t trying to hurt you. Me and Baize made a bet about who could make a boy do that first. I won’t show the pictures to no one but her,” she said. “I promise.”

“Where you think she went? Baize, I’m talking about. The newspaper said they got a lead in the investigation.”

Shay picked up some pine needles and walked toward the road. “The paper don’t know shit,” she yelled and came back towards me.

“Maybe something else happened to her.”

“You met Baize before, City.” Shay looked me right in the face. “Whoever took Baize either hurt her or killed her before they took her. Or maybe they knew.”

“Knew what?”

“Never mind. You think that girl would let somebody just take her? We would’ve heard about it.”

“Wait,” I told her. The craziest thought in the world entered my head. “You think that white man knew whatever it is you’re talking about? You think he took her?”

“You mean the one in your grandma’s shed? Probably.”

“Ain’t no white man in my grandma’s shed,” I told her. She just looked at me with her arms folded.

“Folks say they saw her walk off in these woods one day a few weeks ago with a computer.”

“A computer?”

“That laptop computer she always was messing with.”

“Did anyone find the computer?”

“The white man in your shed,” Shay changed the subject. “Didn’t he kick you in your back yesterday, too?”

“Yeah, he did,” I told her. “But can we talk more about Baize?”

I was expecting a little more quality heartfelt sharing between us, but Shay walked off toward the bushes again. “Where you going?” I asked.

“Gunn told me that your grandma’s preacher, Reverend Cherry, got a carload of pictures of skanks from Waveland doing it.”

“So?”

“So, that’s where I’m going. He hid the pictures in his beat-up car, the one he always letting Deacon Big Shank drive,” Shay said.

I thought for a second about what would be the point of stealing naked pictures that belonged to my grandma’s preacher, especially with a girl who had just hit me in my skin-sacks with a stick.

Then it clicked.

If I stole the pictures and showed them to Grandma, there would be no way she’d let me get baptized by a preacher who kept that kind of nastiness in one of his cars.

“Can we take a picture of the pictures in the car with your phone?” I asked her.

“Yeah,” she said, and came back from around the bushes. “Don’t ask a whole lotta questions, though. You coming or not?”

Shay started texting someone as we walked toward Reverend Cherry’s house.


Reverend Cherry lived about three minutes from Grandma’s, on the other side of the woods. He lived right next to my friend Gunn.

“Hey, scown,” Gunn said to me as we walked in the yard. “What you doing?” Gunn was fourteen, but his voice was a good four or five years deeper than mine. “Heard you went crazy yesterday.”

“I did, kinda.”

“They say it’s on Worldstar and everything. Heard you had fools crying and calling you master.”

“Yeah, I guess,” I told him. “Sometimes you gotta let fools know, you feel me?”

Shay looked at me and shook her head. She was being strange and quiet but Gunn was steady nodding and chewing on a toothpick. The best thing about Gunn was that even if he heard you did something huge like embarrass yourself on national TV and the internet, he’d focus on the fighting you did instead. He loved saying the word “titties” and he loved anything that had to do with fighting. He’d been telling people he was going to be a professional UFC fighter ever since he was six. It was funny at first, but most folks in Melahatchie would be surprised if he didn’t end up fighting for money. He’d beaten almost every boy’s ass I knew in Melahatchie. Everybody he beat claimed that they lost ’cause they didn’t want to “get close to no real-life faggot.”

Gunn’s grandma put him in a kung fu class downtown for his twelfth birthday present. Coach Stroud taught that kung fu class for a while until parents complained that he was too touchy. Soon as Coach Stroud quit, Gunn quit too. He said he quit because he wanted to chop people in the throat and throw ninja stars, but the new white teacher from Biloxi wanted folks to stretch their legs in yoga poses and work on soft punches to the solar plexus. Behind Gunn’s back, everyone said he quit because his boyfriend, Coach Stroud, didn’t want him learning from a new teacher.

Before he quit, though, Coach Stroud gave Gunn one of those white karate suits. And Gunn wore that suit with his own black leather belt at least three times a week during the summer.