Long Division(41)

“Hey, boy,” I heard a deep froggy voice say from behind me. “What you got in your hands?” The voice sounded like it was coming from behind a box fan. I didn’t even plan on turning around, but I did just to see the face that was carrying a voice like that.

The only white boy I’d ever seen with a fro was this old dude on PBS who made you fall asleep and dream about floating while he painted the finest in bushes and clouds. But this white boy had the same kind of fro. He wore a puffy blood-red sweatshirt with bleach stains on it and “Fresh” across the front in green letters. The sweatshirt was way too big for him but he had it tucked in these nice sky-blue pants that were a mix of jeans and slacks.

I angled myself so he wouldn’t see my privacy while I was crossing the T in my name.

“Ain’t trying to see your johnson,” the boy said. “Relax.” I shot my eyes down to his feet and these glowing green fat laces in his All Stars. “What you looking at?” he asked me. “You some kind of queer? If you are, you are. Just like to know what kind of man I’m talking to.”

“Naw, man,” I told him. “Um, I like booties. I like girl booties.”

“Boobies?”

“Naw. Booties,” I told him. “I like booties. Big ol’ girl booties, and boobies too, I guess. But mainly booties. You wouldn’t know nothing about that.”

“You like big ol’ girl booties?” He knelt down, tried to stop himself from laughing and brushed his shoes off. “Where you from, buddy?”

“Chicago, man. I’m down here for spring break because folks stay shooting folks too much in Chicago. I’m in a gang, though.” I was so nervous and being so raggedy with my lies and I had no idea why. “What about you, with that fro? White boys ain’t supposed to have fros like that.

“Ain’t white. From a little bit of everywhere, though,” the boulderhead boy said. He started coughing and eyeing my laptop computer. “Where’d you get that contraption in your grip anyway?” He wiped his mouth.

The white boy’s bottom teeth were so crooked that they zigzagged, and he had the chappiest top lip I’d ever seen in my life. It looked like frozen vanilla frosting was just sleeping on that thing. And his nose was closer to his top lip than it should have been, so it looked like he was constantly smelling his own chappy frosting. The skin on his face was so Saran Wrap tight, too, that the head and jaw bones damn near burst right through his skin. And I hate to gross you out, but there were a few scabbed-up scars on the top-right side of his face that jutted out like raisins. To tell you the truth, I kinda wished I had some scabs like that on my face so I could pick them off before I went to bed.

“This is a laptop computer,” I told him. “What’s your name?”

“Evan,” he told me. “That’s what they tell me.”

“They? What’s your last name?”

“Altshuler. What’s the date?”

“Like aw shucks?” I asked him. “Man, your name, it don’t make a lick of sense. It’s 1985. March. You from the future? 2013?”

“Naw, I ain’t from no future.” He pointed past the Shephard house, toward Belhaven Street. “I’m Jewish.”

Evan’s eyes opened up big after he said that, like he expected me to say something mean. I was kinda surprised, because I never met a person who said they were Jewish before, and to tell you the truth, I didn’t have a clue what it really meant. Since we moved to Chicago from Jackson last year, I heard the word a lot more, but people used the shorter version, “Jew,” and sometimes it was a noun and sometimes it was a verb. In elementary school, I heard about Adolf Hitler torturing Jewish people and how some of them got hanged and drowned in Mississippi back in the 1960s trying to help black folks get the right to vote, read, and pee in the same bathroom as white folks, but that was it. I just didn’t know what to do with this boy saying he was Jewish when he just looked like any slightly deformed white boy to me.

“Can I ask you a question?” I tried to change subjects and come back with a question that might make him stop looking at me so hard. “Is it okay if I ask you why you look so sick? And not even just sick. I’m saying you look crazy dusty. How old are you?”

He looked at the ground and mumbled, “Fifteen. Just told you that I ain’t white.”

“My name is Voltron,” I told him. “Folks call me T-Ron.”

“No it ain’t,” he said. “Citoyen is the name they give you. Folks call you City.”

“What did you just say?” I asked him.

“I know who you are,” he said and stepped closer to me. “Your name is Citoyen Coldson. You was born in Jackson and moved to Chicago two years ago. Your mama dropped you off at your Ma-Maw’s house yesterday. And you lost your granddaddy, your Ma-Maw’s husband, in these woods. Right over yonder.” He pointed toward the Shephard house.

“I gotta go, man,” I told him. “Don’t take it the wrong way. It’s not that you’re Jewish. It’s just that I don’t like the look in your eyes. You can understand that, right?”

“You need my help, City,” the boy said. “Let me show you something.”

“What?”

“The past.”

“The past what?”