Long Division(42)

“I need to show you the past,” he said. “Listen to me. We can change it.”

I couldn’t figure out how Jewish Evan Altshuler knew anything about my mama, my Mama Lara, or my granddaddy disappearing. It was something that only the truly craziest of white characters on a crazy show like Fantasy Island would say. Shalaya Crump always said that truly-crazy-white-folks talk always came before truly-crazy-white-folks action. And Mama, Mama Lara, and Shalaya Crump always told me that if you popped someone in head who was white and crazy, you could go to jail for life. So I had to be careful with this dusty white boy.

“Oh really,” I said. “The past, huh? I hear that. That’s nice to hear. So nice. And um, I want you to show me that past, but I’m finna go home first and eat me a bologna sandwich. You want me to bring you one?”

I started walking backwards toward Old Ryle Road, but Evan walked toward me. “I’m serious, City. You need to see this. We can stop it. Come back with me. That house,” he pointed to the Shephard house. “It used to be a Freedom School. You know what a Freedom School is?”

“Yeah,” I lied, “I know. It’s a school where they teach freedom.”

“They burned that school down to the ground with our families in it. Yours and mine. They took their bodies over to the—”

“So,” I interrupted him, “you want some Sandwich Spread and mustard on your bologna sandwich, right?” And with that, I turned toward the road and sprinted like Carl Lewis until I was all the way out of the Night Time Woods, away from the craziest white boy I’d ever seen in my life, and back on the porch of my Mama Lara’s house.


I wasn’t on the porch longer than two minutes, wondering how much of what Jewish Evan Altshuler said was true, before Shalaya Crump opened the door to her trailer. She had an unwrapped package of saltines in one hand and a cold drank in the other.

Shalaya Crump walked to the middle of Old Ryle Road and stood across from my porch sipping on cold drank. I thought she’d come over to my porch immediately. Instead, she took a big gulp of cold drank, gobbled up three saltines at once, then walked down the road and hopped in the woods.

I figured Shalaya Crump was gonna go in the woods and wait five minutes for me to follow her. When she saw that I didn’t come after her, she’d shamefully walk up to my porch and we’d talk about my new laptop computer, my new book, and how she was jealous of the girl with the greasy forehead. Or, I figured she’d come out screaming after seeing Jewish Evan Altshuler’s ugly face.

I waited and waited and waited for her to come back to my porch. After 20 minutes, I don’t know why, but I was sure that Shalaya Crump was never coming back out of those woods.

I stood up and got ready to go find Shalaya Crump when the worst thought in the history of thoughts just smacked me in the back of the head: What if Jewish Evan Altshuler and Shalaya Crump travel through time together like superheroes and have lots of babies the color of cheap graham crackers?

That thought stretched out for two minutes and some seconds until I remembered that I’d never ever heard Shalaya Crump say anything sexy about white boys in the seven years I knew her. Even when this one white boy named Parker Vincent who looked like a pudgy Michael J. Fox moved to Melahatchie from Memphis and all the other girls said they’d never mess with a white boy but if they did, they’d mess with Parker Vincent, Shalaya Crump told me, “I wouldn’t mess with Parker Vincent or any white boy on earth, not even if I was white and white boys were the only boys left on earth. I’m serious. I’d start liking girls before I did that.”


I walked back in the woods 20 minutes later with my computer and Long Division to find Shalaya Crump sitting on the ground with her legs crossed. She and Jewish Evan Altshuler were messing around with that calculator-looking thing I’d stolen from Baize.

“That’s a phone,” Shalaya Crump told me as she started pushing more buttons. “I figured it out last night but I can’t get no reception.” She put it up to her ear and kept saying “hello,” but no one answered. “I know it’s a phone,” she said to both of us like we all knew each other.

“That ain’t all that cool,” I told her.

“Better than it is now,” she said. “I’m tired of sneaking to use the phone all the time. You know how big of a deal it is if you have your own phone in your room? Imagine if you had your own phone that you could take with you everywhere you went. I wonder if you gotta pay for long distance with it?”

“Hell yeah! Why wouldn’t you? And who you talking to on the phone long distance anyway, other than me?” I asked her. “I thought—”

Jewish Evan Altshuler interrupted my question and started talking to Shalaya Crump about something called a “bell boy” and “area-to-area calling.” Shalaya Crump tried to explain to the white boy what the buttons were for on a phone, because he’d only used the slow-mo rotary kind. No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t make him understand how long distance, beepers, buttons, and answering machines worked.

“Show it to me one more time if you don’t mind,” he said. “Just the part about how you can tell someone you ain’t home when you ain’t home. They can leave a message that you can hear on your phone?”

I would’ve been laughing at Jewish Evan Altshuler’s dumb ass, but I wasn’t thinking about him being a country white moron from the 1960s. I was thinking of how I had never seen Shalaya Crump sit like she was sitting. She was leaning back on her hands and when she wasn’t talking about phones, she was just listening to him. Kneeling right next to her on one knee was that sick-looking Evan. I couldn’t figure out how they ended up in that position, with him kneeling and her sitting, in only 30 minutes.