Long Division(44)

“But would they?” I asked her. “Would your grandma even do that for you if some white boy who called her a ‘Negro’ was the one telling her to do it?” Shalaya Crump was looking all in my eyes and I was so focused on what I saying that I couldn’t even try to spit game front of her. “We don’t know nothing about them old dudes, and nothing about no Freedom Schools and nothing about no Klan. All we know is the Klan ain’t nothing to mess with. You told me that!”

“It’s not the real Klan,” Evan said.

“Does it matter if they kill black folks the same way the real Klan does?” Shalaya Crump asked him.

“The Klan killed Jews, too.”

We waited for Evan to say more, but he just held his mouth open, kept both hands on his hips, and kept swallowing his own spit. I grabbed Shalaya Crump by the hand. “Shalaya Crump, we lived our whole life this far with no granddaddies. Think about it. I don’t know if we somehow got stuck in a dumb book or movie. Right now, I feel like we supposed to say, ‘Golly, let’s go save the grandfathers we never knew.’ But like you always say, life ain’t no book. This is real life. In real life, do we really need our granddaddies?”

Shalaya Crump laughed and actually looked at me like she thought I had a point. Then she looked over at Evan and flicked her gum at his feet and started doing these weird toe-raises. “City’s right,” she said. “We don’t know a thing about having granddaddies. Even if we did, I mean, what happens if we change our future by changing the past? It’s impossible to not change the future if you change the past, right? More would change than just us having granddaddies.”

Shalaya Crump was always taking the best thing you ever said and then adding something even better to it to make the best thing you ever said sound pretty lame. I understood what she was saying. Even if we saved our granddaddies and Evan’s folks, what if it changed everything and we ended up not being born?

“Listen,” Evan said, “you’re both right, but I know the future.”

“So what!” we both said. “We do too.”

“Then you know that the future has to be changed? Look,” he looked at Shalaya Crump. “I know what happens to both of you.”

“You do?” Shalaya Crump jumped in.

“He’s lying, ’Laya.” It was the first time I had ever shortened her name to ’Laya. “How can this goofy white boy know what happens to us or even know the future if he can’t even understand how an answering machine works?”

Jewish Evan Altshuler ignored my question and got right in her face. She kinda backed up. “I promise if you come back and help me, I’ll tell you what happens to you in the future. Not only that, I can change what happens to you. I know what happens to your parents in the past, too.”

“You lying?” Shalaya Crump asked him.

Jewish Evan Altshuler cut his eyes to me, before focusing on Shalaya Crump. “Ain’t much to look at. I know that. Can you listen to me?” He actually grabbed Shalaya Crump’s pinky. “I know so much more than you think I do. I give you my word, Shalayer Crump. Both of you.”

“Oh God,” Shalaya Crump said and took her pinky back, “Just promise. Don’t say you ‘give your word.’ That’s so Ronald Reagan.”

“Hell yeah,” I said and fake laughed. “And it’s Shalaya, not Shalayer.”

I wanted to fight Jewish Evan Altshuler so bad right there, but I could tell by the way Shalaya Crump’s eyes didn’t blink and by the way she was looking at his crusty lip and feeling sorry for it that we were headed to 1964. Shalaya Crump was gonna go back whether I went or not. That was a given as soon as the dude said he could help her find her parents in the past and find herself in the future. And if I didn’t go, I was pretty much admitting that it was okay for her and Jewish Evan Altshuler to start loving each other til the end of time. You think I’m crazy, right? Well, I know that you can’t travel through time with a girl and save folks from the Klan and not kiss them unless you’re slightly deformed or unless you smell like death. And even then, there’s still gonna be some serious grinding going on. Serious grinding.

Shalaya Crump got in the hole first. Jewish Evan Altshuler followed her. I followed him. Before I closed the door, I looked around at the woods and zeroed in on the Shephard house. “Wait.” I said. “Who is that?”

I wanted to tell Shalaya Crump that there was a dark outline of someone watching us from the Shephard house window, but she wouldn’t have believed me, since she knew I was the only one of us three that didn’t want to go to 1964.

“Never mind,” I said. “Don’t worry about it.” I lowered myself under the ground with the laptop computer in my left hand and Long Division in my right hand, and closed my eyes. Then I pulled the door down on all three of us.


When we pushed open the door to 1964, the air was thin and you couldn’t even see Old Ryle Road because everything was so thick and green. Right in front of us, where the Shephard house used to be, was a building that was only half painted yellow. Evan told Shalaya Crump that we were looking at a Freedom School.

“Should we go over there?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “What’s the plan?”

“I reckon our plan is to make sure the Klan in Melahatchie don’t ever kill again,” Jewish Evan Altshuler said. “I can get us some rifles.”