Long Division(56)

I figured I’d read the words to Baize’s song, but I didn’t want to hear her rap it. It would have embarrassed me too much if she couldn’t rap a lick. I knew I should have been thinking more about her dead parents and what kind of storm could just make people disappear, but I wasn’t. I was thinking of that talking cat and those two Dobermans who just earlier in the day were right where I was looking now, and I was thinking about what Shalaya Crump and Evan were doing. I didn’t think they were kissing any more. I knew that they were trying to stay alive or fighting to not disappear together, which was even worse.

“Baize?”

“What?”

“What happened to your brother?”

“He disappeared, too.”

“Oh. Wait. Can I ask you one more question?”

“What?”

“That wasn’t a real cigarette, was it?”


Baize liked to control the remote, and she never left it on one channel for longer than five minutes. “I usually don’t watch this much TV, but since you stole my computer and my phone, I don’t have a choice.”

“You could read that book. What’s it called?”

“Long Division.”

“Yeah, you could read Long Division since you were so pressed about getting it back,” I told her. “Have you read that book? All of it?”

“I read some of it and it made me feel weird.”

“Me too. I like that part where they all got together and listened to that boy talk about that kid LaVander Peeler’s fade. Who wrote it?”

“I don’t know. I told you that I just found it in the woods.”

“Don’t you think it’s weird that there’s no author’s name on it? Is that how they do books in 2013?”

She just looked at me. “That’s what I’m saying, Voltron. There’s something painful in that book. Real painful. And I just don’t feel like reading to the end and finding out what it is.”

“Then why’d you want it back so bad if you weren’t gonna read it?”

“Because it’s mine,” she said. “Whatever is wrong with that book, I wanna be the one to find out before anyone else does.”

“Do kids read a lot in 2013?” I asked her. “Like, in my time, I read a lot because if I don’t, I get my ass whupped. I usually hate whatever I have to read, but when I finish something, I feel so happy. I can’t even lie, though. I probably only finished two books in my whole life.”

Baize was laughing at me. “Nobody around here really reads unless it’s something on a computer, but nobody writes to folks around here either. But that’s the thing about that book. If I gave it to the most illiterate fool in my grade, I bet he’d at least get through the first chapter, you know?”

“Yeah, I do know,” I told her. “I got through the first chapter.”

“No comment.”

“Why no comment?” I asked her. “I would have read even more of it if I didn’t have your computer to mess with. It’s hard for us in 1985 to finish books, and we don’t even have a thousand channels or phones that look like calculators or laptop computers.” I waited for her to ask me something, but she didn’t. “You know what else? I never typed on a typewriter before. But when I typed on your computer, I felt like what I was typing was famous. It just looked so famous on the screen, like I could have written that Long Division book.”

“Voltron, you dumb. I bet you only wrote a few sentences. That’s a big-ass book. I ain’t trying to hate, but you couldn’t write something like that. You have to really have gone through a lot and then have a lot of time on your hands to do something like that.”

“I’m not that dumb,” I told her. “Look. We could turn the TV off and you could just write in a tablet, or we could watch a movie,” I said. When I started talking about watching a movie, Baize muted the TV. I don’t know why, but her turning down the TV to listen to me took my like for Baize from 20 MPH to around 50 MPH. I tried to keep talking and not look as thankful as I was.

“Are you one of those people?” she asked me. “My father used to be like that. I remember he was always telling my mother to turn the TV off so he could watch a movie or tell some ol’ silly story.”

“Were they good stories?”

She started smiling. “Yeah, they were. You would have liked them.” I knew I was supposed to ask why, but I didn’t really want to. Didn’t matter, though, because she kept talking anyway. “He said a lot in his stories, kinda like you do.”

Right after she said that, there was this picture of this white woman with stringy black hair and big eyes and a nose that reminded me of a tiny paper boat.

“Who is that lady? Turn it up.”

“That’s Michael Jackson.”

I got closer to the TV and watched different scenes with this person dancing and sounding like Michael Jackson. But nothing about the person looked like the Michael Jackson I knew.

“Wait.”

“Yeah,” she said. “He died four or five years ago.” She started scratching her head. “Sorry.”

I slumped on the ground away from the TV and just watched the first part of the show about the life and sound and death of Michael Jackson with my head resting on my shoulder. I thought about Shalaya Crump telling me to just be myself. What did that even mean if years in the future, you could look like a totally different person and be dead? There was no way to be yourself and be the same way you were. And even if you did manage to be yourself, one day you were going to die and regret it all anyway. That’s what I realized watching the show about Michael Jackson.