Long Division(57)

“This is real, Baize. This shit is real.” I stood there not caring what I looked like. I understood that if Michael Jackson was really dead, it meant that people I knew were dead too. “I gotta find my ma and my Mama Lara. What if they disappeared in some flood just like your parents?”

“Tomorrow, okay? Look,” she stood up and took the remote controls from me. “You gotta rest so your legs feel better. Then tomorrow, well…” She paused.

“What?”

“You gotta decide if you go back and help your friend or if you stay and look for your family. I don’t care what you do. When the morning comes, I’m jumping back in that hole and getting my computer and my phone back.”

“But what if all my family is dead?”

“What if they are?”

“Well,” I said, and thought about her question. “I guess if they’re dead, I’d want to know and maybe when I go back to my time I can do what I can to stop them from dying.”

“But what if you’re dead?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if you go looking for your people and you find out that they’re alive, but you ain’t?”

“Then, well, I guess…” I just didn’t know what to say. “Where am I sleeping tonight?”

“On the floor in my room, I guess.”

I followed her in the bedroom and then I stopped. “Baize?”

“What?” she turned around and looked me right in the eye.

“Is all of New Edition dead too?”

“New who?”


Baize made a nice little area to sleep on the floor next to her bed. I should have asked to take a shower, but I’d seen when I went in their bathroom earlier that there wasn’t a shower. Couldn’t understand how they had all the technology to get over 200 channels and make the TV sound like life, but they didn’t have technology to make their tub go from the brown of a double-yolk egg to a somewhat regular white.

I sat there on the floor of Baize’s room and pulled up the sheet to look under her bed. There were maybe 20 green notebooks piled there, and all kinds of raggedy keyboards, drumsticks, and broken turntables. Surrounding all that stuff were these tiny fingernails.

I grabbed one of the green notebooks and opened it. There were all these sketches of connected circles, and surrounding the circles were these long winding lines of numbers that looked like they were coming out of the circles. I opened another notebook and it was the same thing. Different-shaped circles and long lines of winding numbers.

While I was trying to figure out if Baize was doing some kind of long division in the notebooks, Baize leaned her head over toward me. “If things start to crawl on you, you can just get in the bed with me, long as you stay on your side.”

“Wait, what’s gonna crawl on me? Fingernails?”

“No, asshole. Roaches.”

“Can I ask you something?”

“What?”

“Why are these notebooks filled with circles and numbers?”

“They’re not circles,” she told me and took the notebook from my hand. “They’re holes.”

“Holes to where?”

“I don’t know. Never mind, Voltron,” she said. “Just watch out for the roaches down there.”

“Well then, can I just…you know…get up there with you?”

“Don’t get it twisted, okay?” she said and moved over. “I’m really not about that acting ho-ish life.”

“Whatever that means.” I told her and got in the bed. “I been wanting to tell you that the slang y’all use is kinda stale in the future.”

Baize put four of her green tablets between us. She told me that I couldn’t cross over the tablets without getting punched in the gizzard, and I told her not to worry. It’s not hard to explain what I felt about Baize. She had the perfect mix of funk and perfume. And even though she had a Mr. T-style haircut, she was cuter than a cute girl. And she was finer than a fine girl. And she was way smarter than a smart girl. And she was even weirder than the weirdest girls. But she wasn’t as good-smelling, as cute, as smart, or as weird as the girl I loved. And even if she was, which she wasn’t, I really told myself that if I didn’t touch Baize, then maybe, just maybe, Evan and Shalaya Crump weren’t touching either.


I wanted to stay up and ask Baize more questions about life in 2013, but the day had beaten me down. A few minutes after my head hit that crappy pillow, I turned away from Baize and was cold knocked out.

Some time during the night, I had one of those dreams where you know you’re dreaming. Everything in the woods was a different shade of maroon. Shalaya Crump had my hand in hers and she was pulling me through the woods toward the Freedom School. When we got to the door, everything turned black and white.

“Why you talking weird,” I asked her, “like this is a stupid book?”

We walked all the way to the center of the room, into the smell of burning hair and pancakes. When we stood in the room, the sound of one of those TV shows I watched on Baize’s TV was surrounding us.

“He’s different than you think he is, City.”

“Who?”

“This guy.” Shalaya Crump pulled out a picture of a white boy I’d seen before on TV. He looked like Ricky’s friend on Silver Spoons. “Evan.”