Long Division(61)



That was the new best question anyone had ever asked me. The thing is, I was never scared of what I should have been scared of. For example, I wasn’t scared of people finding out I stole those Bibles for Shalaya Crump. I wasn’t really even scared of the Klan. I was only scared of knowing that Shalaya Crump could love someone else. Nothing else scared me. And if nothing really scared me, I wondered if anything else really even mattered. Everything else just made me mad or made me embarrassed or made me nervous. But all of those feelings had to do with Shalaya Crump in some way or another.

“Ain’t no reason to be scared,” I told her and took my hands back. “What can people do to you, really?”

“They can make you disappear,” she said.

“Yeah, but then you’re gone. I ain’t afraid of disappearing. I bet disappearing doesn’t even hurt, to tell you the truth.”

“People can mash your heart in your chest, Voltron, while you’re still alive. They can take people from you. That’s something to be afraid of. Stop fronting like you’re ’bout that life, boy.”

I said okay, but I knew people could hurt people way more than Baize would ever know. Shalaya Crump and I had this friend named Rozier. I liked to think about big ol’ JET-centerfold booties for as long as Rozier knew me, and Rozier liked to think about big ol’ boy booties for as long as I knew him. That’s just how he was. The thing about Rozier was that he was the kind of guy who you met and 29 minutes later, you knew he would be better than Eddie Murphy when he grew up. Rozier invented farting out loud in homeroom. He also invented calling people “ol’ blank-blank-blank-ass nigga.” Like if you ate an apple too fast, Rozier would call you an “ol’ eating-apples-like-they-plums-ass nigga,” or if you failed a test, he’d call you an “ol’ watching-Three’s Company-when-you-shoulda-been-studying-ass nigga.”

If you called Rozier a name he didn’t like, Rozier could slap you in the face better than any kid in Melahatchie, except for maybe Shalaya Crump. The summer of ’84, Rozier got jumped by some dudes from Waveland. Rozier had embarrassed one of the dudes in front of his family earlier at the arcade. After the boy called Rozier a faggot, Rozier said he’d never met a boy who smelled like sack and dookie through his church clothes. He called him an “ol’ wiping-your-ass-forward-instead-of-backward-so-the-dookie-get-caked-up-under-your-sack-ass nigga.” He said the boy needed Mr. Miyagi to teach him to correctly “wipe on, wipe off.” Even his friends started laughing, and when the dude got in Rozier’s face, Rozier slapped the boy across his mouth twice with both hands. That’s four slaps right in front of his family. Then he ran.

The boy who got slapped four times got three of his older cock-strong friends to help find Rozier when he was by himself in the Night Time Woods the next day. Rozier slapped the best he could, but they ended up calling him a faggot and beating him down with T-ball bats. They didn’t ever hit him directly in the head, but they crushed his larynx. He was in the woods by himself for a whole day before we found him. Rozier ended up in a coma, and one week later, he was dead. Shalaya Crump and I didn’t speak a word about revenge until the night after the funeral.

That night we planned how we were going to kill the boys, and we planned for the whole rest of the summer. I came up with a good plan, too. But that’s the strange thing about planning to kill boys from Waveland with someone like Shalaya Crump. She had the worst temper of anyone I knew, but she was also the smartest person I knew. At some point, Shalaya Crump realized that we didn’t really want to kill the boys from Waveland.

“We just want them to hurt like we hurt,” she said. Shalaya Crump claimed that in order to hurt the boys, we’d have to “kill some little boy they loved, but not kill them.” And neither of us really had it in us to kill some little Waveland boy we didn’t know. By the end of the summer, all four of the boys involved got sent to juvenile detention centers for five years.

Anyway, I didn’t feel like explaining to Baize how I’d seen Rozier disappear, too, so I just said, “I hear you. You’re right. I should be afraid.”


I opened the door to the hole slowly so we wouldn’t be slapped across the face by the 1964 Klan. I sniffed as I opened the door to the hole and knew we were where we needed to be.

“It’s so dark,” Baize said. She was bent over coughing under a magnolia tree. “Everything is so green here, too. You know why?” I didn’t answer her. I was busy looking around for the Klan. She kept coughing.


“Look,” I told her, “we can’t play in this place the way we could in 2013. We gotta be quiet and we gotta always keep our head up, you hear me?” I was trying to make my nostrils flare and make lines form in my forehead. “You got folks around here who will slap the taste out of your little mouth if they think you did something small, like farted in a way that don’t smell right.”

“You got people like that back in 2013,” she said and kept coughing. “I’m talking about straight goons.” Baize’s nose was bleeding. She wiped it on her shirt. “You okay?” I asked her.

“Yeah, I just feel a little weird.”

I was starting to feel a little weird too, but not in my body. It was more in my head. I guess there were all kinds of ways to say it, but the easiest way was that I liked Baize more and more the longer we were together. And she liked me, too. It didn’t hit me until we got out of the hole that instead of just wanting to get her computer back, maybe she really just wanted to come back with me. I didn’t want to like her too much, though, because of Shalaya Crump. I could never like her as much as I liked Shalaya Crump, but still, if I liked Baize too much, I knew Shalaya Crump would be able to tell, and then everything would be ruined.

Kiese Laymon's Books