Long Division(73)

“Please don’t start mess now, City,” she said. “Why you gotta be so two days before yesterday?”

“I ain’t so two days before nothing! You always telling me not to start something, Shalaya Crump. Always talking about I’m so ‘yesterday’ or I’m so ‘long division’ or I’m so ‘Young and Restless.’ You ain’t never said I’m so foolish, though.” I stopped to think about what I’d just said to Shalaya Crump. It was the best five sentences I’d ever said to her and I hadn’t even practiced them in the mirror. This wasn’t even GAME. “That’s what I am, though. I’m so gotdamn foolish for wanting you to love me like I love you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I can say what I want. I love you. I do. That’s why I ask you everything under the sun except if you ever had a boyfriend. Because if you’d ever had one, even if it was way before me, it woulda broke my heart.”

“You never told me that,” Shalaya Crump said.

“So what. I shouldn’t have to. You shut that door on me. If you had come back with me, none of this would have happened,” I told her. “None of it.”

“I was trying to protect you,” she said. “You were hurt and I knew you needed to go home. And I…I think I need to be here.”

“Why? Just say it.”

“I believed Evan when he told me he knew where I was in the future. I believed him when he told me he could tell me who my parents are. I wanted to know what happens to them and me on the other end. I know you hate me for this, City, but I really want to change the future.” Shalaya Crump got closer to me in a way that would have made me so happy in 1985. “I just wanted to change it so bad that I didn’t care. And to change it I just had to know what happened.”

“Oh. Okay,” I said. I kept finding the body of my granddaddy out of the corner of my eye, no matter which way I tried to look. It made me sadder and madder. “You just wanted to know? Well, I want you to know, too. Baize, tell her who your parents are.”

Baize sounded like she was whimpering, but I figured it was just that her nose was stuffed. “Why? Don’t yell at me.”

“Just tell her.”

“Tell me what?” Shalaya asked.

“City Coldson is…was my father’s name…my mother’s name… was…Shalaya Crump-Coldson.”

“Who?” I said. “Say it louder.”

“Shalaya Crump-Coldson was her name.”

“Was?” Shalaya Crump said.

“Tell her what happens to your parents, Baize. And stop crying.”

Baize wiped her eyes and opened her phone. She pushed a few buttons and looked at something in the phone that made her close her eyes super tight. “These are my parents,” she said. “These were…umm…” I couldn’t tell if she was having a hard time talking because she was sick or because she was sad.

Shalaya Crump and I looked at the picture. She had long shiny braids in the picture and dark patches under her eyes, but she was even more beautiful as a grown woman than she was as a kid. Her cheeks looked like they were about to burst open and knock her glasses off her face she was smiling so hard. A gold locket with an “SC” charm hung around the middle of her neck and I was behind her smiling ear to ear, kissing her cheek. All my hair was gone and I had a strange kind of goatee that made my face look less fat than it was. Both of our eyes were so shiny, too.

“That’s us,” I told her. “We disappear, Shalaya Crump. You couldn’t find you in 2013 because there is no you. You’re dead in 2013. And so am I. We disappear in 2005.”

I wanted to just slump to the floor and cry, but what I said sounded so crazy, I didn’t even know how to slump to the floor right after saying it. Not when directly in front of us was a dead relative with a hole the size of a Coke can in his back. I just wanted to go home to 1985 and slump by myself in the year that I knew the most about.

Maybe we all did.

While we were looking at each other’s eyes and trying to avoid looking at Lerthon Coldson’s dead body, two Klansmen appeared and slowly made their way into the room. These two weren’t as big as the ones who beat me down. They didn’t have glasses on either. The taller Klansman had a rifle that was as tall as me in one hand and Baize’s computer in the other hand. The smaller one had a can of gasoline that you could tell was nearly empty by the sloshing sound it made.

“Look,” Baize jumped in front of them and said in the direction of the bigger one, “we know how to work the computer. Can we show you?”

The Klansmen just stood there not saying a word, moving their heads side to side. “Did one of you shoot him?” I asked. “That’s my granddaddy. He shouldn’t have done what he did, but did you have to shoot him?” They just stood there looking at me. “What if someone shot your granddaddy? Look here, man. We in the middle of some family drama, you know what I mean? I ain’t even lying. Can’t y’all just let us go? We won’t tell nobody.”

Baize walked slowly toward the men with her bag. She looked at us, then tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t so she bent at the waist and coughed into her shirt. I grabbed for her but she walked off and looked at me in a way she hadn’t looked before.