Long Division(76)

“But if they did come to you to get us,” Evan asked, and looked up toward the trees, “what would y’all do?”

I looked at Baize, who looked at Shalaya Crump, who looked at me. Then I looked at Evan and wanted to want to say something so much that my throat muscles started cramping, but nothing came out.

Nothing could.

“Yeah,” he said. “Exactly.”

“What y’all think we should do with him?” Shalaya Crump asked me and ignored his comment. “Can we just let him go?”

I looked up at her and the strangest thing happened. Jewish Evan Altshuler, Shalaya Crump, Baize, and the teenage Klansman were staring right at me. Somehow, some way, I was supposed to have a plan.

“Um,” I said and snuck a look at Baize’s face. I kept my eyes focused on the wooden desk and thought about how much I hated eyes. I had this dream one time where I was backstroking in a bowl full of pound cake batter. In between strokes, something exploded. The explosion made the bowl turn upside down and all around the outside of the bowl was this slow-dripping pound cake batter. The batter started forming these eyes that stared and blinked slower than human eyes. I knew the eyes couldn’t touch me, so you’d think I would feel safe, but being surrounded by blinking pound cake eyes was the scariest thing I ever felt. At least, that’s what I thought before I was sitting in a desk in the middle of that Freedom School in 1964. Three sets of eyes in that room belonged to people I wanted to love me, and those three sets of eyes were burning my insides out.

“I got an idea,” I told them. “Let’s put him in the hole and send him to another time.”

“But how do we know that’ll work if we’re not sure if it’s the hole that’s special or if it’s us that’s special?” Baize asked.

“You’re special, Baize. You are, whether you were born a time traveler or not,” I told her.

“Just because we’re blood doesn’t mean you have to say even wacker stuff than usual,” she said. “I’m for real.”

“Good point,” I said. “Look, we got a fifty-fifty chance of getting it right. Let’s go.”

We kept the hood on Evan’s brother and walked toward the hole. He talked the whole way, mainly to Evan. “Evan, come on, man. Take off the gotdamn hood. What was I supposed to do?”

Evan never said a word back. He just walked with us, but I could tell he was nervous about what was about to happen to his brother.

“You sure you want us to do this?” Shalaya Crump asked him. “You might never see him again. You don’t have to do it to make me happy.”

“Where you think he’ll end up?” Evan asked her.

“You know what’s messed up?” I said. “If your brother ends up in 1985, I don’t think nothing bad would even happen to him. Without the sheet, he’s just a regular white boy. No one would know he was Jewish unless he told them, right?”

“I don’t know about that. He wouldn’t be safe in 2013,” Baize said. Her voice was cracking at this point.

“Why? Because the goons’ll get him?” I laughed.

“Yep,” she said. “They would! They wouldn’t even care if he was Jewish or Italian or none of that. You show up wearing a white sheet like that and it’s a wrap for you.”

“Girl, are you a secret goon? You act like Melahatchie goons are worse than the Vice Lords or something. Only thing is when I was there I didn’t see no Melahatchie goons.” I waited for Baize to say something back but she just smiled at me, shrugged her shoulders, and tried to catch her breath.

“Wait,” Shalaya Crump said and stopped walking. We all stopped too, even though we were just a few feet from the hole. “My question is, why send him to another time if he’ll be fine no matter where he goes? Ain’t that so lip sync?”

We all looked at Shalaya Crump, including Evan’s brother. I tried hard to think about what it meant to be so “lip sync” but I couldn’t get it. “Lip sync?” I asked.

“Yeah, like Puttin’ on the Hits. Why go through the motions if it’s just a motion?”

“Emotion?”

“Naw, City, a motion.”

That was a good question, but if I said I didn’t know, it would have made my plan look half-baked. “We want him to experience what we went through, right? All the emotions.”

“Does that mean he has to suffer?” Shalaya Crump asked.

“We suffered,” Baize told her, and walked right up to the hole.

“Right, but we’re gonna remember suffering whether he suffers or not,” Shalaya Crump said.

We opened the hole and after tons of punching, scratching, screaming, and kicking, Baize and I got Evan’s brother in the hole while Evan and Shalaya Crump watched. Evan grabbed the hood off his brother’s head while he was in. His brother had a young face but half the hairs on his head were actually gray.

“Why’d you take that off?” I asked him.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Just didn’t seem right to send him to another time with that thing on his head. We gotta be fair.”

“Who put ‘that thing’ on his head?” I asked him. “Ain’t nobody make him wear it, did they?”

“You’re right,” Evan said. “But we can’t put it back on him now.”