Long Division(78)

“I’d wanna know what I’m supposed to do now to help time and change in Melahatchie be less painful,” Shalaya Crump kept talking. “I know that’s so Agatha Christie, but I wanna do the right thing. It’s hard when time and people keep on changing, though.”

“I don’t get it,” Baize said.

Shalaya Crump didn’t say a word. I raised my head off the ground and looked over at her. She was looking right at Baize, who was looking up toward the sky. “I just never meant to hurt you,” Shalaya Crump finally said.

At that point, Shalaya Crump understood what I figured only parents could understand about their children. Baize was more than just sick. She could only be born if Shalaya Crump and I had her in 1999, but the longer we were in 1964, the more Shalaya Crump and I knew that Baize would have to eventually disappear.

I wanted to beg Shalaya Crump to save Baize’s life and come back to 1985 with me. I wanted to tell her that we could go close the hole, go home, eat sardines together, dig in the dirt, and never travel again. We could do all the stuff we were supposed to do until 1999. Then we could kiss with tongue. And we could act like we were on HBO after dark. And we could get married. And we could have our baby.

Deep down, I knew it couldn’t work like that anymore.

Shalaya Crump didn’t say a word when Baize asked her, “What do you mean?” She seemed stuck in a long, lonely silence that, I figured, only pops up when a parent has to decide whether to save the future in a special way or save the life of the special child they never really knew.

Baize raised her head and asked Shalaya Crump again, “What do you…”

I interrupted Baize and tried to take the attention off Shalaya Crump for a second. “What does dot-dot-dot mean, Baize? You know, like when you write it on your computer, in those rhymes. What does dot-dot-dot mean?”

Baize didn’t say anything, but Shalaya Crump answered. “It’s what you use when someone is about to cut someone else off, right?”

“Naw,” Evan said. “I think it’s just a long pause.”

“Ain’t a period or a semicolon a long pause?” Shalaya Crump asked Evan. “Like long compared to a comma?”

“Maybe,” he said. “You talking about them three periods in a row, I thought?”

Baize started coughing again and squeezed my hand. “If you could be any punctuation, City, what would you be?” It was the first time Baize called me by my real name, and it felt better than anything in my whole life.

“Um, I think I’d be a question mark,” I told her. “Like if I had my own book, I want a cover with shades of maroon and blue and green like this forest right here on the front and back. And in strange places on the cover, I’d want there to be all these different kinds of eyes of people I love on it. And on every page, I’d want there to be one question mark. I wouldn’t even mind if a Klansman was on the cover.”

“But why?” Baize asked. “If every page is blank, ain’t there a question mark kinda understood to be there anyway? Like that book I was reading, Long Division, the last chapter is just blank pages.”

I thought about what she was saying and it made a lot of sense.

“I guess you’re right,” I told her. “What would you be?”

“I’d be an ellipsis.”

“What’s that?”

“That’s the dot-dot-dot you were talking about.” She let go of my hand and sat up while leaning on both of her hands. “The ellipsis always knows something more came before it and something more is coming after it.” Baize started coughing and grabbing her chest. “It’s hard for me to breathe, City.”

I stood up and made sure Long Division was in Baize’s backpack. I had the computer under my arms. “So you’d have pages filled with dot-dot-dot in your book?” I asked her.

“No,” she said. “I’d have a front cover with the words ‘Long Division’ across the top and below ‘Long Division’ would be a blue-black ellipsis. We’d all be inside the book, too, with those other characters already in the book and we’d all fall in love with each other.”


I got everything ready to leave and looked down at all three of them. Evan’s left hand was in Shalaya Crump’s right hand and Baize was nuzzled under Shalaya Crump’s left arm. “Come on, Baize.” “Where we going?”

“We should be going home,” I told her. “We can come back next week.”

She laughed at me as I helped her up. Shalaya Crump and Evan started to get up, too. “Y’all don’t have to get up,” I told them. “We’re fine.”

Evan walked over and hugged my neck. “I’m sorry,” he said in my ear. “I didn’t think it would happen like this.”

“Yeah. Me either,” I said. “I’ll see y’all soon, though. For real.”

Shalaya Crump walked up to me when I was thinking of cussing Evan out and she had these humongous tears in her eyes. “We did it,” I told her. “We changed the future by changing the past.”

“City,” she said. “It wasn’t supposed to hurt. Not like this. But I can make it worth it.”

“That’s how we know we’re changing the future in a special way, though, right?” I asked her. That was the best thing I’d ever said to Shalaya Crump. I didn’t have to think about whether or not it was GAME. All four of us knew that special change, the kind that lasts, hurts.