Long Division Part 9

Uncle Relle ran into Alcee Mayes's trailer and left me in his van. I knew he was thinking I should be happy that millions of people around the world were looking at me and typing my name on the internet, but seeing my picture pop up when I googled "n.i.g.g.ardly" broke my heart. I just couldn't figure out how I had become the face of "n.i.g.g.ardly" in less than three days. If I could have stayed at the library longer, I would have responded to every messed-up comment on YouTube and I would have typed my own response to the fake @MyNameIsCity Twitter feed someone made up.

Instead, I stayed in Uncle Relle's van and continued reading Long Division, a book that, according to the internet at the Melahatchie local library, didn't exist at all.

A few minutes after we walked in the house, Grandma pulled the screen door open and whispered something in Uncle Relle's ear. Next thing I knew, I was in the bedroom and was told not to come out until she or Uncle Relle came to get me.

I pulled out my book and wrote: It was like she wasn't even Grandma anymore. I never heard my grandma say "ma'am" to someone who was younger than her. And I heard that my grandma brought the Jheri not "Gary" curl to Melahatchie from Milwaukee back in the early '80s. Now here she was acting like she couldn't even p.r.o.nounce "Jheri" right.

Under the revving of box fans and the hum of crickets, I heard about 20 minutes of loud cuss words coming from mashed-up voices. Slowly though, the yelling and cussing slid from the trailer park to the back of Grandma's house, where the railroad tracks were.

And after a while, there were no voices at all.

When Grandma finally came in the house two hours later, she made me sit on the toilet in the bathroom while she took a bath. The suds in the tub were brownish and pink from the dirt and blood on Grandma's hands. I tried to only look at this little pinkish-brown moat of suds near the back of the tub the whole time she bathed, but I kept catching her long nipples out of the corner of my eye.

We didn't say one word to each other until I asked her, "What happened today, Grandma?"

"Nothing, City. That man, he gone far away from here."

"What man? Gone where?"

"Ain't nothing in that work shed for you, you hear me?"

"Did somebody mess with you? 'Cause I never seen you just ..."

"That man is gone home, I reckon," Grandma interrupted. "You got to be a special kind of evil to spend your whole life getting more than you deserve, then turn right around and hate on folks for getting half of what you was born into. Just evil."

"Who is a special kind of evil?" I asked her.

"Listen." She reached out of the bathtub and her hands touched my knee. "That man, that truck, this day, ain't none of it even real as you think. Treat it like it never happened, you hear me? You are a smart child, an educated young man. You try to act grown in front of them cameras? Well, grown black folks forget what they need to forget. That's what grown black folks do. Can you do that for Grandma?"

"Yeah, I can do that, Grandma, but you might want to ease up talking to me like this is fifth-grade special ed."

Grandma's eyes got to twitching. I looked at the ground, trying my hardest not to get whupped again. "Can you do what I asked you, City?"

"Yeah, Grandma." I had no choice. "I can do what you asked me."

"Okay," Grandma said, and got out of the bathtub. She dried off while I looked at the floor. While she was looking at herself in the mirror, she said, "They always expecting us to forget. I'm tired of forgetting. You and that baby didn't do nothing to n.o.body."

I couldn't completely understand how Grandma could go from telling me that grown folks forget what they need, to saying she was tired of forgetting. I knew not to ask any more questions but, in a way, it was all starting to make a little more sense.

TENDER t.e.s.t.i.c.l.eS.

After all that weirdness with Grandma earlier, I just wanted to run down Old Morton Road and never stop until I was back in our garage in Jackson. Since I didn't have either the wind or the guts to do that, I called my friend Shay and asked her to come over.

Shay was the junior queen of Melahatchie and raiser of way more h.e.l.l than a little bit. She walked in Grandma's yard wearing a pea-green muscle s.h.i.+rt and some Memphis Grizzlies shorts. Usually her Afro puffs were the same size but today the left one was way bigger than the right.

"I don't know what you was thinking," she said, with a voice that came directly from her nose. "Nasal" actually isn't the word for Shay's voice. Shay's nose was d.a.m.n near wider than her lips, and it stayed clogged up so she only breathed through her mouth. Shay spoke fast, too, but it wasn't like she said certain words fast. It was more that she moved from word to word fast. "I knew you was crazy," she said, "but I ain't know you was that crazy."

"What you mean?"

"Wow!" she said. "On national TV, too? In front of all them dubs?" Shay called white folks "dubs," which was short for "W's."

"Listen," I tried to change subjects. "Have you ever heard of this book called Long Division? It's about Melahatchie."

"Quit changing subjects, boy," she said. "If there was a book about Melahatchie, don't you think I would have heard of it? Is it a book for dubs or a book for us?"

"Us mostly," I told her. "But it's complicated. It's a book for us and a few dubs, I guess. There's this one boy and he's in love with this girl named Shalaya Crump, and they travel through time and find this girl who lives in Melahatchie. The girl's name is Baize." Shay looked up at me. "Baize Shephard. You heard of it?"

Shay rolled her eyes at me and told me to shut my lying a.s.s up without even opening her mouth. Every time I saw Shay, it was like seeing someone you haven't seen in forever, and it was like seeing a star of a good show and it was like seeing someone you wanted to see every day. Shay never acted too excited to see me ever since I told her this secret when we were playing The Secret Game. The first time I had a wet dream, she was there-in the dream, I mean-and I told her that, and I also told her what we were doing with our hands and mouths.

We jumped the creek and went into this little path leading into the Magic Woods. After stomping through the woods and trying to dodge sticker bushes, we ended up in this dusty opening between pine trees and tree stumps. We were about 50 feet from the Melahatchie Community Center.

Shay walked deeper in the woods. "Keep talking," she said. "I'm listening." She wasn't really listening. I heard all kinds of sticks and leaves breaking before she came out with this huge stick. Right in the same spot where Shay found hers, I found the perfect stick. Not really perfect, but perfect if I was gonna be fighting her with the stick she had.

I was always scared to hit Shay's stick hard unless she hit my hand or my stomach with her stick. Sometimes you could hold your stick out and the person you were playing against would swing wildly at yours and theirs would get stuck in the dusty-a.s.s ground, or the soft mud if it had been raining. It would be stuck just long enough so you had the perfect angle to smash that joker. If you did that technique to Shay, she got so mad that she'd quit or catch fade with her praying-mantis technique.

"I didn't know what else to do," I told her.

"When?"

"At that contest," I told her. "I swear I wanted to win it for all these people. Like you and Gunn and fat boys with waves like me, too." She started laughing. "You laughing, but I'm serious. I wanted to win it for all of us."

"You messed up before beginning, then," she said. "You should've been trying to win it for you. We wanted you to win, but if you ain't win, we would've been happy just 'cause you were in it. You didn't have to shout out Melahatchie like that either. You made us look like losers." She paused and looked like she was thinking of what to say. "I just feel as though you should've just sat down when you got it wrong. But whatever. That's you. Come on and play, City," she said. Shay hated if you held your stick away from hers. "Play, boy!"

"I am a playboy, ain't I?"

"More like a gay boy," she said and started laughing.

"Why you call me a gay boy? I ain't gay."

I swung my stick and tagged the mess out of hers, but it didn't break.

My hand bones were vibrating. "Dang, I hit that mug hard, too."

We were both happy as h.e.l.l to see a stick that hard. It's hard to explain. The stick was a monument in itself and we just stood there smiling in the stick's direction for about fourteen seconds. Then, guess what I started thinking about? I started thinking about my mother. I wondered if she was in our garage missing me and if she had any clue what was happening in Melahatchie.

"Does this feel like deja vu to you?"

Shay sucked on her teeth. "Boy," she said, "Quit trying to switch subjects, talking about deja vu. Naw, this don't feel like deja vu."

Shay started laughing and walked deeper behind some baby sticker bushes. "Come over here."

"For what?"

Time slowed down, I swear it did. When Shay walked her Afro-puffed self over in front of me, the sun coming through the woods. .h.i.t her face perfectly. She had the color and the s.h.i.+ne of a brand new genuine leather football. Shay rarely sweated so the Vaseline all over her face and shoulders never dripped. It just stuck to her and made whatever was surrounding her look pretty dull and blurry.

Shay took the pointing finger of her left hand, and joined it with her thumb, making the symbol that white folks on dumb television commercials used to say that everything is okay. Then she took her middle finger and her index finger of her right hand and pushed them in and out of the hole made by her left-hand fingers.

I wasn't as scared as you probably think I was. I just didn't know what to do. Shay walked over to me and grabbed my hips. "Stand right there and just put your back against the tree."

"I can't," I told her. "My grandma ain't in the mood for me to come back smelling like outside. I ain't lying." Shay just stood in front of me with her hands on her hips.

"Alright, City. Stop talking. Just put your arms behind your back and hold your body off from the tree. Okay?"

It was weird. My fatness wouldn't let me hold myself up like I wanted to. Plus, my lower back and arms started aching, too. All I was thinking about was if Shay was gonna think my belly b.u.t.ton was deformed. I had a regular innie-style belly b.u.t.ton that she'd never seen, but from what I'd seen, all the kids in Melahatchie had walnut-size belly b.u.t.tons.

Shay told me to take my pants off but leave my underwear on. I did it and let my pants hang around my ankles.

"What's wrong?" I asked her as she was looking at my stuff.

"Nothing," she said. "Nothing at all. Close your eyes."

Sounded like a weird thing to say to someone, but I did it anyway.

"They closed?" she asked. "Don't be peeking, boy. You a virgin?"

"I ain't no virgin," I told her with my eyes closed and my p.e.n.i.s getting harder and harder. "I did it once with this girl named Octavia. We recorded it on her stepdaddy's iPad. But look, I think we should probably get a condom from my Uncle Relle if we really trying to get nice. You feel me? You don't want to be pregnant in high school and I don't even know how child support works if I have a baby mama before I'm technically even allowed to work. Maybe we should think about this."

"I can pay my own bills," I heard Shay say before I heard the sound of a camera phone and...

Swinncrhuunch.

The pain in my t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es moved through my lower body and into my chest and head. I couldn't talk. I was on my hands and knees, just fiending for air. I looked up to see what happened. A blurry Shay had grabbed her broken-off piece of tree and recorded herself hitting me in my naked t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es.

I just crouched over the leaves d.a.m.n near choking as Shay took pictures of me. She was dying laughing, too.

I got off my knees, grabbed Shay's shoulders, threw her to the pine-needled ground, and jumped on her. Her phone fell out of her hands. I felt crazy being on top of her like that. I mean, I thought about how no one had probably ever had the nerve or the skills to push Shay down like that.

"What the h.e.l.l is wrong with you?" I asked her. "You can't just go around hitting people in the sack whenever you get ready." I was still all in her eyes. "You know how tender the t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es are? That stuff hurt." I felt goofy saying "t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es" and "tender" to her.

"It's called 'skin-sacks,'" Shay told me. "And it's all one word, with a hyphen."

"Wait." I started laughing. "What? That's the dumbest thing I have heard in a long time. 'Skin-sacks'? Who said it's called 'skin-sacks' with a hyphen?"

"My brother, Alcee. He said it's two sacks and it's covered in skin so it's skin-sacks."

"But the skin is the sack," I told her. "And there ain't two sacks. There's two nuts in one sack."

"My brother said it's called 'skin-sacks' so it's called 'skin-sacks.'"

"Well, first of all," I told her, "Alcee Mayes is my Uncle Relle's weed man and my uncle said he's steady overcharging him for an ounce, so I don't believe nothing Alcee Mayes says."

While I had her down on the ground and was yelling at her, that was the first time I noticed that people have hair under their eyes, you know? Plus, Shay had on that little pea-green muscle s.h.i.+rt, so I could see the little hairs under her arms. I had negative hair under my arms, not even minor hair b.u.mps. I was looking in her big eyes and squeezing on her shoulders softly, and I'll be d.a.m.ned if my p.e.n.i.s didn't start getting harder and harder. It made me too embarra.s.sed, so I gave her one more good push in the shoulders and I got off of her.

"My bad, City."

"What?" I asked.

"My bad. I wasn't trying to hurt you. Me and Baize made a bet about who could make a boy do that first. I won't show the pictures to no one but her," she said. "I promise."

"Where you think she went? Baize, I'm talking about. The newspaper said they got a lead in the investigation."

Shay picked up some pine needles and walked toward the road. "The paper don't know s.h.i.+t," she yelled and came back towards me.

"Maybe something else happened to her."

"You met Baize before, City." Shay looked me right in the face. "Whoever took Baize either hurt her or killed her before they took her. Or maybe they knew."

"Knew what?"

"Never mind. You think that girl would let somebody just take her? We would've heard about it."

"Wait," I told her. The craziest thought in the world entered my head. "You think that white man knew whatever it is you're talking about? You think he took her?"

"You mean the one in your grandma's shed? Probably."

"Ain't no white man in my grandma's shed," I told her. She just looked at me with her arms folded.

"Folks say they saw her walk off in these woods one day a few weeks ago with a computer."

"A computer?"

"That laptop computer she always was messing with."

"Did anyone find the computer?"

"The white man in your shed," Shay changed the subject. "Didn't he kick you in your back yesterday, too?"

"Yeah, he did," I told her. "But can we talk more about Baize?"

I was expecting a little more quality heartfelt sharing between us, but Shay walked off toward the bushes again. "Where you going?" I asked.

"Gunn told me that your grandma's preacher, Reverend Cherry, got a carload of pictures of s.k.a.n.ks from Waveland doing it."

"So?"

"So, that's where I'm going. He hid the pictures in his beat-up car, the one he always letting Deacon Big Shank drive," Shay said.

I thought for a second about what would be the point of stealing naked pictures that belonged to my grandma's preacher, especially with a girl who had just hit me in my skin-sacks with a stick.

Then it clicked.

If I stole the pictures and showed them to Grandma, there would be no way she'd let me get baptized by a preacher who kept that kind of nastiness in one of his cars.

"Can we take a picture of the pictures in the car with your phone?" I asked her.

"Yeah," she said, and came back from around the bushes. "Don't ask a whole lotta questions, though. You coming or not?"

Shay started texting someone as we walked toward Reverend Cherry's house.