Long Division

by Kiese Laymon

  I hated sentences that told me that my emotions were like something that wasn’t emotional, but I loved how those red words looked like they were coming right out of the sun, red hot.

  Ms. Lara Reeves had been a teacher since way back in the ’80s and she became the principal at Hamer about four years ago. The worst part of her being the principal was that she was also my mama’s friend. My mama was known for having friends you wouldn’t think she’d have. Mama had me when she was a sophomore at Jackson State fourteen years ago. She’s old now, in her early thirties, so you would expect her to have only black friends in her thirties, but she had black friends, white friends, African friends, and super-old friends like Principal Reeves.

  Mama taught over at Madison Community College and Principal Reeves took a politics course from her. When I first heard that my principal was my mama’s student, I thought I’d get away with everything. But it was actually harder for me to get away with anything since whenever Principal Reeves didn’t do her homework or answered questions wrong, she liked to talk to my mama about how I was acting a fool in school.

  On Principal Reeves’s desk, you saw all kinds of papers flooding the bottoms of two big pictures of her husband, who disappeared a few years ago. No one knows what happened to him. Supposedly, he went to work one morning and just never came back. If you looked at pictures of Principal Reeves back in the day, you’d be surprised, because she looked exactly the same. She had the same curl at 62 that she had at 31, except now the curl was lightweight gray.

  Principal Reeves also kept a real record player in her office. In the corner underneath the table were all these Aretha Franklin records. Mama loved Aretha Franklin, too, but she only had greatest-hit CDs, which she’d play every time she picked me up.

  I invented calling Principal Reeves “Ms. Kanye” behind her back because even though she asked a lot of questions, you really still couldn’t tell her nothing. She asked questions just to set up her next point. And her next point was always tied to teaching us how we were practically farting on the chests of the teenagers on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee if we didn’t conduct ourselves with dignity.

  Before Principal Reeves stepped her foot in the door of her office, she was saying my name. “Citoyen…”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  “Take this test,” she said, and handed me a piece of paper. “Don’t look at me with those sad red eyes. Just take the test.”

  At Hamer, they were always experimenting with different styles of punishment ever since they stopped whupping ass a few years ago. The new style was to give you a true/false test if you messed up. And the test had to be tailored to what they thought you did wrong and what you needed to learn to not mess up again. The craziest thing is that it was usually harder understanding what the test had to do with what you did wrong than taking the actual test itself.

  Name________Year_____True/False — Underline one

  1. Desperation will make a villain out of you.

  True/False

  2. Only a fool would not travel through time and change their past if they could.

  True/False

  3. You were brought to this country with the expectation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

  True/False

  4. If you push yourself hard in the direction of freedom, compassion, and excellence, you will recover.

  True/False

  5. Loving someone and loving how someone makes you feel are the same thing.

  True/False

  6. Only those who can read, write, and love can move back or forward through time.

  True/False

  7. There are undergrounds to the past and future for every human being on earth.

  True/False

  8. If you haven’t read or written or listened to something at least three times, you have never really read, written, or listened.

  True/False

  9. Past, present, and future exist within you and you change them by changing the way you live your life.

  True/False

  10. You are special.

  True/False

  *Bonus*

  11. You are innocent.

  True/False

  After I finished the stupid test, Principal Reeves put it on top of a stack of tests she hadn’t graded yet and started going in on me. “Citoyen, do you know who the great Brenda Travis is?” she asked me.

  “Umm…”

  “No. You do not know. Brenda Travis was a fifteen-year-old high school student from right up the road in McComb,” Principal Reeves said, and popped what looked like some boiled peanuts in her mouth. “That young lady canvassed these same streets with the SNCC voter-registration workers 50 years ago. She led students like you on a sit-in and, for the crime of ordering a hamburger from a white restaurant, the girl was sentenced to a year in the state juvenile prison.”

  “Just a regular hamburger?” I asked her. “Not even a fish sandwich or a grilled cheese? That’s crazy.”

  “That contraption holding your teeth in place, that’s the problem.” Principal Reeves sat at her desk and started ruffling through papers.

  “I don’t get it,” I told her. “What contraption?”

  “Your mouth, that contraption. It is going to be the death of you or somebody else,” she said. “Today is the biggest day of your life, Citoyen. You want to waste it calling your brother LaVander Peeler a ‘nigger’ and using a wave brush on school property? You know we don’t bring wave brushes to school at Hamer.”

  The problem was that at Hamer, you used to be able to use your wave brush until the second bell at 8:05, but ever since Jerome Wallace beat the bile out of this cock-eyed new kid, Roy Belton, with a Pine wave brush during lunch, you can be suspended for something as simple as having a wave brush on school property.

  “LaVander Peeler ain’t my brother,” I told her, “and I didn’t think I was wasting it. I’m ready. You’ll see.”

  Principal Reeves just looked at me. I tried to look away toward the bookshelf so I wouldn’t have to look at her face.

  “What’s that?” I asked her. “That’s so crazy.”

  “It’s just a book,” she said.

  “I thought you said we were never supposed to say ‘just a book’ about a book.”

  Principal Reeves made that rule up last year. She had every book in her bookshelf placed in alphabetical order but on the floor underneath the shelf was a book called Long Division. There wasn’t an author’s name on the cover or the spine. I couldn’t tell from looking at it if it was fiction or a real story. The cover had the words “Long Division” written in a thick black marker over what looked like the outside of this peeling work shed behind my grandma’s house.

  “Who wrote that book?”

  Principal Reeves ignored my question and just looked at me.

  “Please stop looking at me, Principal Reeves.”

  “I’ll stop looking at you when you start looking at you. You’ve got to respect yourself and the folks who came before you, Citoyen. You,” she paused. “You know better. Didn’t your mother, you, and me sit right here before the state competition and talk about this? What did your mother tell you?”

  “She said, ‘Your foolishness impacts not only black folks today, but black folks yet to be born.’ But see, I don’t agree with my mama…”

  “There are no buts, Citoyen,” Principal Reeves said. “You are history. Kids right around your age died changing history so you could go to school, so you could compete in that contest tonight, and here you are acting a fool. The day of?”

  “Is that a question?”

  “Fifty-one years ago, black students took responsibility for the morality and future of this country,” she said. She was so serious. “They organized. They restrained themselves. They put themselves in the crosshairs of evil. They bled. And when the cameras were on, they were scared. But they stepped up and fought nonviolently with dignity and excellence, didn’t they?”

  I just kept looking do
wn at Long Division and started to smell the french fries coming from the cafeteria.

  “Nevermind that book, Citoyen. Is it too much to ask of you to respect those students today?” she asked. “Look at me. Those that are still alive are watching. You know that, don’t you?”

  “You mean tonight?” I took my eyes off the book and looked at Principal Reeves. “Tonight, they’ll be watching?”

  “Yes. Tonight, they’ll be watching, along with the world. But they’re always watching, so you must behave and compete accordingly. This is just another test. I’m not gonna suspend you or tell your mother. However, if you act a fool one more time this semester, I have no choice but to reach out.”

  I hated when folks used the word “however” in regular conversation. You knew that the person you were talking to was so much wacker than you thought as soon as you heard that word. “I know,” I told her.

  “One more thing,” she said and closed the office door. “I hear from LaVander Peeler and a few other teachers that you’re spending a lot of time alone in the bathroom stalls.”

  I looked down at the stains on my brown Adidas.

  “Have you been—”

  “What?”

  “Touching yourself inappropriately at lunch time?”

  “Lunch time?”

  “Yes. I’ve heard that after many of the boys go into the bathroom to yell ‘Kindly pause,’ that you go in there and … listen. We don’t want to halt natural human functions at Fannie Lou Hamer, but that activity might be better suited for home, possibly before you go to sleep or maybe even when you wake up.”

  I raised my eyes to Principal Reeves.

  “Do you understand what I’m saying, Citoyen?”

  “I’m good,” I told Principal Reeves. “You’re telling me not to get nice with myself on school property. I hear you. Wish me luck tonight.” I started walking out of her office, then turned around. “Wait. Can I borrow that book? I’ll bring it back tomorrow. I just never really seen a book with a cool title like that and no author before.”

  Principal Reeves slowly reached down and handed me the book. “I haven’t finished it yet,” she told me. “Be careful with that, Citoyen.”

  “Why?”

  “Just be careful,” she said.

  Principal Reeves had acted weird before, but this was the first time she was acting like she was sending me off to Syria. “Some books can completely change how we see ourselves and everything else in the world. Keep your eyes on the prize.”

  “I’m good,” I told her before walking out. “Don’t worry about my eyes. And that prize is mine.”

  At 3:15, LaVander Peeler and I waited on the curb for his father to pick us up. I had Long Division in my hands. LaVander Peeler had on these fake Louis Vuitton shades and he kept looking down at my book.

  “What you looking at?” I asked him.

  He asked me if I had figured out the difference yet between sweat and piss. I looked up at LaVander Peeler and noticed two continent-sized clouds easing their way through the sky behind his fade that didn’t fade. I thought to myself that a lot of times when you looked up at the sky, you’d see nothing but bluish-gray shine, and a few seconds later continent-sized clouds would slowly glide up and take every last bit of shine out of the sky.

  I didn’t like the drippy ache in my chest that I was starting to feel, so I opened up Long Division and read the first chapter while LaVander Peeler and I waited for his father, LaVander Peeler Sr., to drive us to the Coliseum.

  …

  Special Game…

  …I didn’t have a girlfriend from kindergarten all the way through the first half of ninth grade and it wasn’t because the whole high school heard Principal Jankins whispering to his wife, Ms. Dawsin-Jankins, that my hairline was shaped like the top of a Smurf house. I never had a girlfriend because I loved this funky girl named Shalaya Crump. The last time Shalaya Crump and I really talked, she told me, “City, I could love you if you helped me change the future dot-dot-dot in a special way.”

  Shalaya Crump was always saying stuff like that, stuff you’d only imagine kids saying in a dream or on those R-rated movies on HBO starring spoiled teenagers. If any other girl in 1985 said, “the future dot-dot-dot,” she would have meant 1986 or maybe 1990 at the most. But not Shalaya Crump. I knew she meant somewhere way in the future that no one other than scientists and dope fiends had ever thought of before.

  Shalaya Crump lived down in Melahatchie, Mississippi across the road from Mama Lara’s house. A year ago, she convinced me that plenty of high school girls would like me even though my hips were way wider than a JET centerfold’s, and the smell of deodorant made me throw up. The thing was that none of the ninth-grade girls who liked me wore fake Air Jordans with low socks, or knew how to be funny in church while everyone else was praying, or had those sleepy, sunken eyes like Shalaya Crump. Plus, you never really knew what Shalaya Crump was going to say and she always looked like she knew more than everybody around her, even more than the rickety grown folks who wanted other rickety grown folks to think they knew more than Yoda.

  It’s hard to ever really know why you love a girl, but all I know is that Shalaya Crump made me feel like it was okay not to know everything. You could feel good around Shalaya Crump just by knowing enough to get by. That’s what I loved about her most. Sometimes, she asked these hard questions about the future but she didn’t treat you like chunky vomit when you didn’t get the answer right.

  It’s hard to explain if you never been around a girl like that. It’s just that no other girl in my whole life made me feel like it was okay not to know stuff like Shalaya Crump did. The worst part of it is that even after all we went through yesterday, I still have no proof that I ever made Shalaya Crump feel anything other than guilty for leaving me with Baize Shephard. I’m not just saying that to sound like something you’d read by a broken-hearted white boy from New York City in a dumb novel in tenth-grade English. If you want me to be honest, everything I’m telling you is only half of what made the story of Shalaya Crump, Baize Shephard, Jewish Evan Altshuler, and me the saddest story in the history of Mississippi. And it’s really hard to have the saddest story in the history of a state like Mississippi, where there are even more sad stories than there are hungry mosquitoes and sticker bushes.

  It really is.

  Shalaya Crump claimed she could love me three months ago, depending on how you count. It was January 3, 1985, the last day of my Christmas break. I was about to leave Melahatchie and head back to Chicago. We were sitting under a magnolia tree in a forest we called the Night Time Woods, sharing the last bit of a can of sardines. I was just tired of not saying all of what I wanted to say to her, so I licked the sardine juice off my fingers, picked up my sweat rag, and asked her what I’d been waiting to ask her the whole break.

  “Shalaya Crump!” I said, “Can you break it down for me one more time. What I gotta do to make you love me?”

  Shalaya Crump laughed and started digging into the red dirt with her dark bony thumbs that were covered in these Ring Pop rings. Right there is when Shalaya Crump wiped her greasy mouth with the collar of her purple Gumby T-shirt and said, “Why you gotta be so green light lately, City?”

  “Green light?”

  “Yeah, you never stop. All you do is spit game about ‘love this’ and ‘love that.’ I already told you that I could love you if you found a way to be…” Shalaya Crump stopped talking, looked me right in the eyes, and grabbed the fingertips of my hands. “City, just listen,” she said. “Look, if we could take a spaceship to the future, and we ain’t know if we’d ever come back, would you go with me?” Shalaya Crump was always changing the subject to the future at the craziest times.

  I swear I tried to come up with something smart, something that would make her think I could be the skinniest, smartest boy she’d ever want to spend the rest of my life with. “Girl, in the future,” I told Shalaya Crump, “when we take that spaceship, first thing is I think that Eddie Murphy is gonna
do a PG movie. And umm, I think that Michael Jackson and New Edition are gonna come together and sing a song at our wedding, but ain’t nobody at the wedding gonna care because everyone at the wedding is gonna finally know.”

  “Uh, finally know what?” She stopped and let go of my wrists.

  “Finally know, you know, what that real love looks like, baby.”

  “City! Why you gotta get all Vienna sausage school bus when you start trying to spit game?” She paused and actually waited for an answer. I didn’t have one, so she kept going. “Just stop. You stuck on talking about love but I’m talking about the future. Can we just talk about that? What happened to you? One day you were just regular and we were playing Atari and hitting each other in the face with pine cones. Then, just like that, you get to stealing Bibles to impress me and wearing clean clothes and talking about love and getting jealous of Willis whenever we watch Diff’rent Strokes and asking me all these questions about what senior I have a crush on. Can’t you just be yourself?”

  “I am being myself,” I told her. “I don’t like how you look at Willis.” I knew that making Shalaya Crump love me wasn’t going to be easy, so I didn’t let her little speech throw me off. “You talk all that mess about me, but you the one who didn’t always talk about the future like you do now.” I looked in her eyes, but she was looking at the ground. “No offense, girl, but you talk about the future way more than I talk about love.”

  “But I’m not just talking.” She wiped sardine grease off my lip. “That’s the difference. I’m asking about what you’d do with me in the future, like in 2013. For real! Would you come with me if I could get us there?” I just looked at Shalaya Crump and wondered how she could say I was being all Vienna sausage school bus and all green light when, seriously, she was the one always wondering about life in 2013. No kid in 1985 admitted to thinking about life in the ’90s, and definitely not in 2013, not even after Back to the Future came out.

  “Never mind,” she said. “You don’t get it.”