by Kiese Laymon
As I got closer to the porch, I could see that the girl on the porch had a strange haircut like a boy. The hair was the shape of Mr. T’s hair but there was still hair on the sides, and the top was thicker than his.
The girl on the porch closed the tiny silver briefcase and stood up. She placed this book, with the words “Long Division” on the cover, on top of the briefcase. The silver briefcase was one of those weird things you only see on TV. When she stood up, you expected her to say something. Or you expected me to say something, but I didn’t, and she didn’t either. I just looked at her for probably ten whole seconds. Then she finally said, “Excuse you! Who you looking for?”
I walked closer and realized that Shalaya Crump had the same eyes and face shape as this girl on the porch, but this girl was a little lighter than her and she had really long legs, and arms like a penguin. Up close, you could see that this girl’s forehead was one of biggest and greasiest you’ve ever seen in your life.
“You might wanna check yourself, mayne, don’t you think?” the girl said. “You think you can just walk up on folks because you can dress?”
“Um, I can dress?”
“Where you get them Converse at? I like that little hipster white boy thang you got going on.”
“You do? I got these for Christmas.”
“What’s your name?”
I just looked at the girl and thought of the coolest name I’d ever heard. “Voltron,” I told her. “But you can call me T-Ron if you want.” I never told white folks or strangers my real name. But usually I alternated between Bobby, Ronnie, Ricky, and Mike, the names of the dudes in New Edition.
The girl rolled her eyes, then opened up her little briefcase and sat back down. “Okay T-Ron, my name’s Baize. Baize Shephard,” she said before moving the book and opening up the tiny silver briefcase. “Look, mayne, I don’t mind you being on my porch, but you gotta quit looking thirsty like you wanna steal somebody’s rhymes.”
“Rhymes? What kind of rhymes? Girl, what’s wrong with you? Why you keep calling me ‘mayne’?”
“That’s what we say.”
“Who? How do you even spell that?” I asked her. “Just be yourself.”
“You don’t even know me,” the girl said. “And I don’t know you either. Mayne! But I know how you look. And you look like the type to wanna steal somebody’s rhymes off their computer. Can I keep it one hundred?”
“I guess so. What does ‘keep it one hundred’ even mean?”
“One hundred. Like 100 percent. Listen, if you don’t want me to think you jack people, then don’t call yourself T-Ron. That can’t be your real name,” she said.
“Wait—that’s a computer?” I asked her.
“Yeah, what else would it be?”
“I thought it was a silver briefcase. Whatever it is, that thing is cold as a mug.”
“A briefcase?”
“Yeah, for children.”
She laughed loud and hard. “You trying to spit game?” she asked me. “What does that even mean? Show me a child who uses briefcases. I know you’ve heard of a laptop computer.”
“A lab top computer?”
“Lap. Lap, mayne. See,” she picked the computer up, held it in the air for a moment, and then placed it back on her lap. “This is a computer and this, see this? This is my lap. Stop fronting. Why you playing stupid? You go to school around here, don’t you?”
“Um, yeah.”
“Then you must’ve gotten one a few years ago with the last of that Katrina money they sent us after all them tornadoes hit us again. Don’t tell me your mama and them sold it on eBay? I was watching this web series, Confessions of a PTSD. You heard of it?”
I looked at the book where she’d moved it. I could really see its cover for the first time. On the cover was a husky black boy’s body standing in the middle of a stage. The picture cut off right above his shoulder blades so we couldn’t see his face. His left hand was in his pocket and his right hand was clutching a wave brush. Behind the boy was another, lankier boy with his head down and both of his balled-up fists dangling between his legs. Near the bottom of the cover were the words “YouTube,” “views,” and the number “47,197,508.” At the top of the cover in bold letters were the words “Long Division.”
I was thinking of what to ask her about the book when I heard a man’s voice in conversation behind me. I turned to the road as a taller man with a big brown T-shirt was walking down the street talking to himself.
“How come everyone around here likes to talk to themselves?”
“He’s on the phone,” the girl said. “Why you trippin’?”
“I ain’t slow. I can see he’s talking to himself.”
“Look, you ain’t gonna get loud with me on my own porch. You know that’s Bluetooth. I know it’s played out. They think they styling with the little headsets, just like you think you think you styling with that outfit,” she paused, “and that curly shag. Where you from?”
I looked across Old Ryle Road at Shalaya Crump and motioned for her to come on over. “My friend is over in those woods and I want her to see all this. Is it okay if she comes over and sees Katrina’s computer?”
“No,” she said. “Why didn’t she come with you?”
“No?”
“Your ‘friend,’” she made these quotations marks in the air, “is a girl, right?”
“Unh huh!”
“She’s your girl, right?” “Um, she halfway my girl.”
“Oh, okay,” she said. “Yeah, well, no! I been seein’ that girl sneaking around here for a while. She looks shade tree to me. I went after her the last time I saw her peeking out of those woods.”
“You did?”
“Yep. But she disappeared. I found this, though, after she left,” she said and grabbed the book. “You ever heard of this book?”
I ignored her question and walked over beside her and saw that the computer really wasn’t a tiny briefcase at all. There was a keyboard and a flat TV screen, and on the flat TV screen were all these colorful dizzy images and boxes and words.
I couldn’t blink.
Or breathe.
Or move.
“Don’t think I’m hating on your girlfriend over there, ’cause I’m not. I just saw this strange white boy over in those woods yesterday, too, and I let him use my computer. He was dressed like one of those white children who be getting home-schooled up north. You know, the kind whose parents don’t let them watch TV or eat sweet cereal? Anyway, I gave him some of my daddy’s old clothes.”
“Wait, what?” I asked. I heard her but I didn’t really hear her. All I could do was watch and listen to my heartbeat as the girl moved her fingers across the letters.
“Yeah, he told me he was looking for more clothes that matched the time.”
“Matched the time?”
“I told him to go downtown to the Salvation Army.” While she was talking, she pushed something below the little square thing on the computer and in a second, the screen flipped on to what looked like the front page of a newspaper. The headline on the newspaper was “The Obamas Get Another Family Dog Just in Time for the Election Cycle.”
“Who is that?”
“Who is who? The dog? I don’t think they named it yet.”
“Not the dog. The man and the woman and those girls. Who are they? And how come you can watch TV on your computer?”
“Stop playing. You think the oldest one cute? All the boys in my class stay falling out over that girl.”
I looked at the bigger girl. “I mean, yeah, she’s kinda cute but who are these folks?”
“Dumbness, we cared about funky dogs when the president was white. Why we can’t make a big deal about dogs when the president is black?”
“That’s the president?”
“Oh my god, dumbness. I just can’t.”
“And this is a computer and a TV and a newspaper all on that screen?”
“Yes, boy.”
“And what is that?”
I pointed to
a little rectangle on the side of the newspaper where someone named @UAintNoStunna815 wrote @SMH you goin to that Spell-Off #yoassdumberthanyoulook and someone named @YeahTheyReal601 wrote TTYL LOL cute herb on my porch #hat-ingaintahabit.
“Twitter,” the girl said, “but that ain’t none of your business.”
“Wait. And people here talk on phones with no hands?”
“Voltron!” It was weird because even though my name wasn’t Voltron, it made my insides tingly to hear her call me by what she thought was my name. “Why are you acting like you stuck in the ’90s?”
“What year is this?” I asked her. “Be for real.”
“2013, crackhead. You got that new swine flu?”
A voice from inside the house interrupted my good feelings. “Baize, come on in here and set this table. We got to practice them words for that Spell-Off.”
“That’s my great-grandma.” Baize looked down at my hips. “She want me to come in and study for the spelling bee tomorrow. It’s over in the community center. You going? Want me to ask her if you can eat with us? I ain’t gonna lie to you; her cooking is wack, but she getting better at frying some catfish.”
As the screen door slammed closed, I got closer to the laptop. Right next to the computer and Long Division was this little black thing that looked like some kind of special calculator. If it wasn’t sitting next to that computer, I would have been super interested in it, but it was kinda boring compared to that laptop computer.
I didn’t know what to focus on when I looked at the computer—the machine carrying the pictures and the words, or the pictures and the words themselves. I had never felt anything like that before. I just wanted to talk to someone who would also understand none of what I was seeing and all of what I was feeling. And that someone was across the road peeking her slow/fast-blinking eyes through green and orange and brown trees.
I picked the laptop computer up with my two hands scooped underneath like it was a tray, placed Long Division on top of it, and looked toward the hole. Then I thought about how happy Shalaya Crump would be if I brought her a calculator from 2013. So I put the calculator in my mouth, jumped off the porch, and sprinted back to the woods.
When I reached her, I gave Shalaya Crump the calculator and we both ran toward to the hole. Shalaya Crump got in first and I followed her. With just my head outside the door, I could see Baize sprinting toward us. She was screaming and cussing, talking about, “Naw. Naw. I know you didn’t.”
It was too late, though. The secret door was closed. The computer, Long Division, the calculator, Shalaya Crump, and me were in it and we were headed back to 1985.
When the door opened up, you couldn’t see Old Ryle Road at all, but you could see the fuzzy glow of the streetlight. Shalaya Crump was next to me breathing louder than I’d ever heard her breathe. I had never even seen her tired in all the years I knew her, not even during push-up contests. Shalaya Crump actually had the best wind of anyone I’d ever met.
“Look at this.” I angled the screen toward her so she could see the pictures and the newspaper and the black president, but the screen was blank except for little shapes along the bottom. “That girl, she told me this is called a laptop computer from Katrina. I don’t know why it ain’t working. I swear when I was on the porch there was all this stuff on the screen. And look at this book. That girl said it’s the weirdest book she ever read.”
Shalaya Crump simply turned and walked off. “I’m going home, City,” she said.
“Wait. Why? Why’d you stay in the woods? You talked to that girl before? She said she’s seen you before. She’s like a fatter version of you with a nappy mohawk but not really…”
“You like her, don’t you?”
“Like who?”
“I know you do.”
“That girl? Baize?” For some reason, I thought Shalaya Crump was really asking me if I liked the girl as in spit-some-GAME like, so I thought about it and told her exactly what I thought.
“I don’t like her like that, but she didn’t get on my nerves like a lot of girls do either. She had these big circle earrings and there was something strange about how she talked. It’s like her tongue was too fat, but sometimes it didn’t seem too fat. She kept talking about rhymes and ‘one hundred’ too much. Her face was bumpy, too, especially on her forehead. And then she liked how I dressed. No girl ever told me that. She looked like you, except her hair was way shorter, but I already told you that. Maybe I liked her but not that much. I think she knows more than I know and I guess I think I know more than her about other stuff, too. I liked that she had a laptop computer more than I liked her. You know what I’m trying to say?”
“Bye, City.”
Shalaya Crump walked off in front of me out of the woods. I followed her down Old Ryle Road talking the entire time about the girl and the laptop computer and asking her did we really just jump to 2013. We must have looked crazy to anyone who saw us.
When I got in front of Mama Lara’s house, I said bye to Shalaya Crump, but she just went to her trailer without saying a word to me. I would have cared if it were any other day.
When I got in the house, I flipped open the computer and moved the little arrow thing around the screen like I’d watched Baize do. In the corner was this little picture with the word “Unfinished” on it. I moved the arrow to the picture and pushed on it. A half-drawn blue, white, and plum-red picture opened up on the screen. At the bottom of the picture was this water with palm trees and a few little boats, but right above the water was a huge face and a cool-looking Klansman with a stick over his shoulder floating in the sky. The face looked like Baize’s in a way, but it kinda looked like my face, too, if my hair would have been lined up right. I ran the arrow over all the images in the picture and pushed on them but nothing happened. It was like playing video games except I didn’t know how you were supposed to win.
After a while I pushed on something called “Word” and a blank screen opened up. After you pushed “Word” there was the word “File,” and at the bottom of “File” were all these sections that said “Storm Rhyme” and the numbers 1 through 10. When I pushed on “Storm Rhyme #4,” writing appeared right in the center of the screen:
…Not your everyday rapper
but every day’s a gray haze.
Who took the moons outta
June?
Come take the
pain outta Baize.
My big fat beautiful mouth
was born right here in the South
where Ma and Daddy, they went swimming,
tryin to find a way out.
But Katrina was hummin
and my folks got to runnin.
Ears open for God but she
ain’t telling them nothin.
Now Melahatchie ain’t
exactly what
We thought it was.
Blues for days, dark mayonnaise
and kinda country…
Uhh…
You wanna
touch us?
Oooh…
You really fucked us!
Booo…
I had a hunch that you’d try to
crush us
so I grabbed
my tool.
And now you’re scared of a dike?
This ain’t a brick, it’s a mic.
You went for yours, growled a little
and I was scared of you.
Sike…
Matter fact you suck,
and quite wack, you ducked.
Now quack, or cluck,
cuz Baize don’t give a…
Sometimes you read the stuff people write and have a hard time thinking the person would write the stuff you read. That’s because most people try to write like they’re writing for a bad Honors English teacher or a librarian even when there’s no Honors English teachers or librarians around. The only honors class I was ever in was English, and Ms. Shivers said everything you wrote had to be believable. It’s more important that it’s believable
than that it’s smart, she told us. English teachers like Ms. Shivers were always talking about “the reader.” Whoever “the reader” was, it never seemed like she could be like me. How could you make someone you didn’t know do things they didn’t want to do?
Anyway, even though I couldn’t figure out how the words were supposed to sound when Baize rapped them, I could still hear Baize saying the words to “Storm Rhyme #4” in my head. I was Baize’s reader, and I believed everything she said. By the end, I hated that Katrina girl just as much as she did.
But I knew no Honors English teacher or librarian was “the reader” for “Storm Rhyme #4.” And it wasn’t just because of the cussing or rhymes. It was mainly because of those dots she used. She used dot-dot-dot to start the rhyme, and she used dot-dot-dot in the middle of the rhyme, and she used dot-dot-dot at the end of the rhyme. And it just seemed kinda perfect to me. I’d seen those dot-dot-dots and I’d heard Shalaya Crump say dot-dot-dot before, but I never really knew what they meant or how folks were supposed to use them. I used them once on a test when I didn’t know the answer and Ms. Arnold wrote, “Citoyen you better be ashamed before God for trying to trick your teacher.” I thought Ms. Arnold should’ve been ashamed before God for not using a comma after she wrote my name.
Anyway, I had never really even been allowed to spend much time on a typewriter or a big computer either, but typing on a laptop computer was even better. Whatever you typed showed up on the screen, and if you didn’t like what you wrote, you could erase it and rewrite it. After you rewrote it enough, it was like your words were famous. Even if you had the best pencil-writing style in the world like Shalaya Crump, no matter how good the writing looked, it never looked famous. And if you erased too much and the paper was all smudged, you just looked dumb, poor, and messy. But the words on Baize’s computer screen looked famous, like words in a book, even if you wrote something that you would never see in a book, like “Storm Rhyme #4.”
I started typing a lot and erasing a lot. It took me about ten minutes to come up with: My name is City. Shalaya Crump says I’m like long division.
Then, out of the blue, I realized something. Shalaya Crump was jealous of me liking that girl, Baize. I guess I should have known it earlier, but I never thought I could do anything to make Shalaya Crump jealous. Just thinking about her being jealous made me feel so good about myself. If she was jealous, I knew it would only be a matter of time before she was kissing me. My new GAME was to keep her jealous for a little bit, then prove to her that I liked her way more than Baize. A few minutes after that, I knew we’d be kissing. Once I got kissing Shalaya Crump back in my mind, I couldn’t think of anything else. It was always like that. So I typed and erased about her for hours. At the end of the night, all I had was one good sentence, and I used italics and the dot-dot-dots in it too. It felt like the right thing to do:
