Long Division

by Kiese Laymon

  Baize gave me the remote and told me that she was gonna make something to eat. “Even if we had a lot of money, we wouldn’t waste it on the outside of our house. That could be gone in a second if another storm came. You want oriental ramen or chicken ramen with your french fries and butter beans?”

  “What’s ramen?”

  “Noodles, boy. Y’all don’t even have ramen in the ’80s?”

  Baize walked through the other room into the kitchen.

  The first thing I did with the remote was check how many channels the TV had. When I pushed below 1, the TV went to channel 1,975. Back in my time, we’d watch TV and say “Ain’t nothing on.” I didn’t know how anyone could ever say “Ain’t nothing on” in 2013. The Flintstones was on. Basketball was on. Soap operas were on. Andy Griffith was on. The Cosby Show and Good Times were on. And PBS shows that looked exactly the same as they looked in 1985 were on.

  And on more channels than you could imagine, there were black women with real JET-centerfold booties yelling and fighting each other.

  Baize came back in the room and just sat on the floor next to me.

  “What?” I asked her.

  “What, what?” she asked me. “Don’t ‘what’ me in my house.”

  “Why you sitting next to me so close?” She didn’t answer, but her hip was touching my left hand. So I moved it and asked, “Is the ramen ready?”

  “Almost. I warmed up the biscuits to go with the butter beans and french fries.”

  “Okay.” I kept changing the channels. “What happened to real actors and comedians? On all these stations, you see people you would see at the mall fighting. And when did McDonald’s start using black folks on their commercials?”

  “I don’t even know, Voltron,” she said. “That’s a good question.” I could tell she wasn’t really listening to me. “Um, do you wanna smoke?”

  “Smoke what? Aren’t you like twelve?” I asked her. “I’m good. You ain’t never heard of ‘Just Say No?’”

  “Wow,” she said. “I’m thirteen. You should have your own reality show. Keep doing you, Voltron. I’m smoking before I eat.”

  Baize walked back toward the kitchen and I just sat there in front of that TV. I hated Baize for smoking without me even though I didn’t want to smoke. After a few minutes I got really curious, though. I had seen plenty of folks smoke weed and cigarettes, but I’d never seen a girl younger than me smoke.

  I walked toward the kitchen and saw that there was a screen door. Sitting on the step on the other side of the screen was Baize. And she had a square in her mouth. Right in front of her was the area where I had seen those two Dobermans doing it. And next to that was a huge, grimy work shed.

  “You ever wonder what happened before you in the same place you’re standing now?” I asked her. “Like, I saw this talking cat right around the corner.”

  I looked at her and waited for her to ask me to explain myself. “Look,” she said, “let’s talk, but don’t be coming out here messing up my high. Don’t say nothing to me about how I shouldn’t smoke, either. I’m thick and I’m extra and I smoke. Leave me alone.”

  “You’re extra what?”

  “Just extra.” She took a puff and exhaled it.

  “If you ask any girl in Melahatchie about me, they’ll be like, ‘Baize, that bitch is extra,’ especially after my song blew up on YouTube. It’s a compliment. I know myself.”

  “That’s nice,” I said. “You don’t mind people calling you that name, though?”

  “What name? ‘Bitch?’ Yeah,” she said. “I mind hating-ass bitches calling me ‘bitch.’ But my girls, they could call me ‘bitch’ and I could call them ‘bitch’ and it wouldn’t be a big deal.”

  I just looked at her.

  “If you called me ‘bitch,’ I’d get you,” she told me. “I’m just keeping it one hundred. Somehow, some way, I’d have to get you, ’cause it’s hard for boys to really love girls anyway, so I can’t really see letting a boy get away with calling nobody a bitch. Mama taught me that a long time ago. And if a boy did love me, knowing how much it hurt…” she started trailing off. “I don’t know what to say. A nigga who loved me wouldn’t call nobody a bitch. But I don’t even like boys like that anyway.”

  “Oh,” I said. All I could think about was how Shalaya Crump whupped this boy, Damon Frazier, to his knees for calling me a “yap-mouth bitch” the summer before last. The whole time she was whupping him, she kept saying, “You gonna respect me.” I thought it was weird she would say that after I was the one that Damon was calling a “yap-mouth bitch,” but it was all making a little more sense now.

  “Seem like you thought a lot about that word,” I told Baize. “Can I switch subjects? You ever wonder why people smoke with their hands so close to their lips? Like if your fingers were more off your lips, smoking wouldn’t even look right.”

  “Then you’d burn your fingers,” she said. “Look Voltron, no offense, you messing up my smoke, though, for real.”

  “Oh. My bad. People still say ‘for real’ around here? You know, you talk like you’re way older than thirteen. Sometimes you call me ‘mayne’ and sometimes you call me ‘boy’ and sometimes you call me ‘Voltron.’” Baize inhaled more but actually took her fingers away from her lips a bit. “You know why I think you sound so old to me? Because your TV has every age on it. Every age! Like my TV back home, we get four channels including PBS, and you gotta watch all the commercials because you can’t be flipping a lot or your mama and them claim that’ll break the TV.”

  Baize looked like she was listening, but she wasn’t. “Whatever,” she said. “You know what was weird when I went back to the past? I was on this same road in my same hood, but no one cared.”

  “Why do you just switch subjects like that? I bet when you watch TV, every time a commercial come on, you get to flipping, don’t you?”

  “Shut up. I was tired of talking about music.”

  “Wait. You walked around back then?”

  “Hell yeah, I walked around.”

  “Girl, that was dumb. Why would anyone back there care? You ain’t even born where I’m from.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.” She lit another cigarette. “It’s hard to go back because you see that there was a time when people in the same space where you are ain’t even care or think nothing about you. But somehow, I’m still related to those folks. When I went back, I wanted to see what the music was like and to see if I could find my parents.”

  “Did you find them?”

  “I was scared to look.”

  “Where they at now?”

  “Dead,” she said. “I mean, I think.”

  “Both of them?”

  “Dead.”

  I had never had someone tell me that both of their parents were dead, and I wasn’t sure what to say. I didn’t want to say something to ruin her high, but since I’d never ruined someone’s high before, I wasn’t sure what kind of stuff could ruin your high.

  “Man, having dead parents must be like, um, like having to eat dessert first for the rest of your life and having that dessert be something like, um, pears when everyone around you is eating greasy fried catfish platters and hot peach cobbler, huh?”

  That’s all I could come up with.

  Baize didn’t say anything. She just kept smoking. “Naw,” she finally said. “Having dead parents ain’t nothing like eating pears.” She blew smoke right in my face. “I only half knew them. They had me when they were young and they died when they were young. But they loved me.”

  “You’re still young,” I told her. She just looked at me and didn’t say a word. “They died together?”

  “Yep. We had come back from the swings over there at Gaddis Park. And everyone knew that the storm was coming. So me and my little brother was gonna go stay with my cousins and my grandma up in Jackson. So they dropped me off, and went back because… shit, I don’t know why they went back. Never made much sense to me.”

  “Then what?”
/>   “Then nothing.” She blew smoke like a professional smoke-blower. “I never saw them again.”

  Baize threw what was left of the cigarette on the grass and mashed it with her Nikes. “They got swallowed up by the water, I think. Or the wind.”

  “Why don’t you know?”

  “I know.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because they wouldn’t have left us.” Baize got up, looked down at me, and walked inside the screen door. I followed her. “If I had my computer, I could play one of the songs I made for them.”

  I figured I’d read the words to Baize’s song, but I didn’t want to hear her rap it. It would have embarrassed me too much if she couldn’t rap a lick. I knew I should have been thinking more about her dead parents and what kind of storm could just make people disappear, but I wasn’t. I was thinking of that talking cat and those two Dobermans who just earlier in the day were right where I was looking now, and I was thinking about what Shalaya Crump and Evan were doing. I didn’t think they were kissing any more. I knew that they were trying to stay alive or fighting to not disappear together, which was even worse.

  “Baize?”

  “What?”

  “What happened to your brother?”

  “He disappeared, too.”

  “Oh. Wait. Can I ask you one more question?”

  “What?”

  “That wasn’t a real cigarette, was it?”

  Baize liked to control the remote, and she never left it on one channel for longer than five minutes. “I usually don’t watch this much TV, but since you stole my computer and my phone, I don’t have a choice.”

  “You could read that book. What’s it called?”

  “Long Division.”

  “Yeah, you could read Long Division since you were so pressed about getting it back,” I told her. “Have you read that book? All of it?”

  “I read some of it and it made me feel weird.”

  “Me too. I like that part where they all got together and listened to that boy talk about that kid LaVander Peeler’s fade. Who wrote it?”

  “I don’t know. I told you that I just found it in the woods.”

  “Don’t you think it’s weird that there’s no author’s name on it? Is that how they do books in 2013?”

  She just looked at me. “That’s what I’m saying, Voltron. There’s something painful in that book. Real painful. And I just don’t feel like reading to the end and finding out what it is.”

  “Then why’d you want it back so bad if you weren’t gonna read it?”

  “Because it’s mine,” she said. “Whatever is wrong with that book, I wanna be the one to find out before anyone else does.”

  “Do kids read a lot in 2013?” I asked her. “Like, in my time, I read a lot because if I don’t, I get my ass whupped. I usually hate whatever I have to read, but when I finish something, I feel so happy. I can’t even lie, though. I probably only finished two books in my whole life.”

  Baize was laughing at me. “Nobody around here really reads unless it’s something on a computer, but nobody writes to folks around here either. But that’s the thing about that book. If I gave it to the most illiterate fool in my grade, I bet he’d at least get through the first chapter, you know?”

  “Yeah, I do know,” I told her. “I got through the first chapter.”

  “No comment.”

  “Why no comment?” I asked her. “I would have read even more of it if I didn’t have your computer to mess with. It’s hard for us in 1985 to finish books, and we don’t even have a thousand channels or phones that look like calculators or laptop computers.” I waited for her to ask me something, but she didn’t. “You know what else? I never typed on a typewriter before. But when I typed on your computer, I felt like what I was typing was famous. It just looked so famous on the screen, like I could have written that Long Division book.”

  “Voltron, you dumb. I bet you only wrote a few sentences. That’s a big-ass book. I ain’t trying to hate, but you couldn’t write something like that. You have to really have gone through a lot and then have a lot of time on your hands to do something like that.”

  “I’m not that dumb,” I told her. “Look. We could turn the TV off and you could just write in a tablet, or we could watch a movie,” I said. When I started talking about watching a movie, Baize muted the TV. I don’t know why, but her turning down the TV to listen to me took my like for Baize from 20 MPH to around 50 MPH. I tried to keep talking and not look as thankful as I was.

  “Are you one of those people?” she asked me. “My father used to be like that. I remember he was always telling my mother to turn the TV off so he could watch a movie or tell some ol’ silly story.”

  “Were they good stories?”

  She started smiling. “Yeah, they were. You would have liked them.” I knew I was supposed to ask why, but I didn’t really want to. Didn’t matter, though, because she kept talking anyway. “He said a lot in his stories, kinda like you do.”

  Right after she said that, there was this picture of this white woman with stringy black hair and big eyes and a nose that reminded me of a tiny paper boat.

  “Who is that lady? Turn it up.”

  “That’s Michael Jackson.”

  I got closer to the TV and watched different scenes with this person dancing and sounding like Michael Jackson. But nothing about the person looked like the Michael Jackson I knew.

  “Wait.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “He died four or five years ago.” She started scratching her head. “Sorry.”

  I slumped on the ground away from the TV and just watched the first part of the show about the life and sound and death of Michael Jackson with my head resting on my shoulder. I thought about Shalaya Crump telling me to just be myself. What did that even mean if years in the future, you could look like a totally different person and be dead? There was no way to be yourself and be the same way you were. And even if you did manage to be yourself, one day you were going to die and regret it all anyway. That’s what I realized watching the show about Michael Jackson.

  “This is real, Baize. This shit is real.” I stood there not caring what I looked like. I understood that if Michael Jackson was really dead, it meant that people I knew were dead too. “I gotta find my ma and my Mama Lara. What if they disappeared in some flood just like your parents?”

  “Tomorrow, okay? Look,” she stood up and took the remote controls from me. “You gotta rest so your legs feel better. Then tomorrow, well…” She paused.

  “What?”

  “You gotta decide if you go back and help your friend or if you stay and look for your family. I don’t care what you do. When the morning comes, I’m jumping back in that hole and getting my computer and my phone back.”

  “But what if all my family is dead?”

  “What if they are?”

  “Well,” I said, and thought about her question. “I guess if they’re dead, I’d want to know and maybe when I go back to my time I can do what I can to stop them from dying.”

  “But what if you’re dead?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “What if you go looking for your people and you find out that they’re alive, but you ain’t?”

  “Then, well, I guess…” I just didn’t know what to say. “Where am I sleeping tonight?”

  “On the floor in my room, I guess.”

  I followed her in the bedroom and then I stopped. “Baize?”

  “What?” she turned around and looked me right in the eye.

  “Is all of New Edition dead too?”

  “New who?”

  Baize made a nice little area to sleep on the floor next to her bed. I should have asked to take a shower, but I’d seen when I went in their bathroom earlier that there wasn’t a shower. Couldn’t understand how they had all the technology to get over 200 channels and make the TV sound like life, but they didn’t have technology to make their tub go from the brown of a double-yolk egg to a somewhat regula
r white.

  I sat there on the floor of Baize’s room and pulled up the sheet to look under her bed. There were maybe 20 green notebooks piled there, and all kinds of raggedy keyboards, drumsticks, and broken turntables. Surrounding all that stuff were these tiny fingernails.

  I grabbed one of the green notebooks and opened it. There were all these sketches of connected circles, and surrounding the circles were these long winding lines of numbers that looked like they were coming out of the circles. I opened another notebook and it was the same thing. Different-shaped circles and long lines of winding numbers.

  While I was trying to figure out if Baize was doing some kind of long division in the notebooks, Baize leaned her head over toward me. “If things start to crawl on you, you can just get in the bed with me, long as you stay on your side.”

  “Wait, what’s gonna crawl on me? Fingernails?”

  “No, asshole. Roaches.”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “What?”

  “Why are these notebooks filled with circles and numbers?”

  “They’re not circles,” she told me and took the notebook from my hand. “They’re holes.”

  “Holes to where?”

  “I don’t know. Never mind, Voltron,” she said. “Just watch out for the roaches down there.”

  “Well then, can I just…you know…get up there with you?”

  “Don’t get it twisted, okay?” she said and moved over. “I’m really not about that acting ho-ish life.”

  “Whatever that means.” I told her and got in the bed. “I been wanting to tell you that the slang y’all use is kinda stale in the future.”

  Baize put four of her green tablets between us. She told me that I couldn’t cross over the tablets without getting punched in the gizzard, and I told her not to worry. It’s not hard to explain what I felt about Baize. She had the perfect mix of funk and perfume. And even though she had a Mr. T-style haircut, she was cuter than a cute girl. And she was finer than a fine girl. And she was way smarter than a smart girl. And she was even weirder than the weirdest girls. But she wasn’t as good-smelling, as cute, as smart, or as weird as the girl I loved. And even if she was, which she wasn’t, I really told myself that if I didn’t touch Baize, then maybe, just maybe, Evan and Shalaya Crump weren’t touching either.