Long Division (30 page)

Shalaya Crump and Baize had their eyes closed. “Open y’all damn eyes. Look!” The voice that was coming out of my body was mine, but it was a voice I’d never heard.

I walked over and saw the blood dripping from the desk to the floor. I let some of it drip on my Weapons, because that’s what I knew they would do in a dumb book.

“You came back so Evan could tell you what happens to you in the future, right? Did he tell you?” Shalaya Crump just looked at me. “Did he? Because I know.” Shalaya Crump stepped toward me. “I know what happens, what really happens. What all did he tell you in between getting his ass kicked? Did he tell you that we get married? Me and you.”

“Please don’t start mess now, City,” she said. “Why you gotta be so two days before yesterday?”

“I ain’t so two days before nothing! You always telling me not to start something, Shalaya Crump. Always talking about I’m so ‘yesterday’ or I’m so ‘long division’ or I’m so ‘
Young and Restless
.’ You ain’t never said I’m so foolish, though.” I stopped to think about what I’d just said to Shalaya Crump. It was the best five sentences I’d ever said to her and I hadn’t even practiced them in the
mirror. This wasn’t even
GAME
. “That’s what I am, though. I’m so gotdamn foolish for wanting you to love me like I love you.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I can say what I want. I love you. I do. That’s why I ask you everything under the sun except if you ever had a boyfriend. Because if you’d ever had one, even if it was way before me, it woulda broke my heart.”

“You never told me that,” Shalaya Crump said.

“So what. I shouldn’t have to. You shut that door on me. If you had come back with me, none of this would have happened,” I told her. “None of it.”

“I was trying to protect you,” she said. “You were hurt and I knew you needed to go home. And I…I think I need to be here.”

“Why? Just say it.”

“I believed Evan when he told me he knew where I was in the future. I believed him when he told me he could tell me who my parents are. I wanted to know what happens to them and me on the other end. I know you hate me for this, City, but I really want to change the future.” Shalaya Crump got closer to me in a way that would have made me so happy in 1985. “I just wanted to change it so bad that I didn’t care. And to change it I just had to know what happened.”

“Oh. Okay,” I said. I kept finding the body of my granddaddy out of the corner of my eye, no matter which way I tried to look. It made me sadder and madder. “You just wanted to know? Well, I want you to know, too. Baize, tell her who your parents are.”

Baize sounded like she was whimpering, but I figured it was just that her nose was stuffed. “Why? Don’t yell at me.”

“Just tell her.”

“Tell me what?” Shalaya asked.

“City Coldson is…was my father’s name…my mother’s name… was…Shalaya Crump-Coldson.”

“Who?” I said. “Say it louder.”

“Shalaya Crump-Coldson was her name.”

“Was?” Shalaya Crump said.

“Tell her what happens to your parents, Baize. And stop crying.”

Baize wiped her eyes and opened her phone. She pushed a few buttons and looked at something in the phone that made her close her eyes super tight. “These are my parents,” she said. “These were…umm…” I couldn’t tell if she was having a hard time talking because she was sick or because she was sad.

Shalaya Crump and I looked at the picture. She had long shiny braids in the picture and dark patches under her eyes, but she was even more beautiful as a grown woman than she was as a kid. Her cheeks looked like they were about to burst open and knock her glasses off her face she was smiling so hard. A gold locket with an “SC” charm hung around the middle of her neck and I was behind her smiling ear to ear, kissing her cheek. All my hair was gone and I had a strange kind of goatee that made my face look less fat than it was. Both of our eyes were so shiny, too.

“That’s us,” I told her. “We disappear, Shalaya Crump. You couldn’t find you in 2013 because there
is
no you. You’re dead in 2013. And so am I. We disappear in 2005.”

I wanted to just slump to the floor and cry, but what I said sounded so crazy, I didn’t even know how to slump to the floor right after saying it. Not when directly in front of us was a dead relative with a hole the size of a Coke can in his back. I just wanted to go home to 1985 and slump by myself in the year that I knew the most about.

Maybe we all did.

While we were looking at each other’s eyes and trying to avoid looking at Lerthon Coldson’s dead body, two Klansmen appeared and slowly made their way into the room. These two weren’t as big as the ones who beat me down. They didn’t have glasses on either. The taller Klansman had a rifle that was as tall as me in one hand and Baize’s computer in the other hand. The smaller one had a can of gasoline that you could tell was nearly empty by the sloshing sound it made.

“Look,” Baize jumped in front of them and said in the direction of the bigger one, “we know how to work the computer. Can we show you?”

The Klansmen just stood there not saying a word, moving their heads side to side. “Did one of you shoot him?” I asked. “That’s my granddaddy. He shouldn’t have done what he did, but did you have to shoot him?” They just stood there looking at me. “What if someone shot your granddaddy? Look here, man. We in the middle of some family drama, you know what I mean? I ain’t even lying. Can’t y’all just let us go? We won’t tell nobody.”

Baize walked slowly toward the men with her bag. She looked at us, then tried to take a deep breath and couldn’t so she bent at the waist and coughed into her shirt. I grabbed for her but she walked off and looked at me in a way she hadn’t looked before.

“Hold up. You want the cord, right?” she said to the Klansmen. “What’s the use in having the cord if you can’t use the thing? Look.”

Baize plugged the computer up and typed a few things on the screen. “Okay, come here.” Music came from the computer. “Walk right in front of the screen and see what happens.” Baize did something that made the computer screen turn into a TV screen,
and whatever was in front of the computer ended up on the screen. The bigger Klansman looked down at the screen and saw himself. “I can show you how to work it,” she said.

Just like before when all the words I typed on the screen were famous, whoever walked in front of the computer looked famous on the screen, too.

The bigger Klansman handed the gun to the smaller one. He walked in front of the computer and started moving his arms like he was an Egyptian. If the past day hadn’t been filled with more craziness than a little bit, this would have been the craziest thing I’d ever seen in my life. Baize knelt down and pushed a button that made these twinkle sounds come from the computer. A voice from the computer whispered, “…1, 2, 3, uh.”

It wasn’t loud overall, but the specific sounds in it were louder than anything I’d ever heard. It really sounded like something from the future. Not the 2000s, either—more like the 3000s. Baize actually stood up and started dancing in front of the computer screen as best she could. You could tell it took a lot for her to actually move because she was getting so weak. She started dancing near me and said, “When I give you the sign, clothesline the big one.”

I said okay and kept watching her dance. I couldn’t believe I was watching her dance on a TV screen with Klansmen in the background and a dead man slumped over a desk with a bloody hole in his back in 1964.

After a while, though, Baize had all of us, including the two Klansmen, dancing in front of the screen and trying to move in front of each other to see who could look the most famous. Baize made us form a version of a really tight
Soul Train
line. Two of us danced on the side and one person jammed in the middle going toward the camera.

I started it off by doing a robot into the Pee-wee Herman, and then I mixed it with a Prince move, where I looked at the camera and licked in between my fingers right in front of the computer.

Then Baize came through trying to do some dance where she acted like she was hammering really fast with her whole body. She was so sick and so weak, though, that it looked like she was doing it in slow motion. Her nose was bleeding a little bit the whole time, too. She broke the hammering thing off into some hard locking, too. Boom! Bam! Lock! Lock! Then she acted like she was riding a bike side to side, and she ended it doing this dance I saw Doug E. Fresh do.

Next came Shalaya Crump, who tried to do a back glide into a moonwalk and a Michael Jackson spin, and then she got right up on the camera and started prepping. She put both hands in the air and worked them back and forth in sync with her long neck. Those other years didn’t have nothing on 1985.

Finally, the bigger Klansman stood in the middle. He asked for the rifle back from the smaller one and just stood there posing, with his hands folded up like he was on top of a mountain. At this point, the voice in the song started chanting something about a Polaroid picture: “Shake it…” The bigger Klansman didn’t move at all until he handed the rifle back off to the smaller Klansman and broke down into this mean twist, super close to the ground. When he was right up on the computer checking himself out, the dude copied Baize and did the Doug E. Fresh dance, too.

I kept looking at Baize for the sign, but I didn’t know what the sign looked like. Then she looked at me and raised her eyebrows a little bit.

Out of nowhere the smaller Klansman swung the butt of the rifle like a baseball bat and hit the bigger Klansman right upside of the head.

He went down, and a small box of matches fell out from under his sheet as he knocked over the computer as he fell. I picked up the box of matches, jumped on the man, and grabbed him by his neck. While I held him down, Baize was kicking him as hard as she could in the privacy while the song was still playing. His eyes kept blinking as the white of his sheet turned liquid maroon right below the left eye hole.

It looked like magic.

Standing above us were Shalaya Crump and the smaller Klansman. He dropped the rifle and both of them looked at it.

“Take the rifle, Shalaya. What you doing? Pick it up.”

She finally took it.

“Shoot him.”

She looked down at me. “Just shoot that asshole somewhere!” It was the first time I’d used “asshole” around a girl.

Shalaya Crump tossed the rifle back down and took the sheet off of the smaller Klansman.

“Oh. My. God,” I said to Baize. The smaller Klansman under the sheet wasn’t a man at all. “Jewish Evan Altshuler?”

The room was silent, except for more music that came from Baize’s computer and her constant coughing. Evan and Shalaya Crump stood in the middle of the room touching fingertips while Baize and I managed to tie the hands of the bigger Klansman with this cheap-looking black belt that she had in her backpack.

Shalaya Crump saw me watching her so she pulled her hand away from Evan’s. I didn’t know where to throw my eyes, so I threw them at the tied hands of the Klansman. His hands were so small for his size. They couldn’t have been much bigger than Baize’s hands. And you know how grown white men have a lot of hair on the outside of their hands? This Klansman’s hands were bare as mine.

Baize pulled out her phone and started taking pictures of the man. “Should we take his sheet off, too?” she asked me.

“Nah. It’ll be harder to hurt him if we take it off. He looks like a monster now, right?”

“Not really,” she said. “More like a white boy in a white sheet.”

“Good point.”

Baize and I started busting more jokes about monsters, goons, and Klansmen when Shalaya Crump hugged Evan with her back to me. I looked up and his eyes were closed. When they opened, he came near me.

“City, I ain’t mean no harm with all this,” he said. “You think you can save someone’s life, you do it. I reckon it can get messier than you think. You know what I’m trying to say?”

“Not really,” I said.

“That’s my brother,” he said and pointed to the Klansman. “Never thought in a million years I’d have to let loose on my own brother with a rifle.”

“I never thought in million years I’d follow a white boy who calls himself Jewish into a hole in the ground in 1964,” I told him. “Thangs happen, I guess.”

“Ev, come on, man,” the Klansman said through the sheet. “These folks ain’t none of your friends. Tell ’em why we did it. I never did nothing disrespectful to a Negro in my life. You know that.”

“You shot my granddaddy,” I told him, “just because you could. That ain’t disrespectful enough?”

“No I didn’t,” he said through that sheet. “I didn’t. We were just coming to burn the school down.”

“With him inside?”

“Yeah, but they said he’d already be dead.”

“Who shot him?” The taller Klansman didn’t answer so I looked to Evan. “Who shot him, Evan? You?”

“City, you know he didn’t shoot no one,” Shalaya Crump said. “Quit being so Perry Mason.”

“How do I know? Just because y’all went through something, I’m supposed to trust him. His plan got all us in trouble in the first place. How come you can’t see that?”

Baize went in her bag and started blowing her nose and hocking up mucus. She spit it in these blue napkins she’d brought with her.

“Mr. Gaddis probably did it,” Evan said.