Long Division by Kiese Laymon Page A

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