[4 of 5 - Group E] Long Division, Book Two, pages 3-57 by Kiese Laymon (2013)

Author: Kiese Laymon

Laymon, Kiese. “Book Two, Pages 3-57,” Long Division, Scribner Book Company, 2013, 2021.

BOOK TWO

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 starring spoiled teenagers on HBO. If any other girl in 1985 said, “the future dot-dot-dot,” she would have meant 1986 or maybe 1990 at the latest. 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, before we moved to Chicago from Jackson, 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 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 a brokenhearted 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 4, 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!” | 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 my fingertips. “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 her 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 which 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.” | 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.” | 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 while we were watching The Jetsons.

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

“I do get it,” I told her. “I get that I might not be the one for you. In 2013, I’ma be like forty-three. When I’m forty-three, you’ll still think my hairline is too crooked and my sweat’ll still stink like gas station toilets.” | looked up and hoped she would interrupt me. She didn’t. “Anyway. You could never love me even if I was the skinniest, smartest boy in the South. I truly know that now.”

Shalaya Crump finally laughed and looked me right in my mouth. “City, I’ma ask you one more time to stop being so Young and the Restless. Don’t never ever say ‘truly’ around me again. Never!”

Shalaya Crump was the queen of taking a show or a person, place, or thing and using it like an adjective. No one else in Jackson or Chicago or Melahatchie or on TV could do it like her. If she told you not to ever use a word around her, you knew it was a word that should never have come out of your mouth in the first place.

Shalaya Crump took her eyes off my mouth and started looking at my hips. “Look, City,” she said. “I could love you the way you want me to, really. I could if you found a way to help me change the future in, I don’t know dot-dot-dot a special way.”

“Dot-dot-dot? I thought you were done with that read-your-punctuation style. You don’t think you played that out last summer?”

“Just listen. I need to know if you’d come with me, even if we couldn’t ever come back.”

Shalaya Crump was always saying weird stuff like that and trying to create new slang. One day, she called me on the phone long-distance during the school year and said, “City comma I realized today that I hate Ronald Reagan. When I’m president comma I wanna make it so you never have to be in a classroom with more than ten other kids from Head Start all the way through twelfth grade. I think I might wanna make it illegal for parents to leave their kids with their grandma in Melahatchie for more than three days at a time if the grandma don’t have cable or good air. What you think?”

I waited for her to laugh after saying that, since my ma was always sending me to stay with my Mama Lara for weeks at a time. Mama Lara didn’t have good cable or air either, and neither did her grandma, but Shalaya Crump didn’t laugh, so I fake-laughed for her and said, “You love you some English and civics classes, don’t you?” A few seconds later, when no one was saying a word, she started laughing all late into the phone. Only Shalaya Crump could laugh all late into the phone and not care about using up her grandma’s long distance to talk about hating Ronald Reagan. It was stuff like calling me long distance and telling me stuff that didn’t make sense and laughing all late at my jokes that made me think I could tongue kiss Shalaya Crump.

Anyway, I had a lot of questions about how to change the future and be special to Shalaya Crump, but my Mama Lara drove in front of her trailer right after she said that thing about coming to the future with her. Mama Lara told me that it was time to take the bus back up to Chicago. I left Shalaya Crump that Christmas break without a kiss, a hug, or any-thing, but I did tell her, “I’m coming back to fly to the future with you for spring break, baby. And when I do, you better love me. Or at least like me a lot.”

“I already like vou a lot.” she told me as I got in the car. “Don’t call me baby no more, though. Just be yourself and come back in March. Please. I need you, City.”

I promised myself right then and there that I’d never call Shalaya Crump “baby” if it meant that she’d be my girl, and that I’d find a way to be special and change the future when I came back down to Mississippi for spring break. In the meantime, no matter where I was in my dreams, I always found a way to kiss Shalaya Crump. Sometimes I’d be in a blue jungle or a raggedy glass airplane, but there would always be a phone hanging out of a tree or underneath a seat. I’d find a phone and dial 1-4-1-1. When the operator answered, it was always Shalaya Crump and she always gave me the best directions to get to her. Once I got to where she was, every single time we kissed with a little tongue and pressed our fronts together until I woke up sore.

In real life, between January and March, I thought of all kinds of ways to show Shalaya Crump I was special. I wrote every plan down in this thick college-lined notebook I should have been using to take notes in English class. The notebook was called GAME in bold capital letters. Sometimes I would think I had the perfect plan, but after a few days, I knew that whatever GAME I came up with wouldn’t be good enough for her. Then, on the first day back down to Melahatchie for spring break, I got lucky.

GAME found me…

BAIZE…

On Old Ryle Road, folks like to bathe, eat, and put on clean clothes before sitting on the porch. When I woke up, I ate a fried-egg-and-cheese sandwich with some old Miracle Whip. Then I sat out on the porch in some faded cutoff jeans and the Magic Johnson Converse Weapons Mama Lara got me for Christmas that hadn’t even been released for regular people yet. I called my grandma “Mama Lara” because everyone else did. Mama Lara said that boys weren’t supposed to call or knock on girls’ doors until they were seniors in high school, so my plan was to wait on the porch all day if I had to until Shalaya Crump came outside. That’s when I’d drop my new GAME on her.

Mama Lara’s husband was a man named Lerthon Coldson. I never knew him. Shalaya Crump’s granddaddy and Lerthon Coldson were best friends way back in the day. They disappeared twenty-one years ago, in 1964, in this place we called the Shephard house. The Shephard house was in the middle of the Night Time Woods, and it was the only real house on Old Ryle Road. Every other house was a trailer or shotgun house lifted off the ground by some cinder blocks. The Shephard house was built right from the ground up, and it had lots of grass that looked like veins growing up all over it.

Neither Shalaya Crump or me knew our granddaddies, but sometimes we’d wonder about how two grown men could go inside a house one day, then never come back out. That wonder brought us together in a way. But even if our granddaddies didn’t disappear, we still would’ve been close. We’d been friends ever since I could remember having friends.

When Mama Lara came out to talk to me on the porch, she told me how her girlfriends were mad because they got group-rate tickets to see The Price Is Right and she decided at the last minute not to go. Mama Lara claimed she would’ve gone to California with her friends except she didn’t like driving with church folks in close spaces for more than one state. To tell you the truth, she only liked to travel on the weekend because she hated to miss the stories on CBS during the week. Plus if she would have gone, I wouldn’t have been able to come down for break.

While I was out there on that porch, Mama Lara hugged me and held her hands on my hips. “Jesus, my baby boy is a fat little man who is two points away from that honor roll,” she said. “Your granddaddy would not believe how fast you sprouting out.”

I sat there waiting for her to explain what she meant with my arms folded across the top layer on my stomach.

“Oh,” she said. “Unfold your arms. You ain’t gotta cover them fat breasts. What I’m saying is that your mind, your mouth, and your heart finally working right. You finally sprouting out.”

“You making me feel funny saying I got ‘breasts,’ Mama Lara.”

“All I’m saying is that you ready to move,” she said and looked me right in my eyes. “Yeah, you ready in mind, body, and soul.”

I loved Mama Lara more than any person in my family. She had these scars on her face from an accident when she was younger, and she’d do everything possible to cover them up when she left the house. It was cute to me how she was old and cared so much about a few scars on her face. But Mama Lara was also a little on the shady side, to tell you the truth. She was always leaving the house at the strangest times and coming back smelling like outside.

I ignored Mama Lara and looked across the street at Shalaya Crump’s trailer. Shalaya Crump was on spring break just like me, but I knew that she wasn’t going anywhere because her grandma had to work. She had actually never gone anywhere for break. Not once. She blamed it on her parents giving her away to her grandma as soon as she was born. Shalaya Crump never met her real parents, but she thought they would have wanted to at least travel to New Orleans or Alabama if she lived with them. She had only been out of the county one time, and that was for the state science fair finals in Jackson. And even then, her grandma didn’t let her spend the night.

From a distance, Shalaya Crump always walked on beat, no matter what the beat was. And she was one of those girls who, when she wasn’t talking, seemed to do everything in slow motion. Shalaya Crump looked really happy to see me and I tried hard not to look as happy as I was to see her. I started pulling my dingy Izod up over my mouth and fake yawning. She offered me a saltine and a sip of cold drank. Then she gave me the kind of full body hug that made me taste melted Jell-O Pudding Pops.

I don’t know how to say this without making you hate me, but Shalaya Crump smelled like she’d just come back from about six recesses right on top of one another. And at every recess, she must have been swimming naked in a sea of cube steak gravy. I didn’t mind her gravy funk, though, for three reasons: #1–I hated the smell of deodorant. #2-Shalaya Crump’s funk smelled better than most girls’ best stale perfume. #3–I loved me some cube steak.

“How vou been?” she asked me.

“What’s wrong?” I asked her.

“You really want to know?”

“I do, my queen. Tell me what’s on vour mind.”

Shalaya Crump shook her head and said, “Oh God,” before grabbing both of my hands and walking toward the Night Time Woods. The Night Time Woods separated Old Ryle Road from Belhaven Street, where most of the white folks lived in their trailers. Grown folks always told us that no good could come from getting caught in those woods after dark because of the crazy Shephards. The Shephard house, where our granddaddies disappeared, got burned down a number of times in the 1960s by the Klan, and all the Shephards were dead now except for this one old woman people called the Shephard Witch. I had never really seen the Shephard Witch, but I heard she lived in what was left of the nasty church right in the middle of the woods.

“I’m worried about the future, City.”

“Oh. That again.” I tried to say it like I was surprised she was bringing it up. “I ain’t thought about it that much, but you think it’ll be fresh? Like, I wonder if it’s gonna be like moving sidewalks and flying cars. That would make it easier for me to get to my queen so I ain’t trippin’.”

“No, boy. Please just stop. Like what if there’s this huge flood that kills people? Or if the water in the Gulf turn black? Or if we have a Black president and…”

“A Black president?” I asked her. She threw me off with that one. “And black water? And you talking about I’m crazy? You know how crazy white folks would go if we had a Black president. Girl, just stop.”

“Just listen, okay? I mean if something you couldn’t believe happened, like we got a Black president, you would wanna know how that changed your life, wouldn’t you? Do you even see what I’m saying?”

Shalaya Crump was really asking me a question, and you know what I was really doing? I was really half listening and half looking at her lips, wondering if they ever got chappy. She had the kind of lips, especially the bottom one, which always looked full of air and shiny, but not too shiny, from all that gloss.

“Well, do you?” she said again.

“Yeah, I think so,” I told her. “You wonder what the future has to do with you if all these new things are happening. Like, everybody knows you’re extremely super bad right now in 1985, right? But if you saw yourself in 1999, would you be like, ‘Oh my goodness. Who is that homely-ass girl right there, cleaning the mess out her toes, looking greasy?’ Or maybe things happening in the future would make other people so mad that they would want to make you be invisible.”

“Yeah, yeah, City!” she grabbed my forearm and looked me in the eyes. “That’s exactly what I mean.

Kinda. What happens if we disappear in the future?”

It was like the smartest thing I’ve ever said, and it was the first time I’d used the word “extremely” in a sentence, but the sad part was that I didn’t really know what I meant. I just knew it sounded like something Shalaya Crump would want to hear. It was some GAME I’d been practicing for two months in my mama’s bedroom mirror. “Hold up, Shalaya Crump. Remember when you said that you would love me? Wait, first did you mean it?”

“If I said it. I meant it.”

“For real? That’s good. Well, ever since you told me all I needed to do was be special and say something cool about the future, I kinda..

Shalaya Crump interrupted me. “City, speed that up. Why you gotta be so long division? For real, you don’t have to tell me all the background. The story doesn’t have to go on and on and on.’

“It doesn’t?”

“No,” Shalaya Crump said. “Everything with you is long division. You busy trying to show all your work. Just get in and get out.”

“But my favorite part of long division was the work,” I told her. Shalaya Crump had thrown my GAME completely off. “I hate the answer. I do. We had this conversation already. You said you hated the an-swer, too.”

“That’s different. I hate the answer because I don’t believe in mastering the smaller steps,” she told me. “They never teach you to like, you know, linger in the smaller steps.”

“Linger? What’s that mean?”

“They just tell you that you gotta master the small steps if you wanna get to the big answer,” she told me. “But I wish we could really pause at each step in long division and talk about it.”

“Pause and do what?”

“Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Just get on with it, City. Please!”

“Okay, well, I wanna linger, too. Remember when I stole those Bibles for you over Christmas?”

“Yeah, I do. We already talked about this.”

“Do you remember what you said to me when I tried to convince you it wasn’t me?”

“I said that I know it’s you because stealing Bibles takes a whole different kind of crazy than Mela-hatchie crazv.”

“Right! And you said that you liked that I was ‘new’ crazy. That meant that I was crazy enough to go around stealing pleather green Bibles from other folks’ trailers just to impress you. Well, I’m still Chicago or Jackson crazy, baby. Southside! That means I’m crazy enough to fly to the future with you, too..” | acted like my shoes were untied. “But when we land, I wanna know what I get.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, if I flew to 2013 with you, I hope that maybe you’d want to, you know, kiss a nigga.”

“City.” She started laughing. “Why are you calling yourself ‘a nigga’? You don’t even talk like that.”

“Whatever,” I said. “You know, maybe kiss a nigga on the lips! With a little bit of that tongue.”

“City, just talk like yourself! Saying ‘a nigga’ a lot ain’t gonna make me love you.”

“Aw, girl! I wasn’ even tryn’ to make you love me,” I tried to correct myself.

“Yes, you were. Now you doing it again.”

“No, I ain’t.”

You should have heard the way I said, “I wasn’ even tryn’ to make you love me.” I made “wasn’t” and “trying” one syllable each. And I sucked my teeth after I said it and rolled my eyes, too.

“When you first came down here, you didn’t even say ‘a nigga’ a lot,” Shalaya Crump said.

‘I said ‘a nigga’ sometimes. Shoot, we say ‘a nigga’ in Chicago and Jackson just as much as y’all say it down here.”

“Yeah, but a little bit is normal. Now, when you trying too hard to make me like you, you say stuff like ‘hard on a nigga’ or ‘worrying a nigga’ or ‘grinding on a nigga’s nerves. I’m not saying that I don’t be laughing when you say it..

“You do laugh.”

“I know,” she told me. “That’s what I’m saying. But…”

“But what?”

“But that just ain’t who you are. I know you, City,” she told me. “You was all scared of flies and chicken when you first came down here.”

“So. What does that have to do with saying ‘a nigga’ all the time?”

“Nothing, but now, it’s weird. You sucking on your teeth and wanting me to ‘kiss a nigga’?” She started laughing and walking deeper behind some baby sticker bushes. “Just be you. And I’ll just be me.”

I knew I should have said okay, but I always had to have the last word, even with Shalaya Crump.

“You know what, Shalaya Crump? You don’t leave enough room for folks to change. I’m serious. You always gotta control everything. How come no one else can change but you? When I first met you, your breath stayed smelling like a pork chop sandwich. For real. You never brushed your teeth. Now you brush your teeth on the regular and chew gum.”

Shalaya Crump was dying laughing but I was just telling the truth.

“Don’t try and laugh it off,” I told her. “You changed so I can change, too. And maybe I changed how I talk from listening to you. You ain’t ever think about that?”

“Whatever, boy,” she said and got serious again. “The point is I ain’t giving out no kisses or no tongue like peppermints. I ain’t no gotdamn Candy Girl. Now can you please shut the hell up and let me show you something?”

We stepped into the cold Night Time Woods together. From inside the woods, the purple-gray of the road cut through the green just enough that it was the prettiest thing I’d ever seen next to Shalaya Crump’s face. Any other color against that green wouldn’t have been so pretty, but this purple, gray, and green was more than pretty. This purple, green, and gray made me know that Shalaya Crump and I were meant to be kissing soon.

I grabbed Shalaya Crump’s hand as soon as we got deep in the woods. In six years of knowing Sha-laya Crump, this was the first time I had ever held her whole hand and had her lead me into something. We had held hands before when we were in Sunday school and I tried to tell her that her hands were the sweatiest girl hands in the country. But this time was different. Shalaya Crump held on, and even when I loosened my grip, she held on even tighter. That’s always how you can tell if a girl likes you. If you loosen your grip and she loosens hers, you might as well go play football with your boys or something, because nothing is gonna pop off. Anyway, I felt like we were in our own version of “Thriller.”

“City. I can’t do this by myself anymore. I need vou to come with me.”

“Need me to what?”

“To come with me.”

“Where?”

Shalaya Crump knelt down next to this rusty handle that was covered in pine needles and leaves. The handle looked like the handle of this rusted brown iron Mama Lara used to keep her doors open. When Shalaya Crump pulled the handle, this hole inside the ground opened up. The door to the hole had rusty handles on both sides so someone inside the hole could pull the door shut if they needed to. Inside the hole were these dusty steps that led straight down to red clay. Shalaya Crump stepped half-down in the hole in the ground and looked up at me. All that was left outside the hole were her boobs, her head, and her bony arms. She looked back at me and said, “Please, City. Don’t let me go by myself this time. I need to show someone.”

If anyone else in the world, including my mama or Mama Lara, were boob-deep into a hole in the ground, asking me to follow them, I would have run away and called the police. But standing right there, watching Shalaya Crump want me to help her so bad, made me ask myself when was the next time I could count on Shalaya Crump inviting me anywhere dark, small, and secret with her. I figured the worst thing that could happen is that we could get covered in worms or maybe it would be too hot in the hole and my sack would commence to smelling sour. But worms don’t bite, I told myself, and Shalava Crump’s underarms were already funky as six recesses.

The hole wasn’t the easiest to get in if you had wide hips, but after a while, I was in. “Now what?” | asked her. “Does my breath stank like stale Miracle Whip?”

Shalaya Crump grabbed my hand with her left hand and grabbed the handle with the other hand. “Don’t let go,” she said, “until I open the door again, okay?” Shalaya Crump pulled the secret door closed and darkness swallowed everything you were supposed to see.

“Your eyes closed, Shalaya?”

“Naw,” she said. “Yours?”

“Yeah.” I kept them closed for about ten seconds. “What about now? Your eyes still open?”

“Yeah, City. You should open yours, too.”

“Mine are open now,” I lied. “I ain’t scared of the dark.”

“Okay,” Shalaya Crump said. “Just be yourself when we open it. I need you to be yourself and don’t say a word to anyone.”

Shalaya Crump pushed the door open after about seven more seconds. Just like that, the woods were green like the Hulk’s chest instead of green like a lime. It felt hotter when we stepped out of the hole, too. Took a while for my eyes to adjust to the brightness. You could see bigger slithers of dark road from where we were in the woods, like the woods had gone on a diet. The road didn’t seem like a road anymore, either. It looked like a tar-black slab of bacon that was way fatter than it was before we went in.

“What’s wrong with Old Ryle Road?” I asked her.

“It’s new,” she said. She looked at my face, hoping that I’d act like I understood. “This ain’t the same woods we know, City.”

“It ain’t new.” | sucked my teeth. “How could woods be new in like five minutes?” | looked around and saw the Shephard house. Then I turned and looked at Shalaya Crump, who was watching me watch everything around us. “Why you watching me like that?”

Shalaya Crump didn’t answer me. “You smell that?” I asked her and started coughing. The air in the woods was heavier than it had been. I always wanted my mama to get me one of those plastic asthma bottles like some of the white kids on TV, but she said I never needed one. “I think I got asthma, girl. I’m serious.” She looked at me and forced a fake laugh. “What happened to all the trees? And that house.” | pointed toward the Shephard house. “What happened to it?”

I started running toward what I thought was the Shephard house and Shalaya Crump ran behind me. It was the same shape as the Shephard house but it read MELAHATCHIE COMMUNITY CENTER on the iron front door.

“City, calm down. Please. You have to be calm. Don’t be so loud. They’re gonna hear us.”

“Who?”

I looked through the woods toward Old Ryle Road and saw a crazy blue Monte Carlo with the most golden wheels I’d ever seen. The rattling of its license plate was in rhythm with a deep boom that sounded over and over again. It was the craziest, best-sounding boom I’d ever heard in my life.

“You hear that? What is it? Is that some new Run-D.M.C. or Herbie Hancock? Who that?”

“Be quiet, City.”

“How you gonna tell me to be quiet and you got me going in a hole feeling crazy? What’s wrong with you?” I grabbed her by her shoulders.

Shalaya Crump pushed my hands off. “Don’t ever push me.” She looked me in the eyes. “Ever! I don’t care if you feel crazy or not. All we can do is watch, okay? We can’t let them know we’re here. Shhh. Listen.”

We stood there in the middle of what kinda looked like the Night Time Woods, looking at what kinda looked like Old Ryle Road. I tried to block out anything other than the sounds of blackbirds chirping and stiff leaves blowing up on our feet and squirrels digging around in trees.

“Yeah, shoatee. Call me,” the voice said from the street. “I’ma keep my phone on!” But there was no one with him. The man was talking to himself.

“Is this a dream?” I asked Shalaya Crump. “Is it? It is, right? Well, I’m ’bout to wake myself up.” I took out my sweat rag and started trying to pop myself in the middle of the forehead, hoping I would wake myself up.

Shalaya Crump took my rag from me and told me to shut up. I heard more rattling booms coming from another strange truck with all-black windows and white hubcaps. I looked at Shalaya Crump and the confusion made me start tearing up right in front of her face. I tried to wipe my eyes with my sweat rag but it was too late. I was so Young and the Restless. Shalaya Crump was right.