Long division : a novel.

Kiese Laymon.

ONE SENTENCE.

LaVander Peeler cares too much what white folks think about him. Last quarter, instead of voting for me for ninth-grade CF (Cla.s.s Favorite), he wrote on the back of his ballot, "All things considered, I shall withhold my CF vote rather than support Toni Whitaker, Jerome Wallace, or the White Homeless Fat h.o.m.os.e.xual." He actually capitalized all five words when he wrote the sentence, too. You would expect more from the only boy at Fannie Lou Hamer Magnet School with blue-black patent leather Adidas and an ellipsis tattoo on the inside of his wrist, wouldn't you? The tattoo and the shoes are the only reason he gets away with using sentences with "all things considered" and the word "shall" an average of fourteen times a day. LaVander Peeler hates me. Therefore (I know Princ.i.p.al Reeves said that we should never write the "n-word" if white folks might be reading, but...), I hate that wack n.i.g.g.a, too.

My name is City. I'm not white, homeless, or h.o.m.os.e.xual, but if I'm going to keep it one hundred, I guess you should also know that LaVander Peeler smells so good that sometimes you can't help but wonder if a small beast farted in your mouth when you're too close to him. It's not just me, either. I've watched Toni Whitaker, Octavia Whittington, and Jerome Wallace sneak and sniff their own breath around LaVander Peeler, too.

If you actually watched the 2013 Can You Use That Word in a Sentence finals on good cable last night, or if you've seen the clip on YouTube, you already know I hate LaVander Peeler and you're probably wondering about my feelings for that short Mexican girl from Arizona who kicked me in my knee.

The Can You Use That Word in a Sentence contest was started in the spring of 2006 after states in the Deep South, Midwest, and Southwest complained that the Scripps Spelling Bee was geographically biased. Each contestant has two minutes to use a given word in a "dynamic" sentence. The winner of the contest gets $75,000 toward college tuition if they decide to go to college. All three judges in the contest, who are also from the South, Midwest, or Southwest, must agree on a contestant's "correct sentence usage, appropriateness, and dynamism" for you to advance. New Mexico and Oklahoma won the last four contests, but this year LaVander Peeler and I were supposed to bring the t.i.tle to Mississippi.

At Hamer, even though I'm nowhere near the top of my cla.s.s, I'm known as the best boy writer in the history of our school, and Princ.i.p.al Reeves says LaVander Peeler is the best boy reader in the last five years. Toni Whitaker hates when Princ.i.p.al Reeves gives us props because she's a better writer than me and a better reader than LaVander Peeler, but she's not even the best girl reader and writer at Hamer. Octavia Whittington, this girl who blinks once every minute, is even better than Toni at both, but Octavia Whittington has issues with her self-esteem and she doesn't talk or share her work with anyone until the last day of every quarter, so we don't count her.

Anyway, LaVander Peeler has way too much s.p.a.ce between his eyes and his fade doesn't really fade right. Nothing really fades into anything, to tell you the truth. Whenever I feel dumb around him I call him "Lavender" or "Fade Don't Fade." Whenever I do anything at all, he calls me "White Homeless Fat h.o.m.os.e.xual" or "Fat h.o.m.os.e.xual" for short because he claims that my house is a rich white lady's garage, that I'm fatter than Sean Kingston, and that I like to watch boys p.i.s.s without saying "Kindly pause."

LaVander Peeler invented saying "Kindly pause" in the bathroom last year at the end of eighth grade. If you were p.i.s.sing and another dude just walked in the bathroom and you wondered who was walking in the bathroom, or if you walked in the bathroom and just looked a little bit toward a dude already at a urinal, you had to say "Kindly pause." If I sound tight, it's because I used to love going to the bathroom at Hamer. They just renovated the bathrooms for the first time in fifteen years and these rectangular tiles behind the urinal are now this deep dark blue that make you know that falling down and floating up are the same thing, even if you have severe bubble guts or constipation.

Nowadays, you can never get lost in anything because you're too busy trying to keep your neck straight. Plus, it's annoying because dudes say "Kindly pause" as soon as they walk in the bathroom. And if one dude starts it, you have to keep saying it until you have both feet completely out of the bathroom.

But I don't say "Kindly pause" and it's not because I think I'm slightly h.o.m.os.e.xual. I just don't want to use some wack catchphrase created by LaVander Peeler, and folks don't give me a hard time for it because I've got the best waves of anyone in the history of Hamer. I'm also the second-best rebounder in the school and a two-time reigning CW (Cla.s.s Wittiest). Toni said I could win the SWDGF (Student Who Don't Give a f.u.c.k) every year if we voted on that, too, but no one's created that yet. Anyway, it helps that everybody in the whole school hates LaVander Peeler at least a little bit, even the teachers, our janitor, and Princ.i.p.al Reeves.

When LaVander Peeler and I tied at the state contest, the cameras showed us walking off the stage in slow motion. I felt like Lil Wayne getting out of a limo, steady strolling into the backdoor of h.e.l.l. In the backdrop of us walking were old images of folks in New Orleans, knee deep in toxic water. Those pictures shifted to shots of Trayvon Martin in a loose football uniform, then oil off the coast drowning ignorant ducks. Then they finally replayed that footage of James Anderson being run over by those white boys over off Ellis Avenue. The last shots were black-and-whites of dusty-looking teenagers from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee holding up picket signs that said "Freedom Schools Now" and "Black is not a vice. Nor is segregation a virtue."

The next day at school, after lunch, LaVander Peeler, me, and half the ninth graders including Toni Whitaker, Jerome Wallace, and strange Octavia Whittington walked out to the middle of the basketball court where the new Mexican seventh graders like to play soccer. There are eight Mexican students at Hamer and they all started school this semester. Princ.i.p.al Reeves tried to make them feel accepted by having a taco/burrito lunch option three times a week and a Mexican Awareness Week twice each quarter. After the second quarter, it made most of us respect their Mexican struggle but it didn't do much for helping us really distinguish names from faces. We still call all five of the boys "Sergio" at least twice a quarter.

Anyway, everyone formed a circle around LaVander Peeler and me, like they did every day after lunch, and LaVander Peeler tried to s.n.a.t.c.h my heart out of my chest with his sentences.

"All things considered, Fat h.o.m.os.e.xual," LaVander Peeler started, "This is just a sample of the a.s.s-whupping you shall be getting tonight at the contest."

He cleared his throat.

"African Americans are generally a lot more ignorant than white Americans, and if you're an African-American boy and you beat not only African-American girls but white American boys and white American girls, who are, all things considered, less ignorant than you by nature-in something like making sentences, in a white American state like Mississippi-you are, all things considered, a special African-American boy destined for riches, unless you're a homeless white fat h.o.m.os.e.xual African-American boy with mommy issues, and City, you are indeed the white fat h.o.m.os.e.xual African-American boy with mommy issues who I shall beat like a knock-kneed slave tonight at the nationals." Then he got closer to me and whispered, "One sentence, h.o.m.os.e.xual. I shall not be f.u.c.ked with."

LaVander Peeler backed up and looked at the crowd, some of whom were pumping their fists, covering their mouths, and laughing to themselves. Then he kissed the ellipsis tattoo on his wrist and pointed toward the sky. I took out my brush and got to brushing the waves on the back of my head.

It's true that LaVander Peeler has mastered the comma, the dash, and the long "if-then" sentence. I'm not saying he's better than me, though. We just have different sentence styles. I don't think he understands what the sentences he uses really mean. He's always praising white people in his sentences, but then he'll turn around and call me "white" in the same sentence like it's a diss. And I'm not trying to hate, but all his sentences could be shorter and more dynamic, too.

The whole school year, even before we went to the state finals, LaVander Peeler tried to intimidate me by using long sentences like that in the middle of the basketball court after lunch, but Grandma and Uncle Relle told me that winning any championship takes mental warfare and a gigantic sack. Uncle Relle was the type of uncle who, when he wasn't sleeping at some desperate woman's house and eating up all her Moon Pies, was in jail or sleeping in a red X-Men sleeping bag at my grandma's house.

What Uncle Relle lacked in money, he made up for in the way he talked and taught the ratchet gospels. The sound of his voice made everything he said sound right. When he opened his mouth, it sounded like big old flat tires rolling over jagged gravel. And he had these red, webbed eyeb.a.l.l.s that poked out a lot even when he was sleeping. I could tell you crazy stories about Uncle Relle's eyeb.a.l.l.s, his voice, and his sagging V-neck T-shirts, but that would be a waste of time, especially since the detail you just couldn't forget about, other than his voice, was his right hand. The day after he got back from Afghanistan, Uncle Relle lost the tips of three fingers in a car accident with our cousin, Pig Mo. Now, he had three nubs, a pinky, and a thumb. You would think that if you had three nubs, a pinky, and a thumb, you would keep your hand in your pocket, right? Uncle Relle always had his right hand out pointing at folk or asking for stuff he didn't need or messing around with weed and prepaid cell phones. He told everyone outside the family that he lost the tips in Afghanistan.

Grandma said Uncle Relle lied about his nubs because he wanted everyone to know he was a d.a.m.n survivor. In private, in a much thicker voice, she said, "A real survivor ain't got to show no one that they done survived." Grandma was always saying stuff you would read in a book.

"Lavender Peeler," I told him while brushing the sides of my head and looking at his creased khakis, "Oh, Lavender Peeler, my uncle and grandma thought you would say something wack like that. Look, I don't have to consider all things to know you ain't special because you know 'plagiarize' is spelled with two a's, two i's, and a z, not an s, especially since if you train them XXL c.o.c.kroaches in your locker, the ones that be the cousins of the ones chilling in prison with your old thieving-a.s.s brother, Kwame, they could spell 'plagiarize' with ummm,"-I started to forget the lines of my mental warfare-"the crumbs of a Popeyes b.u.t.termilk biscuit, which are white b.u.t.tery crumbs, that stay falling out of your halitosis-having daddy's mouth when he tells you every morning, 'Lavender, that boy, City, with all those wonderful waves in his head, is everything me and your dead mama wished you and your incarcerated brother could be.'" I stepped closer to him, tugged on my sack, and looked at Octavia Whittington out of the corner of my eye. "That's one sentence, too, wack n.i.g.g.a, with an embedded quotation up in there. And your fade still don't fade quite right."

Without even looking at me, LaVander Peeler just said, "Roaches can't spell so that sentence doesn't make any sense."

Everyone around us was laughing and trying to give me some love. And I should have stopped there, but I kept going and kept brushing and looked directly at the crowd. "h.e.l.l, Lavender Peeler can be the first African American to win the t.i.tle all he wants, y'all," I told them. "But me, I'm striving for legendary, you feel me?"

Even the seventh-grade Mexicans were dying laughing at LaVander Peeler, who was closest to me. He was flipping through one of those pocket thesauruses, acting like he was in deep conversation with himself.

"Shoot," I said to the crowd. "I'm 'bout to be the first one of us with a head full of waves to win nationals in anything that ain't related to sports or cheerleading, you feel me?"

Toni Whitaker, Octavia Whittington, and Jerome Wallace stopped laughing and stared at each other. Then they looked at both of us. "He ain't lying about that," Toni said. Octavia Whittington just nodded her head up and down and kept smiling.

The bell rang.

As we walked back to cla.s.s, LaVander Peeler tapped me on the back of the neck and looked me directly in my eye. He flicked his nose with his thumb, opened his cheap flip phone, and started recording himself talking to me.

"I'm not going to stomp you into the ground for talking about my mother, my brother, and my pops because I don't want to be suspended today, but this right here will be on YouTube in the morning just in case your fat h.o.m.os.e.xual a.s.s forgets," LaVander Peeler told me. "I do feel you, City. I also do feel that all your sentences rely on fakeness and magic. All things considered, I feel like there's nothing real in your sentences because you aren't real. But do you feel that a certain fat h.o.m.os.e.xual is supposed to be riding to nationals tonight in my 'halitosis-having daddy's' van? I do. All things considered, I guess his mama don't even care enough to come see him lose, does she?"

LaVander Peeler got even closer to me. The boy smelled like fried tomatoes, b.u.t.tered cornbread, and peppermint. I held my arms tight to my body and counted these twelve shiny black hairs looking like burnt curly fries curling their way out of his chin. I scratched my chin and kept my hand there as he tilted his fade don't fade down and whispered in my ear, "You know the real difference between me and you, City?"

"What?"

"Sweat and p.i.s.s," he told me. "I'm sweat. All things considered, sweat and p.i.s.s ain't the same thing at all. Even your mama knows that, and she might know enough to teach at a community college in Mississippi, but she ain't even smart enough to keep a man, not even a homeless one who just got off of probation for touching three little r.e.t.a.r.ded girls over in Pearl."

LaVander Peeler closed his flip phone, said, "One sentence," and just walked off.

ALL CLEAN.

Turns out LaVander Peeler commenced to tell our princ.i.p.al, old loose-skin Ms. Lara Reeves, that I called him a "n.i.g.g.e.r"-not "n.i.g.g.a," "negroid," "Negro," "African American," or "colored." I figured it was just LaVander Peeler's retaliation for someone turning him in two months ago for calling me a "f.a.ggot." I know who snitched on LaVander Peeler, and it wasn't me, but after he got in trouble for calling me a "f.a.ggot" he started calling me a "h.o.m.os.e.xual," because he knew Princ.i.p.al Reeves couldn't punish him for using that word without seeming like she thought there was something wrong with being a h.o.m.os.e.xual in the first place.

I guess you should also know that no one else at Hamer or in the world ever called me a "f.a.ggot" or "h.o.m.os.e.xual" except for LaVander Peeler. I'm not trying to make you think I've gotten nice with lots of girls or anything because I haven't. I felt on Toni's bra in a dark closet in Art and she twerked on my sack a few times after school. And I guess I talked nasty with a few people who claimed they were girls on this website called WhatYouGotOn-MyFreak.com, but really that was it. Truth is my sack stayed dry as h.e.l.l, but I don't think you're supposed to feel like a case about s.e.x unless you make it through tenth grade with a dry sack. The point is that even if LaVander Peeler caught you watching him p.i.s.s once, I don't think that should really qualify you as a h.o.m.os.e.xual.

Anyway, I sat in Princ.i.p.al Reeves's office waiting to tell her that I didn't call him a "n.i.g.g.e.r," but that I did bring my wave brush out after lunch by mistake.

In Princ.i.p.al Reeves's office, next to her huge bookshelf, was a big poster with a quote from Maya Angelou. The backdrop of the poster was the sun and in bolded red letters were the sentences, "Bitterness is like cancer. It eats upon the host. But anger is like fire. It burns it all clean. Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can't practice any other virtue consistently."

I hated sentences that told me that my emotions were like something that wasn't emotional, but I loved how those red words looked like they were coming right out of the sun, red hot.

Ms. Lara Reeves had been a teacher since way back in the '80s and she became the princ.i.p.al at Hamer about four years ago. The worst part of her being the princ.i.p.al was that she was also my mama's friend. My mama was known for having friends you wouldn't think she'd have. Mama had me when she was a soph.o.m.ore at Jackson State fourteen years ago. She's old now, in her early thirties, so you would expect her to have only black friends in her thirties, but she had black friends, white friends, African friends, and super-old friends like Princ.i.p.al Reeves.

Mama taught over at Madison Community College and Princ.i.p.al Reeves took a politics course from her. When I first heard that my princ.i.p.al was my mama's student, I thought I'd get away with everything. But it was actually harder for me to get away with anything since whenever Princ.i.p.al Reeves didn't do her homework or answered questions wrong, she liked to talk to my mama about how I was acting a fool in school.

On Princ.i.p.al Reeves's desk, you saw all kinds of papers flooding the bottoms of two big pictures of her husband, who disappeared a few years ago. No one knows what happened to him. Supposedly, he went to work one morning and just never came back. If you looked at pictures of Princ.i.p.al Reeves back in the day, you'd be surprised, because she looked exactly the same. She had the same curl at 62 that she had at 31, except now the curl was lightweight gray.

Princ.i.p.al Reeves also kept a real record player in her office. In the corner underneath the table were all these Aretha Franklin records. Mama loved Aretha Franklin, too, but she only had greatest-hit CDs, which she'd play every time she picked me up.

I invented calling Princ.i.p.al Reeves "Ms. Kanye" behind her back because even though she asked a lot of questions, you really still couldn't tell her nothing. She asked questions just to set up her next point. And her next point was always tied to teaching us how we were practically farting on the chests of the teenagers on the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee if we didn't conduct ourselves with dignity.

Before Princ.i.p.al Reeves stepped her foot in the door of her office, she was saying my name. "Citoyen..."

"Yes ma'am."

"Take this test," she said, and handed me a piece of paper. "Don't look at me with those sad red eyes. Just take the test."

At Hamer, they were always experimenting with different styles of punishment ever since they stopped whupping a.s.s a few years ago. The new style was to give you a true/false test if you messed up. And the test had to be tailored to what they thought you did wrong and what you needed to learn to not mess up again. The craziest thing is that it was usually harder understanding what the test had to do with what you did wrong than taking the actual test itself.

Name________Year_____True/False - Underline one 1. Desperation will make a villain out of you.

True/False 2. Only a fool would not travel through time and change their past if they could.

True/False 3. You were brought to this country with the expectation of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

True/False 4. If you push yourself hard in the direction of freedom, compa.s.sion, and excellence, you will recover.

True/False 5. Loving someone and loving how someone makes you feel are the same thing.

True/False 6. Only those who can read, write, and love can move back or forward through time.

True/False 7. There are undergrounds to the past and future for every human being on earth.

True/False 8. If you haven't read or written or listened to something at least three times, you have never really read, written, or listened.

True/False 9. Past, present, and future exist within you and you change them by changing the way you live your life.

True/False 10. You are special.

True/False *Bonus*

11. You are innocent.

True/False After I finished the stupid test, Princ.i.p.al Reeves put it on top of a stack of tests she hadn't graded yet and started going in on me. "Citoyen, do you know who the great Brenda Travis is?" she asked me.

"Umm..."

"No. You do not know. Brenda Travis was a fifteen-year-old high school student from right up the road in McComb," Princ.i.p.al Reeves said, and popped what looked like some boiled peanuts in her mouth. "That young lady canva.s.sed these same streets with the SNCC voter-registration workers 50 years ago. She led students like you on a sit-in and, for the crime of ordering a hamburger from a white restaurant, the girl was sentenced to a year in the state juvenile prison."

"Just a regular hamburger?" I asked her. "Not even a fish sandwich or a grilled cheese? That's crazy."

"That contraption holding your teeth in place, that's the problem." Princ.i.p.al Reeves sat at her desk and started ruffling through papers.

"I don't get it," I told her. "What contraption?"

"Your mouth, that contraption. It is going to be the death of you or somebody else," she said. "Today is the biggest day of your life, Citoyen. You want to waste it calling your brother LaVander Peeler a 'n.i.g.g.e.r' and using a wave brush on school property? You know we don't bring wave brushes to school at Hamer."

The problem was that at Hamer, you used to be able to use your wave brush until the second bell at 8:05, but ever since Jerome Wallace beat the bile out of this c.o.c.k-eyed new kid, Roy Belton, with a Pine wave brush during lunch, you can be suspended for something as simple as having a wave brush on school property.

"LaVander Peeler ain't my brother," I told her, "and I didn't think I was wasting it. I'm ready. You'll see."

Princ.i.p.al Reeves just looked at me. I tried to look away toward the bookshelf so I wouldn't have to look at her face.

"What's that?" I asked her. "That's so crazy."

"It's just a book," she said.

"I thought you said we were never supposed to say 'just a book' about a book."

Princ.i.p.al Reeves made that rule up last year. She had every book in her bookshelf placed in alphabetical order but on the floor underneath the shelf was a book called Long Division. There wasn't an author's name on the cover or the spine. I couldn't tell from looking at it if it was fiction or a real story. The cover had the words "Long Division" written in a thick black marker over what looked like the outside of this peeling work shed behind my grandma's house.

"Who wrote that book?"

Princ.i.p.al Reeves ignored my question and just looked at me.

"Please stop looking at me, Princ.i.p.al Reeves."

"I'll stop looking at you when you start looking at you. You've got to respect yourself and the folks who came before you, Citoyen. You," she paused. "You know better. Didn't your mother, you, and me sit right here before the state compet.i.tion and talk about this? What did your mother tell you?"

"She said, 'Your foolishness impacts not only black folks today, but black folks yet to be born.' But see, I don't agree with my mama..."

"There are no buts, Citoyen," Princ.i.p.al Reeves said. "You are history. Kids right around your age died changing history so you could go to school, so you could compete in that contest tonight, and here you are acting a fool. The day of?"

"Is that a question?"

"Fifty-one years ago, black students took responsibility for the morality and future of this country," she said. She was so serious. "They organized. They restrained themselves. They put themselves in the crosshairs of evil. They bled. And when the cameras were on, they were scared. But they stepped up and fought nonviolently with dignity and excellence, didn't they?"

I just kept looking down at Long Division and started to smell the french fries coming from the cafeteria.

"Nevermind that book, Citoyen. Is it too much to ask of you to respect those students today?" she asked. "Look at me. Those that are still alive are watching. You know that, don't you?"

"You mean tonight?" I took my eyes off the book and looked at Princ.i.p.al Reeves. "Tonight, they'll be watching?"

"Yes. Tonight, they'll be watching, along with the world. But they're always watching, so you must behave and compete accordingly. This is just another test. I'm not gonna suspend you or tell your mother. However, if you act a fool one more time this semester, I have no choice but to reach out."

I hated when folks used the word "however" in regular conversation. You knew that the person you were talking to was so much wacker than you thought as soon as you heard that word. "I know," I told her.

"One more thing," she said and closed the office door. "I hear from LaVander Peeler and a few other teachers that you're spending a lot of time alone in the bathroom stalls."

I looked down at the stains on my brown Adidas.

"Have you been-"

"What?"

"Touching yourself inappropriately at lunch time?"

"Lunch time?"

"Yes. I've heard that after many of the boys go into the bathroom to yell 'Kindly pause,' that you go in there and ... listen. We don't want to halt natural human functions at Fannie Lou Hamer, but that activity might be better suited for home, possibly before you go to sleep or maybe even when you wake up."