"Wait," I said. "Who is a shark?"

"Wow! I'm so glad I didn't grow up in the '80s," she said.

The room we walked into was only thing I'd been in since I'd been in 2013 that felt like home. Everything else from the shiny hubcaps to the six-foot TVs to the music to how folks wanted me to compete in a Spell-Off seemed different. I guess I should describe the room or something since it felt like home, but there ain't really nothing to say about it except it felt like home. Looking back on a room, you can make up all kinds of flowery stuff about it if you want to, but this room had four dirty walls, a high ceiling, and a dusty floor, and it was empty just like most of the rooms in 1985.

"Let's do this," Baize said, and we walked toward the stage.

Even though Baize and I were there together, I felt embarra.s.sed. Embarra.s.sed, I understood on that stage, was just another way of saying I felt alone. It was the first time I'd felt alone since I'd been in 2013 and that was mostly because of Baize.

Right there, though, I remembered that I'd forgotten about Shalaya Crump. Even though I'd dreamed about her, I'd forgotten how I needed her. If Shalaya Crump would have been there, we could have dealt with the cameras and the crowd together. I didn't know what I was supposed to do on that stage in front of those people. And even more than that, I couldn't believe I was on some raggedy stage in 2013 when the girl I loved was 50 years away from me, probably doing something fun and nasty with the ugliest boy I'd ever seen in my life.

I couldn't see anybody in the crowd because the lights were shining so bright. I sat on the left side, third seat from aisle, and Baize was in the same seat on the other side.

The judge made us stand up for the Pledge of Allegiance. While everyone stood, I walked over to Baize, who stayed sitting. "Look," I whispered in her ear. "I'm gonna go, okay? Shalaya Crump needs me. Thanks for everything. If I find your computer, I'll bring it back to you, okay?"

"You can't leave yet," she said.

I started walking away from Baize when I heard, "Baize Shephard is our first contestant. I'm sure most of you know that Baize tied for fifth place in last year's Spell-Off. Baize lost her parents and brother in Katrina eight years ago and she actually lives right down the road. In addition to doing her homework, Baize is an aspiring hip hop performer and entrepreneur. Sounds fantastic. She writes in her bio, 'If you get it twisted, please tighten it back up, Boo Boo. My name is Baize Shephard, a.k.a. the Baddest Baize in Mississippi. I do not need to win the Spell-Off to know I'm special. This is Baize Against the World, not that Akeelah and the Bee life. Hashtag Baize killed swag hashtag my hood to your hood.'"

I looked over at Baize and she was frowning.

"Baize, your first word is 'abnegations.'"

Baize stepped to the microphone with her fist clenched, looking down at her red, black, green, and yellow hightop Nikes.

"Um, I don't know how to spell it," she said. "I thought we were supposed to introduce ourselves." Baize walked right back to her seat, still frowning. The crowd and the spellers started clapping in spurts. I was clapping loud and hard as h.e.l.l for her until they called my name.

"Voltron Bailey, from Jackson, Mississippi, we'd like to welcome you. Voltron has been added as an alternate. He is a special wild-card compet.i.tor in our Spell-Off. Voltron was born in Melahatchie but moved to Jackson after the storm hit. As a result of all that gang violence, he is back in Melahatchie, where people know how to act. We expect great things from him. Since you didn't provide us with a bio, Voltron, would you like to say something about yourself?"

"Oh, okay," I said. "Back home, we...uh, we say that reading, it's...umm...it's fun-da-mental. You know, like it's fun and mental, duh. There's a lot of violence in Jackson but it ain't a shark tank. I'm serious. If kids had more programs and our parents had more money, I don't think it would be that violent at all." Everyone was quiet. I guess they expected more, but I was done playing a role in this dumb Spell-Off. I needed to go find Shalaya Crump. "I'm sorry, but, um, I have to go home. My stomach hurts. I feel like I'm about to lose my manners, to tell you the truth. Listen though," I said into the mic. "Be nice to Baize, okay? Let her do her bio like you let me do mine."

No one said a word, so I looked down at my feet as they slid off that stage, and tried not to imagine the looks on folks' faces as I headed out the door of what used to be a Freedom School.

I wanted it all to be a dream.

I wasn't out the door more than 20 seconds before Baize came running after me. When she caught me, we didn't say a word. We just walked toward the hole. During the first minute of our walk, Baize was quiet and I watched my feet miss most of the thin branches that had fallen in the woods. Every time I stepped an inch from a branch, I thought about how I couldn't wait to tell Shalaya Crump that I had been on a stage in 2013 talking about stuff I knew nothing about.

During the second minute of our walk, every time we pa.s.sed an ant bed, I thought of all the folks in 1985 who would have been shamed if they had seen how I represented them. I had looked like a complete fool in front of folks I didn't even know. I could feel Baize looking at my face too hard while I was thinking. "Don't worry about it, Voltron," she said. "How you feel?"

"Why you even asking me that?" I asked her. "I'm fine."

"I mean, you caught an L," she said. "No doubt about that. That was a fail and a half back there, but you had your heart in the right place." She put her hand on my shoulder as we walked. "We should have never come anyway. It was more important that we went back and saved your friend."

"You didn't have to come, though. You should have stayed."

"Naw, I'm good. I just really wanted to say that 'This is Baize Against the World, not Akeelah and the Bee' line on stage. I thought they were gonna let me say it in my own voice. I think it could have gone viral."

It was weird, because up until that point, I hated any folks who were skinnier than me and taller than me and smarter than me and funnier than me and sweated less than me. And I hated folks from different states and folks who had shinier penny loafers and folks who had rounder heads than me, and folks who didn't like as much tartar sauce and hot sauce on their catfish as me. But right then, I didn't even hate those folks. I did, however, hate this future-I mean, Klan-hate. After I saved Shalaya Crump, I wanted to do everything I could to come back to the future and make it suffer for helping me embarra.s.s myself.

With all my hate bubbling, we walked to the hole. Out of nowhere, Baize fell to her knees right outside the hole and told me to hold on a second.

"What are you doing?" I asked her.

"What's it look like?"

"Looks like you praying. But why?"

"The question is, why ain't you praying," she said. "My parents and great-grandma told me that every knee must bend, especially when you have no idea what's gonna happen next. You should probably pray with me."

I looked down at her. "I pray before I go to bed like two times a week."

"That's on you," she said. "Just give me a minute."

And with that, Baize brought her hands together, closed her eyes, and actually started praying right outside the hole. After a minute or so, I started breathing heavy wondering how much longer this prayer was going to take. Near the end, she touched my calf and said, "Amen."

Baize got in the hole first and I followed her. While we were in the hole, deep in the dark, Baize grabbed both of my wrists and made her way down to the palms of my hands.

"Baize." It was the first time I'd called her by her name. "You were scared to stay back here by yourself, weren't you?" I asked her. "Your eyes open?"

"Yeah, Voltron. They're open, and yeah, I was scared to be there alone. Are you scared right now?"

That was the new best question anyone had ever asked me. The thing is, I was never scared of what I should have been scared of. For example, I wasn't scared of people finding out I stole those Bibles for Shalaya Crump. I wasn't really even scared of the Klan. I was only scared of knowing that Shalaya Crump could love someone else. Nothing else scared me. And if nothing really scared me, I wondered if anything else really even mattered. Everything else just made me mad or made me embarra.s.sed or made me nervous. But all of those feelings had to do with Shalaya Crump in some way or another.

"Ain't no reason to be scared," I told her and took my hands back. "What can people do to you, really?"

"They can make you disappear," she said.

"Yeah, but then you're gone. I ain't afraid of disappearing. I bet disappearing doesn't even hurt, to tell you the truth."

"People can mash your heart in your chest, Voltron, while you're still alive. They can take people from you. That's something to be afraid of. Stop fronting like you're 'bout that life, boy."

I said okay, but I knew people could hurt people way more than Baize would ever know. Shalaya Crump and I had this friend named Rozier. I liked to think about big ol' JET-centerfold booties for as long as Rozier knew me, and Rozier liked to think about big ol' boy booties for as long as I knew him. That's just how he was. The thing about Rozier was that he was the kind of guy who you met and 29 minutes later, you knew he would be better than Eddie Murphy when he grew up. Rozier invented farting out loud in homeroom. He also invented calling people "ol' blank-blank-blank-a.s.s n.i.g.g.a." Like if you ate an apple too fast, Rozier would call you an "ol' eating-apples-like-they-plums-a.s.s n.i.g.g.a," or if you failed a test, he'd call you an "ol' watching-Three's Company-when-you-shoulda-been-studying-a.s.s n.i.g.g.a."

If you called Rozier a name he didn't like, Rozier could slap you in the face better than any kid in Melahatchie, except for maybe Shalaya Crump. The summer of '84, Rozier got jumped by some dudes from Waveland. Rozier had embarra.s.sed one of the dudes in front of his family earlier at the arcade. After the boy called Rozier a f.a.ggot, Rozier said he'd never met a boy who smelled like sack and dookie through his church clothes. He called him an "ol' wiping-your-a.s.s-forward-instead-of-backward-so-the-dookie-get-caked-up-under-your-sack-a.s.s n.i.g.g.a." He said the boy needed Mr. Miyagi to teach him to correctly "wipe on, wipe off." Even his friends started laughing, and when the dude got in Rozier's face, Rozier slapped the boy across his mouth twice with both hands. That's four slaps right in front of his family. Then he ran.

The boy who got slapped four times got three of his older c.o.c.k-strong friends to help find Rozier when he was by himself in the Night Time Woods the next day. Rozier slapped the best he could, but they ended up calling him a f.a.ggot and beating him down with T-ball bats. They didn't ever hit him directly in the head, but they crushed his larynx. He was in the woods by himself for a whole day before we found him. Rozier ended up in a coma, and one week later, he was dead. Shalaya Crump and I didn't speak a word about revenge until the night after the funeral.

That night we planned how we were going to kill the boys, and we planned for the whole rest of the summer. I came up with a good plan, too. But that's the strange thing about planning to kill boys from Waveland with someone like Shalaya Crump. She had the worst temper of anyone I knew, but she was also the smartest person I knew. At some point, Shalaya Crump realized that we didn't really want to kill the boys from Waveland.

"We just want them to hurt like we hurt," she said. Shalaya Crump claimed that in order to hurt the boys, we'd have to "kill some little boy they loved, but not kill them." And neither of us really had it in us to kill some little Waveland boy we didn't know. By the end of the summer, all four of the boys involved got sent to juvenile detention centers for five years.

Anyway, I didn't feel like explaining to Baize how I'd seen Rozier disappear, too, so I just said, "I hear you. You're right. I should be afraid."

I opened the door to the hole slowly so we wouldn't be slapped across the face by the 1964 Klan. I sniffed as I opened the door to the hole and knew we were where we needed to be.

"It's so dark," Baize said. She was bent over coughing under a magnolia tree. "Everything is so green here, too. You know why?" I didn't answer her. I was busy looking around for the Klan. She kept coughing.

"Look," I told her, "we can't play in this place the way we could in 2013. We gotta be quiet and we gotta always keep our head up, you hear me?" I was trying to make my nostrils flare and make lines form in my forehead. "You got folks around here who will slap the taste out of your little mouth if they think you did something small, like farted in a way that don't smell right."

"You got people like that back in 2013," she said and kept coughing. "I'm talking about straight goons." Baize's nose was bleeding. She wiped it on her shirt. "You okay?" I asked her.

"Yeah, I just feel a little weird."

I was starting to feel a little weird too, but not in my body. It was more in my head. I guess there were all kinds of ways to say it, but the easiest way was that I liked Baize more and more the longer we were together. And she liked me, too. It didn't hit me until we got out of the hole that instead of just wanting to get her computer back, maybe she really just wanted to come back with me. I didn't want to like her too much, though, because of Shalaya Crump. I could never like her as much as I liked Shalaya Crump, but still, if I liked Baize too much, I knew Shalaya Crump would be able to tell, and then everything would be ruined.

"Get all that sickness out of you," I told her. "They got these Red Naval cats around here. And those things will come after you and start talking if you don't watch it. And these folks here, they don't even dress like real people." I picked up a few acorns and tossed them at the base of tree. "All you can see is their eyes, and if you joke with them, they love to make you suffer."

"That's better than it is back home, where them goons look just like you. I'm serious. Female goons get to hating on you, too. The most basic of b.i.t.c.hes wanna fight you for being glamorous and focused."

"Did you really just say that?" I asked her. "Hard head makes a soft glamorous a.s.s. You gonna be begging to get stomped out by a female goon after the Klan get ahold of you and throw you up in that colored bathroom with one of them Red Naval cats." I threw an acorn at her forehead. "You laughing now, but when they start choking you out, don't say I didn't tell you."

"d.a.m.n, Voltron," she said, "can you not hate for like the next five minutes? d.a.m.n!"

We walked toward the Freedom School and peeked in the window. There was this slim, light-skinned lady talking to a tired, greasy-looking black man. The lady was walking around pointing and yelling and holding some paper with her back to us. The man was facing her, sitting at a desk and laughing.

"Who are those people?" Baize asked me.

"I don't know. Be quiet." I looked harder. "Is something wrong with that lady's face?...I can't tell. Just stay behind me."

We decided to go in the Freedom School, since the people looked nice enough. They didn't look rich at all, but the hair on both of their heads was so shaped up and neat that I started brushing my own hair.

"Whose babies y'all is?" the lady turned around and asked when we opened the door. I'm not sure how to describe her face, but the skin beneath her eyes and all over her forehead looked like it had been burned really bad and it was maybe just starting to heal. The craziest thing was that her eyes looked normal and they were huge and shiny.

"We ain't babies," I told her. I looked at Baize and she looked back at me.

"I'm City and Shalaya's baby," Baize said, stepping forward. "But I stay with my great-grandmama."

I dropped Long Division.

AND A WAY.

After reading the craziest chapters yet of Long Division and sitting there with Pot Belly, I started to understand the sad that he was feeling. There were some red, green, yellow, white, or orange sprinkles in the sad I felt, but mostly, the sad was all just layers and layers of the thickest blue you'd ever seen in your life. Whenever I'd come close to feeling that blue before, I'd pick scabs, or I'd turn off the light and get nice with myself, or I'd come up with a plan about how to get some shine in homeroom at Hamer, or I'd troll the internet with the screen name Megatroneezy, or I'd post something inspirational or something extremely ratchet on Facebook, or I'd eat bowls of off-brand Lucky Charms until I got severe bubble guts. For some reason, I didn't want to do any of that since I had lost at the contest.

I started thinking about Grandma, Uncle Relle, LaVander Peeler, Baize Shephard, and Mama. And when I really thought about all of them, I just felt so much bluer than ever. Yeah, all those folks tried to mask their different blues, but after the praying, smoking, rapping, thinking, drinking, and running, there just seemed to be nothing else left but blue rooms with people who were really even lonelier and bluer than Octavia Whittington, the bluest girl I ever knew.

Octavia Whittington was the light-skinned girl at Hamer with ashy elbows and the bad self-esteem. Octavia almost transferred from Hamer after her adopted parents said, "Fannie Lou Hamer doesn't provide an environment conducive to Octavia's depressive condition." At one of those parent-teacher-student meetings, I remember LaVander Peeler Sr. saying that he was offended that another parent would try to bring that "doggone language of depression" into our school. He didn't say it as plain as he wanted, because a decent number of students were at the meeting, but I do remember him saying loud and clear, "Those other folks might do it that way, but how are we any better than them if we start drugging the doggone feelings out of our kids."

I remember the standing ovation he got, even from Mama, who was usually too busy to come to those meetings. I don't know why, but I always felt sorry for Octavia after that. Yeah, she always stayed alone, and her eyes looked crazy as h.e.l.l because she only blinked once every minute, but if there was any kind of pill or drank that could make Octavia love living, I really think she should have been allowed to take it at school, especially if other folks at school were chasing the blue away by getting nice with themselves in the bathroom and dissing the h.e.l.l out of each other with long sentences.

I pulled out a pen from my pocket and finished writing my will on the last page I'd read in Long Division.

11. I leave my favorite pen to this white man in the shed because he needs to write an apology to Grandma and maybe even to Baize. That would make him not feel so sad.

12. I leave this copy of Long Division to LaVander Peeler.

13. I leave the other copy to share between Grandma, Shay, Baize, and this white man in the shed if he decides to apologize.

14. I don't want to die yet but I don't want to feel this kind of blue ever again. So sad ain't no joke.

WEARING BLOUSES NOW.

I was two hours and twenty minutes from my baptism and Grandma was already at work on Monday morning. She planned on meeting Uncle Relle and me at the church on her lunch break. To tell you the truth, Grandma left the house heated. First, she hated that she had agreed to make me wear this dashiki that my mama had left in her closet. I hated it, too. It was bright yellow with brown half moons and full red sun splotches all over it. She said that Mama had always wanted me baptized in the thing, but she was p.i.s.sed when Mama called her and told her she wouldn't be able to make it to Melahatchie. I could tell the dashiki was too big when Grandma handed it to me. When I put it on, the d.a.m.n thing came all the way down past my navel, all the way past my thighs, and d.a.m.n near touched my kneecaps. Plus, the neck part was too wide, so you could see the suit coat, vest, and tie underneath. I needed a shape-up, too, and there wasn't one wave in my head since that white dude had taken my brush.

Uncle Relle came out on the porch while I was stewing in shame. He had a crazy smile on his face. "Anything you want to say to people before your big day?" he asked with one of his little phones in my face.

"Naw, not really. I'm good. I just hate my outfit."

He laughed and said, "That s.h.i.t looks real f.u.c.ked up, but you good! Anyone you wish could be here to see you go through this day?"

I just looked at him. Couldn't believe Uncle Relle was using the word "wish." Wasn't his style. "Naw, Uncle Relle. I'm good."

"I'll be right back in like ten minutes."

I asked him where he was going, but he ignored me and jumped in his van.

Ten minutes later, Uncle Relle was pulling back into the driveway and someone else was in the pa.s.senger seat with him. Uncle Relle got out, walked around the pa.s.senger side, and opened the door. In what felt like slow motion, a patent leather blue-black Adidas. .h.i.t the gravel.

I knew those Adidas.

Uncle Relle focused his camera phone on LaVander Peeler's face as he got out of the van. As soon as I saw him, I thought about how stupid I looked in that d.a.m.n dashiki. The LaVander Peeler I knew before the contest would have ethered me in one epic sentence for that outfit, but I wasn't sure how much of that LaVander Peeler was left since he'd gone through that h.e.l.l at the Coliseum. Plus, I hated that MyMy and Shay couldn't meet him.

"What up, LaVander?" I tried to be real cool when he walked up on the porch. "What you doing here?"

He looked at my hands. "Where's your brush?"

"Oh." I used my left hand to go over my hair. "Long story."

"You straight up wearing blouses now?" he asked me.

"Oh," I tried to get my lie straight. "This is the new thing they wearing down here. But it's not a blouse."

"What is it then?" he asked, and just stood there reminding me of the old LaVander Peeler. I was deep into thinking of all the ways I could blame LaVander Peeler when one of those crazy things happened where we both looked up at Uncle Relle hoping he would turn that camera off so we could say what we really needed to say.

Surprisingly, he told us we'd be leaving soon and walked in the house.

"Why are you at my grandma's house?" I asked him again.

"My father told me I had to come."

"But why?"

"You doing that show your uncle told me about?" he asked me. "That seems like something you would wanna do. They say we could make over a million dollars each if we do it. All things considered, only a fool could turn down that money."

"Yeah, I guess that's true," I said. "But I feel different after being here for a few days. That contest or that show ain't nothing compared to what I been through this weekend."

He just looked at my feet, shook his head, and said, "..."

"What?" I asked him.