Project X

by Jim Shepard

“This is really an outside kind of toy,” Flake agrees. It’s cracks like that that nearly get him thrown out of the house. One time my dad did throw him out.

  “So you want to know what I was thinking?” my mom goes.

  “The skinny kid with the glasses,” Flake says. He digs his barrel into the potato and points.

  “The one with the nose?” I go.

  “No, the one with the—whaddaya mean?” Flake goes. “They all got noses.”

  “So go ahead,” I tell him.

  “Mr. Hanratty,” my mom goes.

  “You missed,” I tell him.

  “I know that,” Flake says.

  “I’m going to count to three,” my mom goes.

  “What?” I go. “What were you thinking?”

  “I was thinking you guys might like to go out for that martial arts team or whatever that they’re putting together,” she goes. “Who’s doing it, the soccer coach? It sounds right up your guys’ alley.”

  “We don’t have an alley,” Flake goes.

  “You guys could really use some extracurriculars,” she goes.

  “I know. We should be on the debate team,” Flake goes.

  “You’d be great,” I tell him. “Whatever anybody said, you’d be like, ‘Yeah? Your mother.’ ”

  “What about you?” Flake goes. “Anytime anybody made a good point you’d be like—” He scrinches up his face like he’s gonna cry.

  “Shut up,” I go.

  My mom rubs her eyes again. When she stops, she looks sad. “Well, the thing they sent home is on the kitchen table,” she finally says. “If you ever do decide you want to get out of this room.”

  She shuts the door and goes downstairs. I load up another round of potato and throw the gun into the closet.

  “College,” I finally go. “Anybody who goes to college . . .” I can’t even finish the sentence.

  “I wanna be president someday,” Flake goes. “Or maybe Wizard Death Lord.”

  We got no Interests. We got no extracurriculars.

  “I’m goin’ to Fuck U,” I tell him.

  “We’re goin’ to Uzi State,” he tells me back.

  As opposed to our classmates. Our classmates achieve every minute of the day. They Strive Higher and Reach Farther. They put together model UN’s while we sit around in study halls with our mouths open. They’re captains of the mah-jongg JV or Vermont Junior Business Achievement or Hot Pants for Social Change. They think this shithole is something to be proud of. The ceilings are falling in and nobody’s had new textbooks in a hundred years, but they’re all School Spirit. They’re dirps: Dicks in Responsible Positions. When one of them gives us grief for being such lazy shits, Flake’ll lower his chin and go Dirp, like he’s burping.

  “Let’s go throw rocks,” Flake goes.

  “Let’s not and say we did,” I tell him.

  “So what do you want to do?” he goes. We don’t watch TV. We hate TV. TV’s a fucking blight.

  We climb out the window onto the porch roof, jump over the breezeway to the garage, then hang off the gutter and drop down. Sometimes my mother thinks we’re still up there in my room.

  At the practice fields the JV boys’ and girls’ soccer teams are kicking balls around. They’re almost all ninth-graders.

  “What’re we doing here?” I want to know.

  “How about you stop complaining till you have an idea?” Flake says.

  We decide to go to the fort we made under an off-ramp. You can only see in from one direction, and it’s bigger than it looks. We found it one day playing a game where you ride through the gap in the guardrail at top speed. The gap’s about two feet wide, and you have to bomb through without hooking a handlebar or elbow.

  Somebody calls “Heads up!” and we duck and a soccer ball whonks Flake right on the head. The ball ends up in some wicked-looking prickers around a Dumpster.

  I’m laughing. The kid who kicked the ball is laughing. He’s still in his follow-through. Some of the girls’ team is laughing.

  “Ball?” the kid calls. He comes over to the chain-link fence and hangs on it, making faces at his friends.

  Flake goes over to the Dumpster like he doesn’t see the prickers and wades right in. “Ow,” he says, and everybody laughs even more. He tears the ball out of the bush and looks at his hand.

  “Who puts prickers around a fucking Dumpster?” he says. “What’s wrong with this fucking town?”

  “Hey ace, send it back,” the kid goes.

  Flake holds it out in front of him.

  “Give it all you got, ace,” another kid goes.

  “I’ll give it all I got,” Flake says. I can see he’s planning on kicking it to Peru, but he shanks it sideways down the street.

  “Fuck,” he shouts. I know better than to say anything.

  “Nice leg,” one of the kids says and starts to head around to the gate. The girls from the girls’ team have turned away and gotten in a circle to do some kind of trapping exercise. Everyone’s peppy and there’s lots of shouted encouragement. It looks like the Dance of the Tards.

  Flake and the kid reach the ball at the same time. Flake picks it up and turns and booms the thing it has to be fifty yards down the street. It bounces ten feet in the air and keeps going out into the intersection. Cars honk.

  By the time I get there the kid’s got Flake on his back and he’s choking him with the collar of his own T-shirt. I grab the kid by the hair. Somebody punches me on the side of the head. We get piled on. The kid I grabbed hits me two or three times in the chest and shoulders as fast as he can and then grinds his hip on my face and someone kicks me in the back. Somebody else kicks me in the tailbone. Flake’s screaming and swearing.

  I’m twisting around like a fish. I’m hard to hold down. The kid on my head gets dumped off and another drops onto my chest with his knees on my arms. He knocks the wind out of me and slaps my face in various directions. Flake’s on his stomach with a guy on his legs and a guy on his back. The guy on his back takes off one of his cleats and starts beating on Flake’s head with it. The cleats are rubber. Flake’s head pounds into the dirt. “I’m gonna kill you,” Flake yells at him. “You’re gonna kill me?” the kid repeats, and pounds him with the cleat. “I’m gonna kill you,” Flake says. “You’re gonna kill me?” the kid says.

  “Let ’em go,” one of the coaches hollers from the fence. “Now.”

  Everybody piles off us, passing around congratulations. Flake gives a kick from where he’s lying but otherwise lets them go. I have my hands over my head. We hear them crossing the street.

  There’s grass and stuff in my hair. My nose and mouth are bloody. My ear’s scraped up, too. My hand comes away from it wet. The blood’s stringy and slimy from the crying. It’s hard to spit. I don’t want to move because of my tailbone. I shift my butt and that’s enough to make me stop. Off in the distance I can hear the coach giving the kids shit.

  “Fuck,” is all we can say, a couple times, because everything hurts. Flake sniffles and writhes around.

  “You all right?” I finally ask him. Over on the practice fields, the teams are heading in and the kids who kicked our ass are running laps.

  “Fuck you,” he says. I know how he feels: he wants the world to blow itself up, me included. He tips onto his back. His shirt looks like a slasher movie. His nose is a mess. There’s dirt in his eyes. He puts some fingers on his face and feels around. He hasn’t stopped crying yet.

  “Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa,” he says. It’s not very loud. He tips back onto his side. It’s one of the saddest sights I’ve seen all year.

  “Aaaaauuaaaaauuaaah!” he screams. Even lying in the dirt, I jump a little. He wipes snot off his face and flings it. The kids running laps slow down to look over. Then they speed up again.

  2

  My mom sits next to me on the bed and helps with the ice. When the facecloth gets warm I pass it over and she dunks it in the bowl and wrings it out and hands it back. My lower lip’s swollen and one eye’s half-squinty. I
look like Popeye throwing a tantrum.

  “What’s the matter with you?” she says in a soft voice. Like everybody else, she really wants to know. “Why can’t you get along with the boys in your class?”

  “They weren’t in my class,” I tell her. It’s hard for her to hear through the facecloth.

  “Is his nose broken?” Gus wants to know from the other side of the door. He’s four and his favorite video’s The Making of Jaws documentary.

  “He’s fine, Gus,” my mom goes. “He just wants some time to himself.”

  “Can I see?” Gus asks.

  “Then it wouldn’t be time to himself,” my mom tells him.

  “You’re in there,” Gus goes.

  “Why do you think you’re always picking fights?” she asks me quietly.

  “Are there guts?” Gus asks.

  “No guts,” my mom goes. “Are you watching the movie? ’Cause if you’re not watching the movie I’ll turn it off.”

  “I’m watchin’ it,” Gus tells her.

  He’s been on a Predator kick for a few weeks now. Flake thinks it’s a scream. Flake brings him magazines like Fangoria and Cinefantastique with gross pictures of how they do the gore. He shows them to Gus when my mom isn’t around. When Gus tells her about the gushy pictures Flake shows him, she says, “That’s nice.”

  “I don’t pick fights,” I tell her.

  “You just show up, and people hit you, right?” she asks.

  I shrug. My eyes start to tear up because I’m feeling sorry for myself.

  “So did you know any of these kids? They weren’t in your grade?” she says.

  “Ninth-graders hate us,” I tell her.

  “Why?” she asks.

  “Well, eighth-graders hate us too,” I go.

  Gus opens the door and comes in and closes it behind him. “Can I come in?” he goes. He gets on the bed and lies on his side and only looks at me a little bit. It’s something great he wants to save and not do all at once.

  My dad comes home. We all just look at each other while he troops around downstairs. Then he comes up.

  “What’s this, a meeting?” he asks at the door.

  “You don’t look too surprised,” I go. Meaning about my face.

  “I’m not,” he goes. He wears a shirt and tie and Levi’s to class. He gets the Levi’s at the Army-Navy store and spends like seventy-five dollars on the ties. “What happened to you?” he says.

  “He was all bloody,” Gus tells him.

  “He got into a fight,” my mom goes. She sounds like she’s been carrying a big rock up a hill for a hundred years.

  “His shirt was all bloody,” Gus tells him.

  “Some kids,” I go.

  He turns into his room, shaking his head. I hear the hangers in the closet.

  “Is he all right?” he calls to my mom.

  “He seems to be,” she calls back.

  “Was the Nightrider involved?” he wants to know.

  He calls Flake the Nightrider because Flake’s always wanting to go out when I’m supposed to be in for the night. One time I got caught climbing off the porch roof at three in the morning. I slipped and landed on our recycling bin for tin cans. Flake said we would’ve gotten caught by deaf people.

  “Apparently they had a disagreement with most of the soccer team,” my mom tells him.

  “High school kids?” he says.

  “JV,” I go. He’s still in his room, so I don’t see if he has any reaction.

  “I don’t know what to do,” my mom says, I guess to him. “Maybe another school.”

  “I’m not going to private school,” I tell her. I got showed around one last year after I had so much trouble in sixth grade. They probably also figured it’d get me away from Flake. The kid assigned to be my special friend for the day let me sit on a meringue square somebody’d put on my seat in one of the classes. When I got home I put the flyer down the disposal and turned the disposal on. “So how’d it go?” my mom asked, when she got home.

  Gus starts jumping on the bed. He has this game where he jumps on the bed and I cut his legs out from under him with my forearm.

  I tell him to stop it. I have a big pillow under my tailbone, but the jumping doesn’t help.

  “Not now, honey,” my mom says. “Your brother doesn’t feel good.”

  “Is he hurt?” Gus asks, jumping.

  “You’re gonna be hurt, if you don’t get down,” my dad calls from the other room. “And are you watching that movie, or am I going to turn it off?”

  Flake looks worse than I do.

  “Look at you,” I go when he comes over after supper.

  “I’m gonna heal,” he says. “You’re always gonna look like that.”

  His dad cut his hair shorter so now his ears stick out even more. Plus he’s got these cartoon eyebrows.

  The only thing that cheers us up besides somebody getting hurt is mosh volleyball. It’s the only sport we play. Flake doesn’t like to call it a sport. We invented it ourselves. One of us serves off the roof of the garage and the other has to put it back up onto the roof without letting it hit the ground. The roof edge is low so you can sky and pin the thing to the top and then it just rolls off and is pretty much unreturnable. But what’s great is, to slam it like that you have to throw yourself into the garage wall. The paint’s all covered with scuff marks and our legs are all covered with bruises. My dad hates the game because it knocks stuff off the walls inside. Once we knocked the ladder onto his car.

  You also can go up and block somebody’s slam, which means both of you are hitting the wall at the same spot. On some serves, when the return bounces high, you can get way back and get a running start.

  We go at it until it gets dark. I jam a finger and Flake gets grit from the roof shingles in his eye. I bang the shit out of my tailbone again and almost have to stop. I slam three in a row, and he starts leading with his knees when he goes up. He nails me in the balls and we have to take a break while I recover. I cut his legs out from under him on a block. “Asshole,” he goes. “Fuckwad,” I go back. “You are such an asshole,” he goes. “You are such a fuckwad,” I go back.

  He wins 21–17. When we’re heading in, the neighbor on that side of our yard calls from his kitchen window, “I’m sorry to see that game end.”

  A couple hours later on the way home Flake takes a dump on the guy’s picnic table. He tells me about it in school the next day.

  “How about this?” he goes. We’re hanging around the school yard. Both our buses got there early, and we’re not in a hurry to get inside. There’s a jungle gym out in the middle of the field surrounded by a little fence because some kid almost got killed on it. “How about you went down the street with like an armored personnel carrier and blew in every other front door? Imagine how everybody’d freak trying to figure out what the deal was?”

  “I don’t think I wanna go to gym anymore,” I tell him. “Think I could pretend to have parasites or something?”

  We’re pitching little rocks at each other’s feet. We’re pretty close to each other, but we haven’t hit anything yet.

  “Bethany what’s her name is like everywhere lately, you notice that?” he goes.

  “I never see her,” I go.

  “You never see her,” he goes.

  The first bell rings. They call it the first bell but it’s a buzzer. “We better get in,” I tell him.

  He gives me that look. “You didn’t see her. You didn’t see her hanging out with Fischetti and those guys near the thing?”

  “Yeah, I saw her there,” I go.

  “You saw her there,” he goes.

  “What do you, like her?” I ask. He’s the one who brought it up.

  “Suck my dog’s chew toy, how’s that?” he goes.

  “Your mother’s still busy with it,” I tell him.

  He doesn’t answer for a minute. We’re kind of hurrying because it’s a long hallway. In big letters along the ceiling it says THE WALL OF RECOGNITION. There are all
these framed photos of old teachers.

  “Forgot my fucking homework,” he says to himself. “God damn it,” he goes when we’re right outside his door.

  “Bites,” I go.

  The second bell rings.

  “Have a good day,” I tell him. Then I catch my toe on the stair and almost kill myself. He leans his shoulder into the door to his room. “What’re you, my mother?” he goes.

  When I was little, one of the things I really loved was boating. Flake hadn’t moved to town yet, but I really liked going with my parents. We had this six- or eight-foot sailboat that was seriously wide and dumpy, almost as wide as it was long. From the back it looked like a dog dish with a mast. My dad called it the Spirit Breaker, and when I asked him why he said it was a private joke. Every weekend in the summer we’d take it to the reservoir and toot around on it, all three of us jammed in. When you turned the rudder you hit somebody. When you were beaching and pulled out the centerboard, the other person in the front had to lean back.

  One time we gave these other kids in a Sunfish a tow. They broke some hardware at the top of their mast, so they were stuck over by the marshes, just drifting around and arguing. They didn’t want to get out in the muck and walk the thing all the way around. My mom brought us about in a snappy little turn and my dad asked if they wanted a tow. There was a good wind. I remember being surprised he asked and surprised how happy it made me. What did I care? We had like eight hundred feet of rope in the bottom of the boat sloshing around in the water, for tying up to the dock. I got to be the guy who threw the rope when my mom brought us around again. And I held it while we pulled them along until my dad tied our end to the cleat in back. We got going pretty good. I remember the kid in front’s face as we bounced through some waves the powerboats had left. He was older than I was but I still thought, Good for you, kid, like I was his dad. “That was really great,” I remember telling my parents on the drive home. “It really was,” I remember my mom agreeing.

  “Mr. Pengue came by today,” my mom goes.

  “Okay,” I go.

  “He was surprisingly upset,” my mom says.

  We’re all waiting for the pizza to heat up, and it’s taking forever.