Project X

by Jim Shepard

  “Somebody said bad shit about you, we’d tell you who it was,” I go to Tawanda.

  She thinks about it and she knows I’m right. “Maybe we should tell them,” she goes to Michelle.

  Michelle’s slurping from her milk pint. She’s looking at it like it disappoints her. “I was just trying to help,” she says. She’s pissed off but looks embarrassed, too. When she’s sitting she always takes her sandals off and turns them around with her toes and then puts her feet back on top of them.

  “Who told you we were queer?” Flake goes. He’s keeping his voice down but that’s about it.

  “Matthew Sfikas,” Michelle finally says. “Him and another kid.”

  “Who the fuck is Matthew Sfikas?” Flake goes. You can hear him thinking; I don’t even know these people.

  “Oh, shit,” I go. “He’s that ninth-grader I had detention with.”

  “What’s his fucking damage?” Flake goes. “Why’s he doing this?”

  “He said he saw you guys,” Michelle goes. “That’s the only reason I believed him.”

  “I told the monitor he was playing with himself,” I go to Flake. “He’s getting even.”

  “What did he say he saw us doing?” Flake goes. His voice is a little high. I’m getting as worried as the girls are.

  “I don’t want to talk about that,” Michelle says.

  Flake looks around like he’s trying to find something to use on somebody. “Who is he?” he goes to me. “Point him out.”

  “He’s not here right now,” I go. I make like I’m looking and can see he’s not here. He doesn’t say a word from there on, and neither does Michelle.

  “Nice dining with you all,” Tawanda says when we get up from the table. Nobody answers.

  “Isn’t your class that way?” I go to Flake as we head down the hall.

  He shoulders into a ninth-grader and the kid just gapes at him. “I’m not going to class,” he goes. Then he turns a corner and the bell rings.

  He gets detention for having spent fifth and sixth periods wandering around the school looking for Matthew Sfikas. He did his looking by peeking into ninth-grade classrooms one by one. Finally a teacher noticed and went out into the hall.

  “You don’t even know what he looks like,” I tell him in the detention room. He’s alone and there’s one kid waiting outside the door for the monitor to show up. I only have a minute before the buses leave.

  He sits there hanging on to the front end of his desk with both hands like the floor’s gonna tip.

  “Why get a hundred years of detention for this kid?” I tell him on the phone that night. “Why not just save him for our thing?”

  “Save him for what?” he finally goes.

  “Our thing,” I go.

  There’s a little buzzing on the line. Nothing works right in either of our houses.

  “He could be first,” I go. “We could start with him.”

  “Yeah,” Flake admits. I can tell he thinks it’s a good point.

  The next day before homeroom someone trips a seventh-grader when he’s coming down the stairs with his art project. His art project is the Seattle Space Needle made out of elbow macaroni. Flake and I are at the bottom when he lands. Macaroni ricochets off lockers.

  He sits there wailing and scooping up the pieces that are still glued together. He doesn’t care who sees him. Kids with lockers nearby look sympathetic. Some kick macaroni back toward him.

  “Somebody should help BG out, there,” somebody from our grade goes. He got called Baby Gherkin after some kids saw him in the shower in gym.

  A girl carries a bigger piece over and sets it down next to him. “Thank you,” he goes.

  People step around him going up and down the stairs, and he tries to fit a couple of the pieces back together.

  When I see Flake before third period his middle finger is wrapped in this fat bandage. It looks like a Q-Tip. He’s happy about it. He says they were doing dissection in science and he put the little plastic scalpel with the razor blade in his pocket. He only remembered when he put his hand in his pocket later. “Look what I did to my finger!” he says to the vice principal when he goes by while I’m standing there. Kids laugh. “Ouch,” the vice principal goes. It looks like he’s already heard about it. He doesn’t seem to get that he’s just been given the finger.

  After lunch Flake spots me at the other end of the room and waves both hands. Both middle fingers are bandaged. When I ask him, it turns out that after he cut the first finger he stuck the scalpel in his other pocket.

  “You gotta be fucking kidding me,” I tell him.

  “No,” he goes, like he lucked out twice. “Hey, Mrs. Pruitt!” he calls. He sticks up both middle fingers.

  After school we decide to walk home when Flake’s detention is over. I sit on the steps and wait, watching the other kids with their friends. When he finally gets out we hang around the end of the playground for a minute before heading home. A ninth-grader comes up and asks if we want to buy any shit.

  “What do you got in mind?” Flake goes.

  The kid has a white kitchen garbage bag in his knapsack. He shows us the inside of it without taking it out. I can’t tell if Flake knows what he’s looking at.

  “White crosses,” the kid goes.

  We look at them. You can tell Flake’s thinking the kid might be fucking with us.

  “What happened to your fingers?” the kid asks.

  “What fingers?” Flake goes.

  “Those,” the kid says, pointing at the bandages.

  “Boating accident,” Flake goes.

  The kid takes some time to work that out. “So you interested?” he finally says.

  “How much?” Flake goes.

  The kid tells him.

  “I don’t think so,” Flake goes, like that’s too much. The kid shrugs and twist-ties his bag and zips up his knapsack. He walks back over to his friends.

  “You know what white crosses are?” I ask.

  “You?” Flake goes.

  “Yeah,” I go.

  On the way home Hermie comes running over from a side street. He must’ve seen us going by. “What happened to your fingers?” he asks Flake.

  “Boating accident,” Flake goes.

  “Yeah, right,” Hermie says. “That kid try and sell you something?”

  “How do you know?” Flake goes.

  “He’s always ripping people off,” Hermie goes.

  “How’d you know he was trying to sell us something?” I go.

  “I saw you,” he goes.

  A black Camaro goes by and does a U-turn and slows down when it reaches us. A girl hangs out the window and a much older guy is driving. “Eat shit, Herman,” the girl goes.

  “Fuck you,” Hermie calls.

  The guy guns the car and they peel out.

  “My sister,” Hermie goes.

  “You got a sister?” Flake goes.

  “I guess I must, if that’s her,” Hermie goes. I laugh.

  “Shut up,” Flake goes.

  “Duh,” Hermie says. Flake lets it go.

  “So what happened to you?” I finally ask Hermie. He’s got like a huge scuff mark on the side of his head. It’s a black-and-red scab.

  “Budzinski,” Hermie moans. He touches the scab with his fingers like it’s come off before.

  “I’m gonna have to see this Budzinski,” Flake says, like he’s impressed.

  We walk along for a while. Nobody says anything or asks where Hermie thinks he’s going. You can see how happy he is about it.

  “My dad’s got a gun, you know,” he goes.

  “Everybody’s dad’s got a gun,” Flake goes.

  “I know where he keeps it,” Hermie goes.

  “I guess we’re all in trouble now,” Flake tells him.

  I start to say something, but I don’t even know what I was going to say. I’m such a loser and a half. I’m the kid you think about when you want to make yourself feel better. If I were me I’d talk about myself behind my
back.

  It rains for three straight days. One morning it’s so dark that I think it’s still nighttime until my mom comes upstairs and strips the covers off the bed with me still lying there. Flake’s detention lasts until the end of the week, so when school’s finally over I just go home and do homework.

  The girl sitting next to me in homeroom cries all three days. The teacher asked about it on the first day and they talked at the front of the room, but he hasn’t brought it up since.

  “Here he is, Mr. Greenpants,” my math teacher says to everybody when I show up a minute late.

  I spend the rest of the class not believing he did that to me.

  Every Monday morning we have to hear on the PA system, along with the rest of the horseshit about blood drives and smoking on the playground, how JV football did. Half the kids cheer when it turns out we won. The principal always goes, “And in JV footbaaaaall . . .” and then waits, like it’s a cliffhanger. It drives me nuts. It feels like it’s six in the morning and these idiots are getting excited about a game they saw last Friday. Weeks when it turns out we lost, a few of us around the room cheer. “That’s very nice,” the homeroom teacher goes.

  Our nickname is the Hilltoppers. The student newspaper has headlines like LADY TOPPERS O’ERTOP LADY PANTHERS. During Student Fair the first week of school when I found myself over by their table the editor asked if I’d be interested in working on the paper. He had no idea who I was. I told him I would if I got to do a Dirp column.

  “Sure,” he said. “What’s a Dirp?”

  “Dicks in Responsible Positions,” I told him.

  “Hey,” he said to a kid standing right behind me. “You interested in working on the school paper?”

  My dad had the same idea that week. He sat me down and gave me the college-and-extracurriculars talk.

  “College?” I went. We were all in the kitchen and I was helping my mother break the ends off of green beans. “I’m still deciding if I’m going to high school.”

  “Very funny,” he said.

  When he sees me in the living room looking like death warmed over and staring out the window because school sucks and it’s been raining for four years and Flake’s been in detention all week, he goes, “Now, what do you want?” and makes a face at me. “You going to turn into an aggrieved minority group?”

  “What?” I go.

  “Your father had a bad day,” my mom calls from the other room.

  He disappears to change and seems like he’s in a better mood when he comes back. He’s carrying a beer and has his ready-to-talk look on.

  “Given any more thought to the school paper?” he goes, like we were just talking about it. He’s home from class or office hours or the Mascot Committee or whatever he had today, and he’s got his beer and now he’s ready to talk.

  Gus wanders through the living room and hands him a carrot. “I don’t want this,” Gus says, and then leaves.

  My dad takes a bite of the carrot and a swig of the beer. “I’m going to write a book about domestic life in America,” he goes. “It’s gonna be called ‘Dads Eat What No One Else Wants.’ ”

  “If you fell asleep on your back and it was raining hard enough, do you think you’d drown?” I ask him.

  “No,” he goes.

  “I think you would drown,” I tell him.

  My dad eats his carrot. “You seem a little down,” he goes.

  My hands are holding up my chin. I let my head slip through them until they finally have to grab my hair.

  “Your mother tells me the Nightrider’s run afoul of the law,” he goes.

  “Yeah,” I go.

  “He’s a misunderstood figure, there’s no doubt about that,” my dad goes.

  I make a sound like a horse.

  It makes my dad laugh. “Only in junior high can you be the object of awe and derision,” he goes.

  “What’s that mean?” I ask.

  He shrugs. He looks at his beer like he admires it. “Economics humor,” he goes.

  “Doesn’t sound like economics,” I tell him. I still haven’t turned around from the window.

  Gus is in the den singing to himself and playing with a toy that needs batteries and has no batteries. Lately he’s been going around the house butchering one of his favorite songs from a kid’s show he watches. The song’s called “We All Sing with the Same Voice.” He sings it “We all sing with the same boys.”

  “Remember that thing you hung on the Christmas tree?” my dad goes. He says it like he doesn’t need an answer, and I don’t say anything. It’s raining even harder.

  “It’s like blue out,” I finally go.

  What he’s talking about was last year when my English teacher told us at the beginning of a class that she’d just read the greatest short story in the history of the English language. She held up the book and hugged it to her chest. We were like, Please.

  She read the beginning of it in this hushed voice.

  “I’m so moved,” this kid next to me whispered, and a few kids giggled.

  There was one line that sounded right, though. I went up after class and asked if I could see it. It probably made her month.

  The line was “Christmas came, childless, a festival of regret.” I copied it down while she stood there. She asked if I wanted to read the whole story, and I told her I’d get it out of the library.

  When we were decorating, I put the line on a star-shaped piece of paper and hung it on the tree. “What the hell is this?” my dad said when he finally found it.

  9

  Flake had the idea to bury something we wrote in a box for people to find like years later. There’s a word for it but I forget what it is. He said it had to be a good box to keep the water out so what we wrote wouldn’t rot. He said to work on what we were going to put into it. I’d work on mine and he’d work on his. Then we’d put our stuff in together. We don’t know where we’re going to bury it yet, now that we can’t use our fort under the underpass. He thought it would be funny to put it next to the flagpole in front of the school, but I thought people would see where the ground had been dug up. He thought we could do it so nobody could tell.

  I have a pad I’ve been writing stuff in and hiding in a space above where my top drawer fits into my desk. There’s nothing on the cover but on the first page I wrote PROJECT with a pair of crossbones underneath. They look like an X. On the second page I have a score sheet divided into days of the times that people haven’t looked at me or talked to me or answered me at school. I make a crossbones for each one and put them in a column. I fill it out when I get home from school or, if Flake comes home with me, before I go to bed. Mondays are ahead of Thursdays for first place.

  On the third page I have a drawing of these huge Gatling guns they use in Chinook and Huey gunships. They fire like eight million rounds per minute. After that I have a drawing of Gus in sunglasses that I think is funny. I did it when he fell asleep in my room and I was supposed to be watching him. After that I have some demon faces that I can never get right.

  After that there’s a lot I still need to write down. Like: What happens when you hate yourself?

  What happens when you know you’re worse than anybody else knows you are?

  What happens when everything you touch turns to shit?

  What happens when you feel sorry for yourself and then sit around feeling sorry for yourself for feeling sorry for yourself?

  Poor kids or kids who can’t walk or pick up anything and have to work a computer with like sticks in their teeth: we’re lucky compared to them. We’re whiners. We’re babies.

  We’re good at reminding each other how pissed off we are and how nobody cares, not really. Sometimes one of us’ll whack the other on the side of the head to remind him of what we have to do.

  So when we get his dad’s guns and go into the assembly and we see like some special-ed kid in one of those chairs, do we bail and come back later when we hope there’s only going to be people we hate around? We need to make sure
that once we’re in, we can’t be going, Hey, watch out for Tawanda, or Let’s not get Mrs. Pruitt, let’s get Ms. Meier.

  Flake says nobody’s going to be taking him alive and that he’s not going to shoot himself, either. I don’t think we have to decide about that yet.

  We might get away.

  After a sign-up sheet for achievement tests went around the homerooms last week, he had us get out his father’s guns again when the house was empty and he squatted on the bed and had us hold the Kalashnikov and the carbine up over our heads. Here’s my achievement tests, he said. Here’s yours.

  For the next fifty years, people who weren’t anywhere around will swear they were right here when it happened. “So there I was, bullets flying.” Shit like that. It makes us wish they were here. Then we could shoot them and they’d get what they want: proof they’re not bullshitters.

  Flake gives me a 50 percent chance of wussing out. He says if I do he’ll shoot me himself. “I’ll shoot you, you fuck,” I tell him. It always makes him laugh.

  He says to remember that out of everybody in the gym there’s still only going to be two kinds of people: the ones who don’t know anything about us, and the ones who don’t want to know.

  10

  He hasn’t given up on Matthew Sfikas. I can see his brain going, trying to figure something out. When I tell him again about my idea about waiting he goes, “I’ll kick his ass now, and we can shoot him later.”

  “How are you going to kick anybody’s ass with two fingers like that?” I want to know.

  “I’ll use a shovel,” he goes. “I’ll use a rake.”

  “You can’t use a shovel,” I go. “You can’t use a rake.”

  “What do you care?” he goes. “I’ll use a chain saw if I want.”

  He won’t, though.

  “So let’s find him then,” I go. “Bring your rake.”

  “You think I won’t?” he asks.

  But then we end up just sitting in his room, and he’s in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

  “Why don’t you put bug powder in his milk?” I go. I’m looking at the booklet that comes with his Great Speeches CD. Something knocks me to the floor on my face, and he’s jumping up and down on my back with his knees.