by Jim Shepard
“No,” he says.
We don’t say anything for a few minutes. He rolls onto his side. He’s starting to get drowsy again.
“Okay, go to sleep now,” I whisper.
“Good night,” he goes.
“Good night,” I go. “You’re a great little guy, you know that?”
“Yeah,” he goes. “But leave the door open,” he goes.
For the first time in however long my mom has to wake me up for school. “Let’s go,” she says. I have no idea how long she’s been in my room.
While I get dressed she strips the bed and talks about when she’s going to come get me. She has errands to run so she won’t get there till a quarter of twelve or so.
I sit on the floor and pull on my cargo shorts. Assembly’s at eleven.
“You’re not wearing your pants,” she says.
I had my clothes all arranged in order so I could get them on faster.
I look at her and she looks at me. Something goes across her expression. She twists the sheets together and lifts them up and carries them down the stairs.
I forget my earplugs and have to go back up to my room.
Everything I eat and drink feels like it stays up in my throat. “Your brother’s conked out this morning, too,” my mom goes. She’s making and wrapping sandwiches to eat on the road. She reminds me not to forget to show my homeroom teacher the note. “And be where I said,” she tells me. “Don’t make us come looking all over the building for you.”
“I won’t,” I go. “Where’s Dad?”
“He went in early to practice his thing,” she tells me.
“Tell him I said good luck,” I go.
“You’re going to be late,” she says.
I stop at the door but she’s already gone down to the basement with a load of laundry.
At the bus stop the ninth-graders are having a loogie contest. One kid hawks one way farther than anybody else, and it lands on my pack. “Hey,” I go.
“Hey,” the kid goes. The other kids laugh.
I don’t have anything to wipe it off with. I end up dragging it along the grass and it just smears around.
“Hey,” the kid goes. The whole ride they keep saying it to each other—“Hey”—and then they all laugh.
I wait by myself on the playground before homeroom. Flake stays away from me.
When the bell rings I go sit in my chair and look at the pinecone on my homeroom teacher’s desk. It’s next to her water bottle. Some kids are whispering during announcements, and a girl in front of me goes, “Oh my God, what is so funny?”
Assembly’s fourth period, so I’ll be getting out of math. My foot keeps bouncing on the floor under my desk.
In English they’re diagramming sentences. Ms. Meier calls on me to go up to the board three straight times, and even though I didn’t do the homework I get all three sentences right. After the third one, a girl goes, “Edwin’s on a roll,” and Michelle goes, “I swear, there’s someone in his brain doing this for him.”
When I sit back down, my hands are shaking. Ms. Meier tells me I’m doing great. “Can you look up when I’m talking to you?” she asks. “Thanks.”
When she turns to write on the board, two boys in front of me slap palms and touch knuckles across the aisle. She passes around some handouts, and Michelle takes out her three-hole punch for anybody with three-ring binders.
In Spanish somebody’s put up a new poster over the blackboard of an elephant on a beach ball. Over the elephant it says THE KEY TO LIFE IS BALANCE.
“What’s on your pack?” the girl across from me asks.
Flake finds me in the hall before third period. “Go to the bathroom and wait for the bell before you come out,” he goes. “Bring the whole duffel to the doors. I’ll take care of the wedge. And wait till you see me at the double doors. Go in when I go in. Don’t go in before I go in.”
“Look at you two making your big plans,” Tawanda says when she goes by.
In science the black girl who always takes her arms out of her sweater sleeves and sits there like a bundle hugs herself all class long. The bell rings after what seems like five minutes. My hands are numb. I blink three times to focus my eyes.
Everybody’s heading in the same direction but me. On the way to the bathroom I pass one of the special-ed rooms. On the desk there’s a stegosaur made of egg cartons. In the bathroom two kids are wrestling at the sink and I wait in a stall until they finally leave. The bell sounds for the start of fourth period.
I hear the pep band start up.
The hall’s empty when I look out. The sound of kids finding a place to sit on the pullout bleachers is like a far-off rolling boom. One little kid runs past the stairs at the far end of the hall and skids when he tries to turn. My locker’s right across from me. I cross to it and work the combination. I can hear the principal telling everyone to settle down. The second number slips so I start over. The next time the first number slips. The time after that everything goes right but the thing still doesn’t open.
Michelle comes along while I’m yanking on the handle and kicking the door. “What’re you doing?” she goes. “What’s your combination?”
I tell her and she bends over and puts her face next to the lock and opens it. When she swings the door open I stop it halfway and thank her.
“You’re gonna be later than I am,” she goes, and then takes off.
When she’s gone I wrestle the duffel out of the locker one end at a time. The principal starts in on the first part of his talk. I drag the duffel up onto my back and start for the gym. “And in JV footbaaaaall,” the principal says, and the kids all cheer. It sounds like Flake’s CD.
I dump the bag down before I look around the last corner. There’s no one near the doors.
When was I supposed to load in the clip? I squat and root around for it, and then for the gun. I can’t get the barrel clear of the bag. Finally I drop to my butt, stand the gun up, and ram the thing in. I remember another clip but it won’t fit in my pocket. I grab the gun and run for the wall next to the doors. Flake hisses something so loud from the other doors that I can tell how pissed off he is even though I can’t hear what he’s saying. He leans out from the wall with his carbine.
I slap my back to the cinder block. My heartbeat’s going in my ears. I hold the gun so the barrel’s up and away from my face. I remember the safety and fumble it off.
When I look back at the other doors Flake’s away from the wall and facing them. His expression is like he wishes he could scream in my ear. When he sees he’s got my attention he grabs the handle and swings the door open and disappears.
I breathe in all the air I can and push away from the wall and grab the door handle myself. I pull the thing open.
Michelle’s standing in front of me. She turns and looks at me and then looks at the gun.
The vice principal is next to the wall inside the door. I turn the barrel to him. He has a look like I found something strange in the hall and holds a hand out toward the stock.
Someone at the other door yells. Someone screams. Flake starts firing. My head recoils even at that distance and I put a hand to my ear. I forgot the earplugs again.
The sound freaks me out. The whole place ricochets with screaming. I see Weensie bumping down the bleachers headfirst on his back. Another kid’s knocked backward into a girl, and red confettis up his shirt.
Everybody who’s not running away from Flake is running at him. One kid gets him around the neck and then falls over somebody underneath him and Flake puts the carbine in his belly and fires. He pulls the barrel away from that kid and keeps firing at everyone around him, the gun so low I can’t see it anymore.
“Shoot your fucking gun!” he screams, and across from me a fat kid loses his footing trying to get off the bleachers and bowls down five or six girls. Flake fires off more rounds and there are other gunshots and he disappears. A security guard out in the middle of the floor is still aiming at him with a pistol and the vice principal
knocks me flat and when I hit the ground the Kalashnikov goes off and wild thin trenches spike up out of the hardwood floor until my hand comes off the trigger. The concussion blows in both my ears, and over all the other noise there’s a grinding, high-pitched sound like you hear at the bottom of a pool. It feels like my head is spiraling in on itself. An elbow cracks my ear and it sounds like a wooden block. I can’t see if Flake’s okay and somebody’s got my legs. Some ninth-graders jump on the pile and the vice principal yells for them to get away but they don’t listen. Kids are screaming and colliding trying to get through the doors and falling and climbing on the kids already down.
And I’m screaming louder no matter how deaf I am because I know where I’m headed, with cops and reporters and counselors and shrinks asking what I knew, everybody wanting to know what I was in on and what we wanted. The vice principal’s shouting something in my ear and some kid’s working on a headlock but I keep getting out of it. I’m crying and screaming Flake’s name, which pisses off whoever’s holding my arms, and they start punching my face to shut me up.
And weeks from now when they tell me how Flake died and actually show me on the tape from the security camera I’ll see myself in the background, standing there pointing my gun and doing nothing with it. And Michelle will be like He didn’t shoot and the vice principal will be like He didn’t shoot and everybody will be like Flake was the bad one, Flake fucked him up, Flake made him what he was.
Because they know who Flake was. He took no shit and never lied to himself. Good, I think, do it, while they grind my head into the floor. Now I’m like everybody else—a liar—and nobody knows and nobody cares. Nothing about me is any good. Nothing I wanted to be is left. If I could get hold of the gun I’d turn it on myself. And sometime soon they’ll be right: the danger will be past. My dad will say, standing in the hall one night when he thinks I’m asleep, “Maybe we’re out of the fucking woods here.” And we will be. No more woods. I’m a faggot. I’m a joke. I’m a blowup with nowhere to go, a dick who couldn’t do one simple thing, a house burning down from the inside out.
Jim Shepard
PROJECT X
Jim Shepard is the author of six novels and two story collections, including most recently Love and Hydrogen. He teaches at Williams College and in the Warren Wilson MFA program, and lives in Williamstown with his wife Karen, two sons, and tiny tiny daughter.
Also by Jim Shepard
Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories
Flights
Paper Doll
Lights Out in the Reptile House
Kiss of the Wolf
Nosferatu
Batting Against Castro: Stories
AS EDITOR
You’ve Got to Read This (with Ron Hansen)
Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs (with Amy Hempel)
Writers at the Movies
FIRST VINTAGE CONTEMPORARIES EDITION, APRIL 2005
Copyright © 2004 by Jim Shepard
Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks and Vintage Contemporaries is a trademark of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Shepard, Jim.
Project X: a novel / Jim Shepard.—1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Eighth grade (Education)—Fiction. 2. Male friendship—Fiction.
3. School violence—Fiction. 4. Suburban life—Fiction. 5. Teenage boys—
Fiction. 6. Revenge—Fiction.
I. Title.
PS3569.H39384P76 2003
813’.54—dc21 2003047575
www.vintagebooks.com
www.randomhouse.com
eISBN: 978-0-307-42733-5
v3.0_r1
