Jim Shepard - Project X

“I’m not?” I go.

“Look, I don’t have the energy to fight about this right now,” she goes.

“I’m not fighting,” I go. “I’m asking a question.”

“What’s the question?” she asks, sitting down alone at the dining room table.

“I’m not abnormal?” I go.

“Let’s move, ” she calls to everybody else. “Dinner!”

I sit and take a sweet potato and cut it open. It’s like lava inside. “I’m glad to know I’m not abnormal,” I go.

“Edwin, please,” she goes.

“Edwin please what?” my dad goes. He’s in charge of drinks, so he hits the fridge and brings over a pitcher of ice water for them and a carton of milk for us.

“Turns out I’m not abnormal,” I go.

“Well, let’s not rush to judgment on that one,” he goes.

“Honey,” my mom goes.

“What?” he goes. “I can’t kid around with him?”

She shakes her head and starts dishing out the meat.

“You’re fine,” my dad says to me. “I grew up with kids who make you and Flake look like Archie and Jughead.”

Everybody eats for a while. I’m mad I got into this.

“I got a rash on my butt,” Gus says.

“Does it still hurt?” my mom asks.

“Wanna see?” Gus says to me.

“Maybe later,” I go.

He gets up on his chair and drops his drawers. The rash doesn’t look so good.

“Whoa,” I go. It’s just what he wanted to hear.

“You remember when I was six and there was that huge birthday party, pool party?” I ask my mom and dad. “And I didn’t want to go?”

Gus pulls up his pants and sits back down. “We remember,” my mom says.

“How come you made me go to that?” I ask.

“You told that little boy you were going to go at least a dozen times,” my mom says. “Remember how he kept calling to make sure you were still coming?”

“I really didn’t want to go,” I tell them. “I really didn’t want to go.”

“Well, maybe we shouldn’t’ve made you go,” my dad says.

The kid’s older brothers had all their friends there. They took my bathing suit. They locked me in the pool shed. When I got out I had to run around trying to get my suit back, covering myself with a Frisbee. Two kids took my picture.

“Poor Edwin had a hard time today,” the kid’s mother told my mom when she came to pick me up. I got a shovel from our garage and tried to go back. My mom had to call my dad.

“No more pool parties,” my dad goes.

“You better believe it,” I tell him.

“All right, we made a mistake,” he tells me. “From now on, whatever happens, it’s because we made that one mistake.”

“Can we just drop this?” my mom goes.

Gus is taking all this in without saying a thing.

“I don’t need to talk about it,” I tell her.

The phone rings. Nobody answers it. The answering machine clicks on but whoever it is doesn’t leave a message.

“You just shouldn’t have made me go, that’s all,” I tell her.

“Oh my God,” my mom says.

My English teacher is coming down the hall in the morning before homeroom. Of course I’m having trouble with my locker and when I finally rip it open I’m rushing to dump stuff out of my knapsack and pick up other stuff for first and second period. My math book and some papers flop onto the floor, and Dickhead, the kid who beat me with a plank, is going by and scuffs them out into the middle of the hall.

Of course my teacher doesn’t see that. She helps me pick stuff up.

“Thanks, Ms. Meier,” I tell her.

“What’s this?” she goes. It’s a drawing of a pot with curvy fumes coming off it. The pot has a skull and crossbones on it and next to the pot it says 200 degrees in Flake’s spaz handwriting.

The look on my face catches her attention. I’m staring at the thing thinking, I can’t believe I didn’t get rid of this.

“What is this?” she goes.

It’s a chemistry experiment, I tell her. The bell rings.

“You’re not old enough to take chemistry,” she says.

“No, I don’t mean for school,” I go. “My dad got me one of those sets.”

She turns the paper over to look at the front again and asks, “What’s supposed to be in the pot?”

“I don’t know,” I tell her. “Chemicals.”

“Why does it have a skull and crossbones?” she wants to know.

“I don’t know. Because it looks cool,” I tell her.

She thinks about it for a while and then hands it back to me. “Can you write me a pass?” I ask her.

She says okay and before homeroom I go to the bathroom. There’s a boy leaning over the sink to put on Chap-Stick in the bathroom mirror. In a stall I tear the picture into two thousand pieces and flush them down the toilet.

“Bowel trouble?” the vice principal asks when I pop out into the hall. It’s empty and quiet.

“I got diarrhea,” I tell him.

“Mr. Davis, do you think I have problems?” Bethany asks as she goes by with a girlfriend.

“I reserve the right to not answer that question,” he tells her, and they both laugh.

“Mighty quiet in there for diarrhea,” he tells me once they’re gone.

Up yours, I think, on the way to homeroom.

Step two is figuring out a way of sealing up the little door in the gym. We talk about it either at Flake’s house or in the fort. After what my mom said about our sitting around and talking about getting even with people, my room’s out.

Step one I get all the credit for, according to Flake. Step one was figuring out we could do it in the gym instead of having to lock up the whole school.

The door’s not very big but it’s a harder problem than it looks like. It has to be something we can do fast. It has to be something we can do with stuff we can bring to school without anybody noticing. And it has to be something nobody’d notice for at least a few minutes.

We’re not coming up with anything right off the top of our heads.

We’ve already figured other stuff out. We’d have the guns in our lockers. We’d go for the all-school assembly before Thanksgiving. They hang big crepe-paper turkeys and shit on the windows and doors, and that might help hide whatever we do to the lock.

I keep coming back to duct tape, because it’s one of those doors where you hit the bar to open it from the inside. But Flake thinks duct tape’s too easy to see and wouldn’t be strong enough anyway.

“With enough tape it would be strong enough,” I go. We’re in his bedroom and he’s got the Great Speeches CD going in case his mother or somebody wanders by the door.

“What’re you, gonna stand there for thirty minutes wrapping duct tape around things?” he goes.

“I don’t think it would take that long,” I tell him.

“Who do you think was the best serial killer?” he goes. He knows I have a book about it.

“It depends,” I go. “Ed Gein was pretty fucked up.”

He looks grossed out. I told him about Ed Gein.

“I keep thinking we could get a hammer or chisel and just smash the shit out of the thing that goes into the wall,” he goes. “You know, the thing that sticks out.”

“Yeah, like that wouldn’t make a gigantic noise,” I go.

“Well, I’d rather make a gigantic noise than stand there for eight hours,” he goes. “If nobody sees you right when you do it, you could take off by the time people came.”

Suppose they came and checked out the door, I ask, and he makes a face. What about we bring a lock, I ask. Like a bike lock.

“There’s nothing on the wall to lock the bar to,” he says.

We think about it. He’s got a sketch of the door and draws lines from the bar in various directions. “What we need to do is do like a test,” he goes.