Jim Shepard - Project X

“We’re gonna have to get it out at school, ” he says.

“We are?” I go.

“What happens when you want to change clips?” he wants to know.

“Oh, yeah,” I go.

He shakes his head.

I turn over his dad’s nine-millimeter, which looks like something a secret agent would use. Its clip is heavier than a rock that size. Flake’s looking at it, too. We both just look at it for a few minutes. I’m still thinking about changing clips. “Think we’re really gonna do this?” I go.

Flake shrugs. He’s still looking at the pistol. We hear some kids ride by on bikes, but we can’t tell who they are. “Let’s do this later,” he says.

“Okay,” I go.

We put everything back in their cases. At first the snaps on the outside of the big one won’t close, but finally we get it. I push it into the closet while Flake puts the ammo away. When he gets back we fold up all the newspaper and look around to see if we missed anything.

“What do you want to do now?” Flake finally goes.

I’m as depressed as he is. “Who knows?” I go.

He takes the newspaper under his arm and leaves. I can hear him in the kitchen. When I get in there he’s sitting at the table crying.

“We are such pussies,” he goes.

I sit down across from him but there’s nothing to say.

He sniffs and rubs his face and then cleans his hand and nose on a napkin from the napkin holder.

“Wanna play mosh volleyball?” I go.

“No,” he goes.

“Wanna throw rocks?” I go. Sometimes we throw little rocks at cars from a sand-and-gravel lot where we can get a running start when we get chased.

“No,” he goes.

“So what do you want to do?” I go.

He puts his head on the table and leaves it there for a few minutes. “All right, let’s throw rocks,” he goes.

On Monday at breakfast my mom tells me that the meeting with the vice principal and Ms. Meier is going to be tomorrow, which is the same day as Gus’s birthday party.

“That should be festive,” she says.

“The kid didn’t do the scheduling,” my dad goes. He’s up early and looking at something on his laptop at the kitchen table.

“Can I try your coffee?” I ask him.

“Maybe you should try one bite of breakfast,” my mom says.

“I ate one bite,” I tell her.

“This graph is perfectly incoherent,” my dad goes. He turns the computer to show me, then taps around on the keyboard.

“I hate when that happens,” my mom says. She’s rooting in a little bowl for change for my lunch money.

I move his mug closer and take a sip. It’s so full I have to lean over it.

“Can I try?” Gus says.

“It’s not good for you,” my dad goes.

My mom reminds me I’m going to be late. She dumps the lunch money into an envelope and hands it over. I stuff it into my pack. “I hope you finished the rest of your homework,” she says.

My dad looks at me when I come around from the other side of the table. “We gotta get you some new pants,” he goes. “How often does he wear those pants?”

“Every day,” my mom tells him.

“Oh, was I supposed to have noticed sooner than this?” he asks her.

“Don’t you need a jacket?” she asks me.

“I’m all right,” I tell her, but when I open the back door it’s freezing.

“What about your homework?” she calls.

“I didn’t need to do it all,” I go.

“You going to say good-bye to your brother?” she asks.

“Bye, Edwin,” Gus calls.

I poke my head back in. “How old you gonna be, Gus?” I ask him. “How old you gonna be on your birthday?”

He holds up the right number of fingers.

At the bus stop the ninth-graders leave me alone. Outside before the bell rings I don’t see Flake. At the lockers I get mine open without much trouble.

In first-period English I get called on once and I know the answer. In second and third period I have a stomachache but it goes away. In math the teacher goes, “How many people didn’t get to finish the whole worksheet?” and I raise my hand along with a few other kids and he just leaves it at that.

At lunch I make a joke in line about the chocolate pudding and Tawanda and another kid laugh. “Hey, how’d that World of Color project come out?” the other kid, a cross-eyed girl, wants to know. “Don’t ask,” Tawanda tells her. A kid who’s holding everybody up looking for a cookie with chocolate chips instead of raisins has a booger hanging out of her nose and nobody tells her.

No Flake once I’m out of the line with my tray, so I sit by myself.

In fifth period two kids get into a fight before class as I’m coming through the door and I end up having to help break it up. They both get sent to the vice principal.

“Boys’re like dogs,” a girl by the window says, and everybody laughs.

“Well, girls’re like . . .” a boy goes, and when he can’t think of anything the class laughs again.

“I’m not going to be here Monday,” another kid goes. Nobody’s paying any attention. “I’m not going to be here Tuesday, either,” he adds.

In sixth period a kid falls asleep and slides all the way to the floor before he wakes up. In seventh I watch the clock for twenty-two straight minutes until the bell rings. Flake isn’t around before I get on the bus to go home, and nobody answers at his house when I call him from my room.

When they first brought Gus home from the hospital they had him in a little bassinet by their bed. When I couldn’t sleep, instead of wandering around the house all night I’d creep in there and watch him move around. He looked like a little turnover. They left him right in the streetlight. I don’t know how he went to sleep. He’d move for a while and get quiet and then move a little more. My mom slept with her face in the pillow and whimpered every so often. My dad always looked like he’d washed ashore in a storm. Sometimes I sat in the chair in the corner. Sometimes I went back to bed.

In the mornings we had this thing we did when we all woke up. When I heard Gus making his noises I got up and went into their room. By then he was in their bed between them, and I’d climb over my dad and get next to Gus. I’d push the mattress with my hand to make his head move. He kept an eye on me. He grabbed my hair when he could reach it.

I’d say, “Gus, do you like Mommy and Daddy?” and give the mattress a few pushes and it would look like he was shaking his head. My dad especially laughed. I think I was nine then.

“What’s wrong, honey?” my mom would go sometimes. It always surprised me.

“Nothing’s wrong ,” my dad would go. “Why does something have to be wrong?”

“Are you okay?” my mom would go. She’d be lying on her pillow looking at me over Gus’s head. He’d reach for my hair and I’d tip toward my dad, to make him reach farther.

“I’m fine,” I’d go.

“You seem worried,” she’d go. Or “You seem sad.” That happened five or six times.

“ Are you worried?” she said one time a few hours later, when my dad was upstairs changing Gus.

“I guess,” I said. It felt like I was always worried.

“About Gus?” she asked.

I must’ve looked so surprised that she asked if it was something else.

“You think you need to see somebody?” she asked another time. She meant like a psychiatrist. She was always frustrated that she never got anywhere with me.

“I had this dream where I rolled Gus down the stairs,” I told them once at breakfast. “Except he did this stair-luge thing. Then we were all doing stair luge.”

There was this pause before anything else happened. My dad had the paper, and my mom had her coffee mug halfway to her mouth.