Jim Shepard - Project X

“I told you,” Tawanda says without looking up from her dish.

“What’d you tell her?” I go.

“ I told her not to bring it up,” Tawanda says.

Flake has his elbows on the sides of his tray and his fingers are pushing on his cheeks like they want to get in there.

Everyone calls us queer but they call us everything else, too. It wasn’t like we thought anybody thought we were queer.

“My sister says we have the right to our own bodies,” Michelle says.

Tawanda goes, “Girl, I don’t think they’re liking your helping hand, here.”

“It was hard for my sister, too,” Michelle explains to her. “She says she wishes somebody had talked to her.”

Flake stares at her. She looks back. I feel like resting my head in the spaghetti. I settle for turning over the plate. Most of the sauce and noodles end up still on my tray.

Tawanda passes me a clump of napkins for the stuff that isn’t. “ Some body should’ve gotten the vegetarian casserole,” she goes.

“You’re sitting here and calling me queer?” Flake finally asks. The way he says it makes me even sadder. They’re the closest things we had in the school to people who didn’t hate us.

“It’s not a judgment thing,” Michelle tells him.

“If I called you a fuckin’ skank, would you say that’s not a judgment thing?” Flake goes.

Michelle doesn’t answer.

“I hurt your feelings?” he goes.

She looks off toward the cafeteria line.

“I hurt her feelings,” he goes to me. “She calls me a fucking queer, and I hurt her feelings.”

“Where’d you get this shit?” I ask her. “Where’d you come up with this?”

“Forget it,” Michelle says. “Forget I said anything.”

“We’re not going to forget it,” Flake goes.

“Flake,” I go.

“Fuck you too,” he goes. “Hey,” he goes to Michelle. He taps her arm. “Jizzbag.”

“Get away from me,” Michelle goes.

“Tell her she’s gotta talk to me,” he says to Tawanda.

“I ain’t getting in the middle of this,” Tawanda says. “I finished my lunch.”

“Tell her she’s gotta talk to me,” he goes again.

“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.