Jim Shepard - Project X

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.