Jim Shepard - Project X

Flake had the idea to bury something we wrote in a box for people to find like years later. There’s a word for it but I forget what it is. He said it had to be a good box to keep the water out so what we wrote wouldn’t rot. He said to work on what we were going to put into it. I’d work on mine and he’d work on his. Then we’d put our stuff in together. We don’t know where we’re going to bury it yet, now that we can’t use our fort under the underpass. He thought it would be funny to put it next to the flagpole in front of the school, but I thought people would see where the ground had been dug up. He thought we could do it so nobody could tell.

I have a pad I’ve been writing stuff in and hiding in a space above where my top drawer fits into my desk. There’s nothing on the cover but on the first page I wrote PROJECT with a pair of crossbones underneath. They look like an X. On the second page I have a score sheet divided into days of the times that people haven’t looked at me or talked to me or answered me at school. I make a crossbones for each one and put them in a column. I fill it out when I get home from school or, if Flake comes home with me, before I go to bed. Mondays are ahead of Thursdays for first place.

On the third page I have a drawing of these huge Gatling guns they use in Chinook and Huey gunships. They fire like eight million rounds per minute. After that I have a drawing of Gus in sunglasses that I think is funny. I did it when he fell asleep in my room and I was supposed to be watching him. After that I have some demon faces that I can never get right.

After that there’s a lot I still need to write down. Like: What happens when you hate yourself?

What happens when you know you’re worse than anybody else knows you are?

What happens when everything you touch turns to shit?

What happens when you feel sorry for yourself and then sit around feeling sorry for yourself for feeling sorry for yourself?

Poor kids or kids who can’t walk or pick up anything and have to work a computer with like sticks in their teeth: we’re lucky compared to them. We’re whiners. We’re babies.

We’re good at reminding each other how pissed off we are and how nobody cares, not really. Sometimes one of us’ll whack the other on the side of the head to remind him of what we have to do.

So when we get his dad’s guns and go into the assembly and we see like some special-ed kid in one of those chairs, do we bail and come back later when we hope there’s only going to be people we hate around? We need to make sure that once we’re in, we can’t be going, Hey, watch out for Tawanda, or Let’s not get Mrs. Pruitt, let’s get Ms. Meier.

Flake says nobody’s going to be taking him alive and that he’s not going to shoot himself, either. I don’t think we have to decide about that yet.

We might get away.

After a sign-up sheet for achievement tests went around the homerooms last week, he had us get out his father’s guns again when the house was empty and he squatted on the bed and had us hold the Kalashnikov and the carbine up over our heads. Here’s my achievement tests, he said. Here’s yours.

For the next fifty years, people who weren’t anywhere around will swear they were right here when it happened. “So there I was, bullets flying.” Shit like that. It makes us wish they were here. Then we could shoot them and they’d get what they want: proof they’re not bullshitters.

Flake gives me a 50 percent chance of wussing out. He says if I do he’ll shoot me himself. “I’ll shoot you, you fuck,” I tell him. It always makes him laugh.

He says to remember that out of everybody in the gym there’s still only going to be two kinds of people: the ones who don’t know anything about us, and the ones who don’t want to know.

He hasn’t given up on Matthew Sfikas. I can see his brain going, trying to figure something out. When I tell him again about my idea about waiting he goes, “I’ll kick his ass now, and we can shoot him later.”

“How are you going to kick anybody’s ass with two fingers like that?” I want to know.

“I’ll use a shovel,” he goes. “I’ll use a rake.”

“You can’t use a shovel,” I go. “You can’t use a rake.”

“What do you care?” he goes. “I’ll use a chain saw if I want.”

He won’t, though.

“So let’s find him then,” I go. “Bring your rake.”

“You think I won’t?” he asks.

But then we end up just sitting in his room, and he’s in a bad mood for the rest of the day.

“Why don’t you put bug powder in his milk?” I go. I’m looking at the booklet that comes with his Great Speeches CD. Something knocks me to the floor on my face, and he’s jumping up and down on my back with his knees.

I scream for him to quit it when I can, but he doesn’t and finally I’m able to twist around and get him on the side of the head with my fist. Once he’s off I keep using my right hand and he blocks it with his arm but not completely because he’s trying to protect his finger. He straight-arms me in the mouth with the heel of his palm. Then we both go nuts.

His mom runs upstairs and separates us. It takes her some time, and she ends up with a scratched face. We’re screaming at each other and she’s screaming at us. One of his fingers is bleeding through the bandage.

“Fucking maggot,” he keeps screaming.

“Suck me,” I scream back.

“ Stop it, both of you,” his mom screams. We still won’t stop trying to beat on each other, so finally she drags me downstairs by the collar. “Don’t come back here, you fuck,” he yells down the stairs. “Fuck you,” I yell back up. “Stop it,” his mom yells, shaking me so hard that she almost breaks my neck. She shoves me out onto the driveway and slams the back door.

She calls my parents while I’m walking home.

“I hear you and the Nightrider thought you were in the Thunderdome,” my dad says when I walk in the door.

“I don’t know what that means,” I go.

“Are you all right?” my mom wants to know. I look in the mirror in the bathroom. My teeth are bloody and there’s dried blood on my chin and some on my shirt. My back hurts where he was jumping on it. My lip’s cut up again. Otherwise I’m fine. I feel like I’m going to cry, but that’s out of frustration.

“It’s all right,” my mom says when she sees my face once I finally come back out of the bathroom. I stand there in the middle of the kitchen like I got a load in my pants. My dad knows enough not to say anything.

“Want me to help you with your face?” she goes.

“Yeah,” I go. And start crying.

“It’s okay,” she goes. She comes over and puts her arms around me.

“Fucking asshole,” I go, barely able to understand myself. I hang on to her for a minute.

“Hey,” my dad says, about the language. My mom tells him to shush. Gus is up in their bedroom watching videos and misses the whole thing.

I don’t call Flake or hear from him for a week. He wanders by in the hall a few times at school. I get up in the morning, get my stuff together and head for the bus. I come home, go up to my room and dump my stuff on the floor. I do homework. I do better than the teacher expected on a social studies quiz.

My dad asks a few days into this if I want to play catch. The next night my mom calls up the stairs that there’s a special on about naval firepower.

After I’m supposed to be asleep I walk around the house without turning on the lights. I take the Bible out of their downstairs bookcase and read it in the afternoons. I think about copying down parts but never get around to it. I like Leviticus and Revelations. I look at the pictures in African Predators. There’s one of a leopard that got ahold of a baboon. The baboon’s face is being squeezed shut by the bite.