Jim Shepard - Project X

“Project X is a savvy, sensitive take on the tortured inner lives of two eighth-grade boys—Hanratty and Flake, outcasts who plan a Columbine-like revenge on their unwitting school—that builds tension with unremitting skill.”

—Elle

“[Hanratty’s] turmoil proves to be an intense experience in anxiety recall: Your most frustrating teen memories will find unholy corroboration. Which makes Shepard’s intimacy with the bleeding psyche of misfitting adolescence all the more discomfiting—we’re so close, we feel the heft of the Kalashnikov.”

—The Village Voice

“Of all Shepard’s work, perhaps none blends fact and fiction more controversially than Project X. . . . [He] willfully defies the boundaries by which so much of our culture is defined. . . . Shepard, then, is a writer who, along with a small group of contemporaries, is reconfiguring how fiction works.”

— Los Angeles Times

“If Jim Shepard’s fiction carried a sign, it might say DANGER: EXPLOSIVES. As this riveting novel progresses, we find ourselves praying for Hanratty’s salvation—and our own.”

—O, The Oprah Magazine

“A feat of verisimilitude, with an inspired evocation of the caprices of adolescence, deftly tracing the fine line between idle pent-up angst and the kind that puts a gun in the hand of an eighth grader who might use it.”

— Esquire

“Project X truly ups the ante [in] dark realism and depth.”

— New York Magazine

“A feat of stunning imagination. . . . [Project X] leaves you with questions that you’ll ask yourself every time you see one of those kids who seem slightly out of place in school, at the mall, at church—or in your child’s bedroom.”

— The Kansas City Star

“Shepard puts us into the shoes of two boys with murder on their minds but not in their hearts. His compassion for them rings out like a shout—the kind no one hears until it’s too late.”

— Salon

“Shepard’s ear for the speech of today’s youth is remarkable. He has fashioned a kind of staccato poetry out of an often inchoate, vocabulary-poor manner of conveying, or avoiding communication. . . . [The] first-person, present-tense voice varies from deadpan humor to deadpan melancholy. Either way, his narration is unfailingly intense and captivating.”

— Newsday

“After all the hand-wringing and glib explanations for school shootings, Project X offers as clear a view as any into the minds of the kids who actually succumb to . . . a deadly impulse.”

— The Columbus Dispatch

“Unrelenting and touching. . . . There are scenes that remain haunting long after the book is done. . . . [A] sensitive and unflinching novel.”

— The Anniston Star

“[Hanratty] is vulnerable, funny, sullen and heartbreaking.”

— Austin American-Statesman

The author wishes to acknowledge the following people, without whom this book would have been a paltrier thing, or no thing at all: Karen Shepard, Ron Hansen, and Geoff Sanborn; Gary Fisketjon and Amber Qureshi; and, though the events described herein are fictional, Priscilla Wolff, Tim Carlson, and the students at the Curtis School; Mary Alvord and the students in the Mount Greylock Regional School District; and all of the long-suffering teachers and students from Johnson Junior High and Stratford High School, from way back when.

First day of FS and where are my good green pants? In the wash. I have one pair of pants that aren’t clown pants and they’re in the wash. They haven’t been washed all summer but today, this morning, they’re in the wash. It’s too cold for cargoes and everything else in my drawer is Queer Nation, and sure enough I’m the only one on the bus in shorts. “Scorcher, isn’t it?” a ninth-grader asks when he goes by my locker. I’m standing there like I’m modeling beachwear. Kids across the hall chuckle and point. I almost head home right then.

“FS, man,” Flake says when he sees my face.

“I can’t take it,” I tell him. “It’s like, twenty minutes, and I can’t take it.”

“Look at your face,” he says, and he has to laugh. He doesn’t mean it in a bad way.

I put my head on my hands in my locker and try to tear the shelf off the wall.

“FS,” he says. At least our first period classes are near each other.

“FS,” I tell him back. We don’t even have homeroom together, though they told us over the summer we would. FS is fuckin’ school. We argue over who thought of it.

My homeroom teacher has a big banner up on the bulletin board that says WELCOME TO EIGHTH GRADE! Underneath it there’s a sign that says LEAVE NO CHILD UNSUCCESSFUL and a handout for EIGHT WAYS OF BEING SMART.

In the doorway of first-period English my feet like freeze. I can’t even get into the room. I will not fucking do this, I think to myself. “What?” the English teacher says.

We’re not in the same gym class, either. And his is fourth period and the first day stuff runs long, so there I am in the cafeteria without him. C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, I go to myself, like some god’ll say, “Oh sorry, Hanratty, you want your only friend? I’ll send him along.”

And who’s there: Hogan, Weensie, and all the other butt-wipes who are always after me. The kid from Darien we call Dickhead who beat me with a plank last spring. He pulled it from his tree house, and his friends held me down. Flake said when he saw my back that I was lucky there were no nails in it.

“Look who’s watching his figure,” the kid goes. I have like one milk pint on my tray.

“Eat me,” I tell him. My eyes are tearing up and I want to pull them out and pound each of them flat on the tray.

“You’re not sittin’ on this side,” the kid says.

“I’ll sit where I want,” I tell him. But I stand there and then head across the room away from him. I want to set fire to every single fixture and chair and window and crappy water-stained ceiling tile in this cafeteria. I can never eat anything here. Just taking a sip of water makes me want to hurl.

I’d fight if it was just him. But he’s got eight thousand friends. Every asshole in the school is his friend.

I’m standing there with my tray. Pint of milk and a Rice Krispies Treat in a little dish. Every table’s worse than the one next to it. It’s the worst feeling in the world.

When you’re standing there in the middle of the floor with no one to eat with, there are about four kids who don’t look at you. The cafeteria holds three hundred.

“Nice shorts,” somebody says.

Even if you don’t eat, you have to just stay until lunch is over anyway. There’s a spot next to a kid from Latvia or Lithuania or something who smells. She has her hair moussed and smashed onto one side of her head like she fell asleep in tree sap. She showed up last year. She has fewer friends than Flake and me. And we only have each other.

“Is this seat taken?” I go.

“I yev a fren coming,” she says.

I end up next to a girl who has to be the most beautiful person in her zip code. The rest of the table is all her friends. One of them I know from grammar school.

“This is a S.M.I.L.E. meeting,” the one I know tells me. She shows me her folder: Students Making an Impact Locally and Everywhere. I eat my Rice Krispies Treat.

“We could sponsor a child,” one girl goes.

“For a year?” somebody says.